The outfitters didn’t like it for obvious reasons. You couldn’t easily move pack or saddle horses up there because of the timber and the steep slopes; it was damn near impossible to track on that rocky ground, and the gorges were so deep that it might take all day for a string of pack mules to cross one drainage.
That was the country the tracker guru told the FBI he had “covered” in a few hours.
Johnny leaned back against the warm metal of the car’s hood and slowly scanned his binoculars down the canyon walls. Months later, he remembered that another childhood image came to mind at that moment, again the product of the war that had shaped the young consciousness of his generation. He saw vivid pictures of Tarawa and Saipan, Okinawa and Iwo Jima … fortified islands, where fanatical Japanese soldiers fought so stubbornly that the American Marines had to root them out of their caves, one by one, with dynamite charges and flame throwers. They did not surrender; instead they chose to die and to take with them large numbers of Americans.
The fact was that nobody so far had come up with any kind of logical explanation of why Don Nichols had started all this business in the first place. Lots of people had pretty convincing stories about why Don had shot Al Goldstein. The most commonly accepted line concerned Don’s unusually strong love and attachment for the boy. Just like John Onstad had told the newspaper, Don Nichols had reacted like an enraged animal when he found his son threatened.
So far, however, nobody had really addressed the central problem of just what the hell old Don Nichols had been doing up there all these years. Just after the crime, there’d been this local anthropologist who stepped right up to give press interviews all about how the Nicholses were “throwbacks” to an earlier period, who had chosen a simpler form of life over more conventional patterns of living. That kind of stuff kept the reporters happy, for at least a couple of days. But so far, in the several weeks since the bizarre crime, no one had brought forth a convincing analysis of what made Don Nichols tick.
During anxious nights awake at his rolltop desk, a mug of cold coffee at his elbow, and on long, solitary drives, he’d been digesting the known facts of Don Nichols’s life, trying to form his own analysis.
Such an analysis might seem alien to Johnny’s normally open, direct manner. In fact his background did not provide the traditional education normally associated with such psychological assessment. But, in many ways, Johnny France was a mix of the traditional and the unorthodox. Early in his career as a lawman, he had learned that a good cop had to understand human nature. Moreover, he’d learned in violent encounters with emotionally disturbed criminals that a smart cop had to become a bit of a headshrinker, if he was going to stay alive. And, as a county sheriff, he had become the de facto hostage negotiator, a title of dubious value which he’d had to exercise several times.
Within the past year, he had put his amateur psychologist experience to a good test, during one of the most dangerous confrontations of his career. Not three blocks from his house in Ennis, Johnny had been faced with a violently psychotic young man who had barricaded himself in his basement bedroom, armed with a .357 magnum pistol, determined to kill his mother, then to take his own life. When Johnny arrived on the scene, he made the decision to face the boy alone, unarmed, to try to negotiate.
Once Johnny was in the room, under the wavering muzzle of the big pistol, the boy announced that he would add Johnny to his list of execution victims. Johnny had to draw on all his persuasive powers to cajole and flatter the kid, to sidetrack his death obsession, to give him some tangible reason to live.
The boy was in deep, unnatural mourning for his father, who had recently died after a horrible battle with cancer. In his anger and grief, the young man seemed to be using this murderous and suicidal confrontation as a means of abolishing life itself and of somehow transcending death to join his father in the afterlife, the family whole again, complete in death in a way that was now impossible.
Slowly, with as much soft-spoken calm as he could muster, Johnny had reasoned with the kid, not about the central core of his obsession, but about small things, minor concessions.
After an hour, he was able to convince the disturbed boy to begin unloading the pistol. Johnny achieved this coup by suggesting that the dead father had taught the boy to be such a good marksman, that he really wouldn’t need all six bullets, just to execute two people, then to kill himself.
“Your dad,” Johnny said, “was so proud of the way you can handle a gun, that I’m sure he’d want you to give me some of those bullets.”
