WALTER'S HUNT
A Henry Wetmore Series
Chapter 1
Walter Barlow withdrew the left-handed Remington Model 700 bolt action rifle from the gun safe with something akin to reverence. He ran his hands over the cold steel and warm wood and felt the heft of it, absorbed the smell of the gun oil and solvent, and understood the lethal intent of the tool. He’d purchased the weapon brand new at the onset of adulthood, and it had been his one and only deer rifle ever since. They had history. He stroked the walnut stock and felt the roughness of that line of small notches that stretched from the toe of the butt plate almost all the way to the base of the pistol grip, one for every deer the rifle had dropped. He’d spent a lot of quality time with this weapon in his hands. It was an old friend.
He’d always treated the rifle with respect, never put it away dirty—wiped any fingerprints away with an oiled cloth after each time he handled it. The blue stain of the steel was spotless, not a speck of rust. The oil-finished walnut stock felt almost alive. No composite stock for him, thank you. Only wood would do. This was the perfect rifle, a tool with a spirit all its own. It gave him inner joy just to hold it.
Walter re-locked the gun safe. It wouldn’t do to let Gladys get in there. He hung the rifle on his shoulder by its leather sling and gathered the rest of his equipment. Carrying his gear, he left the house downstairs through the shop behind the first floor storefront gallery. A small spotlight illuminated a painting featured in the storefront window. It provided just enough ambient light for him to find his way through the showroom without bumping into anything. In the shop behind the showroom the artwork he’d matted and framed the previous evening was splayed across the workbench. He told himself he’d straighten things up in the evening, maybe do a couple more framings after he’d used up all the daylight for hunting.
Fine snow sifted from the black predawn sky as he started the pickup and let it warm. The snow wasn’t sticking to the truck—not yet. He ran over his mental checklist to make sure he had everything. Wallet with his license—check; the right caliber ammo in his pocket—check; sharpened belt knife and drag rope—check; hunter orange hat for safety—check; watch on his wrist—check; deer rifle—check.
And yes, he had his cell phone. God forbid Gladys should discover he’d left it at home. He despised the stupid thing, only carried it to keep her quiet. The only time he ever actually turned the phone on while hunting was to make a call, which was a real rarity. He didn’t want an incoming call, a ringing or vibrating phone to give him away at the wrong moment, didn’t need or want to talk to anyone when he was hunting. The phone was Gladys’s idea and his attempt to placate her. He wasn’t a cell phone guy, probably one of the few people left in the world still using a flip phone. Just stuff it in a pocket. No worries about cracked screens or butt dialing.
The Tracfone’s carryover minutes kept piling up as he renewed the service each January. Sometimes the damn thing went dead because he forgot to charge it. And then he’d discover he was carrying a useless device. Not that he cared. He didn’t really need a cell phone. It was all about his age. When he hit fifty, Gladys started worrying he’d hurt himself out in the woods somewhere, hunting by himself, the way he did.
“You’re out there all alone,” she’d said.
Like hunting should be some kind of team sport.
“What if you hurt yourself and need help?”
It was a half-hour drive on back roads to the place where he’d bagged a heavyweight eight-pointer the previous year. He’d kept the spot a secret despite questions from his hunting friends. Amazing how everyone asks: “where’d you get him?”
Like I’m going to do their work for them. Let them find their own damn hunting spots.
Other hunters would have an eye out for where he parked his truck, hoping to find his ‘secret spot.’ He put the Toyota Tacoma in four-wheel drive and turned off onto a faint cart road into the woods, the light from his headlamps bouncing through the trees. A hundred yards into a thick stand of young pines he parked, leaving the truck safely hidden, stashed in an evergreen thicket. Concealing the truck wasn’t hard today, but with the snow to show his tire tracks it would be difficult tomorrow. Maybe he could get Gladys to drop him off, use the damn cell phone to call her and have her pick him up when he was done for the day.
Wonder what that would cost me?
Snowflakes tickled his face, and his breath blew a frosty fog as he loaded the rifle and put the orange hat on. New Hampshire didn’t mandate wearing hunter orange, but strongly suggested it. This was the ‘bucks only’ portion of the deer season, which required hunters to look for antlers before shooting, so a lot of hunters didn’t bother with orange, but, hey, you never know.
Better safe than sorry.
Walter zipped up his camouflage coat, slipped on his gloves and set out uphill—finally on the hunt now, just at legal shooting time, in the dim light of a half-hour before sunrise. He moved slowly, eyes alert for any movement that wasn’t falling snow. The walking was quiet, not like the week before when frozen dead leaves on the ground made it sound like he was stomping through giant corn flakes. One good thing about a snow cover was the silent stealth it provided. Also, the deer and any movements they made, stood out against the white background instead of blending in with the overall dull gray and brown of the bare woods. Walter cradled the rifle in his arms, careful not to tilt it vertically and let snow cover the glass eye of the telescopic sight. He stopped often to scan the woods for any movement, any sign of deer, as he climbed uphill, following a stone wall through an ancient sugarbush.
