A Good Man with a Dog

Book excerpt: A Maine Literary Awards Finalist, A Good Man with a Dog follows a game warden’s adventures from the woods of Maine to the swamps of New Orleans. Follow along as he and his canine companions investigate murder, search for missing persons, and rescue survivors from natural disasters. This is a memoir that reads like a true crime novel. Roger Guay takes readers into the patient, watchful world of a warden catching poachers and protecting pristine wilderness, and the sometimes CSI-like reconstruction of deer- and moose-poaching scenes. When Guay’s father died in a tragic fishing accident, a kind game warden helped him through the loss. Inspired by this experience, as well as his love of the outdoors, he became a game warden. Guay searches for lost hunters and hikers. He estimates that over the years, he has pulled more than two hundred bodies out of Maine’s north woods! His frequent companion is a little brown Labrador retriever named Reba, who can find discarded weapons, ejected shells, hidden fish, and missing people. A Good Man with a Dog explores Guay’s life as he and his canine partners are exposed to terrible events, from tracking down hostile poachers to searching for victims of violent crimes, including a year-long search for the hidden graves of two babies buried by a Massachusetts cult. He witnessed firsthand FEMA’s mismanagement of the post-Katrina cleanup efforts in New Orleans, an experience that left him scarred and disheartened. But he found hope with the support of family and friends, and eventually returned to the woods he knew and loved from the days of his youth.