Lost in the Wild

by Cary Griffith

  Seventy miles of highway and backcountry roads separate Two Harbors from the Pow Wow Trailhead parking lot. Fortunately, Lake County is large enough to employ eleven full-time deputies. The deputies divide the county into three geographic regions, or stations. There are four deputies in the Two Harbors station, four in the Silver Bay station, and three in the Section 30 station, located near Ely at the door to the BWCAW.

  The three Section 30 station deputies cover the northern wilderness areas of the county. Truth is, Two Harbors and the southern part of the county are far enough south so turf knowledge, or having plenty of first-hand experience of the northern woods, can be significant. On this night, Joe Linneman is Section 30’s on-duty deputy. The dispatcher reaches him on the radio and relays Jason’s story and the make, color, and model of his car.

  Joe Linneman has been working as a northern Lake County deputy for over twenty years. In fact, the three Section 30 deputies have a collective sixty-three years of law enforcement experience. Linneman knows the Pow Wow Trail. Since the 1999 blowdown they have had more than a few calls from people getting lost in the area.

  From Linneman’s station outside of Ely he takes Highway 1 a little over thirty miles to the Tomahawk Road, then turns left. From here it is another twenty miles, primarily on dark, unmarked forest roads. But Linneman knows the way.

  Linneman’s four-wheel-drive Chevy truck is more than equal to the task of crossing the snow-covered roads. It is a white truck with “Lake County Sheriff” emblazoned on its side, and the usual overhead lights and siren gear. On the way in he notices the snow here is deeper, and the road is a wide blanket of white. Moreover, no tire tracks are breaking the pristine plane; there has been no traffic on this road for the last twenty-four hours. It is the only exit out of the Pow Wow.

  In most missing-person investigations—or at this point, late-person, Joe reminds himself—the vehicle is gone by the time he reaches the last known parking point. Usually the missing people are just late. They end up reappearing within a few hours, having pulled to the side of a road for a quick nap, or checked into a hotel. That’s how most of these incidents end—little more than wild goose chases, Joe thinks.

  Finally, a little after 10:00 PM, his headlights shine over the trailhead parking lot. The lot is well marked, in large part because of Isabella Lake. This is one of the less frequently used entrances to the BWCAW, but it is at least popular enough to warrant a poster board and a lockbox where canoeists, in season, can drop their BWCAW registration forms.

  At this late hour the deputy’s headlights turn around the first entrance corner. And there sits a compact car, tucked up against a wall of winter brush, indistinct under six inches of white powder.

  Deputy Linneman gets out of his truck. He brushes snow off the car’s hood and shines his flashlight on its metallic finish. Green. When he brushes the rear bumper, he sees it is a Saturn. He flashes on the car’s interior. Other than a few food wrappers and the usual assortment of car junk, the inside looks empty and cold. He takes down the car’s license number—478 NJA—just to be sure it is Jason’s.

  As he suspected, this is the only car in the lot. He shines his light onto the wall of brush in front of him. It illuminates thick white branches bowed over in the snow. The night is cold and quiet. Linneman walks out far enough to flash the beam of his light over the remaining lot. There are no cars or tracks. That is fortunate, Linneman thinks. At least no one else is out on that trail.

  He returns to his truck. He switches on his flashing lights. The snow-muffled trees shimmer red and yellow in the spin of lights. He squawks the siren—one good loud burst. If Jason is within earshot, he should hear the siren. He switches it off and listens.

  The wall of brush in front of him is thick with white fluff. He tries the lights and siren a second time and waits again for a response. But there is only the thick snow and the enveloping darkness beyond the edge of his lights.

  From this northern reach, radio reception is spotty. Fortunately, the Isabella Lake lot is one of the good spots. He tries to contact dispatch, and her voice comes back scratchy, but intelligible. He tells her about the car and gives her the plate number so she can run the license and make sure it is Jason’s. Dispatch comes back affirmative, and Joe Linneman knows they will have to reconnoiter in the morning. He tells dispatch he will get back to the office and give Nick Milkovich a call. Milkovich is the on-duty deputy whose shift starts tomorrow morning.

