Dead Meat

by William G. Tapply

  I stopped paddling to glide up on a pair of mergansers that were diving and frolicking in the shallow water against the shore ahead of me. They let me approach almost into shotgun range before they dipped under the water and out of sight, and I wondered how they had become educated. Farther on, I saw a heavy swirl break the smooth surface of the lake. It could have been a bass, but I preferred to think it was a salmon. I unlimbered my fly rod and cast to it, but it didn’t take. And I didn’t actually care.

  By the time I arrived at the mouth of Harley’s Creek, I had worked up a healthy sweat. I nosed the canoe into the slow current and pushed against it. Soon I entered the channel where it cut through the big evergreen forest. The current flowed smoothly near the mouth of the river, where it narrowed before entering the lake. Then the river widened as the riverbed grew shallower, and the water bumped and eddied unevenly as it passed over submerged boulders.

  I beached the canoe and pulled on the waders I had stowed up in the bow. I tied on a bushy Royal Coachman and waded into the riffles. The little Orvis rod was a wand in my hand. The currents surged around my knees. The gaudy dry fly bobbed and drifted, and then there was a quick burst of silver. I struck too late and felt just a momentary tug before the fly came free. I cursed, but not with enthusiasm. I felt too good to care very much about failing to hook a trout. I false cast a couple of times to dry out the fly and then set it down as soft as an autumn leaf on the water where it divided on an exposed rock. Again, the silvery flash of a trout. This time I didn’t miss him. The brook trout tugged upstream, a poor tactic, since he had to battle both the tension of my rod and the force of the moving water. Soon he allowed me to lead him down to where I stood in the water. I ran my fingers along the leader and carefully twisted the hook from his jaw.

  Without moving from that spot I caught half a dozen foot-long brook trout, brilliantly colored little bundles of muscle, with spots like drops of fresh blood on their flanks and flashes of orange like Baltimore orioles. Then I waded ashore and sat beside the canoe. When I lit a cigarette, I realized it was the first one I had had since breakfast. I held it in my fingers for a moment, staring at it. Then I scooped out a hole in the earth and crammed the butt into it. I stood up and ground it under my heel. I felt exhilaratingly virtuous.

  I got back into the canoe and navigated the riffles, sticking to the light currents against the shore. Up ahead lay a broad, shallow stretch studded with rocks. I clambered out and, still in my waders, dragged the canoe upstream to the next pool. At that point the character of the stream became consistent: broad, deep pools alternating with shallow rapids. I didn’t stop to fish. I knew that somewhere deeper into the woods the creek divided and at the top of the bluff was the Indian burial ground. I wanted to see it. Perhaps I’d fish some more on the way back to camp.

  So I paddled through the pools and dragged over the rapids, and by the time I arrived at the fork, I found myself regretting my indulgences in Winstons and Jack Daniel’s and renewing my resolve to amend my self-destructive habits. I beached the canoe and then dragged it entirely out of the water. It was only about eleven in the morning, but I was ready for the lunch that I had hastily assembled in Bud Turner’s kitchen after breakfast. It consisted of half a dozen leftover breakfast sausages, a slab of Vermont cheddar, half a loaf of home-baked bread, and a canteen of icy lake water.

  I munched on my cold lunch and watched a trout that was rising steadily against the opposite bank. A kingfisher swooped over the river, dived, missed, and flew up into a tree, chattering like an out-of-tune lawn mower. After lunch I shook a Winston out of the pack. I hesitated only an instant before I put it back. I didn’t need it, I told myself.

  I disassembled my fly rod, shucked off my fishing vest and waders, and shoved them all up into the bow of the canoe. Then, out of habit instilled from fishing more populated spots in Massachusetts, I wedged the canoe up into the bushes and laid some balsam boughs over it. Then I began to climb the hill.

  It wasn’t exactly hands-and-knees going, but the slope was steep and the undergrowth thick, and I soon worked up my second healthy sweat of the day. I had just begun to persuade myself that the exercise was going to do me good when I felt the first dart jab into the back of my neck.

