Wildlife Wars: The Life and Times of a Fish and Game Warden Read online

  ledge and then to a resting place beyond on the forest floor. One by one the lads hoisted themselves onto the ledge and then gathered in a clump near Dan’s unconscious form, awaiting instructions. “Let’s move on up the hill to my Jeep,” I commanded, “and several of you grab Dan and bring him along.” Moving up the mountainside, we picked up LeeRoy, who was still handcuffed to the pine tree. I removed his handcuffs and placed them on Dan, since I considered him the most dangerous. The cuffs went only one click on Dan’s wrists! That should give anyone familiar with handcuffs an idea of the size of this fellow. With that, up the mountain to my waiting Jeep we went.

  When we arrived I had the lads load Dan into the passenger side of the vehicle, making him as comfortable as I could. Closer examination revealed what appeared to be a broken nose, possible broken bones around the eye socket, and one eye fairly bloody from the high-speed encounter with my boot. I just remembered kicking him hard enough to put him out of the game. Who knows, if his head had come off maybe it would have flown clear across that river. Now I had the worst of the lot under control, and to hell with being a nice guy. Reaching behind the seat of the Jeep, I pulled out one hundred feet of five-eighths-inch nylon rope and tied it to the front bumper. I picked LeeRoy out of the lot sitting in the road in front of the Jeep as I had told them to do and tied a slipknot noose around his neck. He went ballistic! He screamed and jumped around, claiming I was going to hang him. Now, how the hell can you hang someone from the front bumper of a vehicle when he is standing on the ground? Brother. I guess I might have frightened him a little more than I needed to.

  I repeated that process until I had everyone but Dan tied to that nylon rope. Then I told them to walk forward until the rope was tight and they were all strung out in front of my Jeep like a human sausage. I told them they were going to walk to town in that fashion because I had only one set of handcuffs, and I was going to turn them over to the deputy sheriff. I also told them that if the rope went slack I would put the Jeep in reverse and drag them until there wasn’t an ounce of meat left on their hind ends. Their call! The collective look I got back told me they were a beaten lot, and that it would be all right from now on. I had chosen the rope instead

  of trying to place the whole lot in the back of my Jeep to protect myself; I wasn’t letting them any closer to me than was absolutely necessary. With that, I started up the Jeep and we began our three- mile march into the town of Orleans.

  Upon our arrival in town an alarm went out among a few of the local outlaws to rally the boys and get the son of a bitch who had all the lads on a rope like firecrackers. Ignoring the growing crowd, I pulled up in front of the deputy’s house trailer. Honking the horn, I was dismayed to find him gone. The angry crowd was becoming louder, so I laid my .45 on the dash of the Jeep and told the lads on the rope to remember what I had told them: they should keep their friends at bay, or those on the rope were going to have thin hind ends.

  I realized that I couldn’t stay in town without creating an increasing “hoorah,” so we started a long march down the highway toward Willow Creek, the next wide spot in the road. Just outside Orleans I met a speeding California highway patrol officer, obviously responding to a report of the crazy guy with the men on the rope. He passed me and executed a power turn behind my vehicle. He flew up behind me, and on went his red lights and siren, alerting the entire world and God to the saga on the highway. Relieved, I stopped the Jeep and stepped out of the cab only to be met with a 12-gauge shotgun and a terse command to assume the position. I did as I was told and was disarmed before I could say a word. Then the officer turned me around and said, “What the hell are you doing?”

  I told him I was a game warden, had all these lads under arrest, and couldn’t get any help, so I was bringing them in the only way I could since I had only one set of handcuffs.

  He stared at me as if there were no tomorrow. “Identification, please,” came the next command with the shotgun still focused on the center of my chest.

  Once properly introduced by my badge and credentials, I explained what had happened and who my prisoners were. He couldn’t believe what I had done but was relieved to find another officer instead of a nut at the end of the human pack string. Undoing my rope from the prisoners’ necks, we loaded as many as we could safely squeeze into his patrol vehicle and then put the rest in the back of my Jeep along with my evidence sturgeon.

