Running Dark

by Joseph Heywood

  Shuck Gorley looked befuddled when he stepped out onto the porch of his house in his green long johns. “What’re you doing here?” the retired officer asked Grady Service.

  “Using my head. You want to take a ride with me?”

  Gorley considered the invitation. “I’m sure not goin’ hunting openin’ day wit’ so many downstate sound-shooters skulkin’ around out dere,” he said.

  “Okay with your wife?”

  “She give up on me an’ life a long time ago,” Gorley said matter-of-factly. “Let me get some duds on.”

  At 8 a.m. Service dropped the retired officer a half-mile short of the Ketola property, and drove past the entrance to the driveway, hiding his truck in some trees farther down the gravel road that passed in front of the property.

  As it often did when the sun began to rise, the air temperature seemed to drop. Service took his thermos and cut through gnarled jack pines to the house, found a scrub oak tree to lean against and began his wait, shifting from one foot to the other to keep the cold from creeping up his legs. He was less than thirty feet from the pole barn.

  The pickup truck pulled in just before ten. Two men got out, each with an open beer in hand. They looked to be in their late sixties or early seventies.

  “I guess we had da luck,” the passenger said.

  “No talkin’,” the driver shot back.

  The exchange suggested the driver took the lead in things, and that the man knew his business. Professional poachers never talked in public about what they did. Keeping their mouths shut was what made them successful. His old man used to say that big egos were what got lawbreakers caught. The ideal poacher would be a tongueless mute.

  Service waited for them to go to the back of the truck to pull the deer out of the bed before he made his move. The passenger had a hold on the back legs of the animal. Service grabbed the man’s arm, making him spin and stagger backward.

  “DNR!” Service said. “Conservation officer.” When he stepped toward the pole barn door, the driver bumped him with his shoulder, but Service deftly kicked the heel of the man’s support foot and he collapsed. Service grabbed the deer by the antlers, wrenched it away from them, and said, “On your knees. Now!”

  “Holy Je-Moley! What’s da bloody deal!” the driver shouted with alarm. Service looked at the tag affixed to the antler. The animal was legally tagged.

  Service glanced in the truck, saw two rifle cases, took them out, unzipped the cases, and made sure they were unloaded. One was a Model 94 Winchester .30–30, the other a pump-action Remington with a short barrel, probably a .30–06. Both were empty; only the .30–30 smelled like it had been fired recently.

  Service saw right away that the mark on the right forehoof had been shaved away. The two men knelt impassively in the snow as the conservation officer poked around until he found the first of the two slits he had made in the deer’s skin earlier that morning. He inserted his finger. The first quarter he’d put inside was gone; same with the second quarter in the second incision.

  “Lose somepin’?” one of the men asked.

  “You got names?” Service said.

  “Stanley Ketola,” the driver said. “My brudder Leo,” he added with a nod.

  Service asked in a nonthreatening voice, “Where’s the twenty-two, Stanley?”

  The brothers looked at each other. “We don’t got no twenty-two,” Stanley said. “Right, Leo?”

  “Ketolas don’t hunt deer wit’ no plinker,” Leo added with an affirming nod.

  Service said, “I was behind you fellas last night, followed you, saw you shoot the deer, followed you back here, witnessed the whole deal, start to finish.”

  Stanley Ketola grunted. “Me and Leo never liked no DNR fairy tales.”

  Service examined the carcass. The .22 wound was separate from a larger hole. “You two stay right where you are,” Service said. He walked back to his watch spot, got his thermos and set it down so both men could see the inscription on it, and filled his cup. He saw them exchange glances.

  Service took a swig of coffee and let out a sigh. “You boys been around and you know how this goes, right?”

  “Yeah,” Stanley said. “Da easy way or da hard way. Dat’s a fairy tale, too, bub.”

  Leo grinned and nodded at his brother.

  “How about we look in the pole barn?” Service said. “That okay with you fellas?”

  “You got a warrant?” Leo asked.

  “Do I need one?”

  Leo blinked and Stanley glared at his brother. “Dat buck dere’s legal. Guess you’ll be movin’ on, eh?” Stanley said. “You don’t got reasonable suspension to be pokin’ around da property.”

  Service sighed: reasonable suspension? “Tell you what,” he said. “Anything I find in the barn I won’t hold against you unless I can prove this buck is illegal.”

  Neither man showed any emotion, but both obviously were trying to analyze the unorthodox challenge.

  “What’s da deal?” Stanley asked warily.

  “You shot this deer just after three-thirty this morning and you both just drove in here with open containers of alcohol,” Service said, fingering the tag on the antler. “But we’ll forget the open containers, just to show you fellas I’m not tryin’ to be chickenshit here.”

  “We got dat buck dis mornin’,” Stanley said emphatically. Service felt certain that Stanley had been driving last night and that he had done the shooting, but Leo had tagged the animal. He had no idea why.

  “We?” Service said.

  Leo laughed. “Brudders, we always say we, eh?”

  The two men were stone-faced.

  “So you fellas are telling me you both shot this buck before first light, right, one of you with a twenty-two, the other with a bigger caliber? Is that your story?”

