Soothing the nervous horse with murmured praise and a solid neck pat, Johnny found himself smiling at his own fright.
A moment later he caught sight of Brad Brisban, high up to the right, a big, solid figure on a paint horse, working his assigned grid with patient determination.
Johnny put his rifle back to half-cock and scanned the brambles ahead. For some reason, the horse was still a little spooked from that grouse. The tall gelding’s ears were twitching and his eye bad. Well, Johnny thought, he’s probably not used to seeing grouse so tame.
The strawberry bushes were just tall enough to conceal Danny, but not if he rose to brush away the flies. The posse had come out of nowhere, down the sides of the draw, two riders with rifles. But he knew there’d be more. If he turned, he could see both riders. And he could raise his rifle. But he stayed still. He would not make a move for his rifle unless the rider on the big gray horse crossed that last bit of soft ground and actually started into the bramble patch.
Danny waited, his heart thudding in his ears, the flies feasting. How could this posse have gotten so close without Dad seeing them? It was real trouble. Armed deputies right up here at the top of Barn Creek, without Dad even guessing they were coming.
A grouse popped through the brambles behind him, and Danny grabbed for his rifle.
He heard the deputy’s horse spook sideways, and the soft commands the man spoke to control the horse.
After a while, Danny heard the horseman move off. But Danny did not move. He waited in the berry patch, worrying about his Dad.
They searched the top of the Beartrap three times in the next week. No signs, no tracks. The intruder alarm at Cowboy Heaven never sounded.
Later in the month, Johnny got a call from a psychic in California. The man said he hated to bother the busy sheriff, but he was having a “recurrent vision.” The Nicholses were underground, he said, in a cave, or a mine shaft.
“Do you have mines around there, Sheriff?”
“Yessir,” Johnny answered, “we sure do.”
“Well,” the man continued, “in my vision, I see them and I hear three words … yellow, medicine, and thief.”
Johnny repeated the words. “I’ll look into it,” he said.
Johnny was a good enough cop to understand that psychics—just like the tracking guru—can sometimes be helpful.
A mine shaft or cave. Yellow. Medicine. Thief.
He searched the Courthouse records for mining claims. For several days, other duties interrupted. Then he went back to the records.
He found what he wanted late that afternoon. Claim number 3834 in the section that covered the north side of Beartrap Creek near Cherry Creek, was an old gold mine called the Sulphurt.
Sulphurt? Sulphur … yellow.
The next mine over was called the Modesto and the owner of the Sulphur was called Jesse Wood.
Yellow. Medicine … sulphur and molasses … medicine. Jesse … James.
Thief.
They checked that mine late one afternoon, when the Nicholses wouldn’t be expecting a posse.
And they kept their group small; Loren Tucker, the county attorney, joined the party, so did Bernie Hubley. But the rest were the hard core, Dave Wing, Jerry Mason, and Johnny France.
When they made their careful assault on the mine, they found no tracks in the dust and scree around the splintered timber entrance.
Johnny went in alone. He wasn’t grandstanding; in a closed dark space, it was better not to have two people firing from the same direction. That was a good way to get shot in the back.
An hour later he was out, sweaty, plastered with dust, scratched from broken-down old shoring timber.
Nothing. The mine, he said, had not been entered for years. But the men guarding the entrance could see beneath the dust smears and scratches that Johnny France was shaken by his experience down that black, narrow shaft. It creaked and shifted in there, Johnny explained. A little bit, uh, scary.
When he got home that night, Sue told him there’d been an earthquake in the area.
“Did you feel it?” she asked, while he scrubbed in the shower.
Johnny turned off the water. “An earthquake?”
“Yes,” she said. “They said on the radio a strong one. But nobody was hurt, I guess. Otherwise you’d hear about it.”
“I expect so.”
15
Madison Range
October–November, 1984
Some years in the high country, June passes for spring, July and August are all the summer you get, and September has to make do for fall. The other eight months are winter. Some years, the autumn will linger on in a long blaze of golden aspens, and the real snow won’t come until Christmas. That’s called an “open winter” in Madison County, an exception to the normal pattern.