  He said, “If they try to break out the rear window I can shoot from here, and if they want to jump I’ll collect them with my push bumper, so let’s go.” Off we went without incident to the jail in Willow Creek, where, after gathering all the information I needed, we separated, the lads happy to be rid of the Fish and Game madman and I just as glad to be rid of them. Throughout the later legal proceedings, my “rope trick” kept coming up, but the county prosecutor was able to blunt that concern. Everyone was eventually found guilty, and each man drew $1,500 in fines and spent thirty days in the county jail. Dan was also found guilty of assault and battery, not to mention a parole violation, and the last I heard he was finishing up his time in prison from previous charges. The Yurok Indian salesmen disappeared and had not yet been apprehended when I left California in 1974.The store owner was never prosecuted for his role in the snagging ring because the county prosecutor didn’t feel I had a good enough case to wrap him up. But several weeks later, while back in the area patrolling overtly, I caught the store owner on a back road with a loaded shotgun, shooting from a motor vehicle on the road. I was able to arrest him on charges of taking band-tailed pigeons during the closed season and use and aid of a motor vehicle to take migratory game birds. The no-help deputy was soon relieved from his Orleans duty, and the Humboldt County sheriff began to make plans to provide a fulltime officer for the area.

  Several months later a public-spirited fisherman passing through Orleans observed a handmade “wanted” poster offering a $700 reward for killing the “big game warden.” Checking around, he found the same “Wanted Dead” poster in every establishment, including the post office. The FBI was notified, and agents visited the town and took down the poster in the post office. I later learned that the postmaster lost his job for violation of some federal law for placing unauthorized posters of such a nature in a federal facility.

  The sturgeon snagging stopped, but I continued to work that area overtly for several months after my covert operation just to show the lads that the long arm of the law was supreme. I think that because the thrill of the chase had been so strongly manifested in one very young game warden, I stayed in this zone of activity longer than would normally have been expected. There is nothing

  quite like hunting your fellow human, especially when one is young and foolish.

  I learned more about survival in the six months I worked that area than most officers learned in six years and was grateful for that experience. It served me well in the many years that followed in my wildlife law enforcement sojourns, not to mention keeping me alive as a result of some of the survival tactics I had to learn in my time there. Captain Gray had done me a favor through an unseeing management directive. For that I was eternally grateful.

  I later found out that the Ishi-Pishi Bar really did have a gallon jug behind the counter full of money for anyone who killed the big game warden. If you divided the alleged $700 in that jug by my weight, I didn’t even fetch the price of good hamburger! Damn—I would have thought I was worth at least the price of chuck steak.

  two

  A Carload of Indians and a Trunkload of Fish

  During an early part of my career, as part of my cross training I was assigned to work under a senior warden named Hank Merak whose duty station was Willow Creek, California. Hank had a reputation as a very hard worker: his ethic was seven days a week, twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-, and even eighteen-hour days. I appreciated that kind of attitude because I had come to enjoy, even relish, the long hours and attendant challenges my similar commitment had to offer. Hank’s assigned district required t
hat kind of energy, and anything less meant disaster for the many resources it contained. His patrol area included some of the toughest mountain country in the state. Rugged wasn’t the word; rocky and straight up and down were more like it. His flat would be steep in any other warden’s jargon. His rivers were full of king and silver salmon; the mountains were full of black-tailed deer, black bear, and mountain lions; the Hoopa and Yurok Indian Reservations sat in the middle; and all this was surrounded by loggers and every kind of wildlife outlaw imaginable. Throw in 100-degree heat, rattlesnakes galore, and all the poison oak you could care to crawl into far enough to remain concealed and yet view the bad guys, and you should have a picture of where I happily spent many hundreds of hours learning the tricks of the trade from one of the state’s best.