His annoyance with Gladys and her latest nag campaign intruded, wanted to disrupt his enjoyment of the hunt. She had it in mind to quit her job at the school district to become a full-time artist, selling her quilts and fabric art in the gallery where they displayed some of their customers’ work for a thirty percent commission on sales.
Her art was good, damn good, but he had to wonder how much of it the local market would bear.
This grove of sugar maples contained many old trees, elderly, gnarly, warty trees that had lost limbs and now offered hollow spaces for critters like owls, possums, raccoons, squirrels, and porcupines to make their homes. Even the younger trees, straight and tall, looked forlorn, stark without their foliage here on the cusp of winter. Ropes of green plastic tubing crisscrossed the slope, supported by high tensile wires strung tree-to-tree. In a few months that tubing would guide the sweet spring sap downhill toward collection barrels. The old tin buckets and lids of the past were scattered about on the ground, half-buried in leaf litter, discarded and forgotten, slowly rusting into the duff, starting to disappear under a snow cover now.
Beyond the sugarbush, over one last tumbledown stone wall, was a big piece of woods. He suspected it held at least one trophy size buck. He might just walk around in it all day. He could do it easily, was in decent shape for being in his fifties, one of the benefits of hunting as a form of exercise.
. Walter stopped often, scanning for movement, the flicker of a tail or ear, a moment of slow motion shifting, always searching for the horizontal line that might be a deer’s back. He was feeling it now, the inner joy that always came when he assumed the role of apex predator.
Some people called hunting a sport and Walter supposed that was probably correct. More and more there was a general prejudice against trophy hunting, but that was part of what it was all about for him. He wanted to pit himself against the biggest, smartest animals as a test of his hunting talent. Some of Gladys’s friends gave their blessing to his pastime, knowing his family consumed the animals. They felt hunting was justified if it put food on the table. Strange, but none of them seemed to feel or understand what he felt, what he knew, that the hunt was more than just coming to terms with his own killing as a meat eater, that it was a spiritual quest, a way to stay in touch with his inner self and the primitive ancestry that made him what he was, made humans what they are.
He was getting into it now, enjoying the solitude. Since the art business relied a lot on weekend trade, his days off were Monday and Tuesday. That worked well for hunting. It felt like the woods were his alone, everyone else at work. The snow was starting to pile up, about two inches on the ground now.
And look at this—a track. They don’t get any fresher than this.
SYPNOSIS
Small business owner Walter Barlow prides himself on his deer hunting ability. The worst day of his life begins when he shoots a trophy buck… and another deer hunter. Barlow flees the scene in a blizzard that covers his tracks. New Hampshire Conservation Officer Henry Wetmore is the person who leads the search for a missing hunter and recovers the body of Elbridge Bachman, dead from a gunshot wound. State Police oversee the homicide investigation. The lead investigator harbors personal animosity towards Wetmore and doesn’t want him involved. Wetmore can’t help but get involved. Bachman deserves justice. The personal cost for all involved will escalates. Other people are going to die before the hunt is over.
Chapter 2
The tracks led downhill through bare hardwoods into a bowl-shaped swale of evergreens. Walter froze in place at the sight of them still sharply distinct in the snow they were so fresh. He squinted through falling snow to visually follow their disturbance down into the hemlock forested basin below. Studying that shadowy hollow, he thought that if this deer hadn’t already bedded down for the day, he might catch sight of it moving. Deer like to travel the edges of different habitat. If it was still moving, it would likely do so just inside the cover of the evergreens, mostly hidden, looking out at the open hardwoods. He examined the area at a distance, first with the naked eye, then through the riflescope, looking for a horizontal line, a patch of brown, maybe an ivory antler tip, a black nose … any piece of deer.
He found nothing—knelt and studied the track itself. It was a big one, cloven prints splayed from the weight of the animal—a toe-dragger—a buck, for sure!
The wind was favorable, into his face, snowflakes catching on his eyebrows and lashes. Walter decided to follow the track. Not directly, though. He circled back to the edge of that sugarbush, then descended into the bowl and sneaked along through the hardwoods, tight to those hemlocks, hoping to catch sight of the buck bedded down for the day, chewing his cud. These smart old bucks became very nocturnal when there were hunters in the woods. He could visualize it in his mind. The buck would bed with its back to the wind, watching its back trail. With luck, he might catch it unaware. If he didn’t, he was bound to come upon the tracks again. Then he’d reassess the situation.
If Gladys quit her job and gave up all that seniority, they’d lose the good health insurance, have to buy their own.
How many quilts would that cost?
Silently, he crept alongside the stream of hemlocks, feet feeling the way, eyes searching ahead, squatting from time to time to look under the boughs of those evergreens. The deer might bed beneath them, in a spot sheltered from the falling snow. If he could catch it by surprise his hunt would be done.