They trudged straight up the snowy hillside toward the top of the ridge, Danny making the pace. The boy seemed in a hurry. He didn’t like crossing this open country in daylight, even though Don had tried to convince him that they weren’t likely to find anybody out here so soon after the big snow. But the boy wasn’t in a mood to be convinced. Better let it be.
At the top of the naked hill Danny stopped. This whole ridgetop was open country, a big series of wide, snowy pastures, cut up by dark fencelines. The only decent timber cover in sight was a couple miles to the west. But that was just a fringe of low pine around a rock outcropping. In the far distance, there was some thicker timber, but they’d have to cross a fair stretch of wide-open country to get there. The boy looked at him, his expression a mix of fear and resentment.
Don shrugged, but didn’t speak. This open country didn’t bother him much. They’d be off this ranchland in a couple hours, down on the flats where there were old mine drifts and plenty of brushy draws for cover.
Now Don took the lead, slowing the pace, so they wouldn’t get all worn down again. They had a long way to travel. And with any luck, the wind and snow would start up by dark, blowing out their tracks. He strode up the snowy hillside, bent under his pack frame.
It was Don who called the next halt. They stood side by side, staring at the fresh horse tracks in the deep powder. One rider had come in from the right, from the open valley that probably led to the ranch house. By the look of the track, the same rider had come back out. But, twenty paces to the left, he’d stopped his horse, led it downslope from the track, then turned again. As if he’d changed his mind.
Danny gazed at the tracks, his wind-burned cheeks slack, his eyes wary.
“Just some cowboy looking for strays,” Don muttered. “Don’t mean nothing, one way or the other.”
They marched on, their boot tracks cutting the horse tracks at a right angle. For a while, Don tried to make small talk, but the boy was not talkative. So they moved silently across the dead white landscape.
At the first fenceline, Don indicated that they should slip through the barbed wire and begin to zigzag up the long incline, using the geometry of the fencelines as a barrier to slow down anyone on a snow machine or horseback who might decide to track them.
He didn’t have to explain who those trackers might be.
They moved carefully now, trying hard to keep their track close to the wire, so that their trail would not be easily visible from the air.
When they stopped to take a rest, they assumed a natural, back to back position, so they could guard their flanks. Overhead, the sun drifted slowly through cold rolls of cloud. Still there was no wind.
18
Madison Valley
December 13, 1984
Johnny France drove his Eagle up the long incline toward Virginia City. In deference to the snow, he eased off on the gas pedal and let the car slow to below seventy. He was in no hurry today; all he had on his docket this afternoon was lunch and a dull slog through the accumulated paperwork, so there was no sense taking these icy curves too fast. Loren Tucker, the county attorney, always kidded Johnny about the way he drove. “Johnny,” he’d say, “it’s a good thing the daytime speeding fine’s only five dollars.”
You had to drive fast, though, if you were going to cover all the territory in Madison County. Even in winter, with the tourist season long over, the daily business of the sheriff took Johnny more than a hundred miles each day. Each year, he averaged over fifty thousand highway miles in his official Eagle. One of the reasons for this daily marathon was the notoriously bad radio propagation in the county. High mountain ranges, the Madison, Tobacco Roots, Gravellys, and Rubys divided the county’s valleys. And these mountains often chopped up effective radio communication between the sheriff’s officers and the dispatcher in Virginia City. Some days were worse than others. And today was a bad one. Coming back from Bozeman, Johnny had tried unsuccessfully three times to raise Mike Mitchell in the office. For some obscure reason, the windless cold air mass over the valley was blocking his signal.
Johnny looked out at the empty rangeland to the left. The snow was deep and unbroken out across the valley. Up in the high country, the drifts would be deep. Coming back from Bozeman on Route 84, Johnny had slowed through Warm Springs Creek and the entrance to the Beartrap, driving with one hand as he hunched over to stare at the high ridges. It had become a ritual. As if he would one day just get lucky and somehow see them up there.
As he passed through Ennis, he had considered stopping home for lunch, but decided not to. There was too much paper work facing him today. And tomorrow, he was scheduled to begin a week’s vacation, driving down to Kansas for some “chicken shootin’” with his good friend Ron Pederson. It would be Johnny’s first time off since the Nichols case began, five months before.
