The old man seized Kari’s wrists again, while Danny unchained her. Then they pushed her under the cover of the low firs that sheltered the sleeping alcove. When the aircraft pressed nearer, they threw their sleeping bags and packs into the hollow of fir trees after her.
“You must be pretty important,” the old man called from his hiding place at the edge of the clearing. “They already got a plane out looking for you.”
“Yes, I am,” Kari called back, letting defiance ring through her voice. “And there’s going to be a lot of people out looking for me.”
“Makes no difference to us,” he answered from the shadows. “Anybody finds you with us, they get themselves shot.”
Kari crouched in the dark thicket, listening to the airplane.
Mosquitoes tormented the darkness. The moon was rising, but did not cast enough light for Kari to see much detail around her. It had been a long time since she’d heard the airplane or the distant calls of the search team. They had chained her back to the tree when the airplane flew away, and sometime later Danny had given her a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of wool socks to ward off the chill.
When the sky was truly dark, they offered her a musty green sleeping bag to pull around her legs. She sat now with her back to the tree trunk, the chain biting tight around her waist.
The old man spread the second sleeping bag on the pine needles inside the alcove. “Might as well turn in,” he called. “It’s too dark for anything now.”
Kari found herself exchanging an involuntary chorus of “good nights,” just as if this were some family camping trip. She sat, stiff and uncomfortable, the bark scraping her back, the stones bruising her legs through the thin sleeping bag. After the two men had bedded down beneath their mosquito netting, she struggled to test the chain and the lock one more time. It was no good; she was securely chained to this tree, like a heifer to the slaughterhouse rail.
Sleep was not possible. She understood that the old man and the boy were intelligent and crafty, that they were cruel and stubborn, and that they considered these mountains and everything and everybody in them to be available for their pleasure. Either they would wait until she fell asleep to spring out of that dark hollow in the firs and rape her, or they would do it in the morning. Probably, when it got light, they would just announce that it was time for her to become Danny’s “female.” When that happened, Kari knew, she could expect no more compassion than they’d shown to that poor wounded doe.
Later, she heard the distant whine of a trail bike, a long way off in the darkness. Someone was out there, Kari realized, searching for her along the logging roads and trails, calling her name, shining a light. But she understood with terminal sadness that no trail bike could penetrate the thick timber of this draw to find her tonight.
The branches above creaked in the chill breeze. Night birds called. Kari Swenson crouched alone, waiting through what was probably the most terrible night of her young life.
4
Ennis
July 15, 1984
The moon was bright on the lake. But a cool breeze had risen, and the remnants of the party—“the hard core,” according to Bonnie—had moved into the trailer for a nightcap.
Johnny and Sue were wedged into a molded sofa at the end of the small living room. He was still tired, but the long, relaxed meal and the company had helped him forget his obligations and workload for a few hours. They’d say their good nights here in a few minutes, and be home in bed before midnight. A good sleep, he knew, would complement the pleasant evening, and he’d be able to dig in tomorrow and face another couple weeks of eighteen-hour days.
A light rapping on the door and Linn Kreig, the co-owner of the Lake Shore Lodge, ducked inside the trailer. Linn and Kevin had just left for the lodge. Their empty brandy glasses were still on the table. “Sorry, Johnny,” Linn said, brushing back her blond hair as she leaned forward to hand him a pink telephone message slip.
Johnny scanned the slip, frowning. The first call from Vicki had come in at 2200, over an hour before. And there were two more. “Call the office. Emergency.”
Linn was clearly chagrined. “They were on the answering machine … If anybody had been up there to answer the phone, they’d have come right down.”
Johnny was already on his feet. Sue went into the trailer’s small kitchen to gather up her cake pans.
“Anything serious?” Pete asked.
Again, Johnny frowned. Three calls from Vicki since ten o’clock. Merlin Ehlers, his sergeant, was on duty this weekend. Whatever was happening had to be too urgent for Merlin to handle on his own. “Yeah, well …” Johnny nodded to Pete, “it would appear so.”
