Badges, Bears, and Eagles

by Steven T. Callan

  Just then, we heard a vehicle coming down the road. An older model pickup rounded the bend and headed toward us. On full alert, Hatcher and I watched a slender but wiry little man climb out of the pickup. He sported a full gray beard and wore a dirt-stained, Massey Ferguson baseball cap. We caught a glimpse of a lever action rifle on the front seat as the pickup door closed behind him.

  “What the hell do you guys want?”

  “Are you Lester Vail?” I asked.

  The little curmudgeon hesitated to answer, his brow knit in consternation. “Yeah, that’s me. Whadda ya want?”

  “We received a report that you killed a deer recently.”

  “Who told ya that?”

  “Do you have any deer meat inside your house?”

  “I ain’t got no damned deer meat. You’re welcome to look if you want.”

  As we were about to enter Vail’s house, Hatcher and I heard snorting and noticed that the giant pig we had encountered earlier was walking down the road in our direction.

  “Are there any other people living here, Mr. Vail?” I asked.

  “Nope, just me and my pigs.”

  “How many pigs do you have?”

  “I got a dozen or so runnin’ around here.”

  There were no occupied pig pens, so all Vail’s pigs apparently had free run of the adjacent woods. Hatcher and I stepped inside and began to look around. We easily found enough fresh deer hair and tissue in the kitchen area to put together a closed-season deer case against Vail. The fresh skull cap outside would make it a slam dunk. What puzzled us was Vail’s serene countenance—he must have known we would find evidence of deer when he gave us verbal permission to search his house.

  While I bagged up the evidence, Warden Hatcher peaked into the bathroom shower stall, where he discovered a freshly harvested crop of seven foot high marijuana plants. Forty or fifty of them were jammed into the stall.

  “Mr. Vail, what’s this?” asked Hatcher.

  Without answering, the strange little man wrapped his arms around the marijuana plants and carried them outside. He proceeded to drop all of the plants on the ground in front of his giant pig. The humongous swine immediately began to scarf up the plants. Hatcher and I watched in disbelief as the pig munched away.

  “Mr. Vail, this doesn’t change anything,” Hatcher said. “We have to report the marijuana to the sheriff’s department, even if your pig eats most of the evidence.” Hatcher photographed the plants then placed what was left in the back of his patrol vehicle.

  Finally Vail began to show concern—his jaw was clenched and he paced back and forth nervously. Warden Hatcher asked for identification while I made sure Vail stayed away from his pickup and the rifle we had seen earlier. Vail produced a California Drivers License and Hatcher began copying the information.

  “So what’s going to happen?” asked Vail.

  “I am going to give a report to the district attorney regarding your being in possession of a closed-season deer,” replied Hatcher.

  “What about the pot?” asked Vail.

  “I will give the marijuana and a report to the sheriff’s office. It will be up to them what they do with it,” replied Hatcher.

  “That’s chickenshit!” shouted Vail. “I let you guys search for deer, not pot.”

  I got the impression that Vail had been busted for marijuana before and that he was worried about the possibility of going to prison. The misdemeanor Fish and Game violation didn’t seem to bother him; it was clearly the marijuana he was worried about. Although we often ran across marijuana growers in the course of our patrols, I was more concerned about them poaching our deer and polluting our streams. It was our duty to report findings to the appropriate enforcement agencies, so we generally let the sheriff’s office or the local drug task force decide how they wanted to deal with the situation.

  In this case, Warden Hatcher turned the marijuana plants over to the sheriff’s office and provided a written narrative of the circumstances. Neither Hatcher nor I were ever called upon to testify, so Vail paid a fine for the closed-season deer and that was probably the end of it.