  Out on the lake, one forgets about blackflies. In the heavy woods, where there is no breeze to blow them away, one cannot forget them. Blackflies have a special fondness for human crevices and orifices—ears, nose, mouth, among others of a more intimate nature. They enjoy crawling under pant legs and down shirt collars. They like to wander through human hair. And wherever they go, they bite. Mosquitoes plunge a tiny needle into the soft parts of human flesh. Blackflies bite. A thousand blackflies bite ten thousand times. I can tolerate mosquitoes. Nobody can tolerate blackflies. The Maine guides that I have known claim that blackflies will not bite pretty women. The truth is, perfume repels blackflies. The cheaper it is, the more effectively it repels, and the really savvy guides dose themselves until they smell like Times Square whores.

  City sports bring expensive concoctions from L. L. Bean and wonder why their tawdry-scented guides don’t seem to be bothered by blackflies.

  I had brought neither perfume nor Cutter’s. So I cursed and sweated, swatted and scratched, and by the time I got to the top of the hill, I decided my day had been irrevocably ruined. I paused there, waving my hand in front of my face like a windshield wiper on fast speed. One of the miracles of the natural world, which intrigued me at that moment, was the uncanny navigational system that directs blackflies to the insides of a man’s underpants, where they find his tenderest, juiciest parts to munch on.

  The top of the hill proved to be a round, relatively flat place, almost a mesa. I imagined with the fringe of undergrowth cut away it would give a broad panorama of the two tines of the forked river below—a classic Indian lookout.

  I moved to the middle of the circular area. It was, I realized, gently mounded and unusually free of undergrowth. Some low-bush blueberry bushes were scattered here and there among mossy rocks. The area itself was perhaps fifty yards in diameter, enclosed by a square of four giant deciduous trees. It took me a moment to identify them. They were chestnuts, virtually extinct but somehow surviving up here. And the four huge trees were identical in size and shape. A quick fix on the sun told me that they had been planted at the four quadrants of the compass—due north, south, east, and west.

  Inside the square of trees a ring of boulders had been laid out. They lay tumbled and moss covered now, but I wondered if one day they had formed a kind of Stonehenge up in this primeval spot in the Maine wilderness.

  I stood in the center of the sacred circle, my feet, I had no doubt, atop the bones of generations of Penobscot Indians, and even this jaded twentieth-century urban cynic was awed. The Indians, I felt with conviction, had a greater right than the Wheeler brothers to claim ownership of this place. As I gazed around, my eye was caught by an alien shape and color half hidden behind one of the great chestnuts, a solid dark mass where all around were dappled greens and tans. I walked over to it, and I was almost close enough to touch it before I identified what it was.

  Hung by her hind legs from a sturdy branch of the chestnut that grew on the east compass point was the carcass of an enormous cow moose. Her body cavity had been slit from sternum to pelvis and emptied, and it was wedged open with two sticks. Her throat had been sliced halfway through. A dark stain covered the leaves under the cow’s upside-down body.

  The sight didn’t sicken me. I have spent enough time around sporting camps to grow accustomed to eviscerated game. I don’t anthropomorphize animals. I like them. In many ways, I like them better than people. But they aren’t people.

  I have seen dead human beings. That sets my gastric system flip-flopping. But the blood of animals does not affect me the same way.

  My reaction was a mixture of anger and disgust. I recalled what Woody had said to me the previous day—that folks in this part of Maine respect wild game, if not the laws th
at governments create to protect it, and they kill it in order to use it. This dead moose that I was staring up at had not been killed for sport or for a trophy, which, to me, is the worst possible excuse. She had been proficiently gutted and strung up out of the reach of bears, and she waited to be taken off for butchering. A big slab of dead meat.

  But this cow undoubtedly had left a spring calf somewhere, and that angered me. No one who respected wild game would kill a cow moose with a calf. Anyway, moose are great, noble creatures. They live a gentle vegetarian life. The death of this particular one struck me as a violation—a violation of the same natural law that some philosophers claim prevents men from wantonly killing each other.