And Lord knew he needed that vacation. He was burned out on this case. His tormented insomnia and agonizing bouts of gastritis had reached a point where Sue and his close friends had become genuinely alarmed for his health. If this case didn’t break soon, they told him, there was a good chance Johnny’s health would. Despite the stoic acceptance of personal hardship that he had nurtured since childhood on the old Six Bar Nine Ranch, he knew they were right. His Uncle Joe had taught him that men did not complain about their health out here, or use physical pain as an excuse to shirk their chores. And Johnny had lived by that stern code for over forty years.
Now, however, he had agreed to take a short vacation, a week’s break from the case, to clear his head, to purge the ghosts, to let himself get physically worn out stalking the stubble of the Kansas corn fields for quail and prairie chicken, so he could sleep a whole night through.
But this new snow had him thinking. Maybe it would be better to get some men together and run a snow-machine patrol tomorrow, up above Cowboy Heaven to check for tracks. He was reasonably confident that the Nicholses had enough of that stolen food cached to last them through the month of January, holed up in a camouflaged dugout camp up there—providing there was adequate game available. They probably wouldn’t make their move until late in January, maybe even the end of February. At least that’s what he and Dave Wing had decided in their last meeting. Dave had been so confident about their estimate that he’d taken off on a trip himself, driving his mother down to her winter home in Arizona.
Still … this latest storm had really whacked the high country. Johnny made a mental note to give Jim DeBoer, the game warden, a call that afternoon to check on the movements of the elk and mule deer.
As he pondered these questions, he heard Mike Mitchell on the radio, asking Dick Noorlander if he’d copied Johnny calling in his location yet. Johnny grabbed the microphone and broke in, telling Mike Mitchell he was “10–85 back OTH”—en route to the office, back over the hill.
The dispatcher advised Johnny that he’d been trying to reach him, but that radio propagation was bad that afternoon. Mike said that he had some important “10–35 from Roland Moore”—confidential information—for Johnny from his foster brother-in-law.
Instinctively, Johnny’s boot toe sank on the gas pedal. He caught himself breathing hard. On a dull Thursday afternoon in December, there were very few subjects so important and confidential Roland could raise that could not be discussed on the open radio channel. Unless, of course, it concerned the Nicholses.
Johnny gripped the wheel with both hands and leaned forward in his seat, as if to speed the car up the hill, just as he had that long ago morning in July, when he first heard the report of the Big Sky shooting.
It was 1:37 when Johnny called Roland at the ranch. They did not talk very long. Johnny listened, hunched across his cluttered desk, his ballpoint jumping diagonally across the yellow legal pad as he scribbled notes.
Roland spoke with his usual meticulous calm. And Johnny listened carefully, so that Roland did not have to repeat the details. As Roland described the scene, Johnny could clearly picture two men camped at the head of the
draw below the Poison Pasture. He could see the tall figure in the sheepskin coat running back to the shelter of the pines as Roland glassed him from down at the Trapper Springs store.
Johnny made a few notes about Gary Lincoln’s comments to Roland, then spoke at length for the first time.
“Roland, I agree with Lincoln. It’s gotta be the Nicholses. You just hang in at the house. We’ll get deputies there right away.” He closed his eyes and tried to think clearly, but his pulse was thumping loudly in his throat. He took a slow, even breath. “In a little while, your place is gonna be crawling with lawmen … probably helicopters and planes, too. We’ll make our command post down at your cattle guard, on the flat by the bridge. You just stand by at the house.”
As he hung up the phone, Mike Mitchell handed him a pink message slip. John Onstad had called a few minutes before; Lincoln had alerted Bozeman about Barnstorm, and Onstad wanted Johnny to call, ASAP.
Before he did, however, Johnny snatched the Barnstorm alert sheet from the center of his bulletin board, tearing the corner off the page in his haste. “Mike,” he began, his voice hoarse with excitement. “It’s Barnstorm, and we’ve got ourselves a lot to do here real fast.”
The cramped basement offices were almost empty on this quiet winter afternoon; the deputies on duty were dispersed across the county. But Mike was going to have to get them moving toward the Cold Springs Ranch in a big hurry.
