The Poacher’s Son
By Paul Doiron
Minotaur Books
$24.99, hard cover, 324 pages, 978-0-312-55846-8 (2010)
Paul Doiron is the editor-in-chief of Down East: The Magazine of Maine, and this is his first novel. Doiron lives in Maine and is a Registered Maine Guide – and it shows in the detailed and accurate descriptions of the Maine woods and that creatures that live there. The book begins with game warden Mike Bowditch responding to a call about a bear breaking into a pigpen.
I got to work measuring the paw prints in the mud. They resembled the tracks a barefoot person might leave walking along a beach. Judging by the distance between the front and hind feet, I figured it was a medium-sized bear, two hundred pounds or so.
I followed the drag marks through the field, and the rainwater that clung to the weeds soaked through my pants legs. The trail disappeared into the low bushes — scrub birch and speckled alder and sumac — that grew along the edge of the forest. I directed my light into the wet mass of leaves, half-expecting to see the beam reflected back by the eyes shine of the bear’s retinas.
Mike is soon hunting for more than bears. His estranged father leaves a puzzling message for him one evening on his answering machine. The next morning, the police tell Mike that they are searching for his father, Jack, who was arrested the day before, but then escaped from custody. Jack is believed to have killed a local cop and the spokesman for a company that recently purchased nearly half a million acres of forest land in the northern part of Maine.
Mike believes that his father may have escaped custody to avoid being put in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. He knows that his father is a hard-drinking womanizer, and he has experienced firsthand Jack’s bursts of anger and brutality. He recalls his troubled upbringing after his parents divorced and the ill-fated summer he went to spend with his father. Mike knows his father poaches illegal game and killing animals comes naturally to him – but is he capable of murder?
In an attempt to save his father, and despite great risks to himself, his career, and his loved ones, Mike searches for the real killer. Teaming up with a retired game warden, they follow the clues to a chilling conclusion.
This is a gritty, realistic novel that doesn’t pull any punches about life in northern Maine. It’s not the slick magazine version of sunny beaches, quaint lighthouses, steaming lobsters, and carefree nights overlooking picturesque harbors as is often portrayed in advertising. Instead, Doiron shows what out-of-state visitors often miss: seedy bars, weathered trailers, dilapidated cabins with junk cars everywhere but no running water or electricity, and the misery of residents living in habitual poverty.
Dorion also mentions the division of Maine that locals know all too well. When Mike visits his mother, even the memory of living in southern Maine is difficult.
The town of Scarborough is where I'd spent the second half of my childhood after my parents divorced and where my mom and stepfather still lived. It is only a two-hour drive south along the coast, but it always feels longer because the land changes so much with every passing mile. These days, southern Maine is just an extension of the Boston suburbs.
When we first moved to Scarborough, right after the divorce, there were still cornfields and thick oak forests that stretched for miles. Then houses really began to sprout, first along the country roads heading down to the beaches, and then in vast subdivisions where there was enough land for building. Soon the weedy fields where I'd caught the garter snakes became a grid of neocolonial homes and impossibly green lawns. Woods where Wabanki Indians had once hunted deer were cleared to make way for “Indian Woods Estates."
As a teenager, I fought the future as best I could. Rather than taking up soccer or skateboarding, I cast for striped bass in the Spurwink River. Instead of playing videogames I read The Last of the Mohicans. I watched the pavement spread under my feet and dreamed of moving to the North Woods and becoming a game warden. And if you can ever really escape what's coming.
This is a haunting portrait of the bonds between father and son. I wish it had ended differently – but to have done so would probably have made the novel less compelling. This is a story you won’t soon forget.
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