  Joe Linneman suspects the kid is hunkered down on the trail. Linneman knows hiking on a poorly marked wilderness trail in a snowstorm can be difficult at best, treacherous at worst. If it was him, Linneman knows, he would set up camp and wait for the storm to blow over. In the morning, he supposes, Milkovich will go up in one of the Forest Service planes. With all this fresh snow, Jason will be easy to spot.

  “We found Jason’s car,” dispatch finally relates, when she is able to speak with the Rasmussens. “And I suspect I know what’s happened.”

  For the next ten minutes the woman in dispatch relates a theory. They have dealt with this kind of thing in the past. The Section 30 deputies are well acquainted with the woods, especially in winter. If you are on a trail when it starts snowing, it is damn easy to lose your way. More probably, the deputy surmised, Jason recognized the difficulty of traversing through a winter storm and decided to hole up somewhere safe. Deputy Linneman is certain Jason is near the end of the trail, ready to hike out in the morning, when the storm passes.

  What dispatch doesn’t tell the Rasmussens is that snow deeper than a couple of inches can obscure everything, particularly a BWCAW trail. Boundary Waters trails aren’t supposed to be marked—it is part of the Wilderness Act’s requirements. And trails up here are seldom traveled, because most enter the BWCAW by canoe. Hiking out through a foot of snow isn’t going to be easy. Linneman is worried, but upbeat.

  “They’ll be ready to search for him at daybreak,” dispatch tells the Rasmussens. “We have people up here that know the area. I suspect he is close, hunkered down in his tent,” she repeats. “And fine. I’m sure we’ll find him in the morning.”

  The Rasmussens share a few more details about their son. He is intelligent and prepared. And he has a pretty good idea of what to do in the woods. They also tell her he has maps, a compass, and he was planning on hiking the trail in a counterclockwise direction.

  “Good to know,” dispatch says, thanking them for the additional information. For now, she thinks, the most viable theory is the one Deputy Linneman proposed. She also knows it is the most comforting. She hopes it is the right one.

  14

  The Science of Search & Rescue

  Quetico Provincial Park, Thursday evening, August 6, 1998

  Just after dinner, Constables James McGill and PC Jones are nosing their cruiser out of Atikokan, heading out to Highway 11 to start the evening’s first patrol. The constables are part of the OPP’s mandate to provide the public with general law enforcement across Ontario’s non-municipal territory. Like a state patrol in the U.S., the OPP is responsible for patrolling provincial highways.

  Back at cadet school, general law enforcement had an abstract quality. In the country outside Atikokan—a mining town that dropped from 10,000 to 4,000 inhabitants, after the market for ore ran out—the phrase usually meant dealing with domestic disturbances, driving while intoxicated, speeding, parole violations, and the occasional missing person.

  Now the hard-working Atikokan townsfolk make their living cutting lumber. The town rests atop the million-acre Quetico Provincial Park, a vast forest of thick bush, lakes, and rivers. While no one in Atikokan can touch a sapling in the park, to the east, north, and west, the Ontario woods stretch for miles.

  Ontario itself is over a million square kilometers, much of it rivers, lakes, and woods. With its comparatively small population spread across such a huge geography, the province’s poli
ce force owns an unusual assortment of tools to cover the territory. Snowmobiles, four-wheelers, Beaver planes, and helicopters augment the typical patrol cruisers, and a vast telecommunications network keeps it all connected.

  The constables are turning onto Highway 11 when a call comes in from the OPP communications center in Kenora.

  “411 Kenora,” the dispatcher announces.

  McGill picks up the receiver and confirms his number and location. “Kenora 411, Highway 11 east of Atikokan. Go ahead.”

  “Sounds like we got a lost person in the Quetico,” says the dispatcher. “We need you to go back and check it out. Contact the Ministry of Natural Resources over in Atikokan. He’s got the details, over.”

  McGill thumbs the receiver. “10–4,” he says. “I will return to Atikokan and contact the MNR. My ETA is twenty minutes.”

  There is a pause on the other end of the line before the definitive response is heard. “Kenora clear,” the dispatcher concludes. Jim McGill hangs up the receiver and turns the cruiser around.

  That evening the acting staff sergeant, Phil Donald, works over the forms with McGill. Donald and McGill know questions have to be asked, some of them hard. Laid out on McGill’s evening desk are two pieces of paper—the Search Urgency Chart and the OPP’s Lost Person Questionnaire. Beside them, his hands finger a white legal pad and a number two pencil. McGill is trying to concentrate.