  Two or three years after this case was made, I read a disturbing story in the local newspaper. Lester Vail had heard a gunshot coming from the road above his house. Concerned that someone had harmed one of his pigs, he grabbed his rifle and ran up the hill. Reaching the upper road, Lester came face-to-face with his worst nightmare: a car parked in the road, with two men standing nearby. One of the men was holding a high powered rifle. Lying dead at the man’s feet was Vail’s prized pig. What happened next is debatable, but according to the only living witness, Lester went into a rage and pointed his rife at the pig shooter. The pig shooter reacted by pointing his rifle back at Vail. Both men fired at exactly the same time, each hitting his respective target. The pig shooter dropped dead and so did Lester Vail. So ends the unfortunate tale of Lester Vail.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Working the Tribs

  I

  As the Sacramento River flowed through Shasta County, it was fed by several tributary streams. Some were ephemeral, flowing only during the rainy season; others had reliable upstream water sources and flowed year-round. During wet years, we had salmon and Sacramento River rainbow trout spawning in almost all of the streams below Shasta Dam. Salt and Middle Creeks—two small tributaries just north of Redding—ran dry during the summer months, but hosted hundreds of three- to six-pound trophy Sacramento River rainbows during wet spawning seasons.

  There were years when we had to almost stand guard on these streams to keep the poachers at bay. During drier years, spawning activity was restricted to the Sacramento River and larger tributaries like Battle Creek, Clear Creek and South Cow Creek. From late September through December, wardens working in Shasta County generally had their hands full protecting these magnificent fish as they struggled against almost insurmountable odds to reach their spawning grounds and perpetuate the species.

  II

  The morning before Thanksgiving, 1990, Warden Dave Szody hopped in his patrol truck and headed out for a day of patrolling the Sacramento River tributaries. By late November, the only tributary streams that still hosted spawning Chinook salmon were Battle Creek and Clear Creek, so Dave concentrated his efforts there. The five-mile section of Battle Creek between Coleman National Fish Hatchery and the Sacramento River was closed to all fishing in an effort to protect the spawning salmon and steelhead. Ocean-run steelhead had become so scarce in the upper Sacramento River system that every spawner was critically important.

  Szody drove into the County Line Bridge parking lot and noticed that it was empty. This usually meant there were no illegal fishermen on that stretch of Battle Creek, but sometimes people were dropped off. The only way to be sure was to get out of the truck and walk. Grabbing his binoculars, he followed a foot trail that began at the bridge and continued upstream for several miles.

  Dead and dying spawned-out salmon lay all along the water’s edge. That’s strange, thought the warden, the usual entourage of vultures, gulls, ravens and bald eagles is conspicuously missing. The absence of birds feeding on this stretch of stream could mean only one thing. Someone had recently passed through the area.

  Alerted to the presence of possible violators ahead, Szody moved cautiously and kept out of sight as much as possible, using blackberry patches for cover. Just beyond the first bend in the stream, he discovered two men wading knee-deep in the water and casting into a shallow riffle. They followed each cast with a strong rearward jerking motion—a clear indication of snagging. Both men were braving the cold water in trousers and tennis shoes, standard attire for most salmon snaggers in their teens and early twenties.

  Just a month earlier, thousands of salmon had worked their way up this classic spawning stream. Now Battle Creek’s fall Chinook salmon run was largely over and the number of live salmon in the stream had thinned to a few hundred fish—a few of our invaluable steelhead among them.

  In spite of their obvious
efforts, neither of the two fishermen seemed to be having much success. Szody watched for a half hour or more until one of the anglers finally snagged a big hook-nosed buck (spawning male Chinook salmon) in the back. The young man was horsing the fifteen-pound salmon across the rocks and up on the bank when Warden Szody stepped from behind a patch of blackberries and instructed him to carefully release it. “Without breaking your lines, I want both of you to walk over here and set your fishing rods down on the ground,” commanded Szody. “I repeat, do not break your lines.” Both lines were tied to large treble hooks, weighted with wraparound pencil sinkers.

  “Have you taken any other fish?” Szody asked.

  They both shook their heads vigorously, and the taller of the two insisted, “No, no others.”