The fall of 1984 showed early signs of a long, harsh freeze, relented, then hunkered down again for a real cattle killer.
Johnny France watched the weather closely. He knew that, if he had any valuable allies in this case, winter had to rank right up near the top of the list. Blizzards and long stretches of below-zero weather would probably force the Nicholses down from the highest, coldest, and most inaccessible parts of the range.
An early onset of a bad winter would thin the game up there, driving the herds of deer and elk to lower country. Deep snow would slow the two fugitives down, and snow would mean that they would finally start leaving tracks. Long, unrelenting cold would force them to rely on fires, both day and night—not just little squaw-wood cook fires, either, but actual campfires, banked pine logs that would burn through the night.
Johnny watched the season change. Water foul moved south through the intermountain flyway. The duck and goose hunters came and went. All along the high peaks, the naked stone was now plastered white with fresh snow. As he rode the Beartrap, searching for dugouts and tracks, alone or with his deputies, Johnny saw the elk herds forming up for the mating; their coats acquired shaggy substance as they instinctively prepared for the first real blast of Montana cold.
Unlike elk or mule deer, however, Don Nichols and his boy couldn’t just grow thicker coats and scratch beneath the snow for frozen grass when winter struck. They would have to survive by killing game and by returning to their caches for warm clothes and staples. And that left them two choices, either come down from the high country and risk capture in the valleys or return to their caches in the Beartrap and risk being seen by elk and deer hunters, then tracked by the posses the hunters alerted. In any event, if the winter closed in fast and hard, the Nicholses would be obliged to follow the game down to the lower elevations.
As September sped by, with the usual display of fine autumn foilage and the endless, frustrating searches in the mountains, Johnny began to stake his hopes on a winter capture. Dave Wing and other veterans of the manhunt agreed. Snow would make tracking easier, if the snow stayed on the ground long enough for a posse to follow a fresh track back to a hidden camp or dugout. Montana snow often blew away from the high ridges and exposed draws soon after falling, to drift deep in the lower gorges and coulees. A good outfitter—or someone as good at evasion as Don Nichols—learned that you could make fast time traveling the exposed ridges after a blizzard because the cold north wind that usually followed a deep snowfall scoured any treeless country bare of snow within hours.
But Don and Danny couldn’t survive up there on the high ridges for the whole winter, so, sooner or later, they would leave tracks down lower.
Winter and the hunting season gave the law enforcement officers another advantage, which they made plans to exploit. Both hunters and snowmobilers frequented the high country after the first snows. Therefore, armed men on horseback or riding “snow machines,” as they were called out here, would not necessarily alarm the Nicholses. Hunters often spent the entire day away from their tents, stalking deer and elk. The Nicholses would certainly know that hunters’ camps would be a source of food, including both staples like flour and sugar, and also
the sweets that Don Nichols seemed to crave.
What Don Nichols would have no way of knowing was that a good many of the “hunters” working the edges of the Beartrap this fall would be armed lawmen. Some planned to stay behind in ambush, hidden in their bait tents, while the rest of the party patrolled.
Officers would make a show of provisioning certain camps, then an equally obvious show of lashing down the tent flaps and generally securing things, as if they planned to return a little later in the season. Don would have no way of guessing that these officers had hidden high-tech tracking “bugs” in the sacks of pancake flour and brown sugar.
These electronic bugs were furnished by the FBI; they were tiny, but they could broadcast a powerful radio beacon that would lead a posse directly to the source, if the Nicholses made the mistake of raiding the baited camps.
Johnny worked intensely with Dave Wing, Bob Morton, and Bernie Hubley. Their planning took on the precision and detail of a modern commando operation.
More and more, Johnny France became convinced that cunning and luck were going to count, once the snow started falling. Luck would have to take care of itself. He worked on cunning.
