Killing a Cold One

by Joseph Heywood

  “No joke. Dead-soft, too.”

  “I’m tired of talking to you,” he announced.

  “You’re sadly lacking in social skills.”

  “Been told that,” he said, adding, “Bye” before closing his cell phone.

  Noonan, Treebone, Allerdyce, and Donte DeJean were gathered at the kitchen table. “Presidential election today,” Service told them.

  “Absentee ballot for me,” Treebone said. “Can’t stand lines.”

  “No lines for me, either,” Service said.

  “Who you vote for?”

  “Didn’t. Lines are short when you don’t bother.”

  “I don’t vote neither,” Noonan said. “What’s the point? Damn politicians shake your hand before they’re elected and shake your confidence afterwards. They’re all slimeballs.”

  Limpy announced, “Secret ballot. Ain’t gotta say my pick.”

  Treebone smirked. “Bet he isn’t of color.”

  The boy said, “I’m not old enough.”

  “Snowing in the Hurons,” Service told them. “We’ll use today to outfit ourselves. I want to spend a couple days at Ketchkan and Bulldog, scout around. Each man needs a two-man tent, tarp and fly, thermal fart sack. I got plenty of extras. What kind of winter gear you got, Suit?”

  “Good set of galoshes. It snow in the D, I don’t go out, man.”

  Limpy spoke up. “Got plenty of stuff will fit ’im. I take Donte fetch his gear, grab mine for Noonan, be back dark.”

  “What about school, Donte?”

  “Homeschool,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “That’s what my old man tells everyone.”

  Service looked at Allerdyce. “You know the country I’m talking about?”

  “You betcha. Lots game up dose places, good birds, deer, moose, bear. Okay I bring my twenty-gauge, eh?”

  Service shrugged. “Hell, we might as well have us an armed felon.”

  Allerdyce grinned. “I bring some bacon, too, knock us down some pats.”

  “You can’t buy a hunting license,” Service reminded him.

  “Can buy,” the poacher said, “just can’t use legal, eh? You look nudder way when I get supper, okay?”

  Grady Service sighed and spread out his hands. “Why not?”

  What he thought was: I’m going to game warden hell for this.

  17

  Wednesday, November 5

  KETCHKAN LAKE, BARAGA COUNTY

  They took two trucks: Service’s State Tahoe, and his personal Silverado. Ketchkan Lake showed on maps as nameless, a small body of water in the hills between Curwood and High Lakes, a mile north of the Huron River Road. There was a grown-over tote road that twisted up to Ketchkan along a meandering granite razorback. The snow had broken that morning, leaving six inches on the ground, wet and slippery. The temp was already in the low 40s and climbing, expected to reach 50 by afternoon, but drop below 30 that night.

  Allerdyce and DeJean rode with Service. Tree and Noonan drove the Silverado.

  Service knew the area somewhat from years back but parked and let Donte DeJean and Limpy take the lead going in. The boy stood on a ridge above Ketchkan and pointed at a rocky knob to the northeast. “It was below that high spot, headed down toward the lake.”

  “Same place twice?” Service asked.

  “No; the other time was a bit north of here, closer to High Lake.”

  “Time of day?” Treebone asked.

  “Both right in the middle, you know, like one o’clock?”

  Allerdyce was hunkered down, shotgun across his thighs, staring north. Noonan was beside him in the same pose. Monkey see, monkey do. “You looking for a flat place to camp?” Service asked the poacher.

  “Watching moose babies, but don’t see mama.”

  “She won’t be far,” Service said. “They’re born in May, June, will be with her for a year or so.”

  “Don’t survive so good, moose babies don’t,” Allerdyce said. “Onny two in ten, mebbe. Dese two kittles look good, mebbe two hunert pound now. Dey down in red willow. I t’ink I go down dere, take look, get into popples, pop some pats dere.” Then, he asked Noonan, “Wanna go?”

  “Down in that fucking jungle? No way, old man.”

