Season's Revenge A Christmas Mystery

1 The people to whom I was born had lived here before fiercer tribes from the East chased them onto the Great Plains. From time to time they, too, must have stopped to take in the view. Framed in oak, it would have rivaled the photographic landscapes sold in the hopeful little gift shops that crop up in every dying small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This one was a panoramic shot of a stand of tall virgin white pine that crowned a rocky escarpment submarining upward from a deep green sea of pine and hemlock, birch and aspen. Just below the escarpment, a lily pond sparkled in the freshening sun. At dawn a light rain had misted the forest, raising the loamy aroma of damp woods. It was a still, cloudless morning in August, the loveliest time of the year. Blood stained the foreground. Deep claw marks raked the victim's grizzled chest and bearded face, twisted in the rictus of sudden and painful death. His right arm jutted rigidly from the torn sleeping bag in the tatters of his tent, the shoulder deeply punctured, shreds of muscle and sinew dangling from the bone. Under the ruined ripstop nylon, blood puddled in a grisly pudding. Dozens of bear trackssome of them streaked with crimson, bits of tissue clinging to grooves dug by clawscrisscrossed the moist ground around the campsite. I looked up and sighed, trying to make sense of what I saw. From the bow of the escarpment jutted a lone wolf pine a hundred feet tall, its windward side limbless from decades of tacking into winter storms howling off Lake Superior. In the second-growth forests of westernmost Upper Michigan, wolf pinesaged, once-lordly white pines that escaped the logger's ax because they were just out of easy reachare symbols of flinty endurance to the people who hang on in this rugged wilderness country where livings are hard to make. The Finns who settled here a century ago called that quality "sisu"perseverance, fortitude, steadfastness. That morning I didn't know I was going to need it in the weeks to come. Far from the well-trod hiking paths, Big Trees is a favorite retreat of veteran woodsmen who know the most remote crannies of Porcupine County. I'd been there once myself, as the companion of a local hunter. The place lay a rugged three-hour trek through clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies along a rocky, barely visible footpathlittle more than a deer trailbranching southwest from an axle-snapping old loggers' track. The latter led into the Ottawa National Forest from a narrow paved road serving as the southern boundary of Wolverine Mountain Wilderness State Park, largest of its kind in all Michigan. Still sweating from the hike, I stepped back from the tent, squashed a mosquito, and hitched up my gun belt, from which hung a .357 Combat Magnum in a tooled leather holster. No yuppie 9-millimeter Berettas for me, I had vowed when I took the job with the sheriff's department. In the woods, I had reasoned, a man wants a heavy slug carrying lots of foot-pounds of energy. Large animals, especially charging ones, are harder to stop than gangbangers carrying Glocks. Aren't they? It was not long until I discovered people don't need firearms of any kind in the woods, not unless they're hunting, either for game or for a dangerous felon. The people who live here walk in the forest all the time without weapons, except maybe a four-inch Buck knife, the woodsman's favorite tool, far handier than a cell phone is to a stockbroker. They feel comfortable in their surroundings, and they know the woods intimately. If one should encounter a large animal, both parties to the meeting usually take their respective leaves with as much dignity and alacrity as they can muster. And felons? They're in short supply here inKisor, Henry is the author of 'Season's Revenge A Christmas Mystery', published 2004 under ISBN 9780765345875 and ISBN 0765345870.