“First,” Johnny said, striding to the county map on the wall, “I want you to contact Lee Edmisten, Merlin, and Dick Noorlander. Dick’s to patrol Route 84 from the College Ag station to California Point. I don’t want those two guys cutting down from the top and taking cover in the cottonwoods along the creek there.” Johnny tapped the map for emphasis.
Mitchell was writing fast, neat notes on his steno pad.
“Get Lee down from Sheridan to the right-angle bridge below the Beartrap. That’s going to be the command post. I want Merlin suited up in his white gear with a scope rifle in his Bronco to meet me there in—” He glared at his watch. It was so damned late already. “—in half an hour. Tell him to make sure he’s got plenty of gas.”
Johnny strode away from the map, then spun back. “Oh, yeah. Call Billy Clark’s wife. He’ll be coming home from work. Tell her ‘Barnstorm at the right-angle bridge below the Beartrap.’ Billy’ll understand.”
Johnny dove behind his desk and swept the piled papers roughly aside. Then he dialed Onstad’s private line in Bozeman.
Their conversation was a fast, nervous exchange. Lincoln had briefed Onstad, and Onstad was trying to get a hold of Murray Duffy, so that he could come in a chopper.
Johnny would rendezvous with Onstad and the helicopter at the command post near the bridge. Together, they would fly over the high pastures of the Cold Springs Ranch until they cut the Nicholses’ tracks. Then they would follow the tracks to cover, hover low and menacing, and try to talk them out with a bull horn. Meanwhile, deputies would seal off the highway and flank the back of the ranch in four-wheel drive vehicles. Once Don Nichols realized he was surrounded in such open country, they agreed, there was a good chance he’d surrender.
The operational plan they quickly hammered out sounded okay to Johnny. Relatively simple, within their combined resources. And, best of all, fairly fast to implement. It was almost twenty past two. In only two hours, it would be dark. And, with darkness, he knew, Don Nichols would not be likely to surrender without a fight.
Johnny drove now with a speed and abandon that he had never before attempted. He left his office—clutching a flopping armful of heavy flak jackets—at 2:20. With his siren and pursuit lights on, he simply floored the accelerator and ignored the brakes, taking each icy curve on the road down to Ennis in a wild four-wheel drift.
Twelve minutes later, at 2:32, he called in from the Charging Bear Trading Post, fourteen miles down in the valley on the edge of Ennis. Down the icy mountainside he had averaged over seventy miles per hour.
Bill Hancock was waiting for him. Once more, Johnny needed to borrow an assault rifle. But this time, he knew his quarry and he knew where to find them.
“It’s Barnstorm, Bill,” he shouted, dashing across the porch of the log building. “Right on the Cold Springs Ranch. Can you believe that?”
For months, Johnny France and his men, and John Onstad and his deputies, had fruitlessly stalked Don Nichols in his home country, the Beartrap. Now, Don and Danny Nichols had come down from their island in the sky, to the single piece of property in the county that Johnny knew best, the Cold Springs Ranch. For years, Johnny had hunted that land, set his traplines in the draws and coulees, punched cattle and searched for strays on the high pastures. He’d walked every inch of fenceline, cut juniper posts and dug ditches on that land. If any piece of Montana could qualify as Johnny France’s home turf, it was the Cold Springs Ranch.
Bill Hancock handed the rifle across the counter. Again, it was a Ruger Mini-14. But, unlike the GB model Johnny had carried in July, this one had a handsomely varnished hardwood stock. The rifle in July had evoked the failure and frustration of Vietnam. This gun felt solid, a Western weapon. It gave Johnny confidence as he hefted the weight of the shining stock.
Bill passed him a magazine of twenty steel-tipped rounds and waited while Johnny completed the ritual of lock and load. Then Bill shoved across four more heavy black magazines. If there was going to be a shootout, Johnny would need plenty of ammunition.
“Good luck,” Bill said, taking Johnny’s hand. “I’ll be standing by my radio.”
Johnny was halfway out the door, the rifle slung over his shoulder, the spare magazines clutched in his left hand. “Oh, yeah,” he called. “Thanks, Bill.”
