Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  ‘I don’t think it was him.’

  ‘You don’t think it was the person who Mr Nilsson thought it was?’

  ‘That’s not what I said. I said I don’t think he was the man who called himself Albert Johnson – the man I saw in Fort McPherson.’

  ‘Did my brother say who he’d thought the Trapper really was? I mean, did he mention a name for the man with the uniform?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me anything. I asked him a couple of questions myself, but he didn’t care to answer them straight.’ The half-smile again. ‘He kept his notions close to his chest. Like a policeman would.’

  ‘But when you couldn’t confirm the identities, what did he say?’

  ‘He asked me to look again, a few times. He seemed pretty pleased when I said the army guy wasn’t Albert Johnson. Which seemed kind of odd to me. Most people who come to show me old photos want me to tell them it’s Albert Johnson – they’re still trying to prove who he really was. Your brother was the opposite. He wanted him to be someone else.’

  Edmonton, Alberta, 1932

  Confidential report of Constable William Carter RCMP on the pursuit of the fugitive known as Albert Johnson, December 1931 to February 1932

  On 2 February 1932 I was summoned to the office of Superintendent Acland, Officer Commanding G division RCMP for a private interview. At this meeting I was ordered to prepare myself to join a plane flying to Aklavik to assist Inspector Alexander Eames of the Western Arctic sub-division in the hunt for the criminal known as Albert Johnson, wanted for the murder and attempted murder of two policemen. I was further ordered, in secret, to keep a close watch on Inspector Eames and his conduct of the manhunt, and to report back only to Officer Commanding G division in Edmonton.

  It is therefore my duty to inform you that after ‘Johnson’ was killed, Inspector Eames went around separately to the men of the posse, both natives and white men, and had them agree to a story which differs from what actually happened in a number of important respects. I will set these out now.

  Number one. Inspector Eames states that he first sent his constables to interview ‘Johnson’ at his remote cabin on the Rat River because the man had been trapping without a licence. But no animal pelts or traps were recovered from his body or from the dynamited ruins of his cabin, which makes it seem unlikely to me that he was engaged in illegal trapping. Nor, contrary to Eames’s report, is there any clear evidence that Johnson was robbing from other people’s traps. I talked to a couple of the local special constables and they told me that Johnson had angered some of his Indian neighbours by rudely chasing them off when they came visiting, and that they therefore blamed him for mishaps that could have other causes, such as wolves and wolverines.

  Number two. It seems to me that the treatment of Johnson was from the start strangely aggressive. I have been informed that when Constable King first knocked on Johnson’s door on ­December 26th last he had orders from Eames to bring Johnson into ­Aklavik for questioning, instead of just having a word with him where he was. This might explain Johnson’s refusal to come out of the cabin or reply to his visitors on that first occasion.

  Number three. I cannot confirm Inspector Eames’s statement that Johnson was solely to blame for the gunfight in which Constable King was wounded at the cabin after he returned with an arrest warrant five days later. I do not believe that Constable King would have been party to any deliberate provocation but when you are very cold and tired and you have been forced to mush for four days at Christmas time in temperatures of minus forty just to sort out a trivial matter of a trapping licence it would be easy for tempers to rise and mistakes to get made.

  Number four. It is evident to me, having talked to the survivors, that the incident leading to the death of Constable Millen four weeks after Johnson went on the run did not happen as Inspector Eames describes it. When Constable Millen and his three companions snuck up on Johnson’s camp on January 30th last they opened fire without warning on his tarpaulin shelter, which was all that they could see of it. The posse then fired off 200 rounds without reply, shooting blind into Johnson’s tarp. It is little wonder, in light of this, that Johnson chose to lie silent in cover of a windfall tree and to shoot to kill when his attackers closed in on him. It is also not surprising that after his three battles with the police he never sought to surrender, and that he ran and fought to the bitter end.

  Number five. While Inspector Eames portrays the fugitive as a ruthless and determined murderer, it seems to me that Johnson sought only to avoid contact with the law, and only fought when he was cornered, like an animal.

  Inspector Eames has written in the papers that Johnson behaved like a professional gangster. But no southern gangster would have the bushcraft and the stamina that Johnson displayed when on the run. As any policeman knows, your average city criminal is a lazy and undisciplined fellow, fond of his comforts and usually home-loving, given to braggadocio and bullying but not at all suited to life out of doors.

  Yet from his appearance in the north last July, Johnson showed himself to be remarkably at home in the Arctic bush, able to ­provide himself with food and shelter using little more than an axe, a drill and the weapons he bought from the store in ­McPherson. Once the chase began, he surprised his pursuers with his extreme endurance and cunning in the snow. For a long time, he confounded the faster-moving posses by keeping to the hard packed snow on the ridge lines, by crossing rivers only where the wind had exposed glare ice, and by using caribou tracks to disguise the trail of his own snowshoes. He was skilled at looping around on his tracks to get behind his pursuers. He had a trick of putting his snowshoes on backwards to send trackers in the wrong direction.

