Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  "Strap in," he said as he revved up the engine and let go of the brakes to launch the Beaver down the runway and up toward the sky. Rain sprayed the cockpit and streaked along both sides as the buzz saw of the single prop assailed her ears, the Beaver skidding and bumping up through the turbulent air. As Sea Island disappeared below and the muddy Fraser River snaked from the inland valley ahead, Bush banked north and the smothering gray clouds swallowed them up.

  The plane leveled out, and the buzz saw softened to a drone.

  "You see that film?"

  "What film?"

  "Death Hunt," replied Dodd.

  "Doubt it," Spann said. "Who'd it star?"

  "Bronson and Marvin."

  "You must be reading my mind."

  "Yeah? Why?"

  "Marvin. I was just thinking of him."

  "He played the Mountie. Bronson the Mad Trapper. I was pissed no one big played Wop May."

  To Spann, Hollywood didn't know jackshit about the Force. If it wasn't Rose Marie cradled in the Mountie's arms while he crooned "Indian Love Call" to her, it was the sickly sweet pap of li'l Shirley Temple in Susannah of the Mounties, or Texas Ranger Gary Cooper reining in to teach the Northwest Mounted Police how to ride their range, or Jack Nicholson stealing a detachment's horses while its Members sang in church in Missouri Breaks, or Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness and flatfooted Sean Connery giving a "Captain" of the Force—with a zillion-dollar budget, DePalma couldn't afford a phone call to be told there was no such rank?—a lesson in how to police. To Hollywood, dress an American in Red Serge and he became a Mountie, a game of the emperor's new clothes as bogus as English Shakespeareans thinking a Midatlantic accent passed them off as Yanks.

  "I was born fifty years too late," said Dodd. "The Mad Trapper. The Lost Patrol. The Last Frontier. That's what I call action."

  "Yeah," Spann agreed.

  The Mad Trapper of Rat River was the stuff of legend. A short, wiry drifter about forty years old, Albert Johnson had rafted down the Peel River to Fort McPherson in the north in 1931. He purchased an arsenal of guns from the Hudson's Bay Company, then built himself a hermit's cabin near the Rat River. When local Indians complained of tampering with their traplines, Inspector Eames sent two constables mushing sixty-five miles by dog sled to search the cabin. Johnson refused to answer pounding on his door, so Constable King raised an ax to chop it in, and that's when a bullet ripped through the wood to hit the cop just below the heart. Constable McDowell blazed back with his revolver, then carried the wounded man to his sled and strapped him down.

  Spann heard the crack of the whip in her mind, and felt the jerk as the exhausted dogs were urged to pull; then she was off with King on that grueling, heroic race of twenty hours across the Arctic hi bitterly cold, -42 degrees Celsius weather, to reach Aklavik's hospital in the nick of time.

  Using the Voice of the Northern Lights to summon a posse, Eames trapped the trapper in his fort on January 10, 1932. Snow fell and wind tossed the spruce trees as Mounties circled the squat cabin with gun slits through its logs. A fifteen-hour firefight erupted during which the Force dynamited the blockhouse twice, but after the smoke cleared, Johnson was gone.

  The fugitive slyly outfoxed his pursuers for weeks by tramping up creek beds so no snow would leave tracks, or by trudging in ever widening circles until he seemed to vanish, wearing his snowshoes backward to baffle the hunters. On January 30, smoke was noticed twisting up from a deep ravine, investigation of which led the cops to Johnson behind a fallen tree barricade. Twilight was upon them as the Mounties plowed through deep snow into the gorge, where a marksman's shot from Johnson dropped Constable Millen dead. By dawn next morning, the killer had escaped.

  The manhunt in the Arctic caught the public's imagination. The Canadian press tagged Johnson as the "Mad Trapper," and millions more followed the chase over the new medium of radio. American newspapers had corned the motto and printed: Will the Mounties get their man this time? Inspector Eames was livid. Johnson had twice outwitted the Force, and by now could be anywhere along the Arctic Circle. By traveling solo and living off the land, the quarry, not the hunters, had logistics on his side.

  That's when the call went out for Wop May.

