Danny literally jumped forward. “She’s not dead? She’s not dead?” His face showed excitement for the first time. “She didn’t die up there?”
Tom patiently answered his questions, but Danny persisted. At least five times he repeated the same question about Kari Swenson, as if the news was too impossibly good to be true. The boy’s stiff aggression that had met Tom on his return to the camp evaporated, and Danny became a happily excited kid, eager to chat and gossip.
But the old man did not seem pleased to hear about Kari Swenson. He interrupted Danny’s banter to tell Tom that there was a lot of hunting pressure over in the Cherry Creek country. He wanted to know which of Tom’s camps were going to be used, so that he and Danny could avoid those areas.
Taking his father’s lead, Danny tried unsuccessfully to dampen his own effusiveness, but his surprise and relief at learning he was not a murderer showed clearly on his face.
Tom said he was surprised to find them camping so close to a trail.
Don said sourly that the storm had caught them out in the open, and they’d had to settle for what shelter they could find.
Once Danny’s excitement tamped down a bit, he asked Tom if he had any food. Danny nodded to the sooty skillet. “All we got is this squirrel stew.” He could not explain their caches of stolen food.
Sorry, Tom replied, his food was in the spike camps.
The old man began to question Tom in great detail about the trails and ridges leading west and southwest. He wanted to know the best route for them to take in order to avoid other hunters.
Tom answered each question in equal detail.
Once more, Danny asked about food. “We can trade you some elk ivory for food,” he said.
Tom could see the desperate, cold hunger in the boy’s eyes.
“You ain’t got any whiskey in that flask of yours, do you?” Don asked.
Tom was surprised; he carried cold tea in a plastic hip flask. They must have seen him drinking from it on the trail that fall. Amazingly, they’d been watching him for months.
Danny asked Tom for a cigar, but Tom carried no tobacco.
Tom turned to Danny. “Don’t you ever miss people up here?”
Danny’s answer was immediate. “We don’t miss people,” he said flatly. “We don’t miss parties.”
Tom Heintz nodded. The boy had said “We don’t miss” as if they were two people with a single mind.
Tom cleared his throat. “Listen,” he began, “I got a camp cook working for me, and she’s armed, got herself a .357, and she does know how to use it. She’s going to shoot first and ask questions later if you show up.”
Don stared into Tom’s eyes, weighing the message.
But Danny broke the tension of the moment. “Well,” he said, grinning broadly, “I kind of lost interest in girls.”
All three laughed loudly under the lonely, dripping branches.
Don wanted to know exactly what had been reported about the shooting in July. Tom tried to reconstruct the press reports as clearly as he could. He stressed the speculation that Don had shot Al Goldstein because Don had felt Danny was threatened.
Don leaned close to Tom’s face and spoke with a sorrowful intensity. “Tom,” he said, “don’t you think only professionals should point guns at people?”
Tom did not fully understand Don’s meaning, but he assumed the old man was implying that amateurs like Al Goldstein had no right to threaten somebody with a gun. Tom saw that Don was in no mood for an argument, so he nodded somber agreement.
After some neutral banter, Tom decided it was time for him to leave. “Fellas,” he said, “good luck.”
He strode out of camp, down the snowy slope to where he’d tied his horse. Surprisingly, Danny marched right along with him, chatting happily, asking more questions, clearly pleased to have someone other than his father to talk to.
Don Nichols’s voice boomed from under the shelter tree. “Danny, what are doing down there? Get back up here right now.”
Tom turned to see Don holding his rifle. The boy stopped in the crusty snow and reluctantly faced his father. Then Danny trudged back up the slope to join the old man who was half hidden beneath the icy spruce boughs.
As Tom Heintz rode down the trail to find Matt and Doug, he pondered the meeting and the decisions he now must make about alerting the law. It was after three; on a day like this, darkness would come in two hours, well before a large posse could be organized and ride in here. That meant there’d be a lot of confusion in the darkness … snow machines, tracking dogs, dozens of armed deputies, maybe even the famous SWAT team again. In any event, lots of guns, lots of nervous cops. But with this wind gusting to sixty miles an hour, tracking would be impossible; already his earlier horse-track had vanished.
