Another winter, another spring and summer. The law would forget them. Don and his boy would have their life together in the high freedom of the mountains, away from the system and the vengeance of the law. Danny agreed. He seemed to like the idea of a hidden camp, sheltered from the wind, the searching airplanes and ambushes.
They shot a deer above Beartrap Creek. Here they had good cover, and they carefully butchered the deer, cutting the quarters into thick steaks. In a rocky cleft, they built a hot, smokeless fire of squaw wood and fried up a dozen steaks, the heart and liver. When they’d eaten their fill, they packed the remaining meat in two plastic sacks, one of cooked steaks, one of raw. Then they rested, waiting for night.
The clear, windy afternoon grew still. An overcast crept across the sky from the west, and the shadowy canyon grew even darker. Below them, the gray water of the Madison rapids churned between twisted shores of sugary spume ice.
The river was their obstacle. It was too deep and cold to wade. There were only two bridges within twenty miles, the wooden bridge below Ennis Lake, and the “silver” right-angle highway bridge at the north end of the Beartrap. Men from the power station crossed the wooden bridge at all hours of the day and night, and the road out from Ennis Lake to McAllister led past ranches and a busy crossroad. Their only safe route was the highway bridge.
Once across, they would be in the lonely scrub timber and rangeland, laced with abandoned mine drifts, that led all the way to Harrison Lake. It was only eight or ten miles from the bridge to the lake, a distance they could easily travel in darkness. There’d been no snow for several days, and the north wind that blew each day had cleaned the ridges down to brown, frozen range grass. The traveling would not be hard, and—most important—they would leave no tracks for the airplanes to spot. If, for any reason, they got caught out by day-light, there were stands of cedar and spruce at the tops of most draws where they could hole up, living off their cooked meat without risking a fire.
They waited in their gully, the last rocky highground above the canyon floor. In a few hours they would leave the wilderness, their first trip into civilization since raiding the cabins in Gallatin Canyon in October.
The snow began to fall after they were across Beartrap Creek, marching through the darkness, north along the gravel Forest Service road. Because it was already night, and because they were sheltered by the steep walls of the gorge, they could not immediately judge the intensity of the storm. If they had been able to feel the blizzard’s force, they might have turned back to seek shelter in one of the side canyons. But, with the river roaring among the icy boulders and frozen snags, and the overcast hunkered right down on the ridgetops, they had no way of gauging the savage force of the storm.
As they trudged along the gravel track the snow began to drift, ankle-deep at first, then up to their knees. The river widened and the canyon walls dropped away. And the blizzard hit them with full force. They hunched beneath their packs and plodded on.
For a long time the snow blasted them from across the dark water of the upper Madison. Then the wind stopped as if some gigantic vent had been closed. The snow spiraled straight down with silent intensity. Already, there was a foot of dense powder on the ground, level on the flat surface of the track, drifted into soft curves on the dark slopes to their right. Pines and junipers stood like white domes in the nearby darkness.
Sometime around midnight, they reached the north end of the Beartrap road. Ahead of them in the snowy night, they could distinguish the dark angles of the steel highway bridge. Don called a halt, and they took cover behind an icy boulder to watch for passing cars, or maybe a deputy’s patrol vehicle staking out the bridge.
The snow was less intense now, but thick enough to prevent a decent view of the draws and ridges across the river to the west.
While they waited, numb and winded in the snow, several pickups passed, moving slowly on the icy pavement of Route 84. Danny grumbled about the cold, and about their exposed position out here in a snowy field on the edge of the main highway between Ennis and Bozeman. Still, Don waited.
It would take them, he knew, at least ten minutes to move from this cover, cross the bridge, walk down the highway a few hundred yards and up a draw to the hilltops above. In the snowy night he thought he could see a dark band of timber climbing the opposite slope, but he couldn’t be certain. They might need that timber, he now realized. The wind had died away completely, leaving a deep, uniform snow cover across those hills. Without a wind, they would leave obvious tracks, right out of the Beartrap, across the bridge, and up into the draws across the river. In the morning, some patrolling lawman would find their tracks and call in another airplane. The plane would then spot their trail, leading across the snow hills, right to Harrison Lake.
