Dec. 16—The two men were bent over the dead deer, gutting the animal.

“It was powdery snow, so I could walk right up on them without them hearing me,” recalled Josiah Towne, a New Hampshire Fish and Game conservation officer.

As Towne got closer, he could see that the animal was a doe. And as he watched, one of the hunters put the deer’s heart in a plastic bag and dropped it into an inner pocket of his jacket.

Then the man looked up and made eye contact with Towne.

“I was just going to call you,” he stammered. “I made a mistake.”

The men were poachers, caught “literally, as red-handed as you can get,” Towne said.

There’s a good reason female deer are protected in New Hampshire. “One buck can sire a lot of fawns,” Towne said. “One doe can only raise one fawn.”

Poaching is not a victimless crime, Towne said.

“It’s a voiceless crime,” he said. “Because the deer don’t have a voice.”

Towne, 38, is a native son. After graduating from Newfound Regional High School in Bristol, he went to Unity College in Maine, where he earned a degree in conservation law enforcement.

This is his dream job, he said. “I love being in the outdoors, and I wanted to do something in law enforcement,” he said. “I like this because you’re protecting the natural resources.”

He worked for five years on the Seacoast, where Fish and Game partners with the National Marine Fisheries Service to enforce fishing laws and limits. When the opportunity came to cover the district around Newfound Lake, he jumped at it.

Towne currently works out of Fish and Game’s New Hampton office. He jokes that in his career, he’s covered “all the Hamptons” in New Hampshire.

Fish and Game changed its terminology in 1934 to “conservation officer,” but Towne still likes the old term: game warden. It’s a proud tradition in rural New Hampshire: the local warden whom hunters know, and trust enough to call when someone is breaking the rules.

During deer season, Towne dons a traditional red wool jacket and a hat — not a real Stetson, he points out, but a lookalike.

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Shortly after 8 a.m., he climbs into his black Silverado, the back crammed with supplies he might need out on patrol or on a rescue mission. He’ll put nearly 200 miles on the truck this day.

Towne heads out West Shore Road, with its views over Newfound Lake to Bridgewater Mountain, where his wife’s ancestors settled in the 1600s.

As he drives, he scans the woods and roadsides for any sign of drag marks or blood. “You’re always trying to stay one step ahead of the poachers,” he said.

If he sees something, he’ll follow the trail into the woods to start putting together what happened. He can tell where a hunter was standing when they shot a deer, where the animal died, even whether it was a buck or a doe from the rub marks on nearby trees.

“You learn a lot from following it backwards,” he said.

Towne works weekends, with one weekend off a month. These days, he is finishing up investigations from the fall hunting season and getting ready for winter.

When the snow is deep enough, he drives his snowmobile to work and spends the days out on the trails.

“That’s one of the things I love the most about this job: Your job changes with the season,” Towne said.

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Being a game warden is as much a lifestyle as a job.

Hunting culture runs deep in this place, passed down from one generation to the next. Even the daycare center in Plymouth is called Little Antlers.

It goes back to colonial days, Towne said, when the earliest settlers relied on animals and fish to survive. While it’s changing, he said, as recently as the 1950s, “Everybody hunted.”

The local game warden has been an integral part of that culture.

The late Slim Baker is a local legend; after his death, residents created the Slim Baker Area for Outdoor Living in his memory. “Everybody loved him,” Towne said.

Baker’s wife used to wrap his lunch in the daily newspaper, Towne said. “While he ate his lunch, he would read the newspaper,” he said.

Baker died long before Towne was born, but his legend lives on — including the time he captured a man who was kidnapping women from Boston and enslaving them up here.

“I always thought it was folklore,” Towne said, until he came across an old newspaper article that confirmed the story.

Towne often gets recognized these days, thanks to Animal Planet’s popular TV show, “North Woods Law.” One episode featured him visiting his grandmother while out on patrol. But his grandmother, who died in 2021 at age 93, never watched the show, he said, “because it was on the same time as ‘Columbo.'”

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Towne heads into Plymouth on Route 3A, some low-hanging clouds partially obscuring Stinson Mountain. He stops at the Plymouth fire station, a deer registration station, and checks the paperwork, which lists the time, place and details of hunter and animal.

If anything seems off, he’ll call the hunter and ask some questions, but nothing stands out, so he heads back out on the road.

