ESTESBOG

by Peter Walker

 

It was 8:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving Eve. Colorado District Wildlife Manager Betsy Robinson was heading home from Iliff in Logan County an hour’s drive northeast of her home district of Fort Morgan. She was the on-call game warden for the Sterling and Akron Districts this weekend as well as her own.

 Three hours ago a farmer had witnessed someone shooting at running deer from a pickup truck on a county road close to the river. The Logan County Sheriff’s Office had relayed his call to her. She contacted the farmer and got a description of the truck but no plate number. Using a flashlight she found no sign of blood in the area where the farmer had seen the deer. It was a dead end investigation.

The heavy duty tires on her Ford Super Duty hummed loudly as she cruised southwestward on Highway 6 through Atwood, then the village of Merino. The night was crisp and clear and the glow of the sunset had lingered a long time on the western horizon. Meanwhile an almost full moon had risen in the northeast and now made it possible to see trees and round hay bales and cattle quite clearly. The highway made a rising sweep to the left over the railroad tracks, then across the South Platte River. Just ahead were the three access roads to Prewitt Reservoir State Wildlife Area. As she approached the first turn-off, on a spur-of-the-moment decision, she put on her blinker and took the turn. Half a mile down the dusty county road she turned right onto a gravel access road that led to the base of the dike at the northeast end of Prewitt. The lot was empty.

For no particular reason she got out of her truck and climbed the stamped steel stairs all the way to the top of the concrete-faced dike some 30 feet above the water. Aligned from southwest to northeast, prairie winds pounded waves from the big man-made reservoir against the dike with ferocity at times and it required the sloped concrete facing to prevent the lake from simply bursting through and emptying across farmland back into the river. From the top of the dike the night was absolutely still except for the distant hum of tires on Interstate 76 two miles distant to the south. The sky was full of stars, especially in the distant areas away from the bright moon.

As Betsy took in the night’s glory she heard the unmistakable krump-krump krump of a shotgun in the night. It sounded heavy, like a 12 gauge, coming from the west along the northern edge of the lake.

“Hel-lo!” she said to herself, her law enforcement instincts beginning to kick in.

Krump…..krump. There it was again. Now she had it narrowed down. The lake along the northwest shoreline was sandy and sterile from a duck habitat standpoint. But all along the lake a few hundred yards out onto the prairie were a series of shallow seep ponds that usually teemed with waterfowl. The shots were probably coming from one of the ponds and she was pretty sure which one it was. Although it was duck season, hunting by moonlight had been outlawed by the federal government 80 years ago. Shooting ducks against a moonlit sky was a mostly forgotten art once employed by market gunners to kill hundreds of ducks in a single night.

Making her way back down to the parking lot, Betsy had no trouble in the bright moonlight opening the padlock to the cable that allowed her access onto the service road along the base of the dike. With headlights off she drove slowly down the lake with the ponds off to her right. After about a mile she turned the engine off, stepped out and listened.

Five minutes….ten. She began to think she might have spooked the shooter when – Bam! Bam! Bam! – shots rang out in the cottonwoods only three hundred yards ahead. Now she knew exactly where they were coming from.

Grabbing her 4-cell Mag Lite she stepped off down the road towards the sound. Five minutes later she could see the moonlight reflecting from the pond less than a hundred yards to her right through the bare cottonwoods and peachleaf willows. Overhead she heard the faint whistle of mallard wings and a few seconds later another pair of shots – Bam! Bam! – followed by the loud plop of a duck hitting the water.

As she had expected, the shooter was on the west side of the pond facing into the rising moon, the better to see his targets. As stealthily as she could move, the game warden eased slowly around the shoreline, staying back in the trees rather than expose herself at the water’s edge. During her sneak the shooter bagged another duck.

Finally in place only 20 yards or so from the gunner, Betsy had a good view of the small pond’s surface. She counted at least a dozen shapes that she presumed were dead ducks. The gunner was standing in knee deep water in hip boots right out in the pond. Keeping herself concealed in the bushes and reeds, the game warden called out, “Division of Wildlife! Put your shotgun down and come ashore!”

Startled, the man turned toward her but held the shotgun across his waist.

“I said put the gun down!” Betsy drew her sidearm.

A few more tense seconds lapsed, then the gunner whined, “Aw please! It’s a brand new gun and I hate to get it wet!’

Being a gun owner herself, Betsy could understand. “Jack the shells out into the water so I can hear them,” the game warden countered. The man did as he was told.

“Now, hold your gun with both hands above your head and come towards the sound of my voice.”