  Based on what he had seen and the fact that there were very few live salmon left in Battle Creek at the time, Szody was fairly certain that the two snaggers were telling the truth. He suspected that these men were after salmon row—egg skeins were ripped from the females and later used or illegally sold as trout and steelhead bait. There was no evidence of egg spillage on the bank and a cursory search of the area produced nothing suspicious.

  “So how did you guys get here?” asked Szody.

  “We’re very sorry to have caused you this trouble, Officer Szody,” said the shorter man, having read the name tag on Szody’s shirt pocket. “My girl friend dropped us off.”

  Unlike most of the derelicts we caught snagging on Battle Creek, this young man seemed respectful. When Szody asked for identification, he learned that the shorter man was actually on leave from the U.S. Army. Being a former air policeman in Viet Nam, Szody knew that the kid would have hell to pay if his CO found out about him being busted. Because both men had valid fishing licenses and hadn’t killed anything, the soft-hearted warden gave them a stern warning and advised them not to come back.

  During the walk back to the parking lot, Warden Szody noticed that some of the birds had returned, including an immature bald eagle. With long, graceful wing beats, the startled raptor flew to the top of an old cottonwood tree and waited for the three intruders to pass. During the fall and winter months, when salmon were present, as many as forty bald eagles haunted the lower stretches of Battle Creek. Most of the salmon had died, but their decaying carcasses would provide essential food for a dozen bird species, otters, raccoons, mink, invertebrates and thousands of hatchling salmon and steelhead.

  It was mid-afternoon when Warden Szody made his way across the valley. Since he was the only enforcement unit working in Shasta County that day, Szody decided to venture out of his own district and patrol lower Clear Creek. Clear Creek still had a fairly substantial salmon run and some of the local outlaws knew it. Beginning at the mouth, where Clear Creek entered the Sacramento River, Szody’s patrol would proceed several miles upstream to one of the more heavily poached sections of water in the area.

  The weather that afternoon was cold and overcast. By the time Szody had worked his way to the end, it was approaching 4:00 p.m. and the sun was already going down. He pulled off Clear Creek Road, onto a well-traveled dirt road that dead-ended about one hundred yards from the stream. There he saw an obvious red flag: a Chevy pickup surreptitiously parked behind a manzanita thicket. He turned off his engine and walked over to the suspicious vehicle. The hood was cold, which didn’t mean much, considering the forty-eight degree ambient temperature. Inside the cab was a pack of cigarettes and a dark blue jacket. The registration sticker on the rear plate was, to Szody’s amazement, surprisingly current.

  Binoculars in hand, Warden Szody locked his truck and started out on foot patrol. As he approached Clear Creek, the sound of spawning salmon splashing in the shallows caught his attention. He was encouraged by the healthy number of fish and the many redds—depressions in the gravel created by spawning salmon. Unlike many of the Sacramento River tributaries, Clear Creek maintained a constant flow of cold water year-round. This water originated from the depths of Whiskeytown Reservoir, several miles to the west.

  If anyone is poaching salmon, they will be down at the bend, thought Szody.

  Over the years, area wardens had made dozens of salmon poaching cases at the “bend.” Every fish had to swim through a narrow, very shallow riffle and negotiate a small waterfall. If the fish made it past the riffle, they generally stacked up below the falls—vulnerable to snag hooks, spears, nets, rocks and even shotguns. (Yes, we had even made a few cases involving people shooting salmon with shotguns.)

  Szody quietly made his way downstream. He was still fifty yards from the bend, when he heard male voices laughing and calling to each other.

  “You missed, here comes another one,” one voice shouted.

  “Let me have the spear; there’s one right there,” said another.

  Ducking behind a large rock outcropping, Szody directed his binoculars toward the commotion. He immediately spotted four men chasing fish up and down the stream—all of them tolerating the cold water in trousers and tennis shoes, a clear indication that they were young and stupid.

  Taking turns with two long metal spears, the young men were stabbing at the half exposed salmon as the frightened fish tried to swim the gauntlet through the shallow riffle. Thrusting back and forth with all of the energy left in their exhausted bodies, these determined marvels of nature became easy targets for the excited poachers.