Johnny’s small office at home is just off the living room. The decor is masculine and Western—antlers, gun racks, a rolltop desk, and an antique safe.
After Linn had delivered her message to him at the lake front, he had decided to go home to call Vicki. Whatever she had for him, he knew, would probably involve his contacting Merlin and other deputies. And he didn’t have enough range in his car radio to reach everyone he might need. That would mean he’d have to have Vicki serve as relay, a slow, clumsy procedure that would tie up the dispatcher’s radio channel in an emergency.
There was another reason, which neither Sue nor he had discussed on the fast drive back from the lake to Ennis, but which they both understood. Johnny’s heavy guns were at home. Off duty, he only carried a small .38 snubnose. His .45 automatic and his long-barreled .44 magnum hung in their holsters from the mounted steer horns above his desk. Any situation that merited three emergency calls might well require a bigger gun than his .38 snubnose.
Out of long practice, Sue went straight to the kitchen and put on the coffee pot. Johnny opened his rolltop desk, got out his yellow pad, and called the office. It was just after midnight, so he wrote 7/16/84 on the top of the sheet.
“What you got, Vicki?”
“Johnny,” she replied, with obvious relief. “I’m glad I got you. This place has been kind of crazy.”
Johnny frowned, waiting for the bad news.
“An ATL,” Vicki said, her voice going flat as she got down to business. An ATL was an “attempt to locate” a missing person in layman’s parlance. “White female, twenty-three. Up at Big Sky. First call came from Gallatin County Sheriff’s office at … 1943.”
He made brief notes as he listened.
“Gallatin County got a call from Bob Schaap, owner of the Lone Mountain Ranch with an ATL on a girl named Carrie Swenson—”
“Could you spell that, please?”
“C-a-r-r-i-e. She’s a summer waitress, very reliable, he told Gallatin County. She was jogging up around Beehive Basin. Left after lunch for a couple hours’ run, and didn’t show up for work at 1700.”
“Okay,” Johnny muttered, taking notes. “What else?”
“Mr. Schaap found her car, a green Subaru station wagon, at the Jack Creek trailhead. Locked, just like she’d left it. He’s got some men from the ranch up there now with radios, searching for her.”
Sue brought in a steaming mug of coffee and Johnny nodded his thanks as he took it. “Okay, Vicki,” he repeated, “I’m listening.”
“I called Jay Cosgrove at … 1945. He said he’d talk to Mr. Schaap and get back to us.”
Johnny could visualize the whole area on a mental map. The Big Sky resort area was just inside the Madison County line. But, because the resort lay on the other side of the mountains from Ennis and Virginia City, until recently Madison County had contracted out law enforcement for the area to the Gallatin Sheriff’s Department in Bozeman, but for the past year, Johnny’s own resident deputy had been living right there at Big Sky. As Vicki recited the facts of the case, it became clear to Johnny that there was a minor jurisdictional hassle building. Bob Schaap was used to doing business with Gallatin County, not with Jay Cosgrove, the Madison County resident deputy.
“So,” Vicki continued, “Jay called back at 2006. I’m afraid there’s been a grizzl
y sighting in the area where the girl was supposed to be jogging. He said that the ranch has quite a few men out searching. He planned to cover all the logging roads with his patrol vehicle, then switch over to his trailbike to get up the back trails and cover more country.”
Johnny made a quick note. Jay Cosgrove was an old friend. He knew the area well; he was quiet and dependable, and could take charge without waiting for detailed instructions. He was not worried about Jay. But this business of “quite a few men” from Lone Mountain Ranch up there searching in the dark might be a problem, especially if they were armed and nervous about that grizzly sighting.
“At 2158,” Vicki continued, reading from her communications log, “Jay called back. There’s been no sign of the girl. There seems to be about a dozen men searching on foot, four or five on horseback, and a few on trailbikes. Jay requests a regular search and rescue effort from the Madison side.”
