But Dad wasn’t right about a lot of things anymore. He opened the whiskey bottle and drank another hot sip. Dad was right about one thing, though. That cowboy had no right to come busting into their camp, waving a pistol. Dad always said, you never let anybody just come into your camp that way. You’ve got to keep them out. You’ve got to keep the advantage.
He wrapped the whiskey bottle in canvas and thrust it to the bottom of his pack, then loaded the plastic canisters.
Outside, the owls worked the darkness, searching out mice that crisscrossed the meadow. There was no danger.
13
Big Sky and the Beartrap
Late July–Early August
The last Thursday of the month brought Johnny France the first real break in the case, plus the promise of potentially vital assistance.
That morning, he got a call from Dan Cummings, the foreman of the Windy Waters Ranch. Dan and his crew leased the Cowboy Heaven cow camp from the Forest Service and ran cattle up there, using the surrounding meadows for their high summer range. Seems that Dan was moving his herd around yesterday, and the boys stopped at the cow camp for a meal. And they discovered that somebody had been in the tent and had taken off with a fair amount of food. Far as Dan could tell, the thief had taken biscuit mix, sugar, cooking oil, and maybe a bottle of liquor.
“You sure about that, Dan?” He gripped the phone so tightly that his fingernails paled.
“Course I’m sure, Johnny,” Dan replied. Like most ranch men, he wasn’t overly talkative, but when he did speak, he meant just what he said. “We keep a pretty good estimate on the food supply up there, and I know when something’s missing.”
“Well, okay,” Johnny soothed. “Real good, Dan. This’ll help us a lot, and I really appreciate your calling.”
Neither man spoke for a moment, then Dan broke down and asked, “Johnny, you figure it’s the Nichols boys?”
“Uh … well,” Johnny stalled, “can’t be certain, Dan, but you know we’re gonna check her out real good.”
“Yes, sir,” Dan stated. “Oh, yeah … one thing, Johnny. Whoever went in the tent there tried to tie the flap back, just like we’d left it, but they didn’t quite get the hitch right.”
“I understand, Dan.”
Again, silence on the phone line.
Once more, Dan’s curiosity rose. “That’s not the kind of thing just some hungry hiker’d do, is it? I mean try to hide the fact he’d been there.”
“Yep … you’re right about that one, Dan.”
“Well,” Dan concluded, “guess I’d better have my boys be a little more careful up there, huh?”
“Probably a good idea, Dan.”
Johnny went straight to Dave Wing’s office at the Ennis Forest Service station. Over the past twelve years, first as a deputy, later as sheriff, Johnny had worked with Dave on several cases. Dave was a rocksteady, quiet guy in his fifties. To Johnny, Dave was a thick-set bear of a cop, the kind of man you’d want around you in a shootout or a forest fire. As Forest Service Law Enforcement Officer Dave was responsible for all the federal land on this side of the range, and was the official coordinator between local jurisdictions, state fish and game officers, and other federal law officers who had business in the National Forest. His job continually took him up to the mountains and, like Johnny, Dave Wing had often been obliged to clean up the mess when tourists got in trouble in the back country. Dave Wing was everything a good Western cop should be—tough, thoughtful, and persistent. But in Dave’s case, the job also required that he be an expert hunter, tracker, mountain rider, and all-around woodsman.
They sat in Dave’s office, surrounded by the inevitable contour maps and coffee mugs.
“You know, Johnny,” Dave began, speaking with slow deliberation, as was his way, “when I was up working security on that fire, right after the crime, fella hands me a newspaper and says, ‘You kinda got yourself a problem down where you come from, Dave.’ I knew the minute I read that story that it was the Nicholses who done it.” He paused. “Now, sitting here, listening to you talk about this food disappearing from the cow camp, I just know it’s the Nicholses done it again.”
Johnny stood up and went to the map. “If they were at Cowboy Heaven, say two days ago, hitting the tent, that’d mean they had to be crossing the same country the two SWAT teams covered, more or less, when they were covering it.”