By the end of that terrible night, Johnny had convinced the boy to surrender his bullets, one by one. In the process of the negotiation, Johnny had reaffirmed for himself that he had to learn as much as he could about the background and psychological roots of any dangerous criminal he had to face.
And now, for a month, he’d been thinking about Don Nichols and his boy, Danny.
The conclusions that were slowly taking shape might not agree with standard psychological theory, but Johnny wasn’t interested in pleasing the headshrinkers, only in catching the Nicholses with no more bloodshed. In fact, Johnny had only read one or two college textbooks on human behavior, and had retained little of that. But he did know from his own life that people were usually the products of the love—and the hate—of the good things and the bad things that happened to them as children. What the psychiatrist called nurturing and trauma.
So, armed with this simple analytical thesis, Johnny had sifted through the known facts of Don Nichols’s childhood, to see if he could discover what had gone wrong when he was a boy, to have set him so badly off the normal track later in life.
In his analysis, Johnny could draw upon a wide and diverse body of information, ranging from psychological profiles produced after the FBI entered the case, to third-hand out-of-date gossip dating back forty years or more when the Nichols family first moved to Montana.
Sorting through this jumble of fact, rumor, and downright lies, Johnny eventually came up with conclusions that seemed to explain most of Don Nichols’s bizarre personality and behavior.
First, from all accounts of the old-timers in Norris, Don had been a happy, well-adjusted little boy. At least he was until his father, Pat, had driven that car off the curve, coming back from the party in Ennis, drunk.
Don was just six when his father died, and not much more than eight when his mother, Maggie, married Steve Engleman.
In the Catholic Church, Johnny knew, they called seven the age of reason. But the traumas of Don Nichols’s young life had happened before that age. What he was discovering was that, in a weird kind of way, Don Nichols was stuck back there in his unreasonable childhood. Part of him, at least, was frozen in time, trying to re-create the happy summer days when old Pat Nichols would take his boy up to North Meadow Creek or the Beartrap. By all accounts, Pat was a cheerful, easygoing kind of a man. He drank, and he played the guitar, and sang. Pat was a tolerable artist, something you wouldn’t expect in a displaced Oakie gold miner. And he loved to take his son into the mountains, to teach him about the woods, about fishing and hunting.
On the other hand, it was said that Steve Engleman was a stingy, humorless, religious fanatic who believed in discipline, and wasn’t beyond using his razor strap to enforce that discipline. Don Nichols did not take to his stepfather. Nor did he accept the harsh life on the small spread of dryland ranch near Harrison where Steve Engleman established his new family.
According to information from Don’s brother-in-law, Wally Schneiter, Don and Steve Engleman “didn’t agree on anything. Even when he was a kid, Don would argue.” And there were reports that those arguments often ended with beatings. But, Schneiter stated that Don “idolized his real father. They used to hunt and fish together. That’s when he started going up into the Spanish Peaks.”
Johnny tossed a granite chip into the river and watched the smooth band of current twirl the stone down. He’d come to realize that Don Nichols never really had accepted any au
thority after his father was killed. It wasn’t just Steve Engleman, the harsh, inflexible stepfather, that Don could never agree with. It was all authority.
He was smart, so he got along in school fine because the teachers didn’t challenge him.
But he didn’t last too long in the Navy. “He didn’t like the service,” Wally Schneiter explained. “He got out early. Too many orders.”
When he did marry, he was just unable to settle down in any kind of a conventional way. Something kept drawing him back to these mountains. He tried to homestead up around Noxon, near the unspoiled Bob Marshall Wilderness. But then the logging and strip mining started up there, and Don quit in disgust. Johnny was beginning to see that the encroachment of civilization was just an excuse for Don to quit farming. He really didn’t want to live on a farm; that was playing Steve Engleman’s game. Later, when he burnt cow camp cabins and shot heifers, he would make a stronger statement of his feelings about ranchers. Don Nichols wasn’t sure what he wanted when he quit the homestead, but he knew it wasn’t living down on the flats, being part of the “rich man’s rotten system.”
By now, he had a son, a little boy named Dan. Don’s father had named him Donald Boone Nichols. Don Nichols had named his own boy Dan. No middle name, just Dan Nichols.