Off to their right, the brown cube of the Trapper Springs Store stood dark and isolated in the night. Once, Don had considered this store as a source of food, but he then realized that a burglary on this side of the range would alert the law to search for them over here. They would bypass this lonely store for the security of Harrison Lake.
An hour later, when no car had passed for a long time, they rose stiffly and scurried out of their cover, dogtrotting tiredly toward the looming shape of the bridge. When they were on the plowed highway, crunching through the crusty slabs at the roadside, a yellow glow cut the night from behind them, and they dove for cover in the deeply drifted ditch. A ranch truck rattled past, throwing up a buckshot spray of ice. Again they waited.
Then they climbed out of the ditch and trotted across the icy bridge, their boot treads pinging on the exposed metal bridge joints.
They were over the river, on the west slope of the Beartrap for the first time in a year. Moving fast down the highway, they tried to judge the country that rose ahead of them. Here the road swung back south, following the river toward the Beartrap. They had completed a hairpin loop; now the western slope was on their right. A few hundred yards down the road, the hillside was a steep scrub-forest of juniper and Christmas tree fir. But Don could feel a draw opening ahead.
Half a mile from the bridge, they found their draw. But instead of plunging right into the snowy mouth of the gully, Don backtracked to a rocky outcropping. The climb would be more difficult, but they would leave fewer tracks.
He was right about the difficulty of the climb. Exhausted from the long trek against the blizzard wind, they were in poor condition to pick their way up icy shelves of crumbling quartz. Don fell and wrenched his knee. Danny tumbled off a sharp, snow-covered angle. They swore in the cold darkness, cursing the rocky slope, and each other.
Now the snow had stopped altogether. Chunks of chill-black, starry sky opened above them. The snowy dome of the ridgetop hung over them, white, silent.
By the time they reached the top of the draw, they were battered, numb and winded.
Danny sat on the snow, staring dully at his outstretched legs.
Don dumped his pack and staggered around the slope, searching for a decent, overhanging tree where they could make camp. They needed rest, and, more importantly, they needed cover from airplanes. There was open rangeland ahead of them, and they couldn’t cross it until the wind had blown the ridges clean of snow.
Don found a tall, bushy limber pine standing alone on the edge of the drop-off to the steepest part of the draw. He couldn’t judge the country above, but it looked pretty open. Here the rock shelves around the tree dipped to provide natural cover and shelter from the wind. When he squatted beneath the tree’s lower boughs, he couldn’t see the white curve of the highway, five hundred yards to the east and eight hundred feet below him.
There was plenty of squaw wood in the low branches, and nearby junipers and firs would provide even more. And the level rock offered an excellent sleeping platform. Once the shelf was padded well with insulating pine boughs, he and Danny could curl up and wait for the wind to blow the ridges above clean of snow.
Don rose to his full, stooped height and whistled in the cold dar
kness. In a minute, he knew, Danny would come with the packs, and they could prepare their camp.
He was sore and thirsty; his face was both numb and burned from the blizzard snow. But they were out of the Beartrap now, across the river, on their way to safety. They had escaped almost five months of manhunt.
Now they simply had to wait for wind, and they would be free of pursuit.
Daylight came, cold, gray. Windless. Camp robber jays sounded down in the brushy draw. Up here on the shoulder of the gully, the snow was almost knee deep.
Don could see the twisting snake of their tracks leading up the rocky side of the draw, right to this lonely tree. Their camp beneath the limber pine was in the last of the scrub timber that climbed the sides of the draw.
Above them, the expanse of snow rose in an unbroken dome to the wide summit of the ridge. There was almost no timber to be seen up there, just wide-open, snowbound rangeland.