  Particular cunning was shown in his practice of making long zigzag legs when he was crossing deeper snow and could not help leaving a trail. The zigzags allowed him to get a close look at his trackers without their being aware of it. It seems to me that it would have been a simple matter for a ‘ruthless killer’ with these skills to lie in ambush amid the tangles of cottonwood and poplar and willow that fill the river valleys and pick off any number of his pursuers while they were still caught in the open. Yet he never once attempted to do so. Similarly, he made no attempt to prevent Constable McDowell dragging off the injured Constable King after the first gun battle, although he could have killed them both. Constable Millen was also dragged from the second gun battle without further injury or shooting, although sadly it turned out he was already dead.

  Number six. The popular characterization of Johnson as some type of animal, endowed with subhuman strength and endurance by a brutish, insensitive upbringing, is contradicted by Dr Urquhart’s autopsy. This revealed the dead man to have had recent and expensive dental work, including gold bridges, such as you would only expect to find in a wealthy man from the biggest cities in the south.

  Number seven. The strangest thing of all for me is that for most of the hunt ‘Johnson’ seemed oddly unwilling to make good his escape. It would have been a simple matter after the shooting of King, or again after the failed assault on his cabin by Eames and his dozen men, for Johnson to make a beeline westward to Alaska, where he would have been safe from arrest.

  Yet for five weeks after the gun battle with Inspector Eames at his cabin, Johnson seldom strayed more than thirty miles from his starting point. Time and again he veered up into the foothills of the mountains, even as far as the tundra which forms the eastern slopes, only to double back down draws and wooded canyons. It was as if he could not escape the pull of the Rat River. Or maybe there was still some unfinished business, something he was searching for and had not found yet, that prevented his escape.

  Inuvik, North West Territories

  The bulb in the desk lamp was too bright for its task and Fay’s eyes looked sore and tired. She put down the book she’d been skimming, one she’d taken from the shelves in Bert Nilsson’s bedroom.

  ‘There really was a Constable Willi
am Carter, just like the one who wrote that report in Bert’s file.’ Her voice was so tired that Nelson could barely hear her, though he was only six feet away, sitting on the couch. ‘He really was sent up to spy on Inspector Eames during the manhunt, like it says in that report. He really did suspect that the Mad Trapper story was not on the level. He really did accuse Inspector Eames of suppressing the truth.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  She handed him the book she’d been reading, one of several about the Mad Trapper that she’d found on the bookcase. It fell open on the page which Bert Nilsson must have looked at most, a black-and-white photograph of two men standing at the door of an old-fashioned ski-plane: Captain Wilfrid ‘Wop’ May, legendary bush pilot and World War One ace, and his mechanic Jack Bowen. They were on their way north to help the hunt for Albert Johnson. The same photograph, magnified many times, was pinned to the cork-board over Bert’s desk.

  ‘Part of Carter’s report has already been made public,’ said Fay. ‘A few years ago a TV company tried to find out who Johnson really was. Like Moses Isaac said. They’d identified a number of really good suspects – people who’d gone missing around that time in Canada or America and whose descriptions and behaviour sounded like Johnson. Then they got DNA samples from surviving relatives so they could check if they were right. But the tests ruled them all out.

  ‘One thing they did find was this secret report by Constable Carter. For some reason it hadn’t been filed with the rest of the stuff relating to the case. But their researcher only found part of it . . . Your brother seems to have all the rest.’

  ‘Trust him . . . Is there anything important that hasn’t been published already?’

  She opened the folder and selected a page. ‘You could say that, yes.’

  Edmonton, Alberta, 1932

  Finally, there is a curious inaccuracy in Inspector Eames’s version of the gun battle on February 17th which resulted in the death of Johnson and the wounding of Staff Sergeant Hersey of the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals. While the general particulars of the fight are accurate enough – I can vouch for this, having been there myself – it is not true, as Eames writes, that the first man to reach Johnson’s body was Constable Sid May from the post at Old Crow. In fact, the first man to reach Johnson was an individual who has not been mentioned in the official report at all and whose true identity I must admit that I do not know.

  This mystery man had flown up from the south with me on the chartered plane piloted by Captain Wilfrid May. I had been given the impression that he was a representative of the airline and did not question his presence. Wop May addressed him as Deary. There was also a younger man who accompanied him and who I took at first for a second mechanic.

  I did not seek to question this gentleman on the way up as he was very reserved and I took it for granted that he must be what he seemed: an important passenger with an official role in the hunt – to fit the two extra passengers Captain May offloaded a drum of fuel at Fort McMurray and we still took off dangerously overweight.

  Mr Deary was a medium-size wiry fellow with an upper-class way of talking. He sat up front with Captain May on our series of flights down the Mackenzie valley. The younger man sat close behind them and helped with the maps.

  It was hard to hear above the roar of the engine and the blast of the headwinds that we bucked for four days to Aklavik. But from what little I caught of their conversation Captain May appeared to have known this fellow in Europe when May was a flyer in the war - they talked about Von Richtofhen, the famous Bloody Red Baron, who had been lining up to shoot down Wop May when he himself was hit and killed.