  But men do sometimes wantonly kill each other. And they kill moose, too. And if my feelings about it didn’t add up to a coherent philosophical view, they did produce an unmitigated sense of disgust with my race.

  I moved closer to the big bulk and touched her thick, oily hide. I put my hand inside the vacant body cavity. It was no longer warm. Killed, I guessed, by jacklight the previous night, or possibly even the previous afternoon. At the junction of neck and shoulder I found the wound. It was nearly an inch across, and triangular in shape. I probed it with my forefinger, pulling the hair away, and I could see that the skin had been sliced at the points of the triangle. An arrow wound, not a bullet.

  “Don’t turn around. Don’t move. Don’t say anything. Put your hands behind your neck. Real slow.”

  The voice came from behind me. I obeyed it exactly. There was a spot between my shoulder blades that tensed as I imagined the arrow that had sliced through the hide and muscle and vital parts of the moose and how easily it might slip through my body.

  “Good.” The voice was low, calm, and faintly familiar. “Now. Down on your knees. Keep your hands where they are.”

  I sank awkwardly to my knees and stayed there beside the dead moose.

  “Okay. Now lie down. Keep your hands on your neck.”

  I dropped down onto my stomach. I heard the man approach. He came slowly, cautiously, his feet light on the soft earth. Then his hands were patting at my sides and prodding my legs apart.

  “Okay. You can sit up. Keep your hands where they are, and do it slowly.”

  I rolled onto my side and sat.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake…”

  “It’s you,” I said.

  Philip Rolando held an ugly revolver in his hand. It had a short barrel, unlike a Colt Woodsman or other handguns popular among outdoorsmen, and a bore that looked about twice the size of a .22.

  It was aimed at my belt buckle. Rolando let his hand fall to his side. Then he grinned. The bastard seemed to be enjoying it.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he said.

  “What am I doing here? You pulled a gun on me, you son of a bitch. What are you doing here is the question.”

  “Why, I’m out for a stroll in the forest primeval,” he said.

  “Yeah. Bullshit. Did you kill the moose?”

  Rolando cocked his head to the side and gazed at the upside-down carcass. “Me? Naw. Look. I’m sorry if I scared you.”

  “You didn’t scare me, for Christ’s sake. I have people point weapons at me all the time. What is that thing, anyway?”

  Rolando held his gun up in front of his face and looked at it with what I took to be affection. “Colt Python .357,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Right. That’s what I thought,” I said. “Well named. Think maybe you can put it away now?”

  I fumbled for a Winston. So much for good intentions. I found my hands trembling, whether from fright or fury I wasn’t sure, so I turned my back on Rolando so he wouldn’t see them shake as I struck a match. When I turned back to look at him, the Python was out of sight, and he was frowning at me.

  “Listen,” he said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I dragged deeply on the cigarette. It calmed me. “Of course I’m okay. But you didn’t answer my question. What in the hell are you doing here? I mean, it’s a big woods. Plenty of room for both of us.”

  He snorted through his nose, a humorless laugh. “I’m looking for my brother. Decided to drive the back roads. Mr. Wheeler was kind enough to let me borrow one of his four-wheel-drive trucks. The cook mentioned this burial ground, told me how to get here, and I figured, it’s someplace, maybe appropriate that I should come here looking for Ken. The road’s only a few hundred yards that way. There’s a little path, even, that leads right in here.” He gestured back over his shoulder. “So I parked the truck and followed the path. I came to this moose. Looks like somebody’s going to come back for it. Anyway, I heard you coming. Do you know that you were talking to yourself?”

  “I was probably cursing the goddamn blackflies.”

  “Whatever. It sounded like there were two people coming, all the noise you were making and the conversation. So I hid in the undergrowth. I couldn’t make out who you were. Waited until your back was to me. Then figured I’d confront you. Guess you didn’t come for the moose, huh?”