And the snow was deep, undisturbed by wind. Traveling through that country would be like a skywriter leaving a track across a cloudless blue sky.
As Don stood in the cover of their camp tree, a vehicle whined below him on the highway. Carefully, he edged around the tree and stared down, frowning. In the darkness, under the weight of their fatigue, the road had seemed much further away. Now, in the overcast morning, he could see how exposed they were.
They had no choice. The wind had to blow soon. This was Montana in December. And they could only wait for the wind to clear the white dome and ridges above them.
Even from this low on the hillside, Don could see the geometry of the fence-lines quartering the snowy ridges above. In the darkness, they had climbed the draw onto a working ranch, its pastures divided by barbed wire fences and gates. Where there were pastures, Don knew, there would be cowboys, and cowboys paid a lot of attention to man tracks on their land. There was only one route open to him and Danny—up that slope, across the exposure of that snowy dome of rangeland, and out into the flats to the northwest below. But they would have to wait for the wind before crossing those pastures.
They had meat, some flour, and some cracked horse oats they’d stolen from a cow camp manger. For a day or two, they could live on the cooked deer steaks. But water would be a problem. In the dry cold, thirst was constant, and they’d have to build a fire to melt snow. As far as Don could see, there was no live water in this draw, and he wasn’t about to risk leaving more tracks by scouting around for a spring.
Danny lay bundled in the sleeping bags beneath the snow-heavy boughs of the limber pine. In a while, Don would wake him, so that they could gather more wood and cut some better sleeping boughs.
But now he let the boy sleep. Danny looked so small and peaceful when he slept.
All day, the gray overcast hung low on the distant ridgetops. Gray, chill. Windless. They waited under their tree, and around them, the snow stood deep.
Below the draw, pickups and cars droned along the snowy highway.
They ate their cold cooked deer meat, chewing slowly, rubbing the creamy fat from their whiskers.
Afternoon came, then dusk.
They waited, cold and thirsty, huddled in the thin cover of their tree.
17
Gold Springs Ranch
December 13, 1984
By mid-morning, Roland Moore realized he’d have to ride up to the top and chop water for the cattle. It would be the first time for the tedious chore this winter. The blizzard of Tuesday had been followed by a skiff of light snow Wednesday and some real cold weather overnight. Now, on this windless Thursday morning, the sky was clearing to a bright, frigid day. The noon temperature probably wouldn’t get up much above ten or so, not enough to melt the ice in his high stock tank.
Cattle needed plenty of water in this dry cold. It took a lot of energy to move around in the deep snow and graze on the frozen range grass. Some people didn’t realize that about cows. But then, some people weren’t as careful about ranching as Roland Moore.
The care he took with the Cold Springs Ranch was the product of several factors. Most importantly, he and his wife, Elaine, had acquired ownership of the property ten years earlier. Elaine’s parents, Forrest and Betsy Shirley, had spent twenty-eight years working this land into a profitable ranch. They’d raised four kids here and several foster children, including Madison County Sheriff Johnny France. When the Shirleys decided to take it easier, they’d entrusted Roland and Elaine with the future of the land.
Roland Moore understood the responsibility of that trust. And he also understood the complexity of turning a profit—or, conversely, not going bankrupt—that underlay family ranching in the 1980s. Making a go of a place these days meant more than dedicated hard work; a rancher also had to be tough and smart and flexible. In that regard, Roland was the ideal candidate to carry on the tradition of the Shirleys.
He was in his middle thirties, a tall, wiry man with sandy hair and mustache. If they’d been photographing Marlboro Country ads in Madison County, they’d have probably offered Roland a contract. But he was more than a traditional cowboy. He had a degree in range management from MSU, and he’d spent six seasons working as a smoke jumper for the Forest Service, a grueling, dangerous, but high-paying job that had bolstered his quiet self-confidence.
