The Marsh King's Daughter(25)

Judging by the lack of trees and the density of the underbrush along the road, I’d say it’s been ten years since this area was clear-cut. The only things growing now are blueberries and tag alders. The brush piles the loggers left behind along with the ready food source make this prime bear country. No doubt Rambo thinks this is why we’ve come.

I cross the road and walk back along the other side. My father taught me to track when I was little. He’d lay out a trail for me while I was off playing or exploring, and then it would be up to me to find it and follow it while my father walked beside me and showed me all the signs I’d missed. Other times we’d walk wherever our feet took us and he’d point out interesting things as we went along. Drifts of scat. A red squirrel’s distinctive tracks. The entrance to a wood rat’s den littered with feathers and owl pellets. My father would point to a pile of droppings and ask, “Opossum or porcupine?” It’s not easy to tell the difference.

Eventually I realized that tracking is like reading. The signs are words. Connect them into sentences and they tell a story about an incident in the life of the animal that passed through. For example, I might come upon a depression where a deer has bedded down. It might be on a little island sticking up out of the marsh or similar high ground so the deer can keep an eye on his surroundings. The first thing I do is look at how worn the depression is, and that tells me how much the bed is used. If the bed is worn all the way to the dirt, it’s a primary bed, which means the deer is most likely coming back. Next I look at the direction the bed is facing. Most of the time a buck will bed down with the wind to his back. Knowing what wind the buck is using with that particular bed lets me pick a day when that particular wind is blowing so I can come back and shoot it. Stories like that.

Sometimes my father would pretend to be the prey. He’d sneak away from the cabin while I waited blindfolded in the kitchen in a chair facing away from the window so I wouldn’t be tempted to peek. After I counted to one thousand, my mother would take off my blindfold and I’d take up the chase. With all of the footsteps crisscrossing the sand outside our back door, it wasn’t easy figuring out which ones were his. I’d crouch on my heels on the bottom step and study all of the prints carefully until I was sure which were the most recent, because if I started down the wrong trail, I’d never find him, and depending on how far he’d walked and how long he had to stay hidden and what kind of mood he was in that day, that could lead to more contemplation time in the well than I cared to spend.

Occasionally my father would jump off the porch into a pile of leaves or onto a rock to make the game more challenging. Sometimes he’d take off his shoes and tiptoe away in his socks or his bare feet. Once he tricked me by wearing a pair of shoes that belonged to my mother. We both had a good laugh about that. Since I left the marsh, I’ve noticed a lot of parents let their children beat them at games in order to build their children’s self-esteem. My father never made it easy for me to track him, and I wouldn’t have wanted him to. How else was I going to learn? As for my self-esteem, the times I was able to hunt down and kill my father kept me grinning for days. I didn’t really kill him, of course, but depending on where he was hiding, the game always ended with a bullet shot into the ground near his feet or into a tree trunk or a branch next to his head. After I won three times in a row, my father stopped playing. Much later my teacher read to the class a short story called “The Most Dangerous Game,” and it sounded a lot like the one my father and I used to play. I wondered if that was where he got the idea. I wanted to tell the class I knew what it was like to be both hunter and hunted, but by then I’d learned that the less I said about my life in the marsh, the better.

—

A COP CAR IS PARKED at the side of the road. Or more accurately, an Alger County Sheriff’s patrol car, one of the new ones they featured recently on the news: white with a black stripe and a black and orange logo on the side, push bars in front, light bar on top. A car so pristine and shiny, it looks like this is the first time it’s been taken out.

I slow. There are two ways I can play this. I can drive past like I have no idea why a cop car might be sitting at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Let the officer flag me down, then let the fishing gear in the back of my truck do the talking. Maybe the officer will recognize my name and make the connection to my father when he checks my plates and ID. Maybe not. Either way, the worst the officer can do is send me packing with a warning to go home and stay safe.

Or I can tell the officer I cut my fishing trip short and am on my way home because I heard about the escaped prisoner on the news. Option number two gives me a chance to ask how the search is going, which could be useful. Or perhaps I can keep the officer talking long enough to pick up some helpful police radio chatter.

Then I realize both options are moot. The patrol car is empty.

I pull over and stop. Except for an occasional burst of static from the car’s radio, the woods are quiet. I take the Ruger from the rack over the window and the Magnum from the glove box. Scan the area for movement, then squat on my heels to study the prints in the road. One set. Male, judging by the shoe size. One seventy-five to two hundred pounds, judging by the depth. Proceeding with extreme caution, judging by the spacing.

I follow the prints to where they disappear into the vegetation at the side of the road. Broken ferns and crushed grasses tell me the officer was running. I study the trail he made for a long time and decide that the officer was running toward something he thought warranted investigation, not away.