by Paul Doiron
The skin hung down around the boar’s head, hiding it from view, as he began removing the shoulders and tenderloins. Next came the ribs and loins. Snapping the ribs apart required a tree pruner. The hams were next, followed by the feet.
“Hold on a minute,” Stacey said. “We’re going to need the head.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture agent had asked us to send the brain to the state university where it would be dissected and tested for disease.
Ricky knocked some ashes loose and reached for a hose to wash out the empty cavity. “As long as I can keep those tusks. So what do you want meatwise? I can do chops, tenderloins, sausages. I got a new smoker to make some bacon.”
“I’m not keeping it,” I said. “I’m donating the meat to the poor.”
“If you’re giving it away, can I take some?” a man, who was missing his front teeth, said. “I’m as poor as a church mouse.”
“You are not!” a bearded man said, and laughed. “What about that scratch ticket you won last month? Compared to me, you’re Scrooge McDuck.”
At least these jokers hadn’t heard about the dead baby yet, or they would have been peppering me with questions about the gruesome discovery.
“Sorry, guys, it’s going to the food pantry.” I turned to Ricky, who was lighting yet another Old Gold. “Give me a call when I can come pick it up.”
“Remember, I only take cash.”
“You’re going to have to settle for a check from the State of Maine.”
“It better not bounce is all I can say. I ain’t paying any of those bank fees. I’ve been burned by too many deadbeats.”
“The State of Maine is good for it,” I said with confidence.
Stacey’s bitter laugh told me she was of a different opinion.
“So you’ll owe me for three pigs.”
“Two pigs.” Stacey pointed at the truck. “That one and that one. Don’t bother butchering the big sow. No one’s going to eat her.”
It was the hog that had dug up and begun to feed on the infant’s corpse.
Ricky scowled. “What for? What’s wrong with her?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Just do as Stacey says, please.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do with a whole pig?”
“Burn it in that oil drum you got out front.”
“I don’t like wasting meat. What if I feed it to my dogs?”
“Absolutely not,” said Stacey. “In fact, I think we should take her with us, Mike, to dispose of ourselves.”
“Don’t you trust me, ma’am?” Ricky said.
“Not even a little.” She turned on her heel and made her way through the peanut gallery out into the antiseptic sunlight.
“Damn, Warden. Anyone ever tell you your girlfriend is a regular badass?”
No one had ever needed to.
6
When we finally got home, I took a shovel from the garage and dragged the sow by myself to the back of the property, through a thicket of scratchy barberry and Japanese knotweed, which many people mistake for bamboo because of its hard, hollow stalks. Both were invasive plants—imported by clueless gardeners—and just about unkillable.
Beyond the bushes was an old cellar hole, maybe five feet deep and walled with fire-blackened fieldstones: the remnant of a long-forgotten homestead. Farther down the hill was a mound from which random woodland plants sprouted: Indian cucumber, Canada may-flower, goldthread. It had been the garbage dump of the original settlers, now covered with humus and matted oak leaves. More than once I had come out here with a spade to play amateur archaeologist. I’d found rusted bedsprings and copper lanterns; I’d unearthed intact medicine bottles in a variety of bright colors that made me imagine that someone in that vanished dwelling had been addicted to laudanum.
I had decided to bury the sow there, deep in that earthen pile of trash. Despite the thirsty deerflies, I peeled off my shirt and undershirt. It was too damned hot to care about anything but finishing the job at hand.
It wasn’t lost on me that I was giving the sow a more dignified burial than someone had that baby.
When I returned to the house, I found Stacey waiting for me. Her white robe was open, and she wasn’t wearing anything but her cotton bra and panties underneath. “Took you long enough,” she said.
“You didn’t have to wait for me.”
“What else was I going to do? Return messages from Barstow?”
Barstow was her boss in Augusta, the director of Fish and Wild-life Resource Management. “How pissed was he that you took the day off to go pig hunting?”
“He was pretty pissed, but what’s he going to do? I’m Maine’s moose whisperer, remember?” A reporter had given her the nick-name in a newspaper article about her crusade to rescue moose from the winter-tick epidemic.
“I hope you’re not pushing your luck, baby.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to think or talk about anything.” She slipped the robe loose of her strong shoulders. “Take off your pants.”
The living-room curtains were open. “Here?”
“Why not?”
“But I’m filthy.”
“So am I.”
When I was a teenager, before I’d lost my virginity, I’d had ideas of sex that were downright courtly, by which I mean that I envisioned the carnal act as something to be done by candlelight on canopy beds, and always with gentleness and courtesy, out of respect for the delicate nature of my imagined future partner. It would never have occurred to my naïve fifteen-year-old self that I might one day be aroused by a woman’s sweaty, smelly body; that I might find it more arousing than one adorned with perfume and negligee; that I might prefer a fraying couch to a feather bed; that I might find the roughness of our passion—the hair pulling and lip biting, the obscene whispers in each other’s ears—more intimate than anything “romantic.”
