Snakebit

Begin ReadingTable of ContentsAbout the AuthorCopyright Page Thank you for buying thisSt. Martin’s Publishing Group ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content,and info on new releases and other great reads,sign up for our newsletters. Or visit us online atus.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on the author, click here. The author and publisher have provided this ebook to you for your personal use only. You may not make this ebook publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this ebook you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. 1The woman on the phone refused to give her name, but she swore she’d just seen a rattlesnake on her hike up Black Cat Mountain.“I almost stepped on the frigging thing!”The man on the other end of the call was a Maine game warden named Mike Bowditch. “Did you get a picture of it?”“No, I didn’t get a picture of it. I was running for my life in terror. For real.”Bowditch had taken the call in his patrol truck, the air conditioner of which was busted again. Sweat slithered down his temples. He had rolled up the windows thinking it might be cooler without the radiant heat from the asphalt wafting in. He couldn’t decide if it was better or worse.“Can you describe the snake for me?”“You don’t believe me about it being a rattlesnake. I can hear it in your voice.”“That’s not it,” he lied awkwardly. “But you have to understand that timber rattlers aren’t native to Maine, so it would be highly unlikely—”“Why is there a Rattlesnake Mountain in Casco? And a Rattlesnake Island in Kezar Lake?” Her throaty voice cracked. She sounded gleeful and triumphant, like a litigator who had caught a hostile witness in a lie. “Don’t tell me I didn’t see what I saw.”“There used to be rattlers here, don’t get me wrong,” he said as traffic whipped past his stopped GMC. “But people wiped them out in the nineteenth century. The snakes would gather underground in the winter in what are called hibernacula, where they could be doused with kerosene—”The woman hadn’t come to him for a lecture in herpetology, but Bowditch was prone to over explanation, a character defect in himself he seemed incapable of correcting, which suggested he didn’t view it as a defect requiring correction.“I called you as a public service! I don’t want some dog getting snakebitten up there. Or a little kid, even.”Bowditch couldn’t help but note that, for his unknown caller, child safety took second place to canine safety. On this scant evidence, he deduced she was a childless dog owner. Making quick and dirty deductions about people was another of his self-admitted flaws.“I appreciate that,” he told the woman. “But sometimes we get calls from hikers who think they’ve seen rattlesnakes when they’ve stumbled across native milk snakes. They have this defense mechanism—milk snakes—they vibrate the tips of their tails against the ground to simulate a rattle and scare off predators.”“Dude, it wasn’t a frigging milk snake,” she said, her deep voice breaking high again. “You’d better haul ass over to that trailhead and catch that 2The warden had no intention of rushing up Black Cat Mountain in search of a spurious rattlesnake, but later that afternoon, after he’d spent hours in the sun at the Range Ponds public landing, checking the hulls of sport-fishing boats for an invasive weed called milfoil, he found himself passing the trailhead on his drive home and felt obliged to stop.His thoughts were still mired in milfoil as he climbed the short path up the hill. His department’s program to arrest the spread of the lake-choking weed was worse than futile—it was an utter waste of his time. Mere shreds of the plant, caught in an outboard’s propeller or stuck to a hull, were enough to spread the pestilence from one pond to the next, rendering the water unboatable, unswimmable, and ultimately uninhabitable to certain aquatic life. The warming climate was bringing many new species into the state of Maine: red-bellied woodpeckers, emerald ash-borer beetles, maybe even timber rattlesnakes if his caller was to be believed. The milfoil scourge seemed less like an invasion “from away” than from an alien galaxy.The Black Cat Mountain trail was overspread by native white pines and white oaks, the sheltering leaves of which did little to break the late-June heat. When he reached the top, he emerged onto an east-facing ledge with a vista of Lower Range Pond. He’d hoped for a cooling breeze at the summit, but the air was as breathless as at the base. He had hoped, also, to meet hikers whom he could ask about the reported snake, but the only people he encountered were a surprised, half-dressed teenage couple who had the smell of cannabis and coitus on them and ran behind bushes at his approach.“No, man, we haven’t seen any snakes,” the boy said, enunciating slowly, taking pains not to sound stoned. He had rock star hair and a trace of scruff that made his face look more dirty than rugged.“No snakes,” the girl giggled, clutching her bra to her sizable chest because it was unfastened beneath her blouse.Bowditch was twenty-seven.He guessed the lovers were a decade younger than he was, but as he was dressed in his field uniform, with its heavy bulletproof vest and heavier gun belt, he couldn’t help but feel grizzled and world-weary in their adolescent presence. His colleagues in the Warden Service had rightly warned him that the cares of the job would age him. But he was only now beginning to mourn what he had traded away to wear the badge.He would have thought the prospect of rolling around on the