Longtime game warden reflects on career in Lincoln County

After longtime game warden Tamie Laverdure-Fitchett reinjured her back a few years ago, a doctor advised her to consider a change in career or, at the very least, get out of the field.

So she got a second opinion. And a third.

“I’m like one of those people where I should have been born 100 years ago,” said Laverdure-Fitchett. “I like leather ticket books and integrity. I’m not really a computer technology warden. I like being in the field; I like talking with the sportsmen and I like enforcing the rules and regulations the old school way.”

Finally, a surgeon laid out her options. Take a step back or undergo a surgery that the doctor preferred to hold off on until she got older.

For the second time in her life, Laverdure-Fitchett switched careers.

The first occurred more than a decade ago. In 2009, Laverdure-Fitchett was a heavy equipment operator working in an open pit goldmine. A wall failure one night nearly killed her.

A high school dropout, Laverdure-Fitchett went back to school at 38. She attended the University of Montana Western in Dillon and graduated with honors in three-and-a-half years. In 2012, she began her dream job: serving as a game warden for Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

An earlier incident had served as the catalyst for her new career. Laverdure-Fitchett considers herself and avid hunter and angler. She recalled returning to a favorite spot near Basin and found it ransacked by poachers.

They had shot trees, tossed trash on the ground and killed a coyote she remembered seeing during previous trips. They also killed a cow and cut out the ivory. A calf lay dead nearby.

“It hit me so hard,” Laverdure-Fitchett said. “I thought, you know I’ve harvested enough elk in my time, my short time of hunting, that I decided I wanted to start hunting the two-legged, the people that were so blatantly poaching animals, that didn’t have a care for them.”

She remembered her first big game season. As a warden with thousands of square miles to patrol, she had her pick of where to start. Laverdure-Fitchett decided upon going up Dunn Creek.

“Before the sun was even up, I followed a set of taillights, which I assumed was a hunter and as I eased along behind them the vehicle stopped,” she said. “The window rolled down, a rifle came out of the driver’s side window and I heard the shot and then the guy jumped out.

“Turned out, he jumped before legal shooting hours from a roadway, from a motor vehicle, and if I remember right he didn’t have a tag,” she said.

“It never happens that easy,” said Sgt. Jon Obst, her supervisor, with a laugh as he recalled the incident.

“I made him go down over the hill, drag it back up, donate to food bank and I gave him a citation,” Laverdure-Fitchett said.

Not that she enjoyed giving out citations. She decided long ago that her job was to keep things fair. A poacher, in her mind, stole an opportunity or an animal from a law-abiding hunter.

In hunter education classes, she would tell students that mistakes happen. If they made a mistake in the field, they should call her and talk.

“If you’re honest and you own the mistake, it’ll be fine,” she said. “Don’t try to hide it. It’s a small community and everybody knows everybody.”

Most people, she said, have respected her for taking that position.

And there was always what she called “rat out your buddy” season. It typically began about two weeks after general hunting season ended.

“If the season ended and they didn’t get an animal, they would call and rat their buddy out,” she said with a chuckle.

But her favorite part of the job was meeting with sportsmen out in the field. She loved chatting with hunters in the morning or asking anglers about their tackle.

“I love wearing the Wrangler jeans and leather ticket books and meeting with the sportsmen in the field and having a cup of coffee and talking with them about their concerns and what they’re seeing,” Laverdure-Fitchett said. “I enjoyed visiting with the fishermen, talking about what kind of lures and what kind of bait they were using and what they were seeing in the waters.”

It was a job that changed constantly, day-by-day and with the seasons. It’s often assumed that general hunting season is the busiest time of the year, but there’s also trapping season and mountain lion season, she said. In the summer, the emphasis is on water safety and making sure boats are registered and anglers have the proper licenses.

The most quiet it ever gets is during the spring breakup.

“But that’s never quiet, either,” Laverdure-Fitchett said. “In the ‘tween season, you get the folks that take their pickups and they decide to go rip it up and tear it up and go mud bogging in places they shouldn’t be or they get down in Libby Creek itself and decide to go tearing up. They get into mischief because they’ve been pent up all winter.”

Laverdure-Fitchett, who finished her last day on the job Feb. 26, wanted to make a point of thanking the sportsmen and the community for their help and camaraderie over the years. More than once she has gone through a drivethru to grab a cup of coffee and found it already paid for. After one particularly hard day, she found a thank you note tucked beneath the wiper blade.

“They treated me very, very good in this community and I am thankful for that, thankful they accepted me in this community,” she said.

Obst, who patrolled the district earlier in his career, described Laverdure-Fitchett’s departure as a loss to FWP and the community alike.

“She’ll be missed — definitely. [She was] the only warden I had that started here and ended here,” Obst said. “Libby is a really cool community. This area — Libby, Troy, the Yaak — just Lincoln County … it’s a really neat place.”

While her days of patrolling the backcountry with leather ticket book might be behind her, Laverdure-Fitchett isn’t leaving the field entirely. She plans on opening a guide school in Heron, teaching folks how to get in and out of the backcountry safely as well as a variety of other useful skills.

But that promising new adventure did not make leaving the job any easier.

“I spoke to my sergeant last night [Feb. 25] and he signed off on his message, ‘Good night, warden,’ and it broke my heart,” she said.

“It broke my heart,” she said again after a momentary pause. “I loved very much what I did.”