Daniel Boone.
People who were badly hurt as kids—traumatized—people like Don Nichols, did things out of crazy, almost unexplainable motives. They just didn’t think like the rest of us. Fact was, they did not think about their actions very much at all. But they sure as hell did act. That’s what the psychologist called compulsion. These people were compelled to act that way; they had no choice.
Pat Nichols got himself killed when Don was six. When Dan Nichols turned six, Don Nichols started acting so weird that his wife Verdina finally divorced him.
Then all the custody hassles started, and Don and Dan began their long summer “camping trips” up there on those ridges. Hidden camps. People watchers. Stalking old Dave Wing in the brush. Teaching the boy to move and hide like an animal.
By then, Don Nichols was working winters in a machine shop down in Jackson Hole. There were plenty of fine Wyoming mountains for him to camp in, but he always came back right here, to these granite ramparts.
When Don Nichols took his little boy up to those ridges, and cuddled him through the chill mountain nights and sudden, drenching thunderstorms, it was himself he was holding in his arms; somehow, the scared little boy was Daniel Boone Nichols, frozen in time. Don became Pat Nichols. Danny became the little boy who, this time, never lost his father. They were isolated, separated from the terrible calamities of death and cruelty.
Summers passed. And each year as Danny grew, Don Nichols tried to maintain him as a little boy, under the age of reason.
The people who ran the small stores near Ennis Lake and Jack Creek used to marvel at Don’s strange devotion when he’d bring little Danny down on one of their rare provisioning trips. Don never bought anything personal for himself. He didn’t drink or smoke. He didn’t chase women. But whatever the boy wanted, he always got … ice cream, Hershey bars; he could choose as much as he wanted.
There came years when Danny wanted other things than Butterfingers and Dr. Pepper. Danny got in trouble in high school: truancy, fights, and once he chased some girls with a knife. Otherwise, he was an intelligent kid. He painted. He sang and played the guitar, country music, old songs, just like his grandfather, people said. His real grandfather, Pat Nichols.
His junior year in high school, Danny got hooked up with an older woman, a divorced lady named Sue. She liked his long blond hair, his moody, artistic ways. His lean body. He no longer wanted to spend time in the mountains, not when he had Sue.
Don Nichols was sick at the thought. He blustered. He cried, he bullied and cajoled. Danny dropped out of high school and went down to Jackson to join his father. They worked hard that summer, saving their money. Maybe they were going to build a cabin up above the Beartrap; they didn’t share their plans, even with close friends.
They slept in a car parked in a trailer court. They seemed relaxed and happy together.
Then Don discovered that Danny was spending his money on long-distance calls to Sue, talking to her in Montana for hours on the phone. Something bad happened between them in that trailer court. Some said, Don had a breakdown. Others reported that he beat the boy. Still others said he made Danny swear an oath to abandon Sue and return with him to the mountains.
Whatever really happened, Johnny knew, the result was clear. They moved up to the Madison Range last August and lived right through the winter, through spring and half of summer.
Then they kidnapped Kari Swenson. Kari reported that Don Nichols had hoped they could find an “older woman for my son.” A weird desire. Why an older woman for a nineteen-year-old boy? Unless, of course, Don planned to share that woman with his son. Maybe he was having trouble separating just exactly who was the boy and who was the adult about then.
A mountain family.
Don Nichols, Johnny suddenly saw, can’t let the boy go. In Don’s mind, he and the boy are the same person. If Danny leaves him, Don’s life is ripped apart. In a sense, he dies. Rather than die himself, he will kill again.
Johnny sat down heavily behind the wheel of his car. There was only one place they would hide. Don Nichols’s perfect mountain family could only survive on those timbered mountain islands.
The horse patrols continued. When volunteers and deputies were free from other obligations, they would call Johnny, or meet him at Bettie’s Cafe. There’d be a few minutes of soft-spoken conversation, and they’d set a time and place to meet with their horse trailers.