  Disgusted by what he saw, Szody’s first inclination was to confront the violators immediately. Being an experienced professional, however, he knew that blundering in and hoping for the best was not the way to go. By being patient and keeping watch for a while, he could determine the extent of the crime and come away with a far stronger case. Besides, these idiots were wet up to their asses—the cold water and forty degree air temperature would soon dampen their enthusiasm.

  A mere fifteen minutes later the four salmon poachers started complaining about the cold and finally ended their carnage. Peering through his binoculars, Szody wondered what they were doing down by the water’s edge, behind a patch of alders. He had seen the men successfully spear one salmon and miss a dozen more, but the patient warden had no idea how many fish these men had killed before he arrived.

  Warden Szody would later say that the sight of the four men and their illegal booty reminded him of the old African game-beaters photographs in National Geographic: the culprits had threaded each salmon’s gills through the ends of the two metal spears. One spear contained nine eight-to-ten-pound salmon, with a man on each end. The other spear contained eight salmon, also with a man on each end. As the four men clumsily staggered up the trail, laughing and joking as they went, Szody slipped in behind them. Each time they stopped to rest, he stepped off the trail to find cover. More than once, the plundered fish almost ended up on the ground.

  “We made it,” said the first man to reach the pickup.

  “Not quite,” said Warden Szody, as he lit them up with his flashlight. “Who’s the driver of this pickup?”

  “I am,” responded a tall young man with an expression on his pleasant-looking face that instantly shifted from ultimate exhilaration to serious melancholy. The others looked as if someone had just thrown a bucket of cold water in their faces.

  “Hand me your keys,” said Szody. “Now I need to see identification from all four of you.”

  The driver kept repeating the same thing over and over: “My dad’s gonna kill me.” He was a twenty-year-old college student, home for the Thanksgiving holiday. The others were a cousin and two friends from high school, attending the local community college.

  Driver’s licenses in hand, Warden Szody radioed Shasta County Sheriff’s dispatch and asked if any of the four subjects had outstanding warrants; they all came back clear. After checking for weapons, Szody instructed the men to load all of the fish and the two spears into the bed of his patrol truck. With no outstanding warrants and good identification, all four men were issued citations. They were charged with unlawful take and possession of seventeen sal
mon in closed waters and with unlawful method of take—spears.

  The Clear Creek salmon appeared to be in much better condition than those found in Battle Creek so Warden Szody took evidence photographs and delivered the fish to the local rescue mission. While unloading the pickup, he noticed that the spears had been made out of TV antenna poles, smashed at one end. “No end to American ingenuity,” he said, shaking his head.

  A month or so later, the four salmon poachers were each fined over $1500 and placed on one year’s summary probation—a small price to pay for the potential harm they had inflicted on future Clear Creek salmon runs. These were less numerous and significantly more valuable wild fish—not fish that had been artificially propagated in a hatchery.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Fall River Elk Killings

  I

  Approximately sixty-five miles from Redding, in the northeast corner of Shasta County, is a place called Fall River Valley. At thirty-four hundred feet above sea level, this large expanse of agricultural lands, marshes, lakes, streams and crystal clear springs is watched over by Mount Shasta on the north and Mount Lassen on the south. Fall River, from which this beautiful region gets its name, is a world-renowned fly fishing stream that meanders through farmlands and creates habitat not only for trophy-sized trout, but also thousands of waterfowl and other wildlife.

  During its journey across the valley, Fall River intersects with the Tule, Little Tule and Pit Rivers. Near the confluence of Fall River and the Pit River is the little town of Fall River Mills, with a population of about six hundred and fifty. Five minutes up the highway is another little town called McArthur, with a population of about three hundred and fifty. The valley contains a few other tiny hamlets with names like Dana, Glenburn and Pittville, but for all practical purposes, the entire valley functions as one community, where everybody knows everybody and nothing happens that the entire population doesn’t hear about.