In the morning, the law would be all over these slopes. Very possibly Don and Danny would be chased into one of Tom’s camps and they’d hold up there, taking Tom’s guests as hostage.
Tom had three camps and twelve clients spread across a wide, difficult piece of back country. If the law came in here like mechanized Gang Busters, there was a real chance his people might get hurt.
Medicine Lake Outfitters was Tom’s whole life. If he lost a hunter to a police crossfire or to a bullet from Don Nichols during a hostage stand-off, his business would be ruined.
Tom stopped his horse and looked up at the lowering cloud deck. He had reached his decision. In the next two days, he would pull out his hunters and the camps, then he would report his meeting with Don and Dan Nichols.
Tom and his hands rode twenty-five miles a day for the next three days. They pulled back their clients and loaded up the spike camps. The weather was terrible, but no one complained much.
By five-thirty Sunday morning, Tom was back at his place near Three Forks. He called Bob Morton of the Forest Service and made his report. Early Sunday morning, Dave Wing called Johnny France. An outfitter named Tom Heintz, Dave said, had seen the Nicholses up near Willow Swamp; he’d talked to them. It was the first positive sighting since July.
Dave Wing continued his report. “Heintz says they’re headed west, Johnny, toward the Beartrap.”
“Well, all right,” Johnny finally answered. “I guess that’s good news.”
“Heintz also says that they’re hungry, Johnny, real hungry.”
“That’s good, Dave,” Johnny answered. “That means that they’ve gone through all that food they stole. I kind of figured they would. It looked like a lot of provisions on the burglary report, but we forget how many calories a person needs to survive up there in this weather. I think they’re gonna start getting sloppy now.”
Johnny realized that the Nicholses had gone through almost sixty pounds of stolen food between the first and the third week of October. Obviously, the harsh weather increased their daily calorie requirement. Living out in the open, they needed more food. The game up there was scarce. That meant they’d have to hunt in the lower country, then hole up in their cave or dugout back up high.
With this early winter, there’d be chances for tracking that hadn’t existed in the summer. Now, he knew, the Nicholses were trapped in a vice; one jaw was the weather, the other was the law.
The pursuit was redoubled from both the Madison and the Gallatin sides. Deputies on snow machines and on horseback scoured the country around Willow Swamp. They found no tracks because the squally snow continued through the whole next week.
That Wednesday, Dave Wing and Bernie Hubley returned to the Cowboy Heaven cow camp and planted brand new beeper bugs in sacks of pancake mix and flour. These bugs were a new, experimental model that represented, they’d been told, “the state of the art.” If the Nicholses disturbed those food supplies, alarms would ring down at the Forest Service office in Ennis.
November dragged along, cold, snowy. Johnny picked up some frostbite on his face, up in the Beartrap, searching alone one gray afternoon.
On November 11, Detective Bill Pronovost received a letter from the FBI finge
rprint section in Washington. They’d developed five fingerprints from the books and soda cans found at the burglarized cabins in Beckman’s Flats. None of the prints matched those of Don Nichols.
On November 15th, Johnny and Sue’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Johnny joined a night patrol to the steep, wind-blasted slopes of Blaze Mountain. The snow had pretty well been blown off these ridges, and the lawmen wore forest-pattern camies, not white snow suits.
They were acting on a report of a suspected cave camp on a rocky spur side-ridge of Blaze Mountain. This camp, the report stated, would be an ideal winter hideout for the Nicholses. The plan called for about half a dozen lawmen to drive in as far as they could after dark, then trek the rest of the way up the slope. Once more, the FBI had furnished its high-tech support, this time in the form of night-vision goggles.
They met in the gym of the Law and Justice center in Bozeman, and Gary Lincoln of the FBI passed out the night goggles and instructed the men on their use. The party included John Onstad, Jim DeBoer, the game warden; Deputy Wally Schumaker; and Dave Wing.