  Lieutenant Wilfred "Wop" May had earned his reputation flying Sopwith Camels in World War I, where he and Roy Brown, another Canuck, shot down and killed "Red Baron" Manfred von Richthofen. (You thought it was Snoopy?) He returned a hero to Edmonton in 1919 and began the first commercial bush operation in Canada, doing wing walking over rodeos for promotion. Eames asked May to track Johnson from the air, so on February 3, 1932, he pulled the starter of his Bellanca Pacemaker to whirl the propeller into a blur, easing the throttle ahead until the skis began to slide along the snowy runway, and he took off to bank north through a blizzard to rendezvous with the Mounted Police at the junction of the Rat and Peel rivers.

  In her imagination, Spann sat in the seat beside Wop May. The plane flew low to crisscross the white waste as she tried to spot Johnson's tracks with field glasses. Then she saw them, almost eroded by snowdrifts, heading west toward the mountains dividing the Yukon from Alaska. It took weeks to follow the trail, as Johnson used caribou tracks to hide his own, but finally May spotted the Mad Trapper on the frozen Eagle River.

  Police dogs barking, the Mounties closed in. Then-quarry shed his snowshoes and made for the bank, trying to claw his way up the steep slope. When Staff Sergeant Hersey of the Signals Corps neared, Johnson shot him in the lungs and one knee. The police fanned out along the riverbanks, and opened fire as Johnson struggled across the open ice. Burrowing into the snow with his pack for a rifle rest, he answered the Mounties' demands he give up by blazing back. Bullets ripped into his shoulders, hip, and legs; then he was killed by a shot which shattered his spine.

  May landed the bush plane in a billow of snow and waded hip-deep to the body. The emaciated, twisted face was frozen in a grimace. The gaping mouth in a matted beard seemed to laugh at the police. A tin can tied about his neck held $2,410 in U.S. and Canadian bills, along with several gold teeth. Who Johnson was and where he hailed from remains a mystery, and the Mad Trapper secured the myth of the Mounted Police.

  Yes, thought Spann with a mental sigh. Those were the days.

  She glanced at Dodd and knew he yearned for such a hunt, too.

  It occurred to Kathy she might have been too hard on Hollywood, for had she not cast Lee Marvin as Dodd, and nothing was more Canadian than fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants bush pilots.

  The plane droned on.

  The hunt for the Mad Trapper demonstrated the need for police air support, so that same year the RCMP used RCAF planes to arrest rumrunners smuggling booze to the States parched by Prohibition. Flying 3,600,000 miles a year, Air Services now owned twenty-eight aircraft coast to coast, but those in E Division were all requisitioned to fly emergency response teams from B.C. detachments north to reinforce the Mad Dog at Totem Lake. Bush Dodd's Beaver was chartered as backup because he knew the area better than anyone, so that's why Spann was now in the cockpit with him.

  The white waste under the plane today was a sea of clouds, with mountain peaks jutting here and there like the tips of icebergs. Hidden below the surface were the Pacific and Kitimat ranges of the Coast Mountains, which hugged the ocean from Vancouver to Prince Rupert. Above Squamish and Anahim Lake and the Nechako, the flight to Kispiox took four hours plus before they broke through the clouds over Totem Lake.

  "The frying pan beneath your seat. Pass it to me," said Dodd.

  The pilot turned it upside down, then wedged it in under his ass.

  "What's, that for?" asked Spann.

  "Billy Bishop's trick." Bishop had been Canada's flying ace in World War I, with seventy-two shoot-downs to his credit. "We're coming in over the camp, and I don't want my balls shot off."

  "What about me?"

  "You got balls?" said Dodd.

  Of all Canadian-built bush planes the De Havilland Beaver was the best. This all-meta
l, high-wing monoplane powered by a 450-h.p. Pratt & Whitney Wasp Jr. engine was used in sixty countries around the world. Its excellent short-field takeoff and landing got you into and out of the wildest, most dangerous spots on Earth. The Beaver descended sharply into the valley around the lake, Dodd zipping over the treetops to skim the snowy ice, intent on catching shadows cast by any snowdrifts, for hit one of them while landing and the plane could flip. Then up they zoomed over the tents on the northern shore, Spann gazing down on the tepee and snowed-in sundance circle below as the Beaver banked in a tight arc and flew over them again. Bffum . . . bffum . . . bffum . . . went both skis with retracted wheels, Dodd skipping the struts over the icy lake like stones to see if the skids behind turned dark from seeping water.

  Like Wop May on the Eagle River, the Beaver skated to a halt near the lake's southern shore in a billow of powder crystals.