  “Holy moley, we din’t say dat,” Stanley said.

  “You shot the deer,” he told Stanley. “This morning.”

  Leo stammered, “Hey, dat’s my buck. I shot ’im dis mornin’, maybe seven-t’irty. Da buck’s legal and no bloody way youse can prove udderwise, eh?”

  Service said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “Yes to what?” Stanley said, his voice rising slightly. “We din’t agree to nuttin’.”

  “What I hear you saying is that you got dirt in the barn and dirt out here,” Service said.

  “Dis is baloney,” Stanley said, his eyes showing stress. “Youse’re loony.”

  “Look, guys. I know you’ve been at this a long time,” Service said. “You’re professionals and I’m a professional. I say I’ve got you cold, you say I don’t. How about we show our cards?”

  The two men looked at each other and stared at him. “We want our lawyer,” Stanley said.

  “What do you need a lawyer for? You got a legal deer, right?”

  Leo said, “Get off’n da property.”

  Service said, “I thought you guys were pros, but all I see is a joke.”

  Stanley bristled. “We don’t gotta put up wit’ dis crap from no rookie woods cop.”

  Service knelt and dramatically poked his finger into the second hole in the deer hide and wiggled it around, probing deeply.

  The men watched his hand.

  “You lookin’ for change?” Leo asked, laughing out loud.

  “Shut yer pasty hole, Leo,” the other Ketola snapped.

  Service eased out a tiny swatch of blood-soaked red cloth and held it up. “The human mind is predictable, boys,” he said. “People always think in series of threes—in this case, marked hoof, two quarters in the hide—and you fellas were feeling pretty good about finding three markers and eliminating all the evidence.” Service waggled the red patch. “This is number four. I put it there last night—ahead of the second quarter.”

&nbs
p; The two men studied each other. Stanley said, “Dat s’posed to prove somepin’?”

  Shuck Gorley suddenly walked around the back of the pickup with the .22 rifle in hand, yelled, “Catch!” and flipped the rifle at Leo, who caught it awkwardly.

  Service looked at the men. “Nice grab,” Service said. “Let’s summarize where we are: I saw you shine and shoot. I followed you here, I went back and fetched the twenty-two from where I saw you ditch it, I marked your deer, and now the twenty-two has your fingerprints on it, Leo. I think Stanley shot the animal, but since you claim it, you get the brunt of the charges.”

  Leo Ketola dropped the rifle on the ground.

  Service used his brick radio to call the county and within ten minutes they pulled up the driveway. The sullen brothers stared off into the distance while they waited. Service poured coffee for Shuck Gorley.

  “Carcass, rifle, lies—now we have a reason to go into the pole barn,” Service chanted, walking past the kneeling brothers.

  There were twelve deer suspended from stainless steel hooks in a cooler in back, and parts of birds and a couple hundred pounds of lake trout and walleye fillets in a commercial freezer.

  “You fellas been busy,” Service said to the brothers as the Luce County deputies put them in their patrol cars.

  Stanley Ketola looked out at Gorley and grinned. “Well, you never got us, eh Shuck.”

  Service wiggled the thermos in front of the older brother. “Who do you think sent me out there to wait for you two, and who do you think spread it all over town that he wouldn’t be working anymore? He knew you boys would be cocky with a rookie on the job.”

  The patrol cars backed down the driveway with their prisoners and headed for Newberry.

  Shuck Gorley stuck out his hand and grinned. “Thanks for including me.”

  “This was yours all the way,” Grady Service said. “You called in the order. I just made the pickup.”

  Gorley stared at him. “I think you got a heap more brains than your old man had,” he said. “You stay safe out here.”

  Service continued his patrol until nearly 10 p.m. that night, and when he got home his wife Bathsheba was already in bed. He looked for leftovers in the fridge and found none, showered, and crawled into bed beside her.

  “You decided to come home,” his wife said coolly with her back to him. When he put his hand on her hip, she pulled away.

  “I had a lot to do.” He briefly explained the arrest of the brothers and how Gorley had been after them for years and always came up short.

  “Like little boys,” she said. “They cheat, you try to catch them, and for what—a bunch of stupid animals? Good God, Grady, is this any way for a grown man to live?”

  She could not have found more destructive words.

  PART II

  WAR IN THE GARDEN

  3

  GARDEN PATROL, NOVEMBER 20, 1975

  The hunters had suddenly become the hunted.

  Grady Service had no idea what was happening. Sergeant Holloman had called the trailer at 2:30 a.m. and told him to report to Sergeant Blake Garwood at the Fishdam boat launch at noon.

  Grady Service was less than eight months into his responsibility for the Mosquito Wilderness Tract, the same area his CO father had patrolled before him. His wife, Bathsheba, was gone, having abruptly departed six months ago for Nevada to file for divorce. She had lasted less than a year trying to adapt to life as a CO’s spouse before throwing in the towel. Service felt that some of it was his fault, but he was still angry, and sometimes he even missed her when he crawled into bed alone at night. But since his transfer from the Newberry district to the Mosquito Wilderness he had focused all his energy on his new responsibilities, and thoughts of Bathsheba were fewer.