  Tools like the Search Urgency Chart and Lost Person Questionnaire make his job easier, but McGill knows enough about human nature to realize these tools are only the surface of the process. For starters, the Mattson Method for defining a search area relies heavily on whatever information you can gather about the lost person. Woods knowledge, character, and personality are top on the list but never easy to plumb. Interviewees are always quick to tout a lost person’s strengths. The initial responses to “what kind of kid is he?” are as pedestrian as a dollar bill. For example, tonight he has already heard “great kid,” “smart,” “kind of quiet,” and “capable.” He has also heard plenty of testaments to his Eagle Scout status. All of it McGill patiently transcribes.

  Jim McGill wants to know about Dan Stephens. He is interested in the kid’s dark side as much as the color, sweetness, and light he’s been fed during his initial interviews. And he wants to know about the group’s dynamics at the time Stephens disappeared. He spends the first hour on the phone with Tim Jones and Jerry Wills. He masters the details quickly enough, bizarre as they sound. But he has to ask. Was there any tension in the group? Has Stephens come down on anyone for, say, an inability to keep up, or not doing their fair share? Was he a taskmaster in the bush? Did he have any problems with the kids? Any issues with the fathers?

  Jerry Wills is surprised by the questions, but he answers them all the same. “No.”

  In every way, it’s as though Stephens was the perfect guide. Knowledgeable, trustworthy, considerate, and except for walking into the woods and not coming out, he has been practically ideal. A regular Mark Trail, McGill thinks. Was anyone even tired of the guy’s cooking? But to all of these questions the answer is the same. Nothing was amiss. He just walked into the woods and disappeared.

  McGill spends the next hour questioning Doug Hirdler at the Sommers Canoe Base. Did Dan have any history of depression? Did he seem gloomy? Did he have a girlfriend? If he was from Georgia, what was he doing in northern Minnesota? Any inconsistency or nuance in the kid’s character would draw McGill’s eye for salient detail. Only in this case there aren’t any problems with girlfriends or disputes with bosses. Dan Stephens doesn’t seem to suffer from some post-teenage angst or wanderlust. He doesn’t seem to be the kind of young man who would take off on a lark just to prove something—to himself, or anyone else. To James McGill, Dan Stephens sounds like everyone describes him—a pretty good kid with plenty of backwoods savvy. In fact, if someone had to go missing in that area of the Quetico woods—with deep ravines, craggy bluffs, walled bush, swamps, and more bugs than an Amazonian rain forest—Dan Stephens sounds like one of the better choices he had seen. Not only is he an Eagle Scout, he’s also familiar with the Quetico.

  Before McGill rings off with Hirdler, Hirdler asks to be the one to call Dan’s parents down in Georgia. It is against protocol and McGill hesitates. But given Hirdler’s excellent cooperation, James McGill decides to make an exception.

  “If they have any questions,” he reminds Hirdler, “tell them to call the OPP.”

  After hearing all the details, McGill wonders about the kid’s absence. When he walked into the woods to find that portage, what happened?

  He can tell that Jerry Wills and Tim Jones were new to the Quetico woods. But they had been able to guide themselves through over twenty miles of lakes and rivers—making it to the Prairie Portage Station in pretty good time—and he is impressed by their rapid pace. There were plenty of questions he could have pursued. Why hadn’t they spent more time searching for Stephens in that cedar swamp? Why hadn’t they set up camp there and waited? Why hadn’t they at least kept someone, maybe a couple of them, on the scene while the others went for assistance? The protocol for emergency situations like this one called for the group to split up.

  But Wills and Jones were adamant about the need to keep their group together. They were responsible for these kids, and above all else they had taken that job seriously. They had left Dan Stephens a cache of supplies and instructions to say put. But food in that part of the woods doesn’t last long. Most likely it would satisfy the appetite of a passing bear, or a couple raccoons.

  Jim McGill is familiar with one of the woods unfathomables. When you step off the grid in a place as thick and wild as that part of the Quetico, the wilderness can do strange things to your head. Reason sometimes takes a back seat to instinct, and he can hear it in the fathers’ voices—the drive