31
Nantz called when he was on his way home, but McCants came up on the 800 MHz at the same time. “Twenty-Five Fourteen, Forty-One Twenty-Eight.”
Service said, “Stand by one, Mar,” to Nantz, set the cell phone on the other seat, and picked up the mike for the 800. “Twenty-Five Fourteen.”
“You remember that place where you and your friend had a picnic before she went off to Lansing last fall?” With so many police scanners in the public, officers were careful to disguise locations and destinations. They tended to use a code that referred to places only the other officer would know.
“I remember.”
“I’ve got a situation,” she said.
She was in the Mosquito and he felt an immediate surge of adrenaline. “Rolling,” he said. Then to Nantz on the cell. “Did you catch that?”
“Your end,” she said. “I’ll call you tonight around midnight. Be careful, hon.”
Service drove faster than the speed limit allowed, stopping briefly at a country store to refill two thermoses with coffee. Candi wouldn’t have called unless she had something serious, and she was in the Mosquito, his Mosquito. And it was already dark.
Her truck was parked exactly where he and Nantz had found it last fall when they walked back from their afternoon visit to the Mosquito River.
McCants was sitting in her truck, smoking. He handed her a thermos.
“There is a God,” she said with a smile as she took off the top of the thermos and filled it with coffee. “I’ve got a wounded bear and a dead hound. I found a couple of dirty baits two days ago and I was moving in to sit on them tonight. Two shots,” she said, her words clipped. “I heard the dog, the shots, and then the bear came flying by me and veered south into the swamp.” She pointed.
Service knew the swamp intimately. It was nearly twelve miles across to the next road and he had hiked it all over the years.
“The dog’s in back,” McCants said.
He went to look at it, cringed, and came back. “Beagle-Redbone mix?” Even dead the animal left him feeling uneasy.
She nodded, took a sip of coffee. “Grady, I got a good look at the bear. His lower jaw was gone. He left a big blood trail.”
“Size?” he asked.
“Big,” she said.
Shit, Service thought. A big wounded bear was not something officers liked to deal with.
“Just like you said, the action started to pick up over here. There’s been five veeks in the area over the past three days, three North Carolina plates, one Tennessee, one Kentucky. Station 20 ran all the plates. No warrants.”
Which didn’t mean much. Some elements of the bear-hunting crowd were rough, competitive, and lawless, and those who came up from the South were among the worst. “Who has the baits?”
“Kentucky truck,” she said. “It’s owned by Lefton Valda, out of Bailey’s Switch.”
“Kennel?” Most of the hunters from the South were dog men.
“No. Classic dirty baits, hanging anise and some hummingbird juice, ground piles of gummy bears, waffle cones, stale donuts, chocolate-covered raisins.”
“Spare no expense in the hunt for glory,” Service said.
McCants patted his arm. “We don’t want to leave a wounded animal out here.”
Service agreed. “Did the shooters start tracking?”
“I don’t know. They’re east of us in the swamp. I just heard the shots. Their truck’s parked just to the north of here. The blood trails are pretty easy to follow. The dog must’ve run some distance before it bled out.”
“Somebody’s gonna be pissed,” Service said. Most serious bear hunters treated their best dogs better than people. “How do you want to play it?” he asked.
“I don’t want to do any tracking with shooters still in the swamp.”
“They should be out of the woods by now.”
“Shoulda, coulda, woulda,” she said, getting out of the truck.
There was a blood trail about a hundred yards below their trucks. Service looked at the blood and tracks, followed it to the edge of the cedars and went several paces inside, using his light. “Steady flow. Big animal, eh?”
“Biggest I’ve seen in a long time.”
This was bad news. Big bears rarely climbed trees when pursued by dogs, preferring a running fight on the ground. “No dogs pushing it,” he said. “It may lay down.”
She said, “Let’s deal with the shooters before we go looking.”
They took her truck and circled around to where she had seen the Kentucky truck parked.
It wasn’t unusual for hunters to drive up from the Appalachians to hunt Michigan bears. The laws in many of the southern mountain states forbade baits, and their often-mountainous terrain was imposing, with few roads. Here in the U.P. it was relatively flat with numerous dirt roads. The usual dog-hunting procedure was for hunters to drag dirt roads clean at night, then go back in the morning to check for crossing tracks. They would drive around with their best dog, the strike dog, sitting in a basket welded to the front bumper or grill and a kennel with another four or five dogs in the truck bed.