Then they departed Bozeman in three all-terrain vehicles, hoping to reach the slopes of Blaze Mountain by 0200. Driving in on the Spanish Creek road, they doused their headlights, and all three drivers steered by the weird lime green images in their night goggles. The green patterns reminded Johnny of his night flight with the Probeye. That seemed like a thousand years ago.
Near the trailhead, they spotted a big herd of elk, browsing in some timber. Evidently, the blacked-out vehicles were effective because the elk didn’t spook until the last minute, when the sound of the tires on the frozen mud hit the trees.
The hike in was nasty, cold, and dangerous. When they finally staked out the suspect ridge, it was almost daylight.
Johnny’s fancy night-vision goggles started breaking down as he and Dave climbed out to their position on a steep, rocky spur. One of the side brackets had come loose, and he could not focus on close objects, only on the distant ridges. They waited in the dark; when they had enough daylight, they’d assault the cave—if they could find it.
Just before dawn, Johnny slipped on the smooth rock, fell backwards, and tumbled down the slope into the dark brush. His right hand jammed in a crevice and dislocated his thumb. Hanging upside down in the tangled brush, his night goggles off his head, he cradled his mini-Ruger with his elbow and used his left hand to yank his right thumb back into place. The pain almost made him pass out.
Just after dawn, Brad Brisban and his German shepherd, Bear, found a small cave on the side of the ridge. But the hole only went back about five feet and showed no signs that it had ever served as a shelter for man or animal.
Johnny stared at the chill gray slopes. His hand throbbed like a drilled tooth.
The mountains were empty.
Toward the end of November, the lawmen on the Madison side met in Dave Wing’s office to devise a new operational plan. In the event the Nicholses were sighted again, Johnny and Dave wanted to have a fast-reaction capture plan that would involve a small group of experienced officers.
They were tired of big, elaborate productions like the Blaze Mountain high-tech fiasco. And they wanted local boys who knew this country and would be ready to move on a phone call. Each man would prepare a small backpack with some rations and water, and each man would keep his radio and weapons ready. The alert code had to be kept clear and simple. Once a man was contacted by phone and was given the code word, he would know what was happening.
“Well,” Johnny said, leaning across Dave’s conference table, “what should we call the code word?”
They all looked at Dave. He sat stolidly at his place, then looked up at the big map of the Beartrap. His eye fell on Barn Creek. “Yeah … well, let’s call her Barnstorm.”
In November, a reporter from the Washington Times who called himself W. J. Elvin III came out to Montana to interview Johnny. Toward the end of the long taped interview session, Mr. Elvin asked Johnny how long he planned to continue the pursuit of the two fugitives.
Johnny pondered the question a moment, then gave his answer. “Well,” he said, “I’ve got about twelve years until I retire.” He paused and considered his words. “There’s another chapter to the story; it just hasn’t been written yet.”
PART 4
Barnstorm
16
The Beartrap
December 11–12, 1984
Winter now dominated the high country. Cold and snow were a constant presence. At night, the temperature fell to thirty degrees below zero. Some days when the north wind scoured the rock ridges, crippling frostbite hid in the deceptive sunshine.
The last of the big game moved down from the tree line and deep blue timber of the Spanish Peaks to bunch up in the wooded gullies and foothills of the Cherry and Spanish Creek drainages. Now that hunting season was over, mule deer and elk congregated in huge herds below Cowboy Heaven and the trailhead ranger stations. Every day when the cowboys of the Flying D Ranch rode out to spread feed among their scattered herds of yearling heifers and cows, they saw large bunches of shaggy elk, browsing in the lodgepoles, just above the snowy ranges. The deer and elk left the timber at night and grazed among the standing cattle.
For a month, Don Nichols and his son were able to hole up in dugout camps hidden high in the Beartrap. They came down to shoot a deer or young elk when they needed meat, traveling at night to avoid hunters and the game wardens who patrolled the slopes. But now the game was too far below their camps for them to replenish their meat without risk of leaving tracks that might be seen by cowboys or deputies. Snowmobilers and cross-country skiers had replaced the elk hunters on the lower ranges. With every hunting trip below the frozen sanctuary of the Beartrap, they faced the danger of ambush or, at the least, sighting by some zealous skier.