Dave paused to think through his reply. “Those twenty-four hours I spent with the FBI SWAT people, Johnny, were about as tough a deal as I can remember.” He raised his calloused palm. “And they had some special surveillance equipment that’s so secret they wouldn’t even let me get a good look at it. And, Johnny, we covered that country up there, I can guarantee you that.”
“Reckon you know those woods a little better than the boys from Billings, Dave.”
Dave Wing nodded. “Expect as I do.”
Johnny waited for Dave to work toward his point.
Dave got to his feet and joined Johnny at the map. “Well,” Dave said, “the thing is, I’ve been looking for Don Nichols up there off and on for years, after he burned down the Cowboy Heaven cabin and then the Spanish Creek ranger station. You know arson’s a real nasty offense in the Forest Service. Well … like I said, years looking for that fella, and never once, not one time did I ever see him.”
Dave tapped the map several places with his blunt fingertip.
“There were times, Johnny, when I knew they were right behind me in the brush. They could see me okay, but I never once saw them.” He smiled now with grim respect. “And that was when little Danny was only twelve, thirteen years old, and before they went and got themselves in real trouble.” He sat down tiredly in his swivel chair. “If’n I couldn’t even see ’em once back then, John, what chance you figure those SWAT teams had, or that we’ve got now that they’re really trying to hide?”
“Yeah, well,” Johnny muttered, unwilling to concede the obvious logic of Dave’s argument. “Thing is, Dave, we know they’re up there now, after Dan Cummings and all—”
Dave raised his hand. “I knew they were up there then, too.” Again, he smiled grudging respect. “But I’d hear they was up around Rob Arnold’s elk camp one day, and a couple days later they’d be clear over to Jack Creek. Those two know how to travel, Johnny.”
“Hell,” Johnny said, shaking his head. “We can’t just let them stay up there, Dave. We gotta go up and bring ’em down. That’s our job.”
Dave Wing slowly considered Johnny’s words, then nodded. “Oh, we’ll have to keep trying, John, don’t get me wrong. We’re gonna be trying with everything we’ve got. And, if we get lucky, we’ll catch them before they hurt anybody else.”
Now Johnny smiled. “Dave, remember when you and me and old Roy Kitson used to talk about Don Nichols being better off, living alone up there, out of harm’s way?”
Dave smiled ruefully, but did not speak.
“Well,” Johnny added, “we’d figure he was better off in the hills than walking the streets, or costing the state money to keep him in some institution.”
“Yep,” Dave Wing conceded. “I guess we were wrong.”
“I guess we were.”
That afternoon Johnny received the promise of potential expert aid. Apparently Al Goldstein’s family back East had contacted a well-known tracking expert, a fellow who’d written a bunch of books on the art of following human and animal tracks through the most primitive wilderness. This tracker was supposed to have helped several East Coast jurisdictions locate people missing in the woods, and, according to his publicity, he was an internationally recognized expert in “the ancient art of the new survival.”
He ran a tracking and survival school in an Eastern state that was better known for its toxic waste dumps and suburban sprawl than for its untrammeled back country. But he seemed to come highly recommended, and he was coming free; at least Madison County wouldn’t have to pay for him. Whatever the tracker’s skills and record, he had managed to convinc
e the Goldstein family to pay for him and his two assistants to fly out here and see if they could track the Nicholses.
Johnny’s first reaction was elation. He knew full well that there were some highly skilled trackers in this country, and he knew that there were also some damned good bloodhound men, who made their living hiring out to police departments in need. And now, it seemed, they were getting the services of just such an expert, at no cost.
The tracker and his two assistants were due to fly into Belgrade Airport the next day, and the Gallatin County people or Bernie Hubley would drive them up to Big Sky. The plan called for the tracker to visit the crime scene, get a good fix on Don and Danny’s boot prints and on other, unspecified, “signs,” then to cover the immediate Moonlight Creek area. The day after that, Johnny planned to take the tracker and a small posse up to Cowboy Heaven to see if they could find the Nicholses’ fresh tracks from the cow camp tent, back into their home ground above the Beartrap.