  He protested because it was the second week of his second deer season as a CO—and first in his new territory—and he didn’t want to leave the Mosquito Wilderness unprotected.

  “Just meet Garwood at the launch,” was Holloman’s clipped response. “And don’t be late.”

  “It’s not my territory,” Service argued.

  “As I recall, our patches say Michigan Department of Natural Resources,” Holloman said. “Which means we go where we’re needed. Blake’s partner came down with the flu; he needs help and you’re it. This takes priority over deer hunters in the Mosquito.”

  Service didn’t try to argue about his lack of knowledge and dislike of boats. He knew from some of the other officers that the Fishdam River launch site was used for patrols down Big Bay de Noc along the Garden Peninsula. During his time in Newberry he had participated in some Lake Superior marine patrols during salmon and steelhead runs, but he had never done a patrol in northern Lake Michigan, and from what other officers had said, duty in the Garden could range from deadly boring to just plain deadly. He didn’t relish either alternative.

  The Garden Peninsula was a twenty-one-mile-long, shark-tooth-shaped, cove-pocked neck of land between Escanaba and Manistique. It was part of what geologists called the Niagaran Escarpment, limestone, dolomite, and shale-gypsum formations that snaked south from the Garden across a string of rocky, barren islands that eventually led like a geological arrow to Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula. When the first whites arrived in the area they found Noquet and Menominee Indians using the area’s rich soils for gardens, giving the area its name, which persisted to this day.

  The western extremities of the peninsula were largely untillable, with limestone sometimes found within inches of the surface, and though some people still farmed the center and east of the peninsula, few except the occasional fruit grower and small dairyman could earn any semblance of a living. The primary economic focus of the peninsula had been and remained one thing: fish. Since the establishment of Fayette State Park, locals were happy to take dollars from tourists, even though tourists were a nuisance and sportfishermen not particularly welcome. Fish in the Garden were about money, not recreation.

  Fayette had risen during the Civil War, when the North needed iron for its armies. The smelting operation had closed in 1891, leaving intact ruins and a ghost town that had been turned into a campground, state park, and historic site. Fayette, Service thought, was like the rest of the Garden Peninsula. When there was no more money to be made, the village had been abandoned.

  Fewer than a thousand people lived on the peninsula, which had two villages, Garden and Fairport. The DNR had reason to know both of them well. Fairport had been a commercial fishing center since 1880, and nearly all of its residents still fished—a few of them legally, a lot more of them illegally. In 1969 DNR fish biologists had finished studies of Lake Michigan yellow perch, whitefish, walleyes, and lake trout, and decided that heavy pressure on fish stocks had to be reduced. Commercial licenses that lapsed would no longer be renewed. Unlike the past, if you didn’t fish every year, you couldn’t just jump back in and start up another year because it looked like there were big runs and money to be made. You had to keep fishing every year in order to keep your license, and if you let it lapse for a single season, you couldn’t renew. And no new licenses would be issued until biologists judged the fish populations could handle it. “Order Seventeen” became an instant bone of contention.

  Garden fishermen immediately donned sweatshirts that said dnr = damn near russian, and rebelled. Since 1969 there had been repeated confrontations between the DNR and the fishermen who were harvesting illegally. Locals had used long guns and pistols to take potshots at officers, mostly to scare them away; they also had rained rocks on them, vandalized and stolen their vehicles, assaulted and threatened them with knives and scissors and clubs, sometimes with large groups surrounding one or two uniformed game wardens. So far there had been no serious injuries, but everyone knew that the clock was ticking as long as the dispute continued.

  After a confrontation a few months back, the Delta County prosecutor h
ad declared to the state that he would no longer allow county deputies to assist conservation officers until such time that the state beefed up its force, its equipment, and its training. The U.P.’s law boss had simultaneously reduced the frequency of CO patrols down the peninsula for nearly two months, a decision that had many officers angry and ashamed, and had Gardenites crowing with delight.

  Service had never been called in to assist in the Garden, but the decision to cut back the DNR presence there had rankled him because he saw it as just the sort of gutless decision imposed by some spineless bureaucrat in Lansing. It never occurred to him that Lansing might not have had anything to do with the curtailment.

  Blake Garwood was a tall, stooped man with black hair and a full mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. The marine safety sergeant’s duties involved regular lake patrols, and Service had met him only once, and then just to be introduced.

  The sergeant arrived fifteen minutes after Service, but earlier than their meeting time.

  “Lend a hand,” Garwood said, tossing an orange life jacket to Service. The two men moved boxes of gear from the trunk of the patrol car to the dark green eighteen-foot Glastron on the trailer. Some of the boxes held various lengths of nylon rope and some homemade welded grapples. Empty green plastic fish bins were already lashed securely into the boat. Loading done, Garwood backed the trailer down the ramp until its wheels were in the water. The two men unlashed the craft, pushed it off the trailer, and Service held a line to the boat while the sergeant parked the vehicle and trailer against the trees at the landing. They both pushed the boat away from shore and hopped aboard. Service looked at his watch. It was noon, straight up.

  The sky was gunmetal gray, but there was no snow and visibility was good.

  “Your partner’s sick?” Service asked.