  After we arrived at Aklavik I saw nothing of these men for some time, being myself most of the time on the trail with the posse. I quite forgot about them until the final day of the hunt when Johnson, wounded and pinned, was still holding off our posse from a scrape-hole in the ice of the Eagle River. I was then very much surprised to see the pair appear on the scene, both travelling on skis while driving their own dog-sled.

  At great peril to themselves they advanced through the hail of bullets towards the place where the fugitive lay, apparently crippled, out in the middle of the river. Seeing them approach, the fugitive raised one hand, as if in greeting or surrender, but then he was struck by another bullet, fired, I believe, by one of the men working along the banks above him. His hand fell to the snow, and he was not seen to move again.

  Being in advance of Inspector Eames, I was only a short distance off when Deary turned Johnson over.

  Meanwhile the younger man broke open Johnson’s pack, as if in a hurry to search it before the rest of the posse could catch up. With my own eyes I saw him remove from the pack a small wooden case and two metal boxes and some other stuff wrapped in a sack.

  As the younger man shoved these items onto their sled, I saw Deary lean over and whisper something in the man’s ear. Then he stepped back and put his hands in his pockets and stood looking down at the dying man.

  It now became urgent for me to think of Sergeant Hersey of the Corps of Signals, who had been wounded by Johnson in the first exchange of fire and who lay bleeding in the snow nearby. I was also distracted by the antics of one of the native trackers, an Eskimo from Aklavik, who was smashing his rifle against an outcrop of rock, saying he could not hunt food with a gun that had killed a man.

  With all the fuss over Hersey and the Eskimo, I only thought of the unidentified pair again when I chanced to turn around and saw them both disappearing up the river in the direction from which Johnson had come.

  I did not see either of them again. They did not return to La Pierre House that night or the next, or to Aklavik in the days that followed. I do not believe that they came back into the North West Territories at any time in the following weeks.

  I do not know where they got their dogs and sled from, nor how they came to use skis in a land where snowshoes are the rule. My guess would be that Captain May ferried them across the mountains from Aklavik in the plane and set them down close to our posse. But when I asked Captain May about them he denied any knowledge of the pair.

  He said that they had joined our plane at Fort McMurray, Alberta, from where it set out, having come there on a flight from British Columbia. They told him they were on government business and needed a ride to the north, and he had taken them at their word. When I asked to see the passenger manifest so I could check their names May said he had misplaced it - the kind of oversight you get in ‘a war’, he claimed. After that, he got angry with my questions, saying he had told me all he knew and that I was being impertinent.

  When I tried to ask Inspector Eames about the two men he said to me, ‘I thought you brought them,’ and then had nothing more to say on the matter. I cannot escape the feeling that he was ‘covering’ for them, which was particularly odd as I had gleaned from his manner, when he first saw them emerge from our plane at Aklavik, that he knew who they were and was not pleased to see them. It is curious in the extreme that he does not mention their interference with the body in his own official account, especially since the dead man was found to have nothing on his person that could identify him.

  To me it beggars belief that two men were able to introduce themselves uninvited and unidentified into the middle of the biggest manhunt in our country’s history, one which became a running news story all round the world, and had people in New York and San Francisco waiting by their radios for hourly news bulletins, and then to just disappear without trace, taking evidence with them.

  I suspect strongly that to identify them would take you more than halfway towards discovering the true identity of ‘Albert Johnson’. Something about the mournful way that Deary stood over him as the man lay dying in the snow, his smile freezing into a terrible grin, made me think that they knew each other from before.

  Part Eight

  Morgan Island

  68º30’N 75º00‘W

  I
nuvik, North West Territories

  There was nothing left on the desk that they hadn’t examined. Bert’s computer sat dormant, waiting for fingers to bring it to life again. The computer could access most of science, art and history, but the things that really mattered to Fay and Nelson, the files that Bert Nilsson had kept for himself, were locked behind his administrator password. The stuff in the folders, the things they had read, were just fragments, or footnotes, of some vision shimmering beyond their sight.

  Fay turned away from the desk and sat on the couch. Nelson was in the kitchenette, making them coffee.

  He came back into the room holding two mugs. Seeing her in his place on the couch he stopped inside the door.

  ‘You’re finished,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I guess that trip to the hospital didn’t clear up too many questions for us.’

  ‘It makes my head hurt even worse.’

  ‘So much for playing detectives.’ He gave her the coffee and retreated to the desk, settling himself on the swivel-chair. ‘What do you want to do now?’

  ‘You should tell the police about your brother.’

  ‘Maybe they can figure it out.’

  ‘If there’s anything to figure.’

  They sat in silence for a while. She’s helpless right now, thought Nelson, but she won’t ask for help. I could help her but I can’t make that offer. When did getting drunk and sleeping with someone become such a chore?

  ‘We should go to the chalet,’ he said, ‘and pick up your bags. You were supposed to check out today, right?’

  ‘I’d forgotten about that . . . I should find another hotel if I can’t get a plane.’

  But you don’t have the money. He left the thought unsaid. They could work it out in the car, where you sat side by side and didn’t have to look at each other. He didn’t mind if she stayed there another night or two. She could have the bed; he was used to sleeping on couches.