Wednesday, October 19, 2005

It seems that what happens up north, only happens up north

By Neal Rubin / The Detroit News

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The two guys are from Maple City, a 58-year-old and his 51-year-old cousin. They're tracking a deer through someone else's woods. In the distance, over a hill or two, they hear a rumble.

If that's not exactly where the story starts, it's where things start to get deep.

To find the actual beginning, says conservation officer Michael Borkovich, you'd have to go back a few hundred years, to when the peculiar culture of the northern Lower Peninsula began to take shape. That's peculiar as in unique, but Borkovich concedes that if you haven't spent time up his way, it might also strike you as odd.

Borkovich, 50, covers Leelanau County for the Department of Natural Resources. He's spent 25 years enforcing the law, most of it north of Traverse City, and he's found that "up here, people have a way of handling problems on their own."

Sometimes that's good, sometimes not. "There's a fine line between vigilantism and taking care of things," he says. The incident this month was one of the good ones, and it's amazing what a fellow can use to draw a fine line with.

Maple City sits about 13 miles northwest of Traverse City, and just outside Maple City sits Zeke Kalena's log farm. While Kalena is enough of an urbanite to allow an answering machine, he's enough of a no-nonsense northerner that his greeting takes all of two seconds."Zeke here," it says. "Not home."

Kalena cuts down enough maples to help pay the bills and leaves enough that he still has acres of rolling woods. Like many people in that part of the state, he also does a few other things to get by, such as run an excavating company.

His land naturally attracts deer, and anything that attracts deer will also attract deer hunters. According to Borkovich, Kalena has had a number of run-ins with trespassers, including the pair from Maple City.

Meanwhile, back at the farm

It's bow-hunting season, and one night, either the man or the cousin hit a good-sized buck. The buck didn't stick around to see what would happen next, so the following day, the hunters began to follow its trail.

The path led them onto Kalena's land, and while he and the hunters have had their disagreements, no one wants a deer to roam around wounded. "Had they asked," Borkovich says, "I'm sure he would have allowed them to go across."

Instead, they just drove a gold-colored 2002 Ford pickup onto the log farm, hopped out and resumed their search.

A few minutes later, Kalena came across the truck. A few minutes after that, he called the county sheriff.

As a fully trained police officer, Borkovich has made traffic stops, drug arrests and everything in-between. When there's a hunting or conservation problem, though, he's the authority. So he's the one who drove out, picked up Kalena and bounced along a dirt path to where the hunters were now standing with their arms folded.

The Ford was where they left it, but surrounding it was a gaping rectangle, a six-foot-deep, six-foot wide trench. "It was one of those things you had to see to believe," Borkovich says -- a truck, stranded on an island in the middle of the woods.

Law of the land

Fed up with uninvited guests, Kalena had fired up his excavator, a massive piece of equipment that makes a backhoe look like a sandbox toy. "I bet it didn't take him 5 minutes," Borkovich says. "He came as close to that truck as you could without scratching the paint."

"I guess we weren't supposed to be here," said the truck's owner, the older cousin.

"No kidding, Sherlock," Borkovich said.

Kalena asked Borkovich to ticket both men for trespassing. Borkovich offered a compromise: If Kalena would fill in enough of the trench to let the truck drive out, he would ticket the driver and warn the passenger. Kalena nodded and climbed back into the excavator.

Ultimately, Kalena went back to his maples and Borkovich spent two unsuccessful hours searching for the buck, who had apparently only been nicked. The hunters drove away, and Borkovich had another entry for that 10-book series he figures he should write about his career some day.

"The easiest case I ever made," he says -- and the one that most says, "up north."

You can reach Neal Rubin at (313) 222-1874, nrubin@detnews.com or 615 W. Lafayette Blvd., Detroit, MI 48226.