“I got all that,” Johnny said. “What else?”
Vicki sighed, and Johnny knew there must be some complications. “Twenty-two thirty-one, I got a call from John Palmer, the assistant fire chief of Big Sky. He’s their search and rescue coordinator, and he wanted to know what was happening up there on the mountain. He’d seen all the activity, and—”
“Nobody bothered to tell him, right?” Johnny could see the problem unfolding.
“Right,” Vicki answered. “Anyway, he got himself informed on what was going on, and he says that he’ll be able to assist with a search at dawn. He’s got a regular team from the Gallatin side and a good communications setup.”
“Okay,” Johnny said. “I know him.”
“At 2250,” Vicki continued, “Mr. Palmer called again. Seems the Lone Mountain Ranch got ahold of him and wants him to organize the search and rescue effort in the morning. I told him that we have Merlin Ehlers already coordinating our team for a morning effort, and he said he’d call Merlin.”
He heard Vicki turn a page and sigh again. Things must be getting even more complicated. “Mr. Palmer couldn’t get through to Merlin because Merlin’s phone just went out of order. So I copied a message for Merlin about the airplane they had up today. Civil Air Patrol, pilot named Norm Wortman from Gallatin Field.”
“Fine,” Johnny said. “What else is there?”
“Mr. Schaap himself called at … let’s see … 2352. He says he’s now been in touch with Jay, and that he’ll have a couple of tracking dogs available at 0400. I told him that we would be coordinating a regular search and rescue effort from this office and that you’d probably have people up there at first light.”
“Is that it?” Johnny already had his Search and Rescue file open and was ticking off the telephone numbers of those men he knew were in town.
“That’s about it,” Vicki said. “Oh yeah, I finally got ahold of Merlin by phone and relayed all this to him. I said you’d probably be calling.”
“Real good,” Johnny said. “I’ll take it from here.” It was after midnight now. His new work week had begun.
By 1:00 A.M. Johnny had contacted his key deputies and the leaders of the Madison County Search and Rescue team. He called for a 6:15 meeting at Bettie’s Cafe with Robin Shipman and Steve Powell, two of his best mountain riders.
Even before he’d heard Vicki’s full report, Johnny had decided against trying to activate a search and rescue effort before daylight. Johnny had been raised in the foothills of the Madison Range. He had ridden the high summer pastures above Jack Creek many times as a kid, searching out stray cattle. He’d hunted all those drainages for deer and elk since he’d been ten years old. And, since he’d been in law enforcement, he had searched that same wild country several times for lost hunters and campers.
One thing he had learned over the years was that night searches seldom were successful. And, often as not, members of a night search party ended up getting lost themselves. Sometimes they fell and twisted an ankle or dislocated a shoulder. Then they became a bigger problem for the team than the original victim. That country up there was so tangled, so confusing, that people were constantly getting lost in daylight, in good weather. It was never a good idea to send a bunch of men crashing off into that brush in the middle of the night.
But there was another good argument against bringing in his search team before morning. The people from Big Sky were up there right now, bushwhacking the ridges and draws. Many of them were experienced woodsmen, but others were no doubt well-meaning amateurs. And they were probably all armed against the reported bear threat. As any hunter could tell you, a man crashing around that thick timber, or worse, a man on horseback, looked a lot like a grizzly on a moonlit night, especially if you were tired and nervous. Add that risk to the danger of an accidental fall down a rockslide in the dark. His decision was obvious.
Some people might not understand; they might want to charge up there come hell or high water to find the girl, but Johnny had learned a lot about making considered, responsible decisions since taking office three years earlier.
You couldn’t please everybody all the time, and you were probably going to get criticized, no matter what you did. So you might just as well do the right thing and get on with your life.
Easier said than done.
Johnny hunched over the phone on his rolltop desk. Jay Cosgrove would call if they found her. Johnny just did not like the idea of that damned bear. This time of year, a sow grizzly probably had cubs with her, either newly weaned winter cubs or, worse, yearlings she was about to turn loose. A sow bear like that would attack in a wink.
