The Poacher's Son Read Online Free PDF

another voice said, “You’re not going to waste good bear meat on those dogs.”
    I swiveled around to see who was speaking and saw Hank Varnum, the lanky proprietor of the town grocery. He was sitting with a clamdigger I recognized but whose name escaped me. As a newcomer to the area, I was still having trouble connecting names and faces, and since my position as district warden ensured everyone knew who I was, I often found myself pretending to recognize people who recognized me.
    Dot made a face. “Bear’s too stringy for my taste.”
    â€œYou can make a decent chili with it,” said bald Stanley at the end of the counter. I noticed he had a newspaper spread out under his plate of pancakes.
    â€œOr a good hash,” offered someone else.
    â€œHow big did Bud say it was?” asked Varnum’s clamdigger friend.
    â€œHe didn’t get a great look at it,” I said.
    â€œAnd knowing Bud, I bet he was drunk off his ass. I bet he shit himself when he seen that bear eat his pig.”
    â€œI’d thank you not to use profanity in my restaurant,” said Dot.
    The clamdigger looked down at his ketchup-smeared plate and began scraping up the last shreds of scrambled eggs.
    â€œI’ll let you know about the bear, Dot,” I said. “I’m hoping we won’t have to shoot it at all.”
    â€œOh, you’ll shoot it,” she said confidently. “You won’t have any choice in the matter.”
    â€œI hope you’re wrong.” I gestured at Stanley Whatever-his-name-was at the other end of the counter. “You mind if I take a look at that newspaper?”
    â€œYou gonna arrest me if I say no?” He gave a grimace that passed for a smile and shoved the paper down my way. Half of the pages slid off the counter. What was the deal with this asshole?
    â€œYou hear about that shooting last night, Mike?” asked Hank Varnum.
    â€œYeah, I heard about it.” I retrieved the sheets of newsprint from the floor. I found the front page and spread it out in front of me. The headline read:
TWO GUNNED DOWN IN NORTH WOODS AMBUSH
    There was an old file photograph of the Dead River Inn, where the public meeting had taken place that led up to the shooting. It looked the same as I remembered it from the bar fight two years earlier.
    The article didn’t say much beyond what Kathy had already told me over the phone: Somerset County Sheriff’s Deputy William Brodeur, and Wendigo Timberlands, LLC, spokesman, Jonathan Shipman, had been leaving the inn by a back road, driving to the Sugarloaf resort from Dead River, when a person or persons opened fire on the police cruiser.
    â€œIt was only a matter of time,” said Dot.
    I glanced up.
    She gestured at the paper. “Until something like that happened.”
    I hadn’t followed the Wendigo land purchase all that closely, being so preoccupied, first with my new job and then with Sarah’s growing unhappiness. I knew the company had recently bought something like half a million acres of forestland in the northern part of the state, including scores of privately owned camps and sporting lodges. These were largely lake- and stream-front cabins built on sites leased from Atlantic Pulp & Paper, the local company that had previously owned all that timberland. It was the way Maine paper mills used to reward their longtime employees, by granting them leases to build rustic vacation camps on company property. Many of these leases had been in the same families for generations.
    â€œPeople up there are madder than hell,” said Dot, “and I don’t blame them. They were promised that land, and now this
Canadian
company comes in and says, ‘Sorry, we’re ripping up your contract, get out.’ I’m not excusing what happened, understand. I’m just saying you could have predicted things might turn ugly.”
    I thought of my father and Russell Pelletier and all the other