  “You camp up here?” Service asked DeJean as Allerdyce started shuffling downhill through a boulder field.

  “There’s a small rock tabletop just northwest of here,” the boy said. “Can see High Lake from there, maybe a half-mile.”

  Service smiled. Donte had just described the same area where he’d camped long ago. It still amazed him how his old man had dragged such a giant deer out of this sparse, steep country. It struck him that Donte didn’t sound like an older Yooper. MTV and YouTube and texting and all that other crap were erasing the Yooper way of speaking and replacing it—as in Donte’s brother Daly—with an urban ghetto lingo that made the speakers sound like wannabe fools. Service didn’t like it, but life was about change. What could you do but roll with it?

  Finding the rock table, Service had them set up tents with flies, using rock spikes to hold them down. They would gather firewood later. Service, as always, had a supply of birch bark in his ruck, which would ignite even if wet, was the best fire starter he knew, and all free.

  Limpy was stalking birds, so Tree set up the old poacher’s shelter.

  They heard five shotgun reports while they made camp, the shots spaced out, and by the time the tents were up Allerdyce came up the hill, breathing like he’d just gone out to the mailbox. “Better come see,” he whispered to Service.

  The two men hiked down to where the calves had been. A clear rill meandered along the base of a rocky embankment, and Service saw several ravens flap out of the heavy red willow that grew along the stream. Interspersed with willow were paper birches a few inches in diameter. The ravens had slugged their way out from the base of the birch trees.

  “Water’s pret skinny here,” Allerdyce said of the small creek, and led Service across and into the willows where they got halfway to the rock wall before stopping. “Over dere,” the old man said, pointing.

  Service pushed past the poacher. It was a cow moose, but huge pieces of it were spread all around, like it had swallowed a bomb that had exploded inside it. “Seen this before?” he asked Allerdyce.

  The old man said nothing, just shook his head with his mouth tight. The poacher’s eyes were moving continuously, and Service could tell he was on alert, geeked by what he’d found.

  When a wolf, coyote, bear, or cougar made a kill, the carcass would usually carry certain clues to help identify the predator. Cougars cached meat, and so did wolves. Bears generally didn’t kill healthy deer or moose, only fawns, or they ate off carcasses. Coyotes pretty much stopped taking deer once fawns were dropped by early June and rarely ever attempted to take healthy deer. Wolves tended to eat everything from a dead animal—stomach, muscles, tendons, marrow, everything, small bones included. They also tended to rest near kills so they could feed at their leisure. This moose appeared to have been chewed on some, but mostly not; this scene was something he’d not seen before. “Any tracks or scat?” he asked the poacher.

  Another head shake. “Ain’t see this afore. She don’t make no sense, eh? Youse find a kill, she tells you what happen, eh? Not dis. Dis don’t tell shit.”

  Service agreed. “Look for scat and tracks.”

  “Snowmelt,” Allerdyce reminded him.

  “I know. Look close to the remains—logs, rocks, places where snow didn’t get to,” Service said. And then, after a pause, “What has the sort of power to rip a grown moose apart like this?”

  “Beats me,” the poacher said. “T’ing is, wolfies can smell mooses t’ree, four hundred yard away, eh? Wolfies close in, moose fight hards, kill a lot of wolfie. Healthy moose, wolfies leave ’em ’lone. Out wes
t, Isle Boil, Canady, okay, wolfies eat moose dose places. Not up here U.P.”

  “Let’s cover the kill site, grab samples: meat, hair, whatever we can find.” Service pulled latex gloves and plastic bags out of his ruck, tossed some to Limpy.

  “You send lapertory?” the poacher asked.

  “We’ll see if they’re any smarter than us.”

  Service stared up the vertical bluff, twenty, maybe thirty feet up. Cougar attack?

  He searched until he found the moose’s head, and looked at the vertebrae. Cougars killed by breaking necks. No evidence of that here. Not a cougar or a big cat.

