Incident at Big Sky

by Johnny France

  “The suspects are described as follows: White male, early fifties, six-feet-one, slender build, long, wiry black hair and long, graying beard. Last seen wearing green shirt and black pants, and a hard-leather, cowboy-style hat.”

  “How about the kid, Sheriff?”

  “Leather cowboy hat? What’s that?”

  “Green shirt? You mean fatigue shirt?”

  “You just said they were wearing fatigues, Sheriff. Which one is it?”

  This was Johnny’s first exposure to pack journalism. For a long moment he simply gaped at the ruby “on” lights of the minicams and the whining motor-drive Nikons. Was he supposed to answer these shouted questions?

  “Ah,” he began, regaining his composure. “Suspect number two—”

  The reporters went silent.

  “—white male, about nineteen. Long blond hair, maybe over his shoulders, and a blond beard. Five-feet-ten, one sixty pounds. Last seen wearing a denim jacket, green shirt, and black pants. Also wearing a leather cowboy hat. Possible name of Dan.”

  “What’s your source, Sheriff?”

  “Are they doing an autopsy on Goldstein?”

  “What about the fatigues?” the network guy persisted. “You reported a minute ago that they were dressed in quote military-type fatigues unquote. Which is it, Sheriff?”

  Johnny blinked into the cameras. A hot floodlight snapped on. “The … ah, earlier report was from the first witness, James Schwalbe. The second description was from Kari Swenson, herself.”

  “Which one are you going with?” Again, the network guy cut to the core of the question.

  But before Johnny could answer, one of the young women from a local station interrupted. “They’ve canceled the fatigue description. I heard it on my scanner.”

  Johnny stared at the girl, trying to recall her name. All these local reporters had police radios in their cars and were monitoring the manhunt frequencies. And they were feeding the information directly to their stations, which in turn, he’d been told, were interrupting their programs with special announcements. He also realized that if the two suspects up there were part of a larger, organized outfit, they’d be sure to have transistor radios. They might even have police scanners. He realized that whatever hard information he gave the press could easily reach the criminals a short time later.

  He and Onstad were going to have to get their acts together about these press briefings, and also about who could talk to the reporters, even off the record. Earlier that afternoon, Johnny had seen that same girl from the local TV station charm her way through the lower roadblock, past the reserve deputy at the bottom of the driveway, and right up to the open front door of the house. Most of the reserves from the two counties were ranchers and miners, honest, straightforward people but not prepared to handle hungry reporters. And, from the way he’d just seen that girl cozy up to the network man, he realized that this story represented an unprecedented career opportunity for the young local reporters, and that some of them might break all the rules to take advantage of it.

  “Johnny,” a TV reporter cut in, “what can you tell us about this station wagon with Alaska plates?”

  Earlier that afternoon, they’d gotten a report that a long-haired, “mean-looking” young guy in an “army shirt” had been parked near a Big Sky store the day before, annoying everyone with loud rock music from his radio. His car was described as a tan Japanese station wagon with Alaska license plates. Personally, Johnny did not put much stock in the report; the description of the young man did not really match Kari’s details. However, it was about the only tangible lead he had, and the report might provide a smokescreen, should the reporters run with it, and should the criminals up there hear the story on their transistor radio.

  Johnny cleared his throat dramatically. “We have an all-points apprehend alert out on that vehicle right now.”

  The reporters bent over their narrow notebooks. The TV people leaned even closer.

  “You think that they’ve fled the area?”

  Johnny tried to look earnest, but he was too tired to play these games well right now. “Well … we believe the suspects know the area well, and we believe that they are still confined to a specific area, several miles from the Big Sky resort.”

  The reporters exchanged expressions of disbelief.

  “Why look for the Alaska car, if you think they’re still in the mountains?”

  Tiredly, Johnny read from his prepared notes, “A search is currently being conducted in the upper region of the Jack Creek drainage for the suspects—”

  “Come on, Sheriff,” someone shouted from the back of the pack. “What’s really going on?”