  One of the reasons Hank requested assistance was to try to crack an illegal commercial salmon operation that was driving him nuts, not to mention cleaning out the salmon runs on the Trinity River. Hank

  had a confidential informant who had told him there was a small group of Hoopa Indians legally gill-netting the Trinity River but illegally selling their subsistence catch to the commercial fish houses in Eureka. Any use of gill-netted salmon other than subsistence use was illegal under California laws. The informant advised Hank that “the Indians take the fish over the mountains to Eureka for illegal sale to the fish houses, not by the state highway route but over old logging roads.” He continued ,“The Indians have a very special car they use to transport the fish on these runs to the commercial fish houses. It is an old four-door Buick with a huge, powerful engine. They have removed all identifying parts associated with the car so that if they are caught and decide to run and leave the car it can’t be traced back to them. The car has large, heavy-duty tires and beefed- up springs in the rear to better haul the loads of salmon placed in a special metal box in the trunk. They have a driver who is very reckless and a ‘shooter,’ an Indian who would just as soon kill you as look at you, who rides with all the shipments of fish.” To Hank this description sounded like the odds were just about right, and it was a challenge he couldn’t leave alone. Realizing that an attempted capture might lead to a fight with somewhat uneven odds and that he might end up packing fish out with his bad back, Hank thought a partner, especially one the size of the new recruit, might be just the ticket. Fortunately or unfortunately, yours truly was about to get sucked into Hank’s challenge—but I loved it!

  Once the assignment was official and Captain Gray had sent me off to work with another warden he didn’t like, I felt that I had finally come of age. I was being given good, challenging details away from the captain and with wardens who could teach me something about the world of wildlife law enforcement, not to mention how to survive our leader. Driving to Willow Creek that first morning, I was struck by how rugged the north coast country really was. Heavy logged-over undergrowth was punctuated by very steep mountains, followed by many river systems at the bottoms of almost impassible canyons. The terrain and the impending work associated with it lent an extra challenge to the detail. Arriving in Willow Creek, I followed directions to Hank’s house and met the man I would grow to admire and with whom I would spend a lot of frustrating time trying to catch those breaking the law in what

  amounted to a wilderness with a nineteenth-century preservation mentality. At Hank’s home I stepped out and stretched my tired frame. As I started to look around, my eyes caught a figure watching me from the shadow of a garage. The man was giving me the kind of look-over given by gunfighters of old. Walking over to the stranger, I asked, “Hank?”

  “The one and only,” the man with the piercing eyes responded. Hank was tall and thin. He possessed a hawkish nose similar to mine but sure didn’t have the body to match. His reflexes were very quick, and his eyes didn’t miss any detail left by those he pursued. I discovered later that he was a man of extreme fairness, but once you crossed over the line, no matter what the odds, you had a fight on your hands with one who was as tough as a horseshoe nail. During that first meeting, Hank continued to look me over. He seemed to be satisfied with the initial review, but I could tell that he would wait to form his final opinion based on my handling of matters. That was all right with me; proving myself was the way I had been raised, and I could compete in that kind of arena very well. Hank said, “Come on in and meet my wife, Vickie, and the kids.”

  Vickie was a typical game warden’s superwife. She was patient with the public and basically raised the children, ran the house, killed the snakes, and took very good care of her family. In addition, she was an excellent cook, and many a meal fit for a king did I eat at their home. After dinner that first night, Hank and I sat out on the back porch waiting for nightfall and discussing the immediate salmon-poaching and -sale problem, the people of the area, what he expected of me, and the dangers to look out for. It quickly became apparent that Hank was not one to run from danger. He was a fighter no matter what the odds and expected me to back him in any and all altercations. Nightfall found us on the Trinity River checking Indians legally gill-netting salmon, making sure they complied with state and tribal laws. That night ran into many other similar evenings, with the two of us growing closer as time passed. During that fall of the late 1960s we spent many hundreds of late hours staked out in the mountains of Hank’s district, looking for this carload of Indians with their trunkload of fish—not to mention all the other illegal events one came upon when working in the back country at night.