The state just started an online registration system, Towne said. Won’t that make it easier for poachers to get away with it? “That’s what the game wardens think,” he said.

Next stop is Plymouth District Court to drop off a summons for a motor vehicle offense — an unusual case for a game warden. Towne was out on patrol one day when three cars with Massachusetts plates flew by him. He called it in to state police, but no one was in the immediate area. So when a fourth car tried to pass his truck, he hit the blue lights, pulled the driver over and ticketed him for reckless operation.

“I might have yelled at him, too,” he said.

The scenery only gets prettier as Towne drives along Little Squam Lake, his eyes always scanning the woods and roadside for anything amiss.

The view never gets old, he said.

“You think, ‘Wow, I get paid to do this,'” Towne said. “It’s pretty amazing.”

He and his wife live in Bristol, where they’re raising their sons to be outdoorsmen as well.

Last year, all three boys — ages 11, 13 and 14 — got their first deer, Towne said proudly. This year, no one in the family was successful. “It’s feast or famine for us, apparently,” he said.

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Poaching can take a variety of forms. There’s “opportunity poaching” — shooting a deer that wanders into your backyard, for instance. “It’s still a crime.”

Towne also encounters “inadvertent” poachers — like those hunters who shot a deer only to discover it was a doe.

Then there are the others, the “thrill seekers” who poach animals for the adrenaline rush. For them, he said, “It’s all about the kill,” he said.

Towne said he has seen some of those people go on to abuse hard drugs in search of that rush.

Game wardens enforce the wildlife laws equally, Towne said, but he admitted a special satisfaction in finding repeat offenders. “They’re shooting at night, they’re shooting with silencers,” he said. “That can decimate a deer herd.”

He investigated a poaching case last year with his counterparts in Vermont. “They were basically driving all over the place, shooting everything they could see,” he said.

Fish and Game encourages the public to report suspected poaching through its Operation Game Thief program.

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Major David Walsh, assistant chief of law enforcement, said Fish and Game currently has only 42 conservation officers statewide. So the department depends on the public, including hunters, anglers and interested citizens, to be its “eyes and ears” in the field, he said.

“There’s all kinds of technology, but really the success is based on the cooperation of the public,” Walsh said.

Fish and Game gets an average of 360 reports to Operation Game Thief annually, Walsh said. He, too, said that poaching is not a victimless crime — “because it’s a natural resource for all of us, not just those that hunt or fish,” Walsh said. “It’s really stealing from all of us.”

Shooting an animal from a vehicle can pose a danger to the public, Walsh said. But it also violates the “fair chase” ethics underlying the laws Fish and Game enforces.

“Rolling down the window isn’t really considered fair chase. It’s not competitive,” Walsh said. “You’re not out there on an equal footing.”

“Hunting is based on ethics,” he said, “versus poaching, which is based on greed and ego.”

That’s why hunters are as likely as anyone to turn in poachers, CO Towne said. “If someone else is doing something illegal, it makes you mad because you could have gotten that deer legally,” he said.

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Towne always gives suspected poachers the chance to come clean.

“This is what I know happened,” he tells them. “I want to give you the opportunity, if your story changes right now, I won’t hold it against you that you lied to me.”

“For most people, if you have something on them, they’ll be like: ‘You got me,'” he said.

He and another warden once found a dead doe, with “corn spilling out of its mouth.” Searching the area, they found a game camera that linked to a cell phone, a pile of corn, a tree stand — and tracks leading to a house.

It’s legal to use a camera, but you can’t shoot the animal the same day you spot it, Towne said. “It’s not fair,” he said. “You know he’s coming.”

As the game wardens followed the footprints to the house, the hunter’s wife was looking out the window. Two men were coming out of the woods, she called to her husband. “Wearing red jackets?” he asked. They were, she replied.

“That’s when he told her, ‘I’m in trouble,'” Towne said. The man came clean and paid the fine.

“They usually don’t come that easy,” he said. Sometimes, “They just dig their heels in.”

Like the time he found a crashed truck with a dead deer in the bed and uncovered evidence that the animal had been shot illegally, using bait. If the young man who shot the animal had admitted it, it would have been a fine of a couple hundred dollars. But he refused to budge, Towne said.

“By the time it was all done,” he said, “it cost him 1,800 bucks.”

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Towne gets a voicemail from a man who lives in Franklin.

