Check Station

Third Saturday in April, nine hunting trucks in the gravel above a boat ramp and a bass boat that has blocked the apron six days without touching the water. The men come down out of Jeptha Kesterson's hollow happy — a bunk, three meals, and a man who knows where the birds are.

One of them, pleased with the entire world, says that Jep set it all up. Permits and everything. That is a man bragging, not confessing, and Greer Kittrell writes six names in a notebook she has no earthly reason to want. She asks a clerk two counties away for the purchase histories, and is told it takes days.

Opening morning of the firearms portion, and the line at the state's table in the feed mill lot runs out the entrance and along the shoulder. A pickup with a camper shell comes up in its turn. The young man driving it drops the tailgate on the biggest animal of the weekend, alone, and he will not look at her.

It is cold all the way through and loose when nothing else in that lot is, and there is a hand's width of standing water in the bed on a dry morning. His paper is out before she asks: a permit in his own name, a notch on the right line for the right day, a number called in from his own kitchen at twenty past seven. Four documents right, and one thing Greer Kittrell cannot account for.

The thirteenth of March, the upper end of Ferrin Lake flat all the way across, and Greer Kittrell is holding the far end of a net for a man coiling it down into a tub in the loops he wants it in and not the loops it wants to go in. It is not what a person would guess a conservation agent spends March on. It is most of the job.

Two days later the ramp at Bly Ford has vehicles on both shoulders of the road for a quarter mile above it, and people walking down the middle carrying rods too long to carry any other way. Half the trucks in the turnaround still have their headlights on at full daylight, because they came in when it was dark and nobody has thought about it since.

Then a man walks out to her truck to meet her, and a man who walks out to your truck has decided not to say it twice.

Three calls inside one hour on the first Friday in October, and no two of them describe the same crime. A woman on the hotline who will not leave a name, about a deer taken out of the Foy bottom. A man through the regional office who wants the word exclusive written down, about two cameras on that bottom that have been messed with. A man on a number that is not printed anywhere, about a padlock cut off a gate and lying in the weeds.

Inside a day and a half it has been talked about at every counter in two counties, in a version with a vehicle in it and a light in it and a stranger in it, and none of the three is so.

Gilman Foy says he took it before Greer Kittrell is out of the cab. The permit is filled out where it is filled out and notched where it is notched. He tells her all of it the first time, in his own lot, and every word of it is true. That is the trouble, and it takes her most of the month to find out that it is one.

The line at the tag counter on the Carder square is out the door and along the front of the building past the shoe repair, and the woman working it talks the whole way through. Somewhere in the middle of saying that they are backed up every year and every year it surprises them, she says there is a fellow comes in ahead of the rush every morning and buys a handful of these. A good handful. She has never counted them.

The next day a man who has never in his life given anybody a name gives Greer Kittrell one, on his own step, and stops. A clerk at the regional office runs it backward and hands her the cleanest set of paper in the building: one purchase every morning since the first, ahead of the rush, thirteen daily trout tags, cash, the same names each time. The names are real people at real addresses in these two counties. Two of them are dead. Every line of it is lawful, and a purchase record proves a sale and not a fishing.