  Patiently, Johnny folded his yellow pages and composed himself to answer. “We have every reason to believe that the suspects are still in the area, but we are also searching for that tan station wagon with Alaska license plates because we—”

  Parry and thrust.

  The voices came at him from beyond the hot glare of the minicam lights. He listened, then tried to form an answer that might further confuse the criminals when they heard an edited version of it on their radio.

  If this manhunt drags on very long, he thought, I’m gonna get downright sneaky, myself.

  The sun cut behind the stone shoulder of Lone Mountain. Around the command post, tired deputies dragged on long filtertip cigarettes and fiddled with the various knobs of their radios and deadly hardware. Birds of prey glided on the afternoon thermals above the draws. Tourists and curious locals bounced up the potholed road from the lower resort, only to be turned back by the deputies at the roadblocks.

  Time moved silently on, and the two men who had murdered Al Goldstein remained at large.

  Bill Hancock brought the news as Johnny and John Onstad bent over the big map on the dining room table, trying to decide the best route for the dawn posse sweep.

  There was a local woman, Bill reported, a Mrs. Joel Beardsley, who believed she had seen the two suspects up at Ulerys Lake on Saturday morning. Merlin had assigned Bill to interview the lady in her home down on Yellow Tail Road, and he was now here to report. Hancock had been Johnny’s first reserve deputy; he was the sergeant of the reserves, a steady, older guy who took his responsibilities seriously. In typical Hancock fashion, his report of the Beardsley woman interview was detailed and complete. He read from his notes.

  The lady, he said, was in her forties, articulate and well dressed, obviously a solid citizen. Her story sounded true.

  Mrs. Beardsley, her husband, and another couple had been up at Ulerys Lake on Saturday morning around ten, fly fishing; she’d been using an innertube float to drift across the lake.

  A bearded man, “in good condition, actually rather good-looking,” had called her from the far shore. “Lots of fish over here,” he’d said. “Come on over.” He asked if she knew the date. She had been startled.

  “You must have been up here quite a while, not to know the date,” she’d replied.

  “Quite a long time,” he had answered.

  Mrs. Beardsley told him it was Saturday, July 14. She was sure, she said, because the day before had been Friday the thirteenth.

  As she spoke with the man, Mrs. Beardsley had said, she suddenly became aware that they were out of sight of her husband and the other couple in the fishing party. It almost seemed to her that the bearded man was trying to lure her closer to the thickly forested shore.

  At that point, she saw another, younger man up the slope, standing at a large lodgepole from which he had stripped a square of bark.

  “Are you surveyors?” she asked. They both wore long-barreled pistols in their belts.

  “No,” the man answered. “We’re just carving our name on a tree.”

  At that moment, Mrs. Beardsley’s husband called from down the lake, and she yelled back that she was there. When the two men heard her husband’s voice, they grabbed their rifles, put them into dark cases and “rather hurriedly” departed, straight up the steep bank of the shore.<
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  After a while, Mrs. Beardsley said, her group climbed the bank at this end of the lake. They found the tree the boy had been carving. Surprisingly, he had stripped the bark back very deeply, but had inscribed the actual message with a black felt pen, using a bold but graceful script. “Actually,” she had reported, “it was rather beautiful.”

  “Bill,” Johnny asked, “did she remember the names?”

  Bill Hancock flipped shut his logbook. “Sorry, Johnny. I pressed her on that, but she just couldn’t remember. But she thought maybe one name was Don.”

  Johnny went to the front porch and called Robin Shipman. He and Steve still had their horses saddled. “Get a chain saw from Merlin’s Bronco,” he said, speaking softly. One of the reporter girls was lingering at the end of the porch, interviewing a deputy who’d helped transport Al Goldstein’s body. Johnny had authorized the interview, but he knew the girl was dragging it out to remain at the command post as long as possible.

  “What we gotta cut down, Johnny?”

  “There’s a lodgepole up at Ulerys Lake with some names written on it. I want that section of the tree.”