Sex was how Stacey and I chose to deal with the horrors of what we had seen that day. By the time we finished in the shower, we were not only clean. We were spent.
We toweled off in silence. She didn’t bother wrapping her long hair in a terry-cloth turban but let the dark tendrils trail down her back as she walked barefoot through the living room. “Do you want a beer?” she called.
“I can’t. I have to go to work again.”
A moment later, she returned to the bathroom door, clutching her towel above her breasts to keep it from slipping off. “Can’t it wait till morning?”
“I want to finish it tonight.”
She nodded, imagining what I was setting off to do, understanding my urgency. “I don’t think I can go with you.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“Those poor piglets.”
My first serious girlfriend, who had grown up in the Connecticut suburbs, a train ride from New York, would have implored me to spare the orphaned animals. She would have asked why I couldn’t livetrap them to be relocated elsewhere or maybe even redomesticated somehow.
Wouldn’t it be possible, she might have asked, for you to capture them to give to a farmer to grow up alongside his barnyard pigs?
I would have had to remind her that pigs are not bred on farms to live comfortably until death takes them in old age. Even before they are born, they have an appointment with the slaughterhouse.
Stacey didn’t need to be reminded. She had grown up with chickens destined for the chopping block and with cows fated for the abattoir. Like me, she was a lifelong hunter and fisher. Not a drop of sentimentality was in her Stevens blood. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t feel sympathy and sorrow for God’s creatures.
She sat in her robe on the bed, sipping from a bottle of beer, while I got dressed in a fresh set of camouflage clothes.
“What are you going to do for the rest of the afternoon?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t mind taking a nap, but I need to get some groceries. We’ve got a lot of people coming on the Fourth. Has Kathy said if she can make it yet?”
“She
said she’s coming—and she’s bringing the puppy.”
Stacey sat up with a grin. “That’s awesome! She’s a Belgian Malinois, right? How old again?”
“Twelve weeks.”
“Our first house party. Should be interesting.”
“As long as no one calls the cops.”
“A bunch of wardens get together—you never know what could happen.”
I noticed that Stacey still hadn’t mentioned calling her boss to explain her absence from the important meeting that morning.
“Aren’t you going to eat anything before you go?” she asked.
“I’ll get a sandwich on the road. Unless I get lucky and find them right off, I’ll probably be back after dark.”
“Can you do me one favor?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t bring them back here. Bury them somewhere else.”
I took her head in my hands and raised her suntanned face to mine. We kept eye contact the entire time we kissed. There were tears in hers.
* * *
I arrived back in Birnam in late afternoon. I drove up and down the road near the trailhead, slowing before each house to make my own inspection. Pomerleau and Tate would have knocked on every door by now—not only to ask whether the occupants had seen anything suspicious, but in case the person who had buried the newborn might actually reside within. By and large the homes were sad, poorly maintained places, separated from each other by hundreds of yards of mixed woods, far enough from their neighbors to make keeping to oneself a way of life.
The woods of Maine also contained many abandoned farmhouses and cabins: old homesteads whose owners had died without heirs, or who had so thoroughly let their ancestral dwellings fall into disrepair that later generations had found them uninhabitable, not to mention unsalable. From a distance it was hard to tell which buildings were occupied and which had been left to the deer mice.
After two unproductive turns up and down the road, I pulled into the Knife Creek Trail parking lot. The air had been still all day, as breathless as the inside of a killing jar. But a faint breeze now ruffled the oak and beech leaves overhead. To the west, thunderheads had begun to form over the mountains, as they always seemed to do on sweltering afternoons like this. The clouds didn’t always result in storms, but these looked particularly ominous, as dark as the smoke from an angry volcano.
I pulled up the weather radar on my phone and saw a red-and-yellow blob advancing across the map of New Hampshire. Unlike modern humans, many of whom are remarkably oblivious of weather, almost willfully oblivious in certain cases, animals can sense when the barometric pressure is falling. Most species seem to react to approaching electrical storms by taking cover and hunkering down. Unless I literally stumbled over my piglets, I was unlikely to find them until the lightning storm had passed on to the east.
Judging by the radar, it looked as if I might have half an hour before the skies opened and Zeus started hurling thunderbolts. I had driven all the way out here. I decided I might at least have a quick look.
I removed my rifle from its hard plastic case. It was the same government-issued Windham carbine I had used earlier to kill the boar. Based on the M16 rifle, first used in combat in Vietnam, the AR-15 was a weapon of war designed solely for executing other men. As fun as it was to shoot, I never let myself forget the black gun’s origins.
I slung the rifle over my shoulder and locked the truck. The lot was crosshatched with so many tire treads I could have told you this had been the site of a police emergency even without having been present for it. The U.S. Border Patrol calls the art of tracking humans and vehicles “cutting sign,” and their agents consider themselves to be the best in the business. I liked to think that Maine game wardens could give the feds a run for their money.
For instance, I could pick out my own prints from among those of the many boots and shoes that had scuffed the dirt. Stacey’s, too. I wished now that I had paid more attention that morning as we had hiked in to the wallow. If I had shone a flashlight on the trail back then, might I have seen the telltale tracks of whoever buried the infant in the mud?