The combination of the food theft and the unexpected arrival of an expert tracker seemed heaven sent. This might just be the break that all cops waited for in any difficult case. Johnny knew that success usually came from the application of exactly the right resource at exactly the right time and place.
Later that day, however, after he’d waded through the accumulated bureaucratic detritus on his desk, Johnny’s optimism began to fade. Since the first days of the manhunt, the department had received offers of “expert” assistance from an amazing variety of sources. Bloodhound experts from the South and East had called repeatedly. Professional bounty hunters had queried about possible rewards. A number of former “Green Beret” and other less-specified “commandos” had telephoned, offering their services at supposedly bargain rates.
One man called from Texas in the middle of the night and prevailed on Vickie Hudson to write out a long biographic note to detail his prowess. He was, he stressed, a combat veteran “Marine Ranger.” Now Johnny was no expert on the military, but he knew that the Rangers were a branch of the Army infantry, and that the Marines had their recon units filling the same function. They were highly competitive entities, not a hybrid special unit, as this fellow tried to suggest. Clearly, the publicity of the “Mountain Men” case was shaking a lot of bats out of the belfry.
Another crackpot volunteer who came to Johnny’s attention that afternoon was a young fellow from northern Montana named Jerry. He walked right into the governor’s office the week before and demanded that Governor Schwinden “appoint him to the manhunt,” so that he could “kill those two guys.” The governor’s assistant fobbed him off, but spent enough time in the young man’s presence to note that Jerry appeared distraught, “hard-looking,” and “weird.”
Later in the day, Johnny had Merlin Ehlers make some phone calls, trying to check up on the authenticity of the tracker whom the Goldstein family had hired. He hoped that they wouldn’t have another phony nut on their hands.
Merlin’s report did little to calm Johnny’s mounting suspicions. According to Merlin’s sources, the tracker claimed to have been brought up in the woods back East by a “displaced Apache Indian.” As a boy, the tracker apparently met this old Apache through the Indian’s grandson, and the three of them spent nine years of disciplined and spiritual woods lore initiation in the coastal pine barrens. But, according to the foreword of the tracker’s second book, the old Indian had conveniently returned to the Southwest in 1970, where he had died, and the grandson—even more conveniently in Johnny’s mind—“moved overseas” with his family, and there, the only surviving witness to the tracker’s near-mystical apprenticeship in the woods, “died in Europe in a horseback riding accident.”
Johnny had spent a long time in law enforcement, and he figured he could hear the creaking stage props of a phony alibi as well as anybody. Well, the more he heard about the tracker and his background, the more suspicious he became that the guy was not everything he claimed to be.
What Johnny saw the next day up at Jay Cosgrove’s house did little to dispel his suspicions. The tracker and his two assistants were given rooms at Buck’s T-4 down in the canyon. Once they had changed into their working clothes, they were driven up to the Big Sky command post.
Johnny shook the tracker’s strong hand, and noted that the guy was pretty darn young for someone who claimed to be “an experienced woodsman whose extraordinary skill has saved many lives.” He was a big guy with dark blond hair and a shaggy mustache. His camouflaged field clothes were faded from many washings, and his jungle boots looked well worn.
But there was something more remarkable about the tracker in Johnny’s eyes. The guy had a definite sense of himself, a stagy kind of flamboyance, as if he were on camera. Johnny had taken a few movie stars and TV actors on the Beartrap raft trip over the years, and had noted that these people didn’t so much experience the river, but showed themselves to be experiencing the white-water adventure. No matter what the time or place, these actors had a way of just soaking up everyone’s attention.
To Johnny, the tracker seemed cut from the same cloth.
While they consulted the maps on Jay’s dining room table, the tracker’s two assistants seemed to keep a respectable distance behind him, like well-trained acolytes. One carried a canteen and a folding drinking cup in a belt pouch; the other provided an assortment of measuring equipment that the tracker used in analyzing signs and footprints. Throughout the initial briefing, the tracker seemed to keep his leonine head aloof, as if the mundane details of compass variation and trail numbers were beneath his consideration.