  "The snowmobile in back. Help me unload it," said Dodd.

  The spew from the landing settled, but the snowfall went on, the rain storm washing Vancouver freezing up here in the north, gaps between the fluffy flakes filled with eerie silence. A silence soon deafened by the noise pollution of an approaching motor.

  The last dog patrol had been made in 1969 from Old Crow in the Yukon to Fort McPherson—where Johnson rafted—in the Northwest Territories. In the same way that cars replaced horse patrols in 1916, from 1955 on snowmobile patrols replaced dog sleds.

  The Mountie coming toward the plane was Staff Sergeant Bob George, whose Indian name was Ghost Keeper. A full-blooded Plains Cree from Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, he was a native medicine man strengthened by his spirit quest as a boy when he was sent alone into the wilds to learn who he was. Though not descended from one of the West Coast tribes, he was veteran of many a sweat lodge held with troubled Indian kids sent to him by elders of the totem people to rediscover magic known before white colonization. Behind such conquest had come Residential Schools, run by churches for cultural genocide, and now the Force was closing in on nearly a hundred pedophiles who'd preyed on children seized from native families in the name of God.

  George was on that task force.

  Like Spann, he was bundled up in the Mounties' winter dress. A hefty man with black hair, bronze skin, and wide cheekbones, he wore a beaver-skin cap with ear flaps tied above, a navy fur-lined parka with a yellow bottom stripe, and whipcord trousers stuffed into sealskin mukluk boots. His gloves were thick and awkward, so in climbing off the snowmobile he merely banged palms with Spann and Dodd.

  "Kathy."

  "Sir."

  "Bush."

  "Bob."

  Greetings completed.

  He helped them lower the snowmobile from the plane and unload the other supplies in the hold. "Got a block of ice for you to fly back. Mad Dog used a blowtorch to cut the corpse from the freeze."

  "How'd you get close?" Spann asked.

  "Trust," said George. "We're in touch with them by radio phone. Two factions control the rebel camp. Their spiritual leader is Moses John. He had the vision which led to this, and erected the tepee and Sundance circle for spirit quests. The whole area is sacred to Gitxsan, But Totem Lake also has Picture Rock. The rock's carved with symbols from before whites arrived and an image of the first British ship."

  "Is Moses John Gitxsan?"

  "No," said George. "He—like me—is Plains Cree. That's why there's trust. My hunting the predators from the Residential Schools and taking down Gunter Schreck in the Africa case helps."

  "What's the sundance doing out here?" asked Spann. "Didn't it originate on the Western Plains to celebrate the return of bison herds?"

  "Since 1973 the sundance has spread through other native cultures. Here on the West Coast it celebrates the return of salmon and self-sacrifice."

  "Nothing remains pure, eh?" said Spann. "The Force was a white male organization—until you and I crashed its ranks."

  "You said two groups," Dodd cut in.

  "The other faction in the camp is a doomsday cult. Ruby Ridge. Waco. Same mentality. Their leader took the name Grizzly. He's American. The rumor is he shot a FBI agent at the second Battle of Wounded Knee in 1973. The cult links the sundance to survivalists. They think the world is headed for an apocalypse in the year 2000. The ones to survive will be those who embrace the Great Law and live off sacred land. Everyone else is owned by the New World Order: an octopus conspiracy of big business, government, and the police out to create a workforce of slaves and defang all opposition. Those who don't stand up for their rights will go to the slaughter as in Nazi Germany."

  "Volatile stuff," said Spann.

  "I think Moses John has outlived his usefulness to Grizzly. I suspect the doomsday cult wants to be rid of him. Does the sundance embrace the spirit of nature or cataclysmic doom?"

  "What'd you say to John?"

  "No one's been killed in the standoff so far. They have my word we'll be fair if they come out peacefully, and give up whoever shot the headless man frozen in the ice. He said he didn't know what I was talking about. I said it would show good faith if they let us remove the body, and he spoke to you."

  "Let's go," said Spann.

  George turned to Dodd. "The body's waiting at Zulu base. Follow the road two klicks west from the lake. In the woods. On the left. You'll see it."

