The Boreal Owl Murder
Read The Boreal Owl Murder Online
Authors: Jan Dunlap
Tags: #Mystery, #Murder, #Mystery & Detective, #Minnesota, #Crime, #Fiction, #Detective and Mystery Stories, #Suspense, #Bird Watching, #Birding, #White; Bob (Fictitious Character), #General, #Superior National Forest (Minn.)
A Bob White Birder Murder Mystery
Jan Dunlap
The Boreal Owl Murder:
Murder on Warbler Weekend
A Bobwhite Killing
Falcon Finale
A Murder of Crows
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-87839-517-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First Edition, July 2008
Electronic Edition, December 2012
Published by
North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.
P.O. Box 451
St. Cloud, Minnesota 56302
I used to think that there was no such thing as a bad birding trip. I’ve been birding for almost twenty-six years—since I was eight years old—and I’ve always had a blast birding. Sure, it’s Minnesota, and I get mauled by mosquitoes, soaked in the rain, sunburned in summer and frozen in the winter, but, hey, I get to travel all over this great state and eat all the prepackaged donuts I want from out-of-the-way gas stations. What’s not to love about that? And it’s a fairly inexpensive hobby, too. The birding, I mean, not the donut-eating. Of course, sometimes there are additional costs—like having to pay for speeding tickets when I try to get all over the state to see rare birds reported on the state birding hotline. But I’ve been working on reducing those costs. I just remind myself, “Bob, let someone
else
do the driving.”
Anyway, I love to go birding. Unfortunately, though, I now know that there is such a thing as a bad birding trip. It starts when you find a dead body instead of the bird you’re chasing, and, when someone starts shooting at you, it really goes downhill.
It was getting close to midnight, and my buddy Mike and I were deep in the woods north of Duluth, listening for Boreal Owls.
I’ve been wanting to find a Boreal for years, but it’s one of my nemesis birds—no matter how many times I’ve chased one, it’s always given me the slip. Boreals are pretty rare, which, of course, makes finding one that much harder. But this time I was determined. Besides, I have a reputation to keep up. I’m one of the most successful birders in Minnesota—okay, maybe that’s a dubious distinction for most people—but the fact that I still hadn’t gotten a Boreal in almost twenty years of trying wasn’t exactly boosting my self-confidence.
This year, though, I promised myself it was going to be different. This year, I not only had a strategy, I had a plan of attack. So to speak.
To begin with, I had determined the three most likely places to find the owls. Location, location, location, as my last realtor liked to say over and over and over. I had spent weeks researching where the owls had been observed over the past three years, which wasn’t an easy job, since the only available information on the owls’ location was in the annual reports by one Andrew Rahr, Ph.D., an ornithologist and field researcher based out of the University of Minnesota in Duluth.
It became pretty obvious to me, too, that Rahr really didn’t want anyone else prowling around in the owls’ vicinity. In his reports, which I basically had to dig out of the back of birding publications, he made it even more difficult to pin locations down by referring to places with vague directions, like “in the northwest quadrant of the upper third of the Superior Forest,” or “some miles from the Old Gunflint Trail,” or “cut a lock of your hair and trace two circles in the moonlight.” Just kidding. But he didn’t exactly draw a road map, if you know what I mean.
But birders are nothing if not persistent. Hope springs eternal and all that. So I ignored the man’s annoying ambiguity and painstakingly compared the annual reports to see which vague references recurred each year. Then I plotted the possible sites on a map.
At one point, I’d even tried talking with him on the phone to verify the locations. His reaction, however, wasn’t exactly full of warm fuzzies—in fact, he was downright hostile. I’d never met the man, but he practically accused me of sabotaging his research. I mean, for crying out loud, all I wanted was a little affirmation that I was in the right neck of a very big woods to find the owl. I certainly wasn’t trying to steal his job.
I’ve already got a job and it’s a good one, and I like it. I’m a high school counselor at Savage Senior High, outside the Twin Cities. I spend my days helping kids navigate the often obscure and sometimes terrifying twists and turns of graduation requirements and teenage trauma. It may not be as impressive as being a world-renowned owl expert, but it works for me.
Anyway, after that phone call, I gave up on trying to get any help from Mr. Paranoid and focused on the map I’d drawn.
Location, location, location wasn’t the only obstacle to finding a Boreal, however.
Timing is critical. As in
really
critical. As in “if you don’t get this exactly right, you idiot, you are toast for at least another year. Ha ha ha.”