Sue was on the glassed-in back porch, which served as a sunroom-cum-warehouse for the France family. Here Johnny and the boys stored their hunting and fishing gear, their riverboat equipment, and their oddments of riding and rodeo clothes. She drew the line at saddle blankets and bridles, but practically anything else could be found back here, if you looked hard enough.
This afternoon Sue was carefully wrapping the bright Christmas presents and cartons of decorations they would take with them to Oregon, as soon as Johnny got back from his hunting trip with Ron. This would be their daughter Kathy’s first Christmas away from home, and they planned a quick trip out to spend the holiday with her and her husband. The visit, she hoped, would combine with the relaxation of the hunting trip to Kansas to give Johnny the time away from the case that he so desperately needed.
As she sorted through the packages of Christmas tree lights and the rectangular boxes of salvaged tinsel from last year’s tree, Sue heard the first warbling tones of the siren. Sue France unconsciously stiffened at the sound.
When the noise rose to a howl, she knew it was Johnny, and that he was coming home at high speed. Her first rush of fear gave way to the premonition that one of the boys had been hurt, that Johnny was coming to take her to the hospital before it was too late. She didn’t have time to dwell long on this possibility. Johnny’s car slid to a stop outside and his boots pounded up the front steps.
“It’s Barnstorm, Sue,” he called, clomping into the bedroom. “Roland spotted them up on the ranch.”
Sue France stood dead still on the chilly porch, surrounded by the bright decorations, trying to make sense of this incredible news. For months, she had thought of the Nicholses as distant, shadowy adversaries. Now they were real.
Only moments later, Johnny appeared in the back hall, tugging up his thick wool hunting trousers. He wore a dark wool shirt; his rubberized shoepack boots flapped open at the ankles. As she watched, immobile with anxiety, he finished dressing with grim speed.
“Where’s my Barnstorm pack?”
“It’s—” But Sue suddenly could not remember where he’d stored the small brown daypack in which he had so carefully assembled his Sterno stove, extra socks, hunting knife, flashlight, and emergency rations.
Johnny flung himself around the porch,
tossing aside life jackets and Day-Glo orange hunting vests.
The pack lay beneath Kathy’s Christmas presents. Johnny hefted the light sack in one hand and seized his long winter hunting parka that lay folded on the Ping-Pong table. This was a flapping, knee-length tent of a coat, faded green on one side, white on the reverse. The hood hung like a bulbous kettle, wide enough to accommodate a soldier’s steel helmet.
When Johnny had bought the parka years before at the war surplus store in Bozeman, Sue had disparagingly christened it his “survival coat.” But he was attached to it, ratty as it was. When he wore the white side out, he said, he was practically invisible in the snow. The pockets were wide and deep, with plenty of room for ammunition.
Now, as he pulled on the dirty white shroud of the coat, covering his dark wool shirt and trousers, she had no ready quip of friendly sarcasm. She could only pray with mute intensity that this old parka would, indeed, help him survive the day.
She followed him out to the car, which stood with its door wide open, blue exhaust rising in the cold. She noted the evil-looking rifle jammed across the front seat, the stack of ammunition clips, the jumble of green bullet-proof vests.
Johnny saw her staring at the gear.
“Don’t worry, Susie,” he said, nodding toward the flak jackets. “I’ll wear one, and we’ll take the extras and … uh, spread ’em on the floor of the helicopter.”
She dipped her chin in somber acknowledgment. Then he was gone, fast down the snowy street, his siren beginning its shriek.
Johnny sped up the Norris hill at over eighty, lights and siren clearing the talc trucks and pickups from his path. He heard Dick Noorlander call in that he and Merlin were at the bridge. They had established a command post and were checking for tracks in the surrounding country. It was five past three.
Maybe they had an hour and forty minutes of decent daylight left.
When Johnny turned right onto Route 84 out of Norris and entered the steep confines of Warm Springs Creek, he killed the lights and siren. The heights of the Beartrap rose to the right, and the snowy shoulders of Red Bluff and the Cold Springs Ranch began to show on the left. If the Nicholses were up there, watching the road, there was no sense giving them a lights-and-siren show.
Incident at Big Sky Page 24