Although Sue hated the idea, Johnny often rode up there alone on Bambino, checking leads, tracing reports of hidden mining shacks. Johnny was using Bambino so much that the pace was beginning to show even on a strong, deep-chested horse like him. Johnny did not really trust other mounts in the steep, rocky country above the Beartrap.
One day he and the district ranger, Virgil Lindsay, went all the way up Trail Creek, across the Barn Creek drainage to the rim overlooking Fall Creek. They could look down on the river, on soaring hawks. Below them to the west, the irrigated hay fields and the highway looked tiny, distant in time and space. Johnny was beginning to understand why Don Nichols felt superior and invulnerable up here. But they found no signs, no tracks or gardens.
Another day Johnny rode alone up Hammond Creek, right up high to a rocky ridge where he’d been told he might find a mining cabin similar to the one Danny had once drawn for his mother. The cabin was collapsed, obviously abandoned for years, if not decades. In the brushy draw where the cabin’s ruins stood, Johnny found a large mound of fresh bear droppings. Grizzly, a big old bear, judging by the tracks.
A few days later, Johnny led an organized horse posse up Trail Creek and over the ridge into the Barn Creek drainage. They had some more specific information about Don’s garden plots and caches, and he knew it would be foolish to scout these locations alone.
This was the route Don Nichols reportedly used last year when he and Danny had entered the mountains to live here “permanently.” Don was supposed to have pushed a heavily laden bicycle up the game trails here, as high as he could, then cached waterproof sacks of red beans, flour, and other staples.
If they’d been traveling hard since the crime, Johnny knew, they would have to resupply sooner or later. And, if he could get a handle on their main food cache, then he’d be able to plan organized stakeouts and maybe an ambush.
Around noon, the party broke in two, with Dave Wing and John Onstad riding up the faint deer trail to cross over to Cowboy Heaven. They planned to install two “intruder alarms” that Bernie Hubley had obtained from the FBI’s bag of electronic tricks. These devices worked on an electric-eye principle. If anyone entered the cow camp tent again, an invisible beam would be broken and a silent alarm would be broadcast by radio. Dave would have the alarms monitored twenty-four ho
urs a day down at the Forest Service headquarters in Ennis.
Johnny’s party continued searching the steep sides of Barn Creek, looking for signs of a cache or garden. Around two, they were near the top of the drainage, in thick, steep country, with visibility severely restricted by dense timber. The deputies had been picking their way up the gorge in a spread formation, their horses finding footing as best they could.
Now Bob Morton, Merlin Ehlers, and Johnny were waiting for Brad Brisban to work the last slopes of the south side before they climbed out at the top and searched their way north along the ridge.
After waiting maybe twenty minutes, Johnny eased his horse down the steep draw, among the deadfall and blowdowns, trying to get a line of sight on Brad across the gorge. Johnny was riding a borrowed horse today, a big clay-colored gelding about sixteen hands, strong-winded enough, but a little heavy on the rein.
Johnny came out of the thickest timber and found himself in a grassy clearing, cut by the main feeder stream of Barn Creek. The ground was less steep here, but soft from the streambed and brambly. For some reason the horse hunched, and sidestepped fast, as if shying from bear scent. Johnny stood in the left stirrup and worked the gelding’s butt back up slope. There was real danger of a horse spooking on loose ground like this, dancing sideways, then losing his stance where the draw dropped off again.
After a few moments careful work with the reins and nudging with heels, the animal seemed to calm. But then he raised his face, scented deeply with flared nostrils and gave a scared snort. Johnny held him still, but the horse’s ears were forward and alert now, he had a skittish roll to his eyes. There was something out ahead there in those brambles, something close enough to spook this horse.
Johnny was carrying a lever-action deer rifle today. He cocked the hammer and gazed in the direction his mount indicated.
As Johnny moved, the brambles exploded with a slapping rustle. Johnny turned just in time to see a large Franklin grouse bound out of the brush, ten feet from the horse’s nose, a blur of blue-gray feathers. He dug in his heels and hauled down on the reins.
Incident at Big Sky Page 18