Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(10)

“This was no poodle.”

I tried another tack. “It could have been a coyote. There are a lot of them in this area, and they hunt deer. But the prints would be smaller.”

She pushed her fuzzy hat back from her forehead as if it was itching her. “Didn’t coyotes kill two hikers on the Appalachian Trail? If you’re trying to reassure me, you’re not doing a very good job! Besides, I saw dozens of coyotes when I lived in Santa Fe, and this was too big to be one. I’m telling you, it was a wolf.”

I didn’t want to rehash what had actually taken place on the AT; I had spent too many hours trying to put a stake through the heart of rumors that refused to die. Nor did I want to get into a taxonomic debate about the subspecies of coyotes—western versus eastern—with this impossible woman.

There was a long silence while I tried to formulate a response that didn’t sound even more condescending. Some crows far away in the treetops began making a ruckus.

Finally, Gail Evans lifted her chin as if trying to balance a Ping-Pong ball on it. “You’re not even going to make a report of this, are you? Or if you do, you’re going to write something about a crazy woman ‘from away’ who doesn’t know the difference between a timber wolf and a poodle.”

The complacent self-confidence of this woman was bringing out a side of me I disliked. As a rookie warden, I had sometimes been abrupt to the point of rudeness with difficult people, but I had worked hard at managing my anger during the past years. Nevertheless, I needed to get away from her before I said something I regretted.

“I think I’m going to follow these tracks a ways and see what I find. If you want to wait inside—”

“I’m going with you.”

“This is something I need to do alone, ma’am.”

She shook her head in frustration, causing her Furby cap to slide forward again. But she had recognized the seriousness in my tone. When I left her, she was attacking the snowbank around one of her buried statues with the blade of her shovel.

With the new coating of snow, running the track was easy. The prints led across the side yard and through a wall of white cedars that the deer had chewed to shreds. The track shifted course where the young deer had made long leaps trying to escape the death snapping at its heels. I found tufts of deer hair pinned to some bayberry thorns, telling me the chase had happened very recently. A strong wind would have blown those wisps of fur loose.

Stacey teased me about being a compulsive noticer, but I believed my attention to details was one of my better qualities. It certainly helped me in my work on days like these.

The temperature seemed to drop as the shadow of a cloud passed over me. I looked up and felt my heart skip. Directly over my head hung an enormous oak branch—roughly the size of a railroad tie—that had broken loose in a recent storm. The branch should have come crashing to the ground, but it had gotten snagged in the boughs of the surrounding pines. The weight was causing the boughs to sag, and it looked like the next strong gust might send it plummeting to earth. Maine loggers called these looming hazards “widowmakers,” for obvious reasons. They had killed many men in the woods.

Widowmaker was the name of the ski resort where Amber worked. The universe seemed intent on nudging me in a direction I didn’t want to go. I stepped out from under the death trap as the wind rustled the snow out of the boughs around me.

I kept following the deer trail.

A few hundred yards into the forest, I finally came across the corpse of the young deer. It was still warm. Flecks of spittle showed along its lips. The yearling had run until its heart had given out. The ribs rippled beneath my fingertips as I rubbed the animal’s side.

The stomach was torn open, and a bloody pulp of half-chewed organs had spilled out onto the snow.

I pushed my cap up on my forehead and rubbed my fingers through my hair, trying to make sense of what I was looking at. From the size of the tracks, I had expected that it was a dog. But a dog chasing a deer is not unlike a dog chasing a car: If it ever catches its prey, it frequently has no idea what to do with it. The fun is all in the pursuit. Unless a dog is starving, it usually won’t feed on the carcass.

So this must have been a coyote, but that made no sense, either. The prints were twice the size of any coyote prints I’d seen.

It had to be a dog—and a big one, too. Something had interrupted its meal. Maybe it had smelled me coming, or maybe it hadn’t been that hungry to begin with.

Under Title Twelve of the Maine Criminal Code, the section primarily enforced by game wardens, I was authorized to shoot any dog I found killing deer, although I had trouble imagining myself actually doing so without hesitation. In my mind, the owner was the one who deserved a backside of bird shot. Fines for letting a dog run free to attack deer and moose rarely exceeded a few hundred dollars. It seemed a pitifully small amount of money for such willful negligence.

Gail Evans bore some culpability here, too. By na?vely putting out food for deer, trying to help them survive, she had lured this young animal to its death. People never want to believe that their best intentions can lead to the worst outcomes.

I decided to leave the deer to the crows. Birds need to eat, too.

Then I followed my own trail back to the gingerbread house.

“Well?” asked Evans.

“It was a dog,” I said loudly, leaving no room for rebuttal.

“I knew you were going to say that.”