At the end of the briefing, the tracker solemnly addressed the assembled lawmen, asking for their sworn word to keep his presence here a secret. He implied that it might be extremely dangerous for him, should word reach the Nicholses that they were being tracked by someone of his celebrated skill.
In the dedication of one of the books the tracker had brought with him, Johnny had read such Aquarian phrases as “all potential and manifested universes,” and “the reincarnational players who make us a family.” No doubt about it, Johnny thought, this guy comes on like some kind of mystic, like a guru. Now let’s see if he can track.
Hiking into the crime scene, the tracker made a point of stopping to show his assistants several obscure animal signs at the small swamp of the Moonlight Creek tributary near the logging road. Johnny heard him not only identify the animals who’d left their tracks in the mud, but also proclaim a fair amount about the animals’ condition and behavioral state.
Okay, Guru, Johnny thought, lead on.
At the crime scene camp, Johnny thought that the tracker was actually a little reckless. The young man appeared to be working himself into some kind of an intense concentration, but he also seemed to be moving too fast around the clearing to get a good mental picture of the crime sequence, as revealed in muddled tracks and boot prints.
He was interested in the dried mud at the stream edge of the camp, where Don and Danny had first confronted Jim Schwalbe, after Kari had been shot, but before Al Goldstein made his move. Signaling his assistant, the tracker began to work on one set of boot prints, using an assortment of wooden tongue depressors and measuring tape. He was, he explained, measuring the “pressure points” of the print. Through such scrutiny, he could separate normal tracks from those made by the fleeing fugitives. At one point, the tracker called for a glass of water, and his assistant sprang forward with the folding cup.
After his detailed examination of the stream’s margin, the tracker offered his concurrence that the Nicholses had, indeed, left the camp by this route, and that they had fled down the streambed.
Fine, Johnny thought, we’ve been telling you that all afternoon.
He was now prepared to begin his tracking, the young man stated. But he must brief the armed deputies who would accompany him on his methods. Once more, the tracker assumed his aloof manner, raising his handsome, shaggy head above the circle of lawmen. “If you see me drop to my knees,” he said, staring cal
mly into each man’s eyes, “they are within rifle range. If I drop to my belly and lie flat, be prepared for trouble because they’ll be very close.”
His manner was so serious, that the men around him were momentarily subdued. But after that moment, they began to exchange glances, as if to ask, “Is this guy for real?”
The tracker and his assistants were going to be guarded and maybe even guided by Jay, Brad Brisban, and Bob Morton of the Forest Service. These men had all faced dangerous, armed fugitives in these woods; they had been searching for the Nicholses for almost two weeks. Was this young man seriously suggesting that he expected to actually find them this afternoon, right here in the Moonlight Creek drainage?
Apparently that was his intention.
The party of six spread to an arrow formation, with the tracker and his men forming the shaft, and the armed escort taking the flanks.
When they marched out of the crime scene and down the streambed, the tracker bore an expression of intense, joyful concentration. Like a good hunting dog, Johnny thought, just like a damn good elk hound.
Later that day the tracking team returned to the command post at Jay Cosgrove’s. According to the tracker, they had followed the Nicholses’ boot prints all the way down the streambed to the bottom of the draw, near the Jack Creek logging road. There, the Nicholses had moved onto harder ground and had eventually mounted a rocky outcropping that formed a bluff above the road. He had, he said, been able to identify clear indentations that were “buttocks marks,” the sign that the two fugitives had sat with their backs to the orange granite bluff, staring down at the narrow logging road below.
But, he admitted, the signs seemed old, probably from last week.
When Johnny questioned the deputies after the tracker and his men had returned to the motel in the canyon, the lawmen had to admit that they’d not been able to see the same signs, once the young man declared that the track had left the muddy streambed and crossed harder ground.
Incident at Big Sky Page 16