He pulled off the road near a picnic table thinking that he had to stop this unprofitable way of thinking if he was ever going to lock up Dwight-Daryl. He was softening when he should have been hardening. He immediately thought that part of the problem came with being a bachelor and no longer having to monitor his moods, which you had to do in marriage to maintain civility, the day-to-day etiquette that makes marriages last. He had become too easily diverted by rather inane moods, which were fueled by overdrinking and the general sloppiness of his household. Life without a woman to temper your stupidities was difficult indeed. Even something so banal as grocery shopping could throw him into a skewed loop of anger. During his marriage Diane would always shop for dinner impulsively on her walk home from the hospital and then cook with pleasure, actually singing silly show tunes. By contrast he could blow fifty bucks in the supermarket during a quick shop and come home to discover that he didn’t really have anything for dinner. He had quarreled with the store manager over prices because he hadn’t yet caught up with the idea that prices hadn’t actually gone up that much but packaged quantities had been reduced from sixteen ounces to twelve. The manager had patiently explained that he was a vendor of the food not the manufacturer.
Sitting there on the roadside viewing the vast mountainous landscape and the cloak of snow far up Mount Wrightson he vowed the cold clarity of a simpler chase. A few years before the divorce he had met with the game wardens of a half dozen Upper Peninsula counties to help map strategies to catch two poachers up from Tennessee who were involved in the not so uncommon crime of killing numerous bears for their paws and gallbladders, which were precious and extremely valuable items in Chinese pharmacopeia. These bear body parts were dropped off in Chicago and made their way to Beijing on a Northwest flight. Customs in Chicago had picked up on it in the post-9/11 X-raying of random luggage and backtracked through United States Fish and Wildlife Service to a Chinese restaurant owner in Evanston and thence to the two hunters in Tennessee who needed to be caught red-handed hunting and in possession of bear parts in the U.P. of Michigan. It was two weeks of wonderful October pursuit with Sunderson masquerading as an alcoholic bow hunter, not a far reach in sailing terms.
He used his dozens of informants and snitches in taverns across the U.P. and after two weeks or so of fruitless searching it was an informant at a country bar in Wolf Junction north of Newberry in Luce County that panned out. He had called around midnight and was mildly drunk but then so was Sunderson.
“They were headed north toward Superior so they’re likely going over to Crisp Point or Grand Marais. I would have followed to see if they turned left or right south of Deer Park but they was a bit scary and mean looking. One chews a big gob of bubble gum and they’re driving a crew-cab black Ford and they got hounds.”
Sunderson couldn’t sleep so left for Grand Marais about three a.m. in a snowstorm that he knew wouldn’t last because the wind was turning south. He felt silly with his camo archer’s outfit and his compound bow in the backseat because he couldn’t hit a barn at gunpoint. On a hunch, at daylight he decided on the Barfield Lakes area. He had alerted by phone the two game wardens in contiguous counties but the trouble in the U.P. is that poaching was low on the totem pole of seriousness and taking a deer out of season was fairly popular after the bars closed, and after July Fourth when the deer would lose the cedar taste after yarding up in swamps during the winter.
It was barely daylight and he was driving south on a small county road up Pull Up Hill when the three-quarter-ton pickup passed him going the other way. His cell phone worked on the hill and he called a game warden who had positioned himself in Seney. He waited a few minutes before turning around on the off chance that they would “make” his pickup if he was close on their trail.
His luck held when they turned off on a no-exit two-track near Seney where Sunderson had fished the Driggs River. He and the game warden reconnoitered and after an hour they heard hounds baying and a rifle shot and they called in reinforcements. Within a half hour another game warden and two state police arrived. Bingo, Sunderson thought. When the pickup approached it tried to turn around and Sunderson shot out the back tires with his. 38. In a cooler full of ice in a hidden compartment of the pickup there were sixteen gallbladders, one of them still warm, and sixty-four paws. The bust was big in the news but Sunderson declined all credit passing it on to the game wardens. The last thing he wanted was to become too visible. He did, however, relish the pleasure of an ultraclean bust. The perps got five years.
