In This State: A game warden’s life – drowned moose, traplines and bad brakes

Vermont Game Warden David Gregory looks out over frozen Lake Willoughby. VTD/Andrew Nemethy

Editor’s note: In This State is a new weekly column by Andrew Nemethy, Bryan Pfeiffer and Dirk Van Susteren about Vermont’s characters and innovators, its unique ideas and quirky places. The three authors, who will take turns writing the column, formerly worked as reporters and editors for the The Times Argus and Rutland Herald and have contributed to other publications in Vermont and around the country.

After nearly 18 years, there’s one thing Game Warden David Gregory can predict about his job in the Northeast Kingdom: It remains unpredictable.

Still, he admits even he was surprised the day his office landed in a ditch.

By office we mean his green, four-wheel-drive 2006 Chevy three-quarter ton pickup, where many of his nine-hour days are spent. The one with 156,000 miles on the odometer – hard backroad miles. The one well beyond its reliable life span for a law enforcement officer who counts on it to haul dead moose and deer, respond to lost hunters or track down deer-jackers at any hour of the day or night. The one he takes good care of because that’s the way he is.

Which, turns out, wasn’t enough last September, when he was patrolling on Carter Road in Burke and tried to slow for an intersection when “the brake pedal goes to the floor and there’s nothing there.

“It was a big surprise. Luckily, where I was, I was the only one there,” he says.

To stop, he went off-road, or as he puts it, “I just rode the ditch until it slowed down.”

Gregory tells this tale the way he does most every story, in a laconic just-the-facts style flavored with a wry sense of humor.

You want animation? Try Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Patrick Berry, whose department “has been living on a starvation diet” because of increasing costs and the slump in hunting and fishing license fees that fund his budget and his 27 field wardens. Berry was shocked at what he found when he came aboard a year ago with new governor Peter Shumlin.

“Some of them have trucks so beat up, it’s incredible,” he says. Berry snapped photographs of the trucks and their odometers with 160,000 miles or more and packaged it all in a PowerPoint pitch. It got the attention of Shumlin, who has backed a $216,000 boost to buy eight new trucks this year and included money for 16 more in 2013.

“We’re just trying to catch up,” Berry says.

Gregory, 44, is one of those targeted for a new vehicle, which he’s happy about – well, except for the chore of cleaning out his old truck, which is crammed with the tools of his trade: two rifles and a shotgun, search and rescue gear, backpacks, extra clothes and boots, food, radios, binoculars, first aid stuff, a rabies test kit and a batch of books on fish and game regulations.

“That’s the biggest drawback of getting a new truck, shifting everything over,” says Gregory.

Gregory discusses his job as he heads to Lake Willoughby for a call about a moose that has fallen through the ice. Stocky and about 5 feet 10 inches, Gregory is wearing his dark green uniform with thick vest, sport sunglasses tight on his face and a black watch cap over his close-cropped hair on this frigid day. At Willoughby, Mounts Pisgah and Hor hang over a lake that appears to be boiling. Steam rises off the wave-tossed open waters in the zero-degree air, creating a sticky fog that has coated the trees with a filigree of fine rime ice. It’s a surreal scene, both chillingly lovely and incredibly desolate.

“Not many folks on the nude beach today,” quips Gregory as he looks onto the lake.

David Gregory traverses the snowy back roads of Vermont in his 2006 Chevy pickup that has 156,000 miles on its odometer. VTD/Andrew Nemethy

Why on earth, he’s asked, would a moose walk onto the partially frozen lake. Gregory’s answer, distilling years of experience with Vermont’s largest creature, is simple: Who knows why a moose does anything?

We head north along Route 5 where Gregory is hailed by a red Ford F150 that leads him to where the moose was spotted. He pulls over by an iced-in cove dotted with summer cottages, grabs his binoculars and surveys a sad scene. Far out in the lake a big dark lump floats, unmoving at the edge of the ice sheet, nature and merciless thermal logic already having taken their toll. There’s nothing Gregory can do.

It’s not the first time this son of nearby Newark has encountered a moose-ice fatality. Sometimes he can shoot the struggling animal and put it out of its misery. On this day, there’s nothing to do but wait until spring. That’s when he’ll go out in a boat and tow a “nasty” hairless carcass ravaged by ravens, crows and coyote, bloated and stinking, to shore.

“It’ll be awful,” he says, “I got a pretty good stomach, stuff I’ve dealt with, but it’ll catch me sometimes.” On the other hand, he says he can joke to curious fishermen: “You want to catch big fish, you’ve got to use big bait.”

Dead moose aside, most of the time David Gregory loves his job. “It’s really all I ever wanted to do,” he says.

His family tree includes relatives, among them his dad, who were game wardens or worked in the fish and wildlife field. He’s an avid hunter and a trapper: A coyote he caught, neatly skinned, lies frozen in the truck bed.

“Coyotes are kind of a hobby of mine,” he says, mentioning their vocalizations and how they can decimate deer yards in winter.

A game warden’s life is dictated by seasonal rhythms and the state’s hunting and fishing rules, and is ever subject to the daily unexpected, which arrives via calls to Gregory’s cell phone or state police dispatch. He’s found himself spraying rambunctious bears with a garden hose to get them out of downtown Lyndonville. (Young male bears are “like teenage boys – lots of energy misdirected.”). A few weeks ago he broke a bone in his wrist when he fell down a bank while checking some suspect trapping lines. A removable cast now encircles his left forearm.

Not surprisingly, he’s accumulated a host of stories and has sharpened his instincts and insights thanks to his years of witnessing so many human and animal misadventures.

“You see the best, and the worst,” he says. That includes fall-down drunk ice fishermen on a shantytown weekend bender to a shivering all-night stakeout in a Ryegate swamp waiting for a hunter to claim his poached deer. He caught the surprised hunter just before dusk.

“I remember what he was lugging for a rifle, but I don’t remember his face,” he says.

After Willoughby, Gregory drives remote back roads to Newark Pond to see if any ice fishermen are out. Only a hardy Nordic skier is in sight. Later a souped-up jeep with Colorado plates, parked roadside, piques his curiosity. A break-in? He tramps into a snow-draped camp with smoke wafting from the chimney and knocks on the door.

A surprised college student in shorts appears. He explains it’s a friend’s vehicle and his dad’s camp, and he arrived to ski at Jay. He thanks Gregory for checking.

Back in the truck a fellow warden calls in about a suspected violator of game laws. Gregory’s ears perk up. Recognizing the name, the two schedule a chat over lunch in Danville. Then it will be back to his mobile “office.”

“This is my fourth truck in 18 years,” he says. “Every one of them has gone 155,000 miles.”

“It just is what it is,” he says.