When I got back to the bend with the rifle inside my coat I saw two red dots pulling up over the hill a good mile off, the tail lights of a car. He had been picked up, but going in a different direction, the back roads. Then it was clear, they were setting up checkpoints at unusual places to pare down to a final point, closing in on the whereabouts of the killer. Or the point was them sticking a pin on the map of the county and hoping. I toyed with idea of a fast shot, a mile about, not out of the question, but hardly time for two shots. And there’d be no hiding two men anyway, never mind a car off a narrow road.
I left the rifle back in its cloth on the seat and set off again. In addition to the book and the weapon I had brought an index card and pencil, a kind of bait, for I had not forgotten that there was a writer in Fort Kent who had plenty to say to me evidently.
33
I DROVE THE LONG WAY AND THE ONLY WAY IN WINTER, through the towns of Fort Kent and Frenchville, then south to St. Agatha, passing the slow trucks that spread salt and ploughed the snow aside, their wipers and headlights on. The entire sky had fallen and collapsed into sludge. You could lose the place where the sun hung on a day like this except for the wind that herded the clouds from occasional patches
The weather forecasters down in Bangor always point to Caribou on the map and refer to it as “up there,” but that town is forty miles south of us, and we are also a good four hours north of Montreal. Fort Kent is the most north you can live in the continental United States and be in any town: people hanging their washing in long back yards can see the televisions flickering in the living rooms of people in Saint Clair, New Brunswick. If that isn’t enough you can also speak French all day long if you want, even the English in you has run out by the time you make it this far. A small few thousand year-rounders live here, and the main street twists along a few restaurants, banks, a supermarket, building supply store, auto shop, pharmacy, a motel, and then opens out on both sides west into the wider Saint John Valley, the fields and the forest, the road following the river turn for turn, like dancers. I stopped at a station off the highway. A logging truck maneuvered in the parking area, and two men in red gear and flannel shirts held steaming coffee by the wall outside the restaurant where it was warmer, especially now that some blue had broken out briefly in the sky.
I passed them with a nod.
It’ll melt now, one of them said to me, for the day and some of tomorrow.
Expect so, I said, and entered, felt the blast of hot air and the smell of more hot coffee and fried bacon. I did not want much, some tea and a cheese sandwich. The restaurant was busy, and this morning, hours after the first snowfall, the snowboarders no doubt soon arriving, though not as many as in parts south and west, and the place would fill with noisy families, not the hard men and women who sat here today, the ones with long journeys fixed permanently in their eyes, the long-distance men.
A very light snow from the cloudy part of the sky brushed the air and swept the parking area as a truck drove in with antlers attached. Two men got out and walked in, thick arms, caps down to cigarettes without smoke. They eased into their table and made their orders with a nod. Snatches of their talk drifted through the clang of cutlery and the orders, the coughing and sneezing, the drone of the television up on the wall unit:
I bagged a big buck and had him strapped to the back in under fifteen minutes.
Yeah? I took this one black bear that came at me and moved off again like it knew. I opened up with the Winchester, dropped it like a sack.
Some of the locals, they’re harvesting a lot of bears up there on the border.
Then their voices dropped and they leaned together. I had to turn my head to hear the whispering above the clank of dishes:
No, don’t know what’s happened either. No sign of him these past three days. And then the other two. I tell you this, something’s wrong. Men don’t go off missing in groups without sight nor sound.
One of them lit his cigarette and saw me staring at him and I looked up to the television where on the screen a rifle was superimposed over a red question mark.
And now, reporting from Fort Kent: three missing hunters and two families in a desperate limbo. What has happened in the North Woods? Where have these men disappeared to?
Three photographs popped up on the screen. Yes, there they were, and up last the bow hunter, the skinny one. The reporter said that two of them were family men from Frenchville, whom I knew to be the two recent friends now lying in the truck in the woods, and the first in the shooting order lived in Fort Kent. Two had children but not the skinny, who was not married. I felt my heart drop at the children item. The little fellows, no father now; there was no need for that, and why in heaven’s name would a man need to go hunting when he had a child at home? And why go hunting and near my cabin? Why shoot a dog or associate with a dog shooter? That’s what happens when you do that kind of thing, isn’t it just. Harvest, that hunting term, it sounded more like what you do with crops and didn’t seem all that bad a thing to do, which is what I was doing anyway. Get them where they don’t expect, isn’t that what hunting is all about, the art of the hunt? You hide and let them have it if they have it coming.
You should all have been more careful. I said to the crossbow man, You came to shoot in the woods, but the woods shot back.
I wanted to feel sympathy, but sympathy was driving ahead of me and I’d be behind it in a few minutes, as soon as I finished the sandwich cradled in my hands, which were shaking. My hands never shook, even when I was nervous. A state trooper car pulled up outside as I munched.
Two troopers got out and came in and went up to the counter, their revolvers shooting a stripe down the side of the trousers, and they opened not a newspaper but a map, the county it looked like, with some circles drawn. They didn’t have to ask, the waitress put coffee in front of them, and they looked up as the television news item on the missing hunters continued.
I went to the bathroom and saw as I passed them a circle on the map around McLean Mountain and the Back Settlement south of St. Francis, on the river, a few hundred yards from the border. A fifty-square mile circle at first glance, and three arrows coming at it from different directions. They were triangulating.
Fair enough, that was to be expected. But as I washed my hands in the soap and cold water I realized I would have to be more careful if there were ever any confrontation again, mighty careful, otherwise those arrows might take a better aim and finally point to the cabin and in the window from every direction. But then my present journey might help aim them the wrong way. I paid my check and said good morning to the officers, who smiled a greeting back.
I got in the truck and drove away with a fresh cup of coffee to go. Hot tea was good for a gentle, steady, reliable life, the broad arc of the afternoon, that sort of thing, and I brought some for later, but for ten minutes that followed, I needed the coffee to surge my blood awake and keep me alert for locations. A car with skis on the roof rack passed me, going in the opposite direction. People dressed in yellow coats and hats, even in the car. They were that eager to hit the slopes, and it was cold, getting colder. I wondered why I chose St. Agatha instead of the woods around my house, where Hobbes was shot and my reasons for taking action were more defensible: I knew it had nothing to do with Claire being from there, and anyway, she lived in Fort Kent now it seemed. I was not driving into St. Agatha with a rifle looking for Claire.
34
I ARRIVED IN ST. AGATHA AT ONE-THIRTY IN THE afternoon and made a left for the east side of the lake south of town, the wilder part, and parked off the road, and with the rifle slung and the book under my coat and the thermos in my right pocket I walked to the nearest tree with a tree stand on it, one that bordered a field and offered an excellent field of fire. The woods were sparse here, more potato fields than trees, but bird and deer hunters would no doubt be active here, and possibly that fellow who was commentating on the poster.