  Limpy was on the far side of the remains while Service went methodically from clump to clump. He saw something whitish gleaming from griseous foreleg meat. He got down to a knee, felt the thing through his latex gloves. Couldn’t move it. Deep.

  He got out his pocketknife and loosened the object into a plastic bag. It was a huge, lethal-looking tooth, a cuspid or fang. He couldn’t remember what terminology biologists used for various teeth. Way too big for a coyote. He leaned close to the leg joint and then to the meat, his eye moving from where the tooth had been until he found a second puncture wound, equally large, but no tooth in this one. He laid out a small tape measure and photographed the distance between the punctures. As he looked through his digital camera, he whistled in astonishment. If these were fangs, the width from one side to the other was nearly seven inches. The wolves he knew would measure two or three. Totally fucking weird. Not to mention disturbing.

  Two hours later they went back to camp. As they hiked, Allerdyce asked, “You find somepin’ dere?”

  Service showed the poacher the bag with the tooth.

  “Wolfie,” Allerdyce said. “Big wolfie.”

  Service didn’t tell the man what he measured on the bite width. It wasn’t believable, even to him.

  The tooth was interesting, the kill site unusual, to say the least. But does any of this mean anything? He had no answer. He showed the tooth to the others. “Tomorrow we’ll spread out and cover this area, see if we can find tracks, scat, anything.”

  Later, Allerdyce brought him a cigarette. “T’ing kill dat moose ain’t no normal wolfie,” he said, shaking his head.

  •••

  The next afternoon Limpy found Service, said, “Got ’nudder one.”

  No tooth at the second carcass, but the same violence as the first. And no tracks or scat, for any species, prey or predator. It was like the site was sterile, the carcasses dropped from a UFO, or maybe this placed was cursed.

  18

  Friday, November 7

  BULLDOG LAKE, MARQUETTE COUNTY

  They hiked out of Ketchkan at dawn, drove south to the Peshekee Grade, and to a small parking area for the trailhead up into the McCormick Wilderness. They hiked three miles north and uphill through the stone hills and pines, past White Deer Lake, which connected to Bulldog Lake by a thin channel. All the way they moved through mazes of SUV-size granite boulders spackled with pastel-colored lichen.

  Grady Service pulled them together and passed around his camera, showing them the moose carcasses at Lake Ketchkan. “Be methodical,” he told them. “Expect moose in the marshy wet areas, deer up in the hardwoods near cedar swamps.”

  “Where’d you make your sighting here?” Service asked Donte DeJean.

  “At the bottom of this trail, where it leads across the channel.”

  “You were down there?”

  “No, I was up here, but this was the closest of the four times. I think I surprised it.”

  “Why?”

  “Took off across the channel, running south.”

  “Two feet?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Show us with your hand,” Service said.

  The boy demonstrated, and this time Service saw that the motion was almost certainly four-legged, not bipedal. “We’ll camp at the old logging camp clearing on the northwest corner of the lake—about a half-mile up the trail here. Limpy, Donte, and I will take the low areas, Tree and Suit, you guys take the trail north up into the hardwood stands.”

  With everyone headed for the campsite, Service ascended a steep promontory, found he had cell coverage, and called Cale Pilkington, wildlife biologist at the Marquette Regional Office, the man responsible for monitoring and managing the state’s moose herd.

  “Cale, Grady Service. I’m up in the McCormick Tract, near Bulldog Lake. Last couple of days I was camped at Ketchkan and found two dead cow moose, and saw two live calves.” Service gave him the coordinates from his GPS unit. “We estimate two hundred pounds, give or take.”

  “Calves probably belong to one of the cows,” the biologist said. “Size suggests six to eight months old. They could probably make it through the winter—if it isn’t a blinger.”

  “What about wolves?”

  “They’re not an issue with our moose. We aren’t aware of any wolf-killed moose so far. Isle Royale, sure, but here, I don’t think so.”

  Service said, “I’m sending you some photos from Ketchkan. Let me know what you think.”

  “Okay. Seeing any big bucks up where you are?”