Early in October, Johnny got a call from Kari Swenson’s parents, Bob and Jan. They asked if they and Bob Schaap could come over to Ennis to talk about the details of the initial search-and-rescue operation. Fine, Johnny said, we can talk over a cup of coffee at Bettie’s Cafe.
He was looking forward to the meeting because he’d been too busy to ever tell the Swensons about how brave he thought Kari had been the day she was shot. Johnny had seen his fair share of crime victims, and he knew that a person’s true character often emerged in the aftermath of violence.
What he had seen of Kari Swenson that morning in the camp clearing told him that she was a kid who combined both mental and physical toughness with an unusual degree of personal courage. Kari had not panicked. She had remained coherent, despite the hemorrhage, the pain, and the encroaching shock. She had even smiled when he lifted her to the stretcher and said “thank you.” Johnny had thought that Kari was one tough, classy kid. Now he welcomed the chance to tell her parents.
But the meeting did not stay friendly very long.
When he shook hands with Jan Swenson, Johnny said, “You have a remarkable daughter. You have a girl who’s a real tribute to the American athlete. She’s a tough kid.”
The Swensons were an attractive couple. Jan was a neat, fit woman in her forties, with obvious good taste in clothes and a sense of presence. Bob Swenson reminded Johnny of Clark Kent in the old Superman series on TV: a tall, well-built guy who seemed to wear his glasses as a disguise. It was easy to see where Kari got her beauty and physical endurance.
Jan Swenson smiled, and they took their chairs at a side table in a small alcove past the cash register, away from the ranchers and miners in the booths. Outside, it was a bright, windy fall afternoon with chunks of dead sage blowing in the half-deserted street.
Almost as soon as the coffee cups were filled, the Swensons and Bob Schaap began picking at him. They clearly weren’t here on a social call, and they just as clearly did not intend to listen to his version of the story.
Why, they wanted to know, hadn’t the Madison County Sheriff’s Department started a night search for Kari as soon as she’d been reported missing?
Johnny began to explain that the department had not received word of the missing person until well after dark. But they insisted that he should have “saturated the mountain” with searchers, working “grid” patterns. If he had conducted a proper search-and-rescue effort, they implied, Al Goldstein would be alive and Kari unwounded.
Again, Johnny tried in his slow, soft-spoken way to explain his reasons for not deploying men at night, in rough country, when there’d been a bear scare and when he knew there already were armed men from the other side of the valley out on patrol.
Schaap and the Swensons did not seem to want to listen. The thrust of their argument was that Madison County in general and Sheriff Johnny France in particular ran an archaic, badly organized search-and-rescue team.
Johnny stared bitterly at Bob Schaap’s well-groomed beard. This was pretty ironic, he thought, because in the first days of the manhunt, Gallatin County Sheriff John Onstad had been the most critical of Bob Schaap’s original amateur search-and-rescue effort. It had been Bob Schaap who had dispatched armed men to the hills to search, before calling the Gallatin County sheriff’s office. Schaap seemed to have called Jay Cosgrove, the resident deputy with proper authority, only as an afterthought.
As to “saturating” the mountain with skilled searchers who could follow a “grid,” Johnny tried to point out that the thick country up there did not allow easy map reference or compass orientation, even in daylight and certainly not at night. This was steep, thickly timbered mountainside, not cleared ski slopes.
Finally, Bob Swenson, in his cool, professorial hauteur, summarized their collective feelings. Johnny’s search-and-rescue attempt, he said, had been “badly bungled.”
Johnny almost lost what little remained of his composure. He was tempted to remind them that it had been him, the bungling sheriff of Madison County, who had arranged the helicopter with the cable litter that had saved their daughter’s life. It was Johnny France who’d had the foresight to realize a lost jogger in the woods might be badly injured and need vertical medevac. And, he knew, if they had tried carrying Kari out of that thick country, her internal hemorrhage might have worsened, and if so, she might be dead today.