The caller reports that some of the neighbors like to “put out nuts and berries” for the deer that frequent his dead-end street. The night before, he says, he saw a doe and fawn foraging there — and then saw someone “creeping up towards them.”

They’ve heard gunshots in the area as well, the caller says. And they’ve been seeing a lot fewer deer lately.

Towne gives him a call.

He’s worried, the man tells him. It’s an elderly community and “it’s kind of scary when you see people out in the woods like that,” he says.

The man tells Towne he might go out and do some looking around. Towne says he plans to stop by himself in a bit. “You see someone in a red jacket and cowboy hat, that’ll be me,” he tells him.

That might be better, the man says, sounding relieved.

It’s outside of Towne’s territory, but the Franklin-area CO is off, so Towne heads there to check out the report. He scans the ground, looking for footprints, drag marks or blood that would reveal a crime.

Snow cover helps investigators. “It tells the tale,” Towne said. “Snow holds no secrets and tells no lies.”

He finds a few hoofprints, but there’s no evidence of wrongdoing. On his way out, he pulls over to chat with Joe Garneau, who owns the local building materials store.

They’ve known each other for years and share a love of restoring antique cars. It’s something Towne grew up doing with his own father and now shares with his own sons.

Towne and Garneau talk about the gunshots folks have been hearing at night, and the homeless encampment at the river. “It’s sad that people in the United States have to live outside in the winter,” Garneau tells the warden.

In a poaching case, Fish and Game confiscates the animal. Towne sometimes makes it part of the restitution for the accused to pay for butchering the deer and freezing the meat.

If the person is found not guilty, the meat is his. If he’s found guilty, Towne gives it to local food pantries and soup kitchens.

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It’s noontime and Towne stops in for some lunch and local gossip at the Danbury Country Store. It’s a local gem — the kind of place that sells candy in glass jars, locally made jams, warm hats and gloves and gift items such as a man’s apron that reads “Trophy Husband.”

Towne gets a warm greeting from the store’s employees and patrons. In that special way of a New Hampshire small town, everyone seems to know everyone else.

“I was nice to Josiah once,” a guy in a plaid shirt offers.

“I don’t remember it,” Towne deadpans.

Towne grabs some pizza from a glass case and sits down at one of the wooden tables to eat. He is soon joined by the Phelps brothers, Stanley and Dennis, and they talk about the deer season just ended and the lack of acorns this year.

Lunch over, Towne gets a Facebook message and heads to Bristol’s Tapply-Thompson Community Center. Inside, volunteers are busy as elves, getting ready for the annual Christmas shoppe they set up for children from eight surrounding communities.

At the very top of an upstairs wall, like a forgotten Halloween decoration, is a big brown bat, fast asleep.

Towne thinks about driving home to grab his large net, but Pete Bourbeau, who runs Wildlife X Team in Bristol, is on his way. Soon enough, Bourbeau arrives with a net and quickly snags the animal and with Towne’s help, drops it into a bucket and puts the cover on.

Bats should be hibernating this time of year, Bourbeau says, so he’s not optimistic about the animal’s chances of survival. “It’s too cold for him,” he says. “I’ll take him outside and let him go, and hope and pray for the best.”

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It’s 1 p.m., and Towne still has a lot to do. He’ll visit the deer registration station in Bristol, drop off some summonses for snowmobile violations at court, and get back to New Hampton to start getting the Fish and Game snowmobiles ready for the season. He also needs to meet up with another conservation officer to send off evidence for DNA testing.

Towne got into this field to protect New Hampshire’s natural resources. But he also takes his responsibility to protect his communities to heart.

After school shootings in other states, Towne recently took it upon himself to visit all the schools in his 10 communities and get key fobs for all the buildings. “So in case of an emergency, I’m not standing there trying to get in,” he said.

He shakes his head when he thinks about what happened last year in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 little kids and two teachers were slaughtered as armed law enforcement officers waited in a school hallway.

That was a tragic lack of training, he said.

Once a year, Fish and Game conservation officers engage in “simunition” training, using real guns and wax bullets to respond to an active shooter scenario.

“You head toward the threat,” he said. “Ignore all victims. Once you hear that shooting, you get there and you stop that threat.”

Towne, who wears a Glock 9 mm pistol on his right hip, said he wouldn’t hesitate to act.

These are his communities, his people, his kids.

And in this rural place, he knows, “A lot of times, I would be the first officer there.”

swickham@unionleader.com