And, Don soon realized, there were more than amateur sportsmen on the northern slopes. Almost every clear day brought the frightening intrusion of low-flying airplanes, shiny, high-winged Cessnas, quartering the snowbound meadows and gullies, searching for tracks. Some men on snow machines rode higher than the others; they wore white suits, not red hunters’ vests, and they carried rifles across their handle bars long after the elk hunters had disappeared.
If he and Danny had a good supply of staples, Don knew, they could survive the winter on squirrels and grouse as their only source of meat. But they had almost exhausted their flour and beans, their stolen Crisco and Bisquick. They needed fats and carbohydrates; they needed calories to endure the killing pressure of the wind.
Another burglary raid on the cabins of the Gallatin Canyon would be suicide. Hitting the camp at Cowboy Heaven was equally risky. Judging from the snowmobile and foot tracks, the law had staked the camp out for ambush several times during the hunting season.
And there was another, less obvious, but equally compelling force that drove Don Nichols and his son down from the icy safety of the Beartrap. Ever since their meeting with the elk outfitter, Tom Heintz, Danny had been acting strange. Distant, moody, stubborn. Now Danny bitterly complained about the cold hardship, about the hunger and the isolation they had to endure. He believed what Tom had said about the girl, that she had lived, that people all felt her shooting had been an accident. Danny now realized that he had not killed her, that he did not face a murder charge. The boy knew enough about the law from his juvenile troubles down in Three Forks to see that he could probably bargain a guilty plea of some kind for a light sentence if it ever came to that. But Danny also understood that his father had no such option.
Before Tom Heintz, they had been united by their common guilt. Two murderers could not expect mercy from the law. For all they knew, they’d killed a man and a woman. Down in the valley, they faced ambush and death. Up here, their survival was a matter of daily pain and vigilance, but surrender was unthinkable.
After Tom Heintz, they were no longer united by blood guilt. Now Danny was less willing to accept the dead white cold, the hunger, the sour fear that
came with the whine of a distant snow machine or the drone of an airplane.
For the first time in their life together, Danny began to openly challenge Don’s authority. They argued at first about small matters … an easy source of dry wood, the best way to stalk a deer … the domestic fabric of their daily lives. Then Danny’s mood darkened. He grew sarcastic, mocking. For the first time, he laughed at his father.
Now, when Don hit the boy, Danny hit back. They screamed in rage beneath the silent, snowy lodgepoles.
At night, they were forced to huddle together in their double sleeping bag in rancid, smoky union, waiting out the long darkness.
Finally, Don proposed a plan, and Danny accepted it.
They would cache their sidearms, their heavier tools, their plastic tarps and extra ammunition. Traveling light and fast, they would descend the Beartrap Canyon, then cross the Madison River highway bridge at night and strike out across the hills, northwest toward Harrison. Don knew that country well; as a boy, he’d trapped and hunted there. The willows around Harrison Lake were dense, good cover, full of game in the winter. They could build a hidden camp that no lawman would ever find. And Don argued that the law would never think of looking for them there, down on the flats.
They had twenty-five dollars in cash. Once they’d made their camp, Danny could get cleaned up and walk into the store in Harrison. No one knew the boy in town. With his hair cut and his beard off, he’d be impossible to recognize.
Twenty-five dollars would buy an awful lot of red beans, flour, vegetable oil and sugar. The white tail deer and rabbits in the willows were almost tame, Don said. There was good shelter from the wind. There they could live out the worst of the winter in relative safety and comfort.
In the spring, they’d hit some outlying ranches and cabins for more staples, then climb back to the Beartrap to build new secret camps and plant their gardens, high in the steep draws where the deputies never went. By next winter, they’d be better prepared, with two or three crops of turnips and rutabagas, with smoked deer haunches and sacks of sun-dried berries.
Incident at Big Sky Page 21