Now he and Elaine owned this land; they were raising their two kids in the handsome log home that they’d built on the grassy rise, just above the Shirleys’ original lodgepole ranch house in the creek bottom cottonwoods.
To supplement the unpredictable income from their cattle sales, Roland broke and raised saddle horses, mules, and big draft horses. There wasn’t much he didn’t know about raising stock or the rolling rangeland on which they grazed.
So, with the first deep, windless freeze of the winter following the first big December blizzard, Roland mounted a little blue saddle horse named Toby that he was training for ranch work and set off to chop water. He planned to ride along the road leading to the Madison, cut up the slope to the snowy dome of treeless rangeland they called the Poison Pasture—it contained larkspur, fatal to cattle—and break the ice on the stock tank that overlooked the Beartrap above Red Bluff.
Normally, the prospect of this chore would not have bothered Roland; he enjoyed riding across his land in all seasons, and it always interested him to see how the birds and game adapted to the first deep snow. But Toby was a clumsy little horse. He’d fallen with Roland a couple of days earlier, and there was a danger he might fall again in the deep powder snow. However, Roland was determined to work the horse this winter, so he saddled him for the ride up to the high stock tank. Toby was a well-behaved animal in every other way, and Roland felt he could work him around this clumsy streak, if he were just patient enough.
As a caution, however, he stopped by the house to speak to Elaine before he started through the bare cottonwoods to the road.
“If I’m not down by noon, Honey,” he said, “have Crock come looking for me up there. I might get bunged up if this little horse falls on me.”
Elaine took the news without undue alarm. She was ranch raised and had married a rancher; she knew all about the dangers of cattle ranching in Montana. Elaine didn’t say anything, but she’d decided that she wouldn’t just send Crockett, their hired man, to look for Roland if he wasn’t back by lunchtime. She would lead the search herself.
Climbing through the drifts to the first fenceline, Roland saw that there’d been no wind on the ridge during the night. The light dusting of snow barely filled the tracks of birds and jack rabbits that criss-crossed the slope above.
Like most ranchers, Roland was intensely conscious of the land around him. He instinctively scanned the skyline, searching the ridges above for signs of stray cattle or broken fence. Hunting season had just ended, but there might be some gutshot deer that had staggered onto the land to die that could attract coyotes or mountain lions.
There was always the possibility of poachers and cattle thieves, too. All during the deer season, Roland patrolled the place
with a .308 scabbard rifle on his saddle. He didn’t have much use for the city boys in their little red suits who roared their Broncos and Blazers right up to the door of his house and practically demanded the God-given right to kill large mammals on his land. Now that the official season was over, there were hundreds of mule deer holed up on the ranch, a tempting target for poachers. And there was always the risk of losing a cow to some laid-off copper miner from Butte with a hungry family to feed and no more unemployment checks coming in.
However, Roland had not carried a saddle rifle with him this morning. He really didn’t expect that anyone would be out in this fresh snow, either poaching or looking to shoot a heifer.
He unlocked the first gates and carefully locked them behind him. The herd was in a pretty good set of pastures over on the southern ranges, and he didn’t want to have to go hunting down strays if the weather closed in again. He let Toby get his wind on top of the rise and sat back in the saddle to study the country revealed above the horse’s steaming breath. From up on top here he got a good view of the Beartrap and the Spanish Peaks, further east. It looked like the blizzard had really plastered that high country.
For a moment, he thought about the Nichols boys. It must be pretty tough going up in that high blue timber after a storm like this, in the biting cold and chest-deep drifts. Johnny and Sue had been out at the place for Thanksgiving, and Johnny had talked a lot about the Nicholses. They were bound to come down, Johnny’d predicted, as soon as the real cold and snow set in up there in the high Beartrap. And when they did, Johnny added, brooding over his coffee cup, there were only two places for them to come out … either the wood bridge up above the power station, or down the Beartrap road and across the right-angle highway bridge.
“When do you think they might make their move, Johnny?” Roland had asked.
Incident at Big Sky Page 22