Backtrack

Mike Bowditch #12
Backtrack (2019)

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Backtrack is a Mike Bowditch short story rather than a full-length novel, and like several of Paul Doiron’s shorter series pieces, it shifts the spotlight away from Mike and toward his mentor, Charley Stevens. The premise follows a young Charley heading into a snowstorm to search for a visiting hunter who has gone missing in the Maine woods. What begins as a rescue soon turns more complicated when Charley starts to suspect that the man may not actually want to be found.

That setup gives the story a strong wilderness-suspense pull without needing the broader scale of a full Mike Bowditch case. The snow, isolation, and uncertainty about the missing hunter’s motives create tension quickly, while Charley’s presence adds an older, rougher woodsman sensibility that longtime series readers will recognize as an important part of Mike’s world. Rather than building around a large procedural investigation, the story leans into survival, instinct, and the uneasy possibility that disappearance can be a choice as much as a danger.

As a series interlude, Backtrack works best as a compact character piece that deepens the mythology around Charley Stevens and the harsher traditions of the Maine backcountry. It is less about advancing Mike Bowditch’s main arc than about enriching the world he comes from, which makes it a natural fit among the short works connected to the series. Paul Doiron has also noted that readers sometimes mistake stories like Backtrack for full novels, but it is one of his shorter Mike Bowditch works.