The Poacher

Mulak Reader - The Poacher

There is no shock quite comparable to driving up to a place you’ve hunted for years only to find a new owner has posted the land. Trespassing is a felony in most states. This story is an attempt to explain how a law-abiding man might go through the mental wrestling match that ultimately finds him on the other side of the law. Editors of outdoor magazines won’t touch anything that hints of law-breaking, and this one certainly qualifies. I couldn’t get anybody to publish The Poacher, so it ended up in Brown Feathers.

THE POACHER

"YOU KEEP OUT! I MEAN IT!"

Wording from an

anonymous posted sign,

Hardwick, Massachusetts

At this time of the morning, Russell always thought the garage looked like a drawing by Andrew Weyth, with sunbeams through the dirty south-facing window cutting obtuse angles with the floor. If he allowed his eyes to focus on something illuminated within the square puddles of light, the rest of the interior blacked out and he couldn't really see that instead of rustic tin buckets and scythes the walls inside his garage were hung with garden hoses and snow shovels.
He stood for a moment, a leather dog collar in his hand, sure of what he needed to do but reluctant to pass the point in time that would make accomplished fact of his intention. There was a bell attached to the collar, and for a moment the vibrato of its last ring was the only sound in the dark silence. At length he shook his head and, cursing himself under his breath, deliberately hung the collar on a nail driven into one of the joists. Then he turned and walked out of the Weyth drawing into the sunlight.

Cars continually passed him as he drove on the highway. There were times, particularly in idle moments like these, when he debated the right and wrong of what he was doing. If taking game ever gets so important to me that I've got to start breaking the law, I'll take up bank robbery or something where lawbreaking really pays some dividends. He recalled saying that not so long ago. His Brittany sat on the floor of the passenger's side, her head on the seat. He reached down and scratched Pearl behind her ears. Brittanys had gotten their start as poachers' dogs in France. Russell smiled to himself, thinking this one was going to get another chance at it. Another car passed him, doing 75.