But he didn’t have it in him, mad as he was, to lay that one on Kari’s parents. Instead, he let his anger flow coldly in his words. “You people,” he began, “come into Madison County and expect all these wonderful services from us … hundreds of volunteers to saturate the mountain … and you expect magical results. Well, perhaps you should concentrate all that leisure time you’ve got for jogging and skiing over in Gallatin County, so they’ll be responsible for you, not us.”
Bob Swenson leaned across the table. “That,” he said, “sounds like a threat.”
Johnny realized that he might be skating on thin legal ice here. Don’t let them rattle me so bad, he thought. “Well,” he replied for the legal record, “I didn’t consider it a threat, just some good advice.”
Now Jan Swenson intervened with a calming, rational tone. She had names of local avalanche experts, people from the Big Sky ski patrol who could train Johnny’s people. But the more she went on, the more Johnny’s anger got stoked up again.
Johnny stared out the window at the dusty street. Apples and oranges, he thought. Madison County and Gallatin County were two different worlds. The people from Bozeman go up there to play, for recreation. People over here use the mountains to make their living. My rescue team are ranchers and outfitters, every one of them a skilled horseman who’s grown up in this valley and who knows those steep drainages. Their people are well-meaning amateurs, young guys like Al Goldstein who had a romantic picture of what Western life was all about. The poor guy never should have been sent up there that way, not armed with a .380 pistol.
The meeting broke up with a chill. There were no smiles or handshakes on departure.
Back in the booths, Johnny’s friends stared down at their coffee cups, not eager to share his foul mood, or to embarrass him by letting on they’d heard it all. Johnny refilled his coffee cup and stood in the alcove, watching the wind trash tumble down the street. His gut was pulsing with frustrated anger. He felt like smashing something. Those people come over here from the Gallatin side and try to …
The anger began to thin. He sighed and released a clenched, stale breath. These were the girl’s parents, after all. They had a reason to be angry. Grief, he realized, grief and guilt do strange things to otherwise normal people. The Swensons were grieving for their daughter, for all the pain and sorrow that Kari has had to suffer, for her ruined career, for her nightmares and fears. Bob Schaap was probably wound up tight with guilt about Al Golds
tein, but was too stubborn a Dutchman to admit it.
Johnny drained the last of his coffee, nodded to his puzzled friends, and stepped outside into the bright, chill wind. Instinctively, he gazed up at the high country, at the new snow around Fan Mountain.
The insight came fast with the cold sunshine. Don Nichols, Johnny realized, was a Madison County problem; Don was the product of this land, of the harsh imperatives that drove old Pat Nichols out of the Dust Bowl and up here to hack out a living for his family in the deep rock shafts of the Boaz Mine. If Don had been raised beneath the cottonwoods in the quiet old neighborhoods of Bozeman, there would have been social workers and headshrinkers to counsel the troubled boy after his father’s death. That was the kind of rational, organized world the Swensons came from. But Don Nichols did not. Instead of social workers, he got a dryland ranch, the Bible, and liberal doses of his stepfather’s razor strap. Country and city. Old West and New.
Don Nichols, Johnny knew, came from this land; he was cut from the same cloth as the people whose job it was to hunt him down and bring him to justice.
In the eyes of the Swensons, maybe, the Nicholses were just trash. And maybe they saw Johnny that way, too, a “bungler.”
Johnny walked sadly through the fall wind toward his dusty car. He would have preferred winning that little shouting match with Schaap and the Swensons. He would have liked to explain to them what Ron Alles, a leader of the most-elite federal law enforcement agency’s best field team, the U.S. Marshal’s SOG, had told him about the futility of “saturating” the mountainside with searchers. He would have liked to take Schaap and the Swensons down to Dave Wing’s office to show them the bank of electronic listening devices that were monitoring the equipment they’d installed up above the Beartrap; he would have enjoyed sitting them down to read the details of the classified search and patrol operations about to begin. He did not need to be lectured to about “modern” methods.
Incident at Big Sky Page 19