  “You bet,” Robin said, smiling at the prospect of some action.

  While the massed camera crews had their predictable field day with the section of lodgepole trunk, Johnny and Onstad stood in Terry Cosgrove’s kitchen, well shielded from the camera lights and microphones on the porch, speaking intently about the suspects, Don and Dan Nichols.

  Obviously, these were the men who had accosted Mrs. Beardsley. They probably had tried to lure her close enough to shore to grab, but had dropped the plan when they discovered that she wasn’t alone.

  But they had not hesitated the next afternoon when Kari Swenson came jogging up the lakeside trail.

  Nor had the old man hesitated, Johnny knew, when he raised his rifle and sighted the scope on Al Goldstein’s face.

  “John,” Johnny said, looking up to meet Onstad’s eyes. “These have to be the same guys that gave Dave Wing so much trouble the past couple of years, the hermit types who burned down the cabin at Cowboy Heaven and the Spanish Creek ranger station.”

  Onstad frowned. “Dave Wing’s in California on that forest fire, and we’re going to have to get some details on the Nicholses as soon as possible.”

  Johnny nodded, his mind occupied with a half-remembered event … something his predecessor, old Sheriff Kitson, had told him. He tried to think while John Onstad listed all the logical, methodical steps that they must now take to compile a complete file on the two suspects. First, of course, they must contact the Law Enforcement Services Division’s Criminal Investigation Bureau in Helena, then the Motor Vehicle Division, next the Identification Bureau of the Department of Institutions, Probation, and Parole.…

  John Onstad had a sheriff’s department of over fifty deputies and support personnel. The city of Bozeman alone had five times the population of Madison County. By necessity, Onstad ran a modern, well-organized, impersonal operation. He was a skilled administrator, a law-enforcement executive who believed in technology.

  Johnny France had considerable respect for computers and modern communications technology, but he understood one basic fact that his colleagues in the neighboring cities might have forgotten in the stampede to build hi-tech sheriffs’ departments in the 1970s. There’d been plenty of federal anti-crime money and expertise available, and some people had begun to confuse fancy equipment with old-fashioned experience or even common sense. At the end of the day, criminals were just people who got themselves in trouble. A computer in Helena could probably provide a lot of facts about Don Nichols and his son, Dan, but no data bank could give Johnny what he really needed, a clear human understanding of those two strange people, a sense of them as human beings who had gotten themselves into deep trouble.

  While John Onstad handled the logical channels of modern criminal investigation, Sheriff Johnny France got on the Cosgroves’ phone and began calling those people whom he knew had encountered the Nicholses at one time or another.

  It was after dark when Johnny completed his initial round of phone calls. Although his effort had been punctuated with unavoidable interruptions, he had learned a great deal about his suspects.

  While the Criminal Investigation Bureau computers were buzzing and beeping up in Helena, Johnny was following one phone lead to another, the receiver propped under his chin, a fresh mug of coffee near his elbow, the dusty yellow pad open before him.

  The picture of the Nicholses that he formed from these preliminary inquiries was both interesting and troubling. They definitely were not a couple of bums who’d gone up to the high country for a weekend of beer and target shooting, then just grabbed a pretty girl who happened to come by. If that were the case, tracking them down and talking sense to them might be a relatively straightforward job.

  But Don Nichols and his son did not fit this conventional pattern. According to the people Johnny had contacted, it seemed that Don Nichols had never fit into a normal mold. Originally, he came from Norris, a small crossroads community of gold miners, just north of Ennis. His dad, Pat Nichols, had brought his family there during the Depression, like so many other displaced Dust Bowl farmers. Pat had worked as a miner, and, according to Johnny’s sources, had been a friendly, generous kind of guy, who loved to hunt and fish, if he wasn’t otherwise occupied down at the saloon.

  When the boy, Don, was about seven, Johnny discovered, his dad had been driving home from a Saturday night party in Ennis, “drunk as a lord,” missed a curve on the old Norris hill, and slammed the car into a deep ravine. Pat Nichols was killed instantly, and the other passengers were pretty banged up.