  The snowmobiles parted at right angles, going west and north, Spann seated motorcycle-style behind George. They followed the plane skids back across the lake, the snow drifting around them from gusts of cross wind, and tumbling thicker and thicker as they advanced. The roar of the engine was a blasphemy to Nature, personified in every aspect of the Great Lone Land. Then suddenly over Ghost Keeper's shoulder she saw the ghosts, two snowmen on the northern shore. As the snowmobile came to a halt twenty feet from land, they shook the flakes from their clothes to reveal themselves.

  Two native men.

  One with a gun.

  The gunman was dressed in combat fatigues. Over top was a sweatshirt emblazoned with a portrait of Almighty Voice, the Plains Cree blown to death by cannons during a showdown with the Mounted in 1897. His lower face was masked by a kerchief in Haida patterns worn like a Wild West outlaw under a blue beret. His rifle was a surplus Lee Enfield No. 1, World War II vintage with a ten-shot magazine of .303 British cartridges. Spann pegged Voice as one of Grizzly's men.

  Spiritual leader Moses John bared his pride to the sky, long black hair in two braids woven with beads and feathers. Over an antique breastplate of wampum shells, his great-grandfather's winter robe draped to the snow. Wary eyes watched as George turned the snowmobile about so it faced south, and left the motor idling with Spann in the saddle for a quick getaway. In one mitt the holy man gripped an eagle feather.

  Trudging through the drift, George met John at the lakeshore.

  What they said to each other, Spann couldn't hear, but eventually John motioned Voice to store the En-field hi the branches of a tree, then move to a position some distance away. George returned to the snowmobile to ask for Spann's Smith, which she withdrew from the holster under her parka.

  "Go to him," said Ghost Keeper, placing the pistol on the snowmobile's seat. "He'll answer questions about the body at the falls."

  Breath billowing like smoke signals, Spann tramped across the buried ice to the lakeshore. Up close, Moses John's stare was evangelical.

  "Who killed the man in the ice?" she asked.

  "Not us," said John.

  "Did you know the body was there?"

  "No," he replied.

  "The man was shot with an arrow. Any suspicions by whom?"

  "I may have spied his killer hunting in the woods. On the bluff above the falls in the twilight before the freeze."

  "Who?" pressed the Mountie.

  As the Indian stepped forward to meet her eye to eye, a blast of wind cleared the snowfall from sightlines to the sundance forest. The answer the sergeant thought she heard uttered was "The white man ..." But no sooner had the phrase escaped from the native's mouth than one
side of his head exploded in a shower of blood and bone and brain.

  Voice ran for the rifle.

  Spann for the snowmobile.

  The wind opened and closed the snow in a series of curtain calls.

  Grabbing her pistol, Spann swung backward onto the seat, throwing an arm behind her to grip Ghost Keeper's shoulder. "Let's get out of here!" she cried and braced for acceleration, the jerk as they left yanking her gun arm into the air, and that's when she saw the Enfield's muzzle aimed at her heart.

  Voice pulled the trigger.

  The shot found its mark.

  And the force of the slug slamming her heart slammed Spann back against Ghost Keeper's spine.

  Suzannah

  Vancouver

  Round and round went the tape in the tape recorder playing on the desk. . . .

  ". . . but what I remember most of all is those rings piercing her lips.

  "Suzannah's lips.

  "Suzannah was my Mother.

  "It was Mardi Gras time in New Orleans. ..."

  Jazz was in the streets, where it wafted up on the warm night air, this musical mix of ragtime and bop and boogie-woogie and swing, drifting up over the heads of drunken revelers snaking through the French Quarter, up over the mingling of rich and poor, of black and white, of priest and libertine, higher up over the surging mob crowded eight deep, some on scaffolds, some on stepladders, some on the tips of their toes, higher still over parents who sipped pink spirits from hurricane glasses while pushing and jostling children toward the front of the line, children munching on popcorn and hot dogs and apples on a stick, everyone shuffling about on a carpet of confetti and broken bottles. Up rose the jazz over a maze of costumes and masks, "He-Shebas" dressed in drag as butterflies and snails, Comus with his goblet raised in parade to meet Rex, a King Kong here, and a Zigaboo there, and the Queen of Hearts with fig-leafed Adam and Eve. Up from the "Big Shot of Africa" and away from the Zulu King, up from the one-eyed cyclops and away from a cowboy garbed in white leather except his ass was bare, up and away from Royal Street with its banners and limp streamers, up to where the jazz slid softly through the wrought iron balcony to open French doors of Suzannah's House of Pain.