Backtrack: A Mike Bowditch Short Mystery by Paul Doiron

Author:Paul Doiron [Doiron, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Traditional, Thrillers, Crime
ISBN: 9781250259578
Google: inGcDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07SVTDKBP
Barnesnoble: B07SVTDKBP
Goodreads: 46223455
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2019-06-25T05:00:00+00:00

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Once they were clear of the ravine, the pattern of the tracks underwent a change. Now they showed signs of stopping and pausing, as if the doctor really had lost his way. The prints zigzagged back and forth through the trees in a slalomlike fashion. They ranged off in an oxbow loop than returned to the original path after a lazy detour.

The overall course might indicate a confused man wandering. Hypothermia can prompt a kind of delirium. Some sufferers even throw off their clothes and go naked through the woods.

As I rounded a cluster of balsams, pulling my toboggan on a rope over my shoulder, a buck exploded out of the powder at my feet. He was big brute of a deer, let me tell you, a twelve-pointer, with a ridge of snow down his back like a white crest. He disappeared before I could get my flashlight on him. The gray ghost left behind a secret bed, the snow melted from the heat of his body, tufts of gray hair trembling in the wind before they got snatched away.

Being spooked by that buck got to me. I couldn’t say why, but I felt as if the missing man was toying with me. I spat out the whistle, reached for my pistol, and fired three more angry rounds into the blackness above.

After the echoes had been pushed aside on the wind, I did my ear-cupping trick. Again with no happy result. By now the weather had erased all signs of the hunter’s passage. I would have had an easier time following that trophy deer than locating Dr. Stoddard.

It was only the sharp crack of a branch breaking that saved me from turning tail. The sound came from a place to my left and slightly ahead. Nor did I reckon it was the wind.

“Dr. Stoddard!”

Another branch broke, this one not as loud. I set off into the thicker cover in pursuit. The trees were mostly pines of various widths and heights. And under one of the biggest, oldest pines was an impression like the one I’d found before: the outline of a man’s bottom, legs, and boot heels. I bit off my mitten, passed my palm over the melted snow, and felt the same lingering warmth I had felt in the deer’s bed.

Fresh tracks showed where the doctor had jumped up and fled into the forest.

What else could I do but chase down the poor delusional man before he injured himself or eluded me for good?

He’d tried to walk backward in his own prints, the way a child might hope to fool another child, but I recognized the gambit for what it was. I switched off my flashlight and let night vision take over.

I found him crouched behind a cabin-sized boulder, one of those erratics the glaciers had left behind on their retreat north ten thousands year past. He held his military rifle at waist height, pointed at where he thought his pursuer might appear, coming around the rock.

“You don’t need that rifle, Doc,” I said.

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