  “No. I just wanted to see the place, like you. Saw this shape hanging over here, decided to take a look.”

  Rolando sat on the ground beside me. “So do you think this has something to do with what happened to your brother?”

  He shrugged. “Supposing Ken stumbled on to something like this moose. And supposing whoever killed the moose happened upon him, the way I did with you.”

  “You think some poacher is going to kill a man just because he found some illegally killed game?”

  Rolando shrugged. “It’s one idea.”

  “Actually it’s happened,” I said. “Wardens get killed. Up in these woods folks have a peculiar concept of justice, you know.”

  “So I understand. Still…”

  “Your brother wasn’t a warden, was he?”

  He frowned. Perhaps he noticed that I had used the past tense. “Of course not,” he said.

  “Because,” I continued, “I understand that selling poached game is a pretty big business. Matter of fact, even the federal government has gotten involved. Game killed on national park land, for example.”

  “This isn’t federal land,” said Rolando.

  “No, it’s not. But the other thing is, taking game across state lines to sell it puts it in federal jurisdiction.”

  “We’re a long way from another state.”

  “You said there’s a road near here. A truck could load up with a couple moose, drive from here to a butcher, then to New Hampshire or Massachusetts in less than a day. I don’t know what a man might get per pound of moose meat, but I’ll bet this cow would dress out at six or seven hundred pounds of the most delicious eating you can imagine. Say even a couple bucks a pound. Two moose. That’d be way over two grand. Big money in these parts.”

  “Big enough to kill a man for, maybe,” Rolando mused aloud.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe somebody thought your brother was a warden. Wrong place at the wrong time. All it’d take. It’s possible.”

  Rolando was staring at the suspended moose carcass. “Big sucker, isn’t she?” he said.

  I nodded. “You’d think it’d take a bazooka to bring her down.”

  He nodded. “High-power rifle would do it, I guess.”

  “An arrow got this one.”

  “How do you know?”

  I pushed myself to my feet and went over to the dead beast. “Here. Look.”

  Rolando came over, and I showed him the wound on the moose’s neck. He prodded it with his finger. “Looks like an arrow wound, all right.” He moved around to the other side of the animal. “Look at this.”

  I went to his side. There was another wound, virtually identical to the first. “Went clean through her,” I observed.

  “It’s all muscle here. Tough gristle and hide. Takes a hell of a lot of power to send an arrow clean through. A strong man pulling a mighty bow, I’d say.”

  I nodded. “Smart, too, if you’re a poacher. No gunshots to a
ttract attention. I don’t imagine it’s that difficult to stalk a moose. They’re not easily spooked. A well-placed arrow is just as deadly as a bullet.”

  “Sounds like Indians,” said Rolando.

  I glanced sharply at him. “Indians aren’t the only ones who hunt with bows. Matter of fact, I bet Indians don’t hunt with bows at all anymore. They don’t hunt for sport much. You ever see one of those modern compound bows?”

  He shook his head.

  “They’re short—no more than four feet from tip to tip. Made out of space-age alloys. They’ve got gears and pulleys—wicked-looking contraptions, and they can really zip an arrow. Thing about them is, you can get about eighty pounds of thrust for only forty pounds of effort. And they’re accurate as hell.”

  He shrugged. “An Indian could have one of those bows.”

  “So could anyone else.”

  We moved away from the hanging carcass and sat on the ground. I lit another cigarette. “I had quit these things,” I remarked to Rolando.

  “And I went and drew a gun on you. Blame me. Things like that put a man back on the weeds, I suppose. How long did you quit for?”

  “Couple hours, at least.”

  “Very impressive,” he said. He gazed up at the moose. “Wonder who’s doing the poaching.”

  I shrugged. “Could be anybody. With those logging roads, men could come from pretty far away. There’s a lot of marshland around this place.”

  He nodded. “Well, anyway, I don’t think I want to be here when they come back. I’m going to just mind my own business about this.” He stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. “You want a lift back?”