Diplomatic border warden keeps watch in northern wilds > Career spans 36 years of stalking lawbreakers

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ESTCOURT STATION — Warden Philip Dumond holds up a broken boat paddle, showing where chunks of wood were gouged out when a poaching, drugged fisherman he was arresting “went crazy” and attacked him.

Dumond also has been shot at, assaulted by a man with a hunting knife, and verbally threatened “two, three, four dozen times” while enforcing state fish and game laws alone over 700 square miles of Maine wilderness.

But for Dumond, who turned 62 on Monday and plans to retire next year, the risks and perils over 36 years in the forbidding region have been far outweighed by the allure of the hunt — for lawbreakers.

That attraction has kept Dumond on the job for 20 years after he could have retired.

“I like the idea of going out there — it’s just like going on a hunt to see if I can catch somebody,” said Dumond, who admits he lies awake some nights plotting how he can catch poachers.

Isolated in the northern corner of Maine where there’s no police backup, communications are poor, and the winters are long and brutal, Dumond has learned to rely on tact, tenacity and trickery to get his man.

“He’s a knowledgeable woodsman, an excellent tracker and a hell of a student of human nature,” said William Vail, a former state fish and game commissioner who says Dumond was “a legend” among wardens a generation ago.

Dumond’s headquarters is his modest, neat-as-a-pin home, feet from the Canadian border in a hamlet of fewer than 10 people at Maine’s northernmost point.

The international boundary dominates Estcourt Station and Pohenegamook, Quebec, a sawmill town of about 1,200 on the other side. It is visible as a clearing in the forest, a painted white line on the street. It even bisects some homes.

The Canadian side of the frontier is dotted with small farms and is more developed than the Maine side. It has been hunted so heavily that much of the game has disappeared.

The Maine side is largely the domain of loggers and a bountiful moose herd, a veritable game preserve that has long been a powerful attraction for poachers.

Canadians know they need only to dash back across the border to avoid arrest. That sets the scene for a cat-and-mouse game in which Dumond has become a masterful player.

“It’s so easy for them to pull the wool over our eyes,” said Dumond. “You have to be awfully quick to get them” before they slip to the Canadian side.

Some Canadians set up salt licks to lure game to their side of the border, challenging Dumond to find them so he can douse them with kerosene to destroy them.

Others use horns to call moose from towers they build along the Canadian side of the St. Francis River, which forms part of the border.

Dumond said he has even discovered a wire-and-pulley “trolley” spanning the river to provide quick getaways for poachers. Others call his home to see whether Dumond’s around — so they know whether it’s safe to go out and poach.

“I’ve played tricks on them” too, said Dumond. He had a friend wear his warden’s hat to act as a decoy while Dumond went out on a trail bike and made an arrest for a fishing violation.

Dumond has passed himself off as a hunter to pull information from others in the woods. He spoke in French, the dominant language in the region, but his English accent almost gave him away.

He has stamped fake moose prints into the earth and used silhouettes of deer to trap poachers.

While staking out an area where he had set up a partridge decoy, Dumond heard the zing of shotgun pellets just over his head. Among the hunters he nabbed was a priest.

“I was glad I didn’t have to go to confession,” Dumond said with a laugh.

The smell of freshly killed moose drew Dumond to hunters who had dragged most of the animal’s remains to the Canadian side of the border.

He couldn’t make an arrest, even though shells and parts of the animal were found on the U.S. side. But Dumond told the poachers that they might encounter legal problems when they tried to cross the border to return to work in the Maine woods, and persuaded them to submit to arrest.

Some cases keep Dumond in the woods for days at a time, and he has gotten into brawls with violators unwilling to submit to arrest.

On one occasion, a young man who was caught night hunting fired his rifle inches from Dumond’s nose. With his gun cocked, Dumond persuaded the man to give up, promising to arrest him only for night hunting if he gave up. The man took Dumond’s offer and the standoff ended peacefully.

“On the boundary here, if I treat these people too bad, I might get shot,” said Dumond, who seldom has reached for his gun even when attacked.

As he moved in to arrest a trout poacher in the middle of a lake, the suspect flailed away at Dumond and his boat with his paddle and threatened to drown the warden.

“He went crazy,” Dumond said.

Even though his arm was numbed by repeated whacks, Dumond held fast onto the man’s boat until the paddle finally broke. The suspect managed to break free and vanished in the woods, but Dumond tracked him down and arrested him the next day.

When Dumond broke into the warden service in 1957, he was sent to the much more genteel surroundings of Bar Harbor, where he was more likely to run into millionaire vacationers than backwoods desperados.

One shabbily dressed man he caught fishing without a license failed to deliver on his promise to produce one. When Dumond tracked the suspect to his home, he was amazed to find Cadillacs out front and butlers inside.

The errant angler turned out to be restaurant magnate Howard Johnson, who promptly ordered Dumond off the property.