Again he scowled. All the more reason not to send out the search team in the dark. Bears were active feeders on a moonlit night. If one of his people spooked a cub and treed it, there’d be hell to pay, no doubt about it.
But … Johnny drank more coffee, and his stomach churned. All his life, he’d been plagued with a bad stomach. Maybe it was the hard times he had known as a kid, losing his mother when he was only four, and coming to live with his Uncle Joe and Aunt Eva on the Six Bar Nine, a poor enough little place, even with those high beef prices during the war. Maybe it was a childhood of venison and red beans, seven days a week. Maybe it was sharing adult worries, taking things so seriously, even as a small kid.
Johnny grinned. Sue always said he was the funniest serious person she’d ever known. That was a pretty fair way to describe him, he had to admit, a friendly, smiling kind of a guy who was real no-doubt-about-it serious, just beneath the surface. And the one aspect of his life that Johnny took most seriously was his sense of duty, the weight of responsibility. You learned that on a ranch, and you learned it young.
When Johnny’s aunt and uncle had moved down to a bigger place in Wyoming, he was twelve. He stayed back to live as a foster child with Forrest and Betsy Shirley on the Cold Springs Ranch. They were making a go, year by year, but everybody had to pull his share of the load. Horses and cattle did not take weekends off or give you a summer vacation. If you kept livestock, you became responsible. A cow and her calf were a serious investment. They represented your future, your ability to survive, to maintain an independent life on the land.
And life, Johnny learned long before he acquired the strength and height of a man, was a real serious business.
If that girl was dead up there, or worse, if she was now dying, mauled by the grizzly, alone in some draw where the bear had chased her … Well, then he, the sheriff of Madison County, who had the final decision on dispatching the search and rescue team, would undoubtedly take the blame for not having done his duty. And, Lord knew, there were plenty of self-proclaimed wilderness experts on both sides of the mountains who would line up to blast him, if this girl Carrie had gotten herself killed by the bear.
The Madison Range, like all the subranges of the Montana Rockies, had attracted a strange mix of people in the past twenty years. There were unreconstructed hippies, recluse Vietnam vets living on disability checks and marijuana, and all manner of rich Easterners who had followed Chet Huntley’s lead to Big Sky a
nd were now buying up ranch and timber country at a crazy pace. There was no shortage of righteous environmentalists, either, with postage-stamp ranches and fat monthly checks from Merrill Lynch who claimed their vision of range and forest management was the only way the mountains could be saved—and anybody who disputed them was a Neanderthal fascist.
And then, there were some downright dangerous people up there, too. Recently, Johnny had received FBI bulletins on right-wing and neo-Nazi groups, reported to be building fortified survivalist “compounds” in the wilderness areas of the mountain West. Outfits like the Posse Commitatus and a lunatic group called “The Order” were said to have formed alliances with the Klan and some whacko anti-Semitic cult known as The Church of Jesus Christ, Christian. They, too, had definite ideas about how this wilderness should be used. And to them, any law enforcement officer who tried to interfere was “an agent of the satanic Jews who controlled America.”
If that weird bunch wasn’t enough, Johnny had heard stories of some old boys living alone in shacks or abandoned mine shafts up above the canyons, poaching game and stealing an occasional calf, taking the odd potshot at anybody invading their “territory.” Sleep was going to be hard tonight. It was not going to be easy to relax, thinking of that poor kid up there, alone in the forest.
5
Moonlight Basin
July 16, 1984, Dawn
Robber jays scolded as the sunlight touched the treetops. On the forest floor, the shadows were deep and chill. Kari tried to slouch lower into the musty sleeping bag bunched around her hips, but the chain cut into her waist. She hunched there in the cold, exhausted from the sleepless night.
In the hollow beneath the firs, the old man dozed under the green sleeping bag. Half an hour before, Danny had left camp with his rifle in search of “meat for breakfast.”
Incident at Big Sky Page 4