Free Bitch Creek by William Tapply Page A

right. You let me know what falls out of those trees.”
    â€œOf course I will.”
    After he disconnected from Kate, Calhoun opened Lyle’s gazetteer on the kitchen table and flipped to Map 4, the one that included South Riley.
    Unlike road maps, topographic maps, as their name implies, show topography—man-made as well as natural features. Each map is a rectangle—a quadrangle—which they call a quad. It represents twenty-five minutes of latitude and longitude, encompassing an area twenty-nine miles north-south by twenty-one miles east-west, on a scale of one-half inch per mile.
    Calhoun, like many outdoorspeople, and especially hunting and fishing guides, consulted topo maps religiously. He knew that a single dotted line represented a trail that might or might not be passable in his four-wheel-drive truck, that little tufts of grass meant a marsh or swamp, that a black square represented a dwelling or a cellar hole where a dwelling had once stood. Thin blue lines were brooks or streams. A swath of pale green meant a woodland. You could estimate the steepness of a hill by how close together the contour lines were drawn.
    Calhoun loved to study topographic maps, to translate their legends into mental pictures and to read the stories they told, and like Lyle, he’d discovered a few secret ponds and trout streams in the middle of the winter by reading a topo map at his kitchen table.
    Of course, he knew that there really wasn’t a single truly secret pond or stream left in the entire state of Maine. After nearly four centuries of lumbering and farming and deer hunting and trout fishing, not a square foot of topography had been left unexplored, even in this state where thousands of acres that were owned by lumber companies still did not have names.
    But there were some streams and ponds that were too small and inaccessible and unpromising for most people to bother with, even in the more populated southern part of the state. Calhoun assumed that Fred Green’s secret pond was one of these.
    The western shore of Sebago Lake jutted into the upper-right edge of Map 4, which covered the western half of the skinny southern part of Maine over to the New Hampshire border. South Riley sat west of Sebago, only about six crow-flying miles from New Hampshire, in Oxford County just north of the York County line. Most of this country west of Sebago featured large unbroken patches of green and a lot of irregular blue lines and shapes, representing streams and lakes and ponds. It was crisscrossed with roadways, most of which were double dotted lines—dirt roads that were, in theory, passable by any sort of vehicle.
    It was rural country, and Calhoun knew that all the towns—like Dublin, where he lived—were small, and that most of it was rolling old farmland, much of it now in the advanced stages of reverting to mature forest.
    The Great Fire in October of 1947 had roared through here on its way to the sea, destroying houses and barns and woods and bridges and forests and a few entire villages, leaving several people and hundreds of head of livestock and uncounted numbers of wildlife dead in its wake.
    Lyle collected stories about that fire and loved to share them with Calhoun.
    Most of the old-timers who’d been burnt out in ’47, the stoic old Yankee farmers, had shrugged, cleaned away the ashes of their homes, and set to work rebuilding. But many hadn’t. The woods west and south of Sebago Lake were dotted with old cellar holes filled with charred timbers and rusted bedsprings and old crockery. The dirt roads that led into them—single-dotted lines on the topographic maps—were now growing thick with alder and poplar.
    Lyle’s legends were scattered across Map 4, hillsides and ridges and swamps and ponds that he’d circled in black felt-tip pen, many of them labeled in Lyle’s neat printing—“Big Buck,” “Hot Corner,” “Bear Shit”