So the first thing you have to remember is that the owls are nocturnal, which means they’re only active at night. If you tried to look for them during the day, you could be standing right under one and never know it, because they’re small and they blend right into the trees. At night, though, they’re busy, hunting for food and doing whatever it is owls do with their free time. Remodeling nests, maybe. Making babies. Watching reruns of
Seinfeld
. I don’t know. So the bottom line is, you have to hunt for them in the dark, and since they’re still hard to see (it is dark, remember), instead of looking for them, you listen.
Fortunately, Boreal Owls have a very distinctive call, a series of rising flute-like notes. Once you hear it, you know it’s a Boreal and not a Great Grey or a Barred Owl or a Great Horned Owl. And since your best bet to hear them is when they’re calling during mating season, that narrows your window of opportunity even more for finding them. In fact, there are only about four weeks, from mid-March to mid-April, when the Boreals are mating in northern Minnesota.
As a result, my grand strategy to finally see a Boreal was simple: spend four weekends at three sites in the north woods of Minnesota in the freezing cold while listening for lusty owls.
A brilliant plan.
Cold, but brilliant.
Actually, make that damn cold.
And that was why Mike and I were hiking around in near-zero weather dressed in about ten layers of thermal clothing in the middle of the night in the forest north of Duluth
.
After trying the first two of my chosen locations on Friday night and getting nothing, we headed for this last remaining site. We followed an old logging trail most of the way in, so the path was pretty smooth. Here and there, though, patches of ice and some deep drifts made night walking a little hazardous.
“Are we having fun yet?” Mike asked, slogging through the snow behind me. “I could be home with my wife and daughter right now, you know. Warm, well-fed.”
“And wishing you were here with me closing in on a Boreal,” I added. “Come on, Mike, you know you want it. You get a Boreal, and you’ve got every possible bird in this county. A birder’s delight. Tonight, we’re the Canadian Mounties—we always get our man. Make that bird.”
“I got news for you, Bob. We look like dough boys, not Mounties. Besides, I don’t think we’ll be getting anything tonight. I haven’t heard even one owl cry, not even a Great Horned, and those guys are everywhere.”
I had to admit that the absence of
any
owl calls was bothering me a little. It seemed like the deeper we got into the woods, the quieter it became. As Mike had pointed out, we should have been hearing some other owls calling by now. The Boreal wasn’t the only species around here.
Instead, it was quiet, like the birds had been hushed. Like when they sensed humans.
Or danger.
Or both.
My boot slipped on something—a branch or root, I assumed—and as I caught my balance, it popped up in front of my knee.
Except it wasn’t a branch.
It was an arm. A really stiff arm.
“Holy shit!” I yelled, jumping back at least a yard and right into Mike, who had apparently stopped to check out his new night vision binoculars and was looking beyond me.
At least that’s what I figured he was doing because the edge of his binos nailed me hard in the neck, and I doubled over in pain.
Which put a hand directly into my face.
It was not, however, my hand.
Nor was it Mike’s.
Which left only one very unattractive possibility: it belonged to the stiff arm.
“What? What?” Mike was still behind me, trying to keep his excitement in check, whispering loudly, swinging his binos from treetop to treetop. “Where is it? Where is it?”
“In front of me,” I croaked, my stomach doing a double barrel roll. Even through my layers of winter gear, I could feel myself breaking into a sweat and shaking all over.
“The owl’s in front of you?” Mike asked, pointing his binos into the trees ahead of us.
“No, the
hand
is in front of me.”
I said it as clearly, as meaningfully, as I could, taking deep breaths and straightening back up. I took a step back and turned to look at Mike. “The hand that is attached to the arm that is, I assume, connected to a body that is, I’m thinking, probably dead.”
Mike lowered the binos and peered at me in the darkness, totally non-plussed.
“What?”
“There’s a dead body in front of me.”
Mike leaned sideways to get a look around me. At six-foot-three, I’m a foot taller than Mike, so he hadn’t yet seen the hand that now stuck upright a few feet away. I heard him make a gagging sound, and then, a moment later, he let out a low whistle.
“Yeah. Looks like a dead body, I’d say.”
For a minute or two or three, it was—well—dead quiet. Then, somewhere in the distance, a hooting sound floated.
I froze, listening.
The Boreal?
I strained to hear it.
Another hoot.
I held my breath. Was I going to get the owl? Finally, after all these years? We had the location right, I was sure of that. I focused on the notes of the unseen bird’s cry, willing it to be the flute-like call of the Boreal.