  Hank’s vacation was coming up, and he didn’t want to leave the stakeout after all the hours we had spent in the bush. However, Vickie insisted, and Hank left on his travels, grumbling all the way. I thought I might get a little relief from the many unproductive night hours I had spent on this detail, a vacation of sorts, if you will—but I was sadly mistaken. One day after Hank left on his vacation, Bill Williams, the Klamath warden, called and told me to meet him at Hoopa the next day.

  It seemed that Bill, a hell of a hunter of men, didn’t want to lose any benefit from the work Hank and I had already done and was slipping into Hank’s adjacent district to continue the project. I was a little surprised, but the idea was fine with me. Bill was one hell of a good officer and a gentle, soft-spoken man, and I truly enjoyed working with him. His sneaking over into Hank’s district made me a little uneasy, but as a rookie I found that I was destined to lead a life of following orders, not giving or questioning them. We picked right up where Hank and I had left off, with long, hot, dusty hours in the backcountry at night, and during the process I was surprised at Bill’s stamina. He was a lot older than I but had just as much drive as I did. Years later I discovered how that combination comes to be. The good Lord has a job for a game warden to do protecting his creation. When wardens grow old and slow, He sees to it that those people still have the energy to go the distance. Today, at fifty-seven, though old and slow myself, I find I can still outwork many of those who are thirty years younger than I.

  One morning about three a.m. found us staking out a high mountain pass, surrounded by “snakes” of logging roads running in every direction through the second-growth timber. Through this maze of logging roads ran one heavily traveled dirt road that eventually wound itself down into the city of Eureka, some thirty miles away. Our patrol vehicle was parked just above a steep turn, so anyone traversing the road would sweep around the curve and be upon our rig before the driver of the oncoming vehicle realized we were there. If that person were on the wrong side of the law, we could fall upon the culprit posthaste, and escape was not an option. We had been so parked since nightfall and were sitting on the road bank behind our vehicle, visiting and listening to the night sounds around us. Our dinner had been the usual game-warden meal, cold

  C rations. We were drinking iced tea from our thermoses to keep awake, and our talk had slowed until we had both drifted off into our own thoughts.

  At first it was hard to be sure, but eventually we heard the grinding of an automobile engine laboring under a heavy load as it
inched up toward our high mountain location. We could see by the sweep of its headlights as it navigated the steep logging road switchbacks below us that it was coming our way! To a game warden, there was no reason for anyone to be out on those roads at that time of the morning unless they were up to no good. It was time for action. Bill positioned himself at the bottom of one switchback about thirty- five yards from where he placed me, at the top of the next turn in the road. That way, if they drove by him they still had to get by me, with Bill “eating up” their rear. Oh, to be a rookie game warden at a moment like this. By God, what a thrill!

  The car slowly ground around the last turn by our parked vehicle, and as its headlights hit our patrol car, out stepped Bill. Bill, like me, was in uniform and easy to recognize as a Fish and Game warden. He strode out into the middle of the dirt road, shone his flashlight into the driver’s eyes, and shouted, “Halt! State Fish and Game warden!”

  There was a pause that seemed to last for hours; then I heard the car’s engine roar to additional power, heard the spinning of tires on the dirt road, and saw Bill suddenly leap out of the way. As I stated earlier, Bill was an older man and not too fleet of foot. To avoid being run down, instead of running he dove off to one side of the road. But the onrushing car was too close, and it hit his legs, throwing his rag-doll form into the ditch. The car, gaining speed, was now coming my way. At that point, this rookie game warden decided he’d better get his crap together or he too would soon be lying in a ditch. That moment certainly had all the trappings of a dangerous situation—I found myself standing in the middle of the road, in full uniform, holding up my hand, while my hind end did strange things! I guess I couldn’t blame myself for having a tight tail end, especially in light of Bill’s notable lack of success in stopping the fleeing automobile just moments before...