Even before I reached the crime scene I saw yellow ribbons of police tape flapping. Certain officers had been given the task of cleaning up the site after the forensics team had finished its work, but they must have been careless or in a hurry to escape the claustrophobic woods. I made a sweep of the clearing, picking up litter. In addition to the scraps of tape, I found a Big Red gum wrapper, caught in the upper fronds of a fern, as well as a dropped ballpoint pen, the kind used by state troopers to write tickets. I pocketed the trash to dispose of later.
I squatted down beside the old beech tree to look again at the initials carved into the bark. Who or what was KC? Something about the letters struck me as furtive, as if whoever had scratched them had done so quickly so as not to be noticed.
A hard gust rattled the treetops. It sounded as if a flock of birds had come to roost in the branches and were rustling about up there among the leaves, invisible to the naked eye. The temperature began to drop. I knew that I should return to the parking lot to wait out the storm in the comfort and safety of my rubber-wheeled truck. But just as I was turning to go, I heard a squeal in the undergrowth up the hillside. Then another and another.
I removed the rifle from my shoulder and clicked off the safety.
7
When I had finished, I returned to my truck and hauled out the polyethylene sled and trudged back into the woods while the first drops of rain began to fall and the treetops continued to shake. There had been eight of them, not six, and I placed each gently into the sled, the way you might set down a sleeping child.
The first crack of thunder—ten miles to the west—sounded to me like the angry outburst of a disapproving god. Even though I had done what had needed doing, I felt deserving of being judged.
Leafy twigs dropped to the ground, and the now-chilly air swirled between the trunks of the trees. I pulled hard on the rope to out-race the coming downpour. Loaded as it was, the sled still weighed less than it had when I’d hauled out the boar. I was able to deadlift the whole thing off the ground and slide it into the bed.
For reasons I couldn’t explain, I drew a blue tarp over them. They wouldn’t feel the water, but somehow it seemed the right thing to do.
The skies opened seconds after I’d slid behind the steering wheel. The volume of water that fell in those first minutes was astounding. The windshield became utterly opaque from the gushing flood. When I tried the wipers, they did nothing to clear the glass. The weight of the raindrops seemed capable of crushing the steel roof on my head. I was stuck here in the lot, not going anywhere, a prisoner of the storm.
Then the lightning started. I saw the first bolt leap across the sky and then an almost simultaneous boom in the direction of the Saco River. I thought of the rafters, float-tubers, and canoeists—most of them liquored to the gills—out on the water. Many of them didn’t know enough to realize what prime targets they were for electrification.
Just as foolish were those taking shelter beneath the huge oaks and pines along the sandbanks. Clustering together under a tall tree was about as safe in a lightning storm as joining hands around a metal flagpole.
I turned up the police radio while I waited for the worst of the weather to pass, fearing I might soon receive a summons to pull charred bodies out of the water.
After a while, my mind drifted back to the morning’s horrors. Where had she come from, that broken little girl? The Saco Road was heavily traveled, but the Knife Creek Trail was little used. You didn’t have to live across the street from the parking lot to know the hillside above was a tangle of hiding places.
I regretted now that I hadn’t taken the time to explore Burnt Meadows when I’d first been assigned to cover the district. Maybe if I knew the trail better—and more important, who used it—I would have had some insights into the thoughts of whoever had chosen the spot to conceal a corpse.
With the rain pouri
ng down, I reached for the battered Maine Atlas and Gazetteer I kept under my driver’s seat and turned to the quadrangle for the southernmost corner of Oxford County. The page showed the trailhead with a dotted line leading up the eastern ridge of the hill toward the low, tree-covered summit. Unfortunately, the scale of the map was too small to reveal any topographical details that might’ve helped me visualize the landscape.
To an outside observer, my truck might have appeared to be an unredeemed mess, cluttered as it was with raincoats, tools, firearm cases, and discarded coffee cups. But I knew each and every item that I carried with me on patrol and where it resided within the vehicle. I knew, for instance, that the aluminum fly-rod tube behind the seat didn’t hold an actual L.L. Bean fishing rod, but instead contained a roll of antique topographical maps prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey. I unscrewed the metal cap, and the compressed sheets of yellowed paper curled open across my passenger seat.
The map I had for this region was dated 1941. The names of the roads were mostly unfamiliar, having been replaced with route numbers in the subsequent decades.
But it wasn’t the highways that interested me. The detailed 1941 map showed the trail Stacey and I had hiked that morning. The path had been in continual use for decades. But the map also showed other, fainter trails, including what looked like an old logging road that ascended into the highlands from the north and intersected the Knife Creek Trail less than a quarter mile from the pig wallow.
Pomerleau was assuming—as I had—that whoever had buried the baby had parked at the Knife Creek trailhead and hiked up from the Saco Road, but what if the person had come from another direction?
The lightning passed. The downpour ended as abruptly as it had begun. The moon appeared.
There was no harm in having a look, I decided.