  Maggie Nichols remarried pretty soon after that, another miner, named Steve Engleman. And not much later, she and Steve got saved at a revival and started having prayer meetings right in their own house.

  The people who spoke with Johnny were of two opinions about Don Nichols’s stepfather, Steve Engleman. Some said he was a hard, stingy kind of guy who’d take the last egg in the house off the dinner table and eat it himself, a bad-tempered perfectionist who believed in using his razor strap on his stepchildren. Others described him as a God-fearing, hard-working fellow who believed in everybody pulling his share of the load and spending his free time—if he had any—in church.

  One thing that everybody who knew Steve Engleman agreed about, though, he did not like to hunt and fish. He certainly never took young Don Nichols up to North Meadow Creek or the Beartrap Canyon on fishing trips, the way the boy’s real father, Pat, had done.

  Not long after Don’s mother married Steve Engleman, the young boy apparently began to show signs that he wasn’t what you’d call well adjusted. He was bright enough; no one Johnny talked to in Norris or neighboring Harrison would dispute that, but Don had been a loner in school, quiet and intense. People told Johnny that the boy spent a lot of time alone up in the mountains, either in the Beartrap Canyon area or higher, past Cowboy Heaven, right up in the Spanish Peaks. He just didn’t go on camping trips, they said, he sort of went up there to live for a few months. And hike, they all stressed. Old Don Nichols could hike damn near anywhere. While most folks would drive where they had to go, Don Nichols would walk.

  He had done well in high school in Harrison, and then he had left home and joined the Navy. But that didn’t last long. Don couldn’t adjust to the regimentation; he just did not like authority. Perhaps it reminded him of his stepfather.

  He left the Navy and ended up marrying a girl named Verdina in West Virginia. Here Johnny’s sources got a little vague. But, sometime in the early sixties, apparently, Don had brought his wife back to Montana and tried to run a homestead up near Noxon, right on the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. He just couldn’t stay away from the mountains.

  Danny, the son, was born in the mid-sixties, but nobody seemed to know where, exactly. When the homestead went bust, Don moved his family down to Jackson Hole, where he worked as a machinist. But he really could not sta
y away from the mountains, especially the Beartrap Canyon and the Spanish Peaks, where his dad, generous, old Pat Nichols, used to take him camping and fishing, thirty years before.

  Instead of keeping a steady job, Don Nichols would work long enough to get some money together, then take off for the mountains, where he’d live a few months, picking berries and poaching game, hiking up and down the range. He got increasingly bitter about normal society, what he called the “rotten system.”

  Up in the mountains, he’d told everyone who’d listen, a man can be free.

  His wife divorced him, remarried, and settled in Three Forks, up near Bozeman.

  But Don did not give up on family life. People said that he loved that boy of his, Danny, with the same intensity that he felt for the mountains. After Danny got old enough for Don to take the boy with him, their “camping trips” started lasting all summer long.

  According to people in Harrison, Don Nichols had been living up in the mountains full time, summer and winter for at least this last year.

  In 1973, Sheriff Roy Kitson had to go after Don Nichols on a truancy complaint from the Three Forks schools. It was well after Labor Day and the start of school, but Don had kept his eight-year-old boy with him, way above the granite cliffs of Beartrap Canyon, in that steep, wild country above Barn Creek. That was the part of the high country that few people ever went into, even the experienced elk outfitters. But people said Don had gardens and food caches up there, that he had enough supplies to hang on twenty years.

  Somehow, Roy Kitson got word up to Don Nichols to bring the boy out, and they arranged a rendezvous at the south end of the Beartrap, not far from the power plant.

  Sure as hell, old Don showed up with the boy in tow, right on time. He apologized to the sheriff for keeping his son up there so long, but said that they did not follow any kind of man-made calendar in the mountains. He’d been waiting, he said, for the wild strawberries to ripen, before bringing the boy down to civilization.