Readers may remember that earlier this year I fell into CJ Box’s game warden novels starring Joe Pickett with the eagerness of a winter traveler who finds a cabin laden with quilts and fresh chili. I subsequently found Paul Doiron’s game warden novels and enjoyed those, too, but my guilt over ignoring nonfiction led me to pulling away. Now I visit Backcountry Lawman, memoirs of 20+ years of real-life game warden business in northern Florida. I listened to it as an audiobook, which I think added to the experience: Jeremy Arthur had a good voice for conveying the tales of a Florida lawman, and a more than adequate range for depicting different characters. Game Warden Bob H. Lee began his service in 1977, running patrols on the St Johns river, and continued through the eighties and 1990s. Because he spent so long working in a tri-county area, his book isn’t merely episodic: there are recurring characters, the most notorious being Roger Gunter. Gunter was a poacher who eluded Lee and other wardens his entire career, specializing in the fine art of “monkey fishing” — or using an old telephone magneto to irritate catfish so they’d rise to the surface to be netted by cunning fishermen. An interview with him opens the book, and helps inform many stories that follow: one of the most memorable is an epic boat chase that young Lee would figure until either he or Gunter ran out of gas, but which ended more abruptly when Gunter proved more able at navigating around a pound net in the dark. (Lee didn’t run into the traps’ piles, unlike his partner, but he lost so much time trying to get around one obstacle in the river that Gunter had skedaddled and run into problems of his own further upriver.) Most of the book’s content is direct confrontations between Lee and poachers of various sorts, whether on land or on water: in one instance, he hides in a brush pile for hours on end and even gets peed on when some male fisherman decides to use it for target practice, but finally surfaces in a very smelly raincoat to nick a poacher and a bag of fish killed via illegal means. There are other cases like his participation in a long-duration investigation of AMTRAK, though, which was outsourcing sewage-containment to a more primitive method called “dump the stuff over swamps, fishermen and fish be damned”. I enjoyed this enormously, both for the content and its delivery. Lee has evidently written a game warden novel, which I’ll be sure to try out. This was a lot of fun!

Coming up: a return to Doiron, featuring wild hogs and backwoods burials that said hogs unearth.