She took the shotgun from him when he reached her and had him walk out with her to her truck. There she began her questioning. Grateful to be allowed to keep his shotgun dry, the young man appeared to talk quite freely. He was a twenty-five-year-old Fort Morgan resident, an employee at the beef plant.

“Do you always hunt ducks at night?”

“Only when the moon and the weather are just right,” he boasted. “We almost always have a duck feed on Thanksgiving.”

“We?”

“Oh, my brothers and a couple of cousins and me. We never overdo it.”

“Just doing it at all is overdoing it,” the game warden responded.

After a few more minutes of conversation Betsy thanked the duck poacher for being cooperative. She told him she would make out his ticket in better light and look him up Friday at his place of work. In truth she wanted to come back at daylight with her hunting dog, Daisy, and retrieve all of the illegal birds before figuring out what charges to levy on the shooter. The man said good night and headed off down the service road toward the next parking lot. Betsy waited until she heard his car door slam and saw his headlights flash through the trees as he headed back out to the highway.

She got in her truck and started the engine. As she continued on down the road, still driving by moonlight, she thought about what had just happened. This was a very unusual bust and instinct told her this wasn’t over. On a hunch, she took the radio microphone off its clip.

“Morgan Comm, Wildlife 343.”

“Go ahead 343.”

“Can you tell me what time the present shift at the beef plant gets off?”

“Stand by 343.”

She brought her truck to a stop and waited.

“Wildlife 343, Morgan Comm.”

“Go ahead.”

“The night shift at the beef plant ends at 2300 hours.”

“Thanks. 343 out.”

Some of the very best game wardens develop an instinct for poachers. Betsy Robinson had seen this in a couple of her mentors. Her grandfather had been a Maine Game Warden. He had the instinct. Now she was getting a visceral feeling that something more would be going down. Recently widowed, she’d volunteered to work the holiday weekend. She made a decision to stay right here at Prewitt for the night if necessary.

Repositioning her truck well back on the service road beneath the dike where no one was apt to come along in the night. She dug around behind the rear seat and found a set of insulated coveralls and put them on. The night was chilly and there would be a hard freeze before dawn. Then she settled in behind the wheel of her truck and waited.

An hour passed. It was officially Thanksgiving Day. By twelve forty-five the moon was almost dead overhead and Betsy was getting sleepy. Stretching out across the back seat and going to sleep began to look tempting. As she sat half awake, half asleep, the tops of the trees off to the west lit up for a moment. Betsy snapped fully awake. Did she dream it, or had it really happened? Had a vehicle just pulled into the middle parking lot?

She rolled down her window and listened intently. There it was: car doors slamming and distant voices. They’re pretty confident no one is around, she thought. Good!

Climbing out of her truck, she doffed the coveralls, stuck the Mag-Lite in her belt and crept forward toward the pond. Ahead she could hear vegetation crunching and low voices. She swung in behind the poachers as they passed on their way back to the very same pond. Their careless noises and talk masked whatever noises she made and she tagged along only a few yards behind.

There were three men this time. All carried shotguns. When still 50 yards from the pond she watched and listened as each one loaded his gun. There was a twenty-foot ring of flattened grasses along the west side of the pond. When the men stepped out of the bushes into the open space, there arose a great commotion of and loud quacking as well over a hundred ducks took flight. All three poachers emptied their guns into the flock and several ducks fell back into the water.

The game warden simply walked into the group unannounced while they laughed and high-fived each other. One of them turned and offered to high-five her before he realized she wasn’t part of his group.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed. “Who are you?”

The other two shut up and stared.

“Division of Wildlife,” the officer said. “Don’t bother reloading your weapons, gentlemen. For a start, I’ll need to see identification.”

The man farthest away said, “You’ve already seen mine once tonight.”

The three men were considerably less enthusiastic during their walk to the game warden’s truck. Using the spotlight on her idling truck, the wildlife officer set about writing each man up on charges of hunting after hours and illegal take of wildlife. The man she’d caught earlier in the evening received double charges. One of the other men was the original offender’s younger brother and the other a cousin with the same last name. Instead of issuing penalty assessments which can be paid in lieu of going to court, it was Betsy’s prerogative to write each a summons that would require them to face a judge.

The audacity of coming right back out and taking up where he left off really rankled the wildlife officer.

“Now,” she said. “I want all three of you to lay your shotguns here on my back seat. I’ll give you each a receipt, but I am going to ask the judge to award the Division ownership of them.”

As she expected, the first guy really howled at that. She thought he might be suppressing tears as he placed the brand new Browning in her truck.

“I just bought it last week,” he whined.

“You can tell that to the judge,” the officer replied coldly.