          He drove by the orchard and the chalkboard sign ("Macs - 1/2 bu $3.00"), then slowed and took a left a quarter mile farther along. As his truck bounced along the gravel road, Pearl sat up, muttering nervously: She recognized the indications that they were 'almost there'. On his left, brand new paper signs were tacked to the run-down fence bordering the road. They promised all trespassers prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. The line where the landowner was supposed to sign his name was left blank.
          Russell drove across a little swampy creek and followed the road up the other side, going slowly so as not to miss the turn-off. A few hundred yards farther, hardly noticeable in the thick laurel, was a house trailer, long since abandoned. He eased his truck into the drive and pulled up next to the old hulk. Standing at his truck he could see the road, but only if he looked straight back along the drive. No one was going to notice that he'd parked here—at least, so long as they weren't intentionally looking for him. He stuffed his hunter orange hat under the seat, and put on the brown Jones cap he used for duck hunting. Today, he'd rather not be noticed.
          Downhill was a beaver dam where he could cross the brook. Coming onto the posted land this way from off the road, he had crossed none of the "no trespassing" signs. That didn't make it any more right, but at least he wasn't being blatant about it... He laughed under his breath at his attempt at self-delusion.
          This was the cover he knew as "Mister John's." Behind the active orchard along the main road was an extensive series of forgotten fields and wooded margins—perfect bird cover, bordered by a swamp on one side and a dairy farm on the other. Years before, when he had stopped at the same roadside apple stand he had passed today, the old man he spoke to had initially said no to his request for permission to hunt. Before giving up, Russell had tried one last tack:
          "If it's a matter of you not wanting to have the birds on your property hunted, that's fine—I'll go. But if you're wondering if I'm the sort of person who shoots out barn windows or cuts fences or steals apples, let me assure you that I'm not." That had earned him a nod, and soon afterward he was hunting. When he had presented Mister John with the native rooster he took that day, he made a friend.
          "I used to hunt these dragons myself." Mister John had said. "'Always had a lot of respect for 'em. I gave it up when my eyesight started to go: 'Couldn't hit 'em clean any more—Too many cripples runnin' off for fox bait."
          Russell had opened the season here last week, but unlike previous opening days, he hadn't gotten the chance to offer his first bird to Mister John. As he crossed the beaver dam, he thought back to that morning:
          Any year's first pheasant was always cause for a minor celebration, and Russell was still wearing his self-congratulatory grin when a voice from the opposite side of the fence row called to him.
          "Hey you—Unload your gun."
          Russell didn't have to be told to open his gun when someone else was around, but he did. "Hello. I didn't see you there."
          The stranger had a .22 pumpgun tucked under his arm and a hunting license pinned to his cap, but he obviously wasn't hunting: he wore a pair of loafers. "Is that your truck parked in the barway?"
          "What's the problem?" Russell had left his truck where he always parked.
          "Didn't you see the signs? This is my sister's land, and she don't want nobody hunting here."
          The stranger's dirty blue cap proclaimed that he was a fan of Ford farm equipment. Russell wondered if Ford wouldn't want their hat back. "I've hunted here for years, and have always talked to John down at the farm stand. As far as I know, this is his land and it's okay for me to hunt here." He regretted never having learned Mister John's last name.
          Blue Hat stepped closer to him. "I'm telling you to get out."
          Russell abandoned any pretension of politeness. "Yeah? Well I'm telling you, fella', that you're all wet. I'm hunting here with full permission of the landowner..."
          "John died last Christmas. My sister owns this now, and she don't want nobody hunting here."
          A silence hung in the air for a long moment. So Mister John was dead. Russell felt sorrow and anger at the same time. And defeat. He whistled to Pearl and started along the field edge back toward his truck. Blue Hat walked immediately behind him. At length Russell said, "You can unload your gun any time—I'm leaving."
          "Not until I see you drive off. I've copied down your license tag number, so don't try comin' back."
          "Are you always this ornery, or is this just a front?"
          "A few years back, somebody shot out my sister's back window..."
          Russell stopped and turned to the man. "And you think it was me, right?"
          "No, I'm not sayin' that..."
          "Well, that's the way it sounds to me."
          "She don't want nobody huntin' here..."
          "Hold it." Russell raised his hand. "Answer me—If you don't think it was me who did the shooting, why are you out here with a loaded rifle? It's not like I'm stealing a bushel of your topsoil. I've hunted this land for a dozen years or so— Mister John never had reason to complain, but all of a sudden I'm a criminal."
          "It's not just you—She don't want nobody here."
          "So you've said." Russell's sarcasm went unnoticed. "Watch out, though—The next guy you run off might not feature you coming after him with a loaded rifle. There's something in the law about that—assault, I think they call it." He turned in disgust and walked away, knowing he had said too much to a man who didn't have the brains of a two-dollar dog.
Maybe at one time someone had fired a gun too close to a house. Maybe. The land hadn't been posted, after all, and not everyone went through the formality of asking permission. But if a window had been shot out, Mr. John certainly would have mentioned it to him. Those things didn't happen in reality. He shook his head. And Mister John was no more. That was something that really was too bad.

          The back-up behind the new beaver dam could not yet be termed a pond: It was simply an irregular area that had been flooded, leaving alders and streamside birches standing knee- deep in the water. As proof that the flood was no accident, canals led to still-dry areas where pointed stumps were surrounded by wreaths of woodchips on the ground. Some seemed fresh enough to have been gnawed the night before.
          Pearl pointed. In these alders, it had to be a woodcock. He approached from her flank, and when the bird bounced up and twittered off he knelt and called his dog to him. There was no way to explain to her that today some shots were going to be passed up, but he petted her and scratched her ears.
          They followed a wood line up into a series of abandoned pastures. The absence of the dog's bell was disquieting. His Brittany seemed such an extension of Russell's will that his occasional quiet whistle to her was all but unnecessary, but he hadn't realized how much he relied on the sound of the bell to track her. At one point their course took them close to the electric fence of a dairy farm's pasture, guarded as always by a line of bright orange 'no trespassing' signs. Russell had never been able to gain permission to hunt the farm's cornfields. Several Holsteins watched them vacantly until they had passed out of sight again.
          There were years of memories in this place. He was smiling to himself, remembering a time when his dad had been with him, and they had each taken one of the pair of roosters Pearl's predecessor had found beneath a stunted thornapple. It had been right along in these blueberries somewhere...
          He hadn't been paying attention, and when he looked up his Brit was standing on point by the same apple tree, in a near- perfect imitation of the scene in his memory. He smiled—Who's going to believe this? he thought. Pearl had the bird pinned, and Russell had to literally kick it up. As the pheasant leveled off, its tail flipped from vertical to horizontal. Russell chose that instant to shoot the bird in the head.
          There followed a moment when, in another time, he would have stopped to field-dress the pheasant and spend a moment digesting the glow of a job done correctly. Instead, he took the bird from Pearl and hurried downhill, out of the overgrown field and into the wood edge across the brook. When he thought he had traveled far enough so as not to be associated with the gunshot, he found a tree stump and sat to clean the bird.
          The moment wasn't the same: Though he was out of breath, it was for the wrong reason. Guilt shouldn't be a part of successes, but it shared his seat with him.

          His wife shook the water from the pheasant and placed the naked bird on a square of freezer paper. Russell wrapped and taped the package.
          "I can never understand it." He spoke more to himself than to his wife. "What do people think they're accomplishing by posting open land? I could see if the guy lived on the land, or was using it for something. But why post open land? Does the guy think a sign's going to stop the sort of people who steal cordwood or are careless with fire?"
          With a wax crayon he marked '10/29 - Mr. John' on the wrapped package.
          "It's crazy," He said as he crossed the kitchen to the freezer. "The only people a guy like that ends up keeping out are law abiders—People he'd probably welcome in the first place."
          His wife had heard it all before. Many times. "Isn't there something the club can do? Maybe there's somebody you can talk to?"
          Two years before Russell had joined a sportsman's club. At first it seemed a good place to air his ideas and frustrations, since the organization professed to be devoted to the preservation of open lands. The increase in the amount of posted land was a problem evident to anyone who knew enough to be concerned, after all. But he soon found the club to be more interested in its own internal workings than any altruistic cause. He had joined ranks with fund-raisers, parliamentarians, and social meeting-goers. He laughed in disgust. "That bunch? Come on."
          His wife dried her hands and hung the towel on the handle of the oven door. "Which place did you lose?"
          "Mister John's. He died. Now his wife's got the whole place posted."
          She looked at him for a long moment. She knew where he had hunted that day. "It's not like you to hunt posted land."
          "I know," he said. "There's really no good explanation for it. You've heard me grouch about lost covers before, but Mister John's was something special. I'm having a hard time with the idea that I'm not supposed to go back—There's a lot of memories there."
          She was slow to reply. "I don't like what's going on, Russ. You're making excuses for yourself, and that's not like you, either."
          Later, he sat with her, staring into the cherry wood fire on the hearth. "Think of an old man, one who's outlived his friends and discovers that his memories are populated by dead folks. That's how I'm beginning to feel. So many of my hunting memories are of places that are housing projects or shopping centers now." He shook his head. "That sort of thing is inevitable. This is different: Someone's perverted sense of entitlement is trying to keep me off of a place I've loved for years."
          She took a breath as if to say something, but then changed her mind. There was an absence of dialogue that lasted for several minutes. At length, as if reading her thoughts, he said, "Trespassing is a felony. A difficult one to prove, to be sure, but a felony none the less. And I've been told once to stay out."
          "Remember what you've often told me," she said. "More than anything else, wisdom is caution."
          He mulled over her sentiments for a moment. He nodded, but made no reply.

He spent a Saturday hunting with Chem Romuluski. Chem was the best shot he knew. Probably the most amazing thing about his shooting was that he did it with a Remington 870 right out of the box—a perfectly ordinary gun in the hands of an extraordinary wing shot. But Chem was a poacher. He spoke freely of 'hunting posted', and Russell found himself out of sympathy with some of Chem's equivocations: “I hunted that Audubon place way back before those nature fakers took it over. They've got to catch me to prove anything, and as long as I've got a gun, they ain't gonna catch me."
Measuring his own actions against Chem's, it became obvious how self-righteousness can cloud judgment. Although he wished he could be as sure of any one thing as Chem seemed to be about everything, he came away with his own actions in clearer focus.

          He had been caught picking up litter. A farm truck stopped as he was emptying his game bag of several bottles and soda cans.
          "What're you doin'?" A weathered face looked out of the truck.
          "I was hunting that swamp edge over there." Russell pointed across to the far side of the road.
          "No—I mean with them bottles?"
          "Oh, this is just some trash that was along the road."
          "Is it worth anything?"
          Russell smiled. "No. It's just junk."
          "Why'd you pick it up, then?"
          "Because the road looked better without it."
          The face looked at him for an uncomfortably long time without saying anything. Finally, the man muttered, "You people come out here and throw that trash around— 'stands to reason you ought to pick it up."
          Russell watched the truck drive off, then poured some water into the plastic cover of a shell box for Pearl. "'You people.'" he muttered. As if every stranger is a slob. He shook his head. A leaf fluttered into the water dish, and he bent to pick it out. He had parked beneath a huge spreading oak, now nearly naked late in November. The tree had grown in the open for a hundred years or more, and its branches reached outward rather than upward as a forest tree's might. He had compared enough leaves to know that even though every oak leaf looks like every other oak leaf, no two were identical.
          He studied the leaf as he leaned against his truck. ‘You people.' It was a convenient assumption. Too bad people can't be categorized that easily. They tend to be what they prove themselves to be—irresponsible idiots, thugs, slobs, and sometimes even sportsmen. You can't tell at a glance, they all look like hunters. He laughed out loud, but there was no humor in his laugh.
          Pearl looked up for a moment before returning her attention to the water dish. He stood listening to his own thoughts for a moment. "Next week we'll give Mister John's one last visit, Pearl. What do you think?" The Brit wagged her stub tail and looked at her master, aware only that he was talking to her.

          Late in the afternoon, he parked next to the gutted house trailer in the laurel thicket. It had just started to snow, and his tire tracks hardly showed in the sugaring on the fallen leaves. Russell took a pair of low brass shells from his pocket and slid them into his gun. Hunters everywhere would certainly have a lot less trouble if their guns went "plink" rather than "ka-BOOM!" he reflected.
          The beaver pond was still open, and a single black duck flushed into the falling snow as Russell stepped onto the dam. An hour later, the snow turned to sleet-like pellets as he and Pearl hunted through the low blueberry bushes behind the dairy farm. This was the last Saturday of hunting for Russell. Next week the deer season began. He looked at the clean imprint left by his vibram soles. The deer hunters will be grateful for this snow, he thought.
          Pearl crossed under the row of orange signs and cast into a harvested cornfield. The harvester had taken only the corn, and the field was littered with naked corncobs among the knocked-down stalks. A flock of crows took flight at Pearl's approach, complaining noisily. Beyond them, 100 yards away at the edge of the field, a hen pheasant took off and flew back toward the cover behind them. As Russell watched, two more took wing, then a small cock followed by another pair of hens. Pheasants can be the toughest of birds to flush a second time, but Russell had a good idea where they would be headed this late in the day: He remembered a little tamarack swamp where they liked to roost up. He whistled to his Brit and turned back, already planning his approach. It took him a moment to realize that Pearl was still standing in the field, staring at the spot where the pheasants had taken wing. Russell knew his dog: There was another bird there—maybe a wise old rooster that knew when to fly and when to hide. He scrambled under the fence with its row of signs.
          In the waist-high pigweed of the cornfield's margin Pearl's point went from tentative to solid. Russell circled wide in front of the dog and waited. In the frozen weeds there was a rustling that had an almost bell-like quality, then the bird stopped. One very long moment stretched into the next. He grinned: This was the part he loved best. He shuffled his feet and brought the rooster clattering into the snowy sky, cackling obscenities and spewing a white stream behind it. This was an exceptionally big long-tailed cock bird.
          Sometimes even good shots miss: Russell did, but he held deliberately under the bird with his second barrel, and although his shot drew feathers the pheasant kept going, following the field edge, coasting beyond the fence, then flapping again to climb over a stand of cedars, then, suddenly—falling. It was easily 300 yards away.
          "Hey, you! Get outta here!"
          A man was yelling from the next field. Russell hadn't noticed how close he had come to the buildings of the dairy farm.
          "This is posted land. How'd you get in here?"
          I'll go talk to him, Russell thought. The jig is up. Maybe I can apologize my way out of this. He opened his gun and started toward the angry man, but Pearl was after the crippled pheasant. After a moment's indecision, Russell turned and followed the dog. Behind him, the yelling became indistinct. He didn't look back.
          Even though it was still a half hour before sunset, the snowfall made for a false dusk. If the angry farmer was going to make some calls, maybe a quick exit was in order—After all, the truck was the better part of a mile away. But Pearl was tracking the finest rooster he had shot all season, the kind Mister John would have called a 'real dragon'. From the look of the bird's tracks, there was nothing wrong with its running ability—The footprints in the snow were twelve inches apart. Russell hurried to stay with Pearl. This last bird at Mister John's was not going to end up as fox bait.

It had gotten colder. The beaver pond was skimmed with ice as Russell crossed the dam in the dark. Trophies are not often a part of bird hunting, but in his left hand Russell carried the last bird from Mister John's covert. It was a fine old cock pheasant, with long spurs and a half-inch of fringe on its tail feathers. A real dragon. All but forgotten were his phantoms of conscience.
He noticed the flashing lights before he reached the laurel thicket. He cursed under his breath, but then realized it was a fitting ending to an embarrassing obsession. This was among the alternate endings he had considered. He hefted the pheasant and whistled Pearl in to heel.

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This site was last updated 09/21/06