Chasing a Blond Moon

1

The sight of condominiums flanking Navy Street along the boulder-lined Portage Shipping Canal made Grady Service wince. The Upper Peninsula was Michigan’s last remaining wilderness, and as more downstaters and out-of-staters discovered it and decided to retire here, they were moving north and bringing their flatlander lifestyles and values with them. Condos in the U.P., he grumbled in the late August darkness.

The entrance to the primitive two-track, which led to the place many locals simply called “the fish house,” was hidden at the end of a low concrete wall behind some condo garages. Gus Turnage had told him it was a little less than a half-mile to the fish house and that the road was often used by kids and miscreants seeking privacy. Above him he could see the blurred lights of the town of Hancock, the so-called Gateway to the Keeweenaw, but the surroundings along the two-track remained wild and untamed. Hancock had once been the epicenter of copper mining in the Upper Peninsula, but the ore had petered out and the mining companies had moved west, leaving ruins and descendants of Finnish miners to fend for themselves. The area had never recovered.

This should be Gus’s case, Service reminded himself, but Gus Turnage was home in Houghton recovering from gallbladder surgery. Service, Nantz, and Walter Commando had come to Houghton for Walter’s orientation at Michigan Tech. The boy had been accepted, but had not yet decided to enroll. They had been visiting Gus when the call for assistance had come in from the Houghton County dispatcher. Walter had lived with them for nearly a month, and had come to the campus at the invitation of the varsity hockey coach. As an unknown and because of his age, Walter would not have an athletic scholarship, but he had been asked to camp as an invited walk-on. Service had expected his newly found son to reject the invite because a scholarship had not been offered, but Walter had accepted graciously, leaving Service scratching his head.

Service and Nantz had picked Walter up from campus last night for an evening with Gus, who had regaled Walter with outlandish and embellished stories of his father’s exploits. He had wished Gus had shut up or stuck to the facts because his friend was making him seem larger than life. As a boy his own father had been a legend, and he knew how hard it was to grow up in such a large shadow. At fifty, he was still hearing comparisons to his old man.

If law enforcement staffing had been normal, another CO would have filled in for Gus, but Governor Sam Bozian’s ham-handed budget cutting had left DNR law enforcement short and, in some large counties where four officers should be covering, there was only one.

Easing his way down the two-track in his unmarked green Yukon, Service shut off his interior and exterior lights. When you were in the dirt at night, you came upon more things running dark than by advertising your presence. With less than a year as a detective in the DNR’s Wildlife Resources Protection Unit, he welcomed any chance to operate the way he had for nearly twenty years as a conservation officer. At night, that meant all lights out except the sneak light that let him see the ground but could be seen only from inside the vehicle.

After a while the pitted, rocky road ascended a steep hummock and dropped down the west face. To his left he could faintly discern the outline of an old boathouse, one of the landmarks Gus had told him to watch for. The boat garage held three dilapidated 36-foot wooden boats once used for fishing in the area. Like many things in the U.P., whose economy had been in a steady slide for decades, stuff that couldn’t be used or sold quickly usually got left to the whims and ravages of nature.The people of the U.P. didn’t get much better treatment, but you rarely heard them complain. People up here might be trapped by circumstances, but they were stoical and endured what had to be endured, including a crapped-out economy, a three-month growing season for agriculture, and seven-month-long winters.

Eventually the undulating narrow road led into an open area and Service left his lights off, stopping to peer ahead. It was a fairly large parking lot of dirt and gravel, something clearly not graded or taken care of in years. Puddles of water stood in low areas and the steady rain danced on the surfaces, prickling the water.

To the left there was a large dark building, perhaps a hundred feet long. This would be the place the locals called the fish house. It had once housed the Superior Coastal Fishery Company, a typical Yooper brainstorm. The owners had been determined to market Lake Superior fish throughout the Midwest—lake trout, whitefish, pickled herring, whitefish roe—but the owners found the actual marketing more difficult than the idea and the business had gone belly-up. Now the building housed the fishing boats and gear of Native Americans who carried tribal IDs and could fish both on commercial and subsistence fishing licenses. COs referred to them most of the time as tribals.