  “Not a single deer, any sex, any age, any size.”

  “Deer carcasses?”

  “None. Just seems like no deer, no tracks, no rubs, no pellets, no nothing.”

  “Weird. I’ve seen them yard up in some of those ravines.”

  “No sign of deer,” Service reported. “And it’s way too early for them to yard. Maybe we’re not in the area you’re thinking of.”

  “West or east of Ketchkan?”

  “Mostly northwest.”

  “That’s the area with the population.”

  “Let me know about those photos.”

  “You bet. You guys getting ready for deer season?”

  “Sort of.” Deer season: What’s today, the seventh? Shit. One week until the firearm deer opener. Surprised to still have a signal, Service punched in Chief Waco’s speed dial, and the chief answered his own phone. “It’s Grady. I’m up in the McCormick on that case from the governor. Does this case take priority over deer season?”

  “It takes priority over everything, Grady. By the way, there was a dogman report on the Detroit TV station this morning. It said the dogman was possibly linked to some recent U.P. killings, and the reporter criticized police for being so tight-lipped. You stay with your case; we’ll cover your area for firearm deer.”

  “You know this assignment is ludicrous, Chief.”

  “She’s the boss, Grady.”

  “She’s micromanaging to shift attention from her job performance: She’s a hornswoggling, thimble-rigging, political pinhead pushing pure piffle!”

  “Spoken like a Hoosier from the hills,” the chief said, laughing. “Just do what the boss wants done.”

  After a day of searching Service decided to move the team out at first light. Too much territory here, too few people, and not enough supplies.

  That night after dark they were all at the fire getting ready to get into their shelters when an animal howled northwest of them, up toward Summit Lake, and on the same azimuth as Ketchkan. The quavering call lasted a good six seconds and burned into all of them.

  After a long silence, Allerdyce managed to say, “Never heard dat sound.”

  “Wolf,” Treebone said.

  “Sure,” Allerdyce said. “What kind?”

  19

  Saturday, November 8

  PESHEKEE GRADE, MARQUETTE COUNTY

  The others were loading the trucks when Friday called Service. “Where’ve you been?” she asked.

  “Boots in the mud,” he said, not liking her tone.

  “We’ve got another one,” she said wearily.

  “Where?”

  “Beaver Lake, Baraga County, between Parent and Worm La
kes. Best way there is off Old M-28.”

  “Campground?”

  “No, it’s a camp owned by some minister from Kalamazoo. He hasn’t been up here in ten years, and the place is falling apart. Party house and vagrants.”

  “Officially abandoned?”

  “Nope, just neglected.”

  “We’re rolling,” he said.

  “You find anything?” she asked.

  “Not really,” he said.

  Cale Pilkington called as Service was driving past Michigamme. “Service?”

  “Here.”

  “Got those photos. Is this some kind of joke?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those moose are . . .”

  “Fucked up?” Service suggested.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. I showed the photos to my boss and colleagues. None of them have ever seen anything like this. Ever. It makes no sense biologically. We don’t know of anything that can do that to a live moose.”

  Service tried to think, but his mind was already moving forward to Friday. “The photos are legit, Cale; they show exactly what we found.”

  “Corroboration—scat, hair, tracks?”

  “The spinal columns aren’t broken.”

  “Okay, so we rule out cougar. That I can buy.”

  “I found a tooth,” Service said.

  “From the moose?”

  “No, something stuck in a moose’s thigh. Looks canid to me, but big.”

  “Wolf-big?”

  “Twice that.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Couple of months ago Denninger and I found tracks near Twenty Point Pond.”

  “Cast a mold?”

  “Got photos. You want them?”

  “Please. Dimensions?”

  “Length is seven and a half inches, almost eight, splayed like fingers.”

  “Canid?”

  “My first thought was whopper wolf.”

  “And now?”

  “No opinion. I’ll e-mail the photo in a minute.”

  “What about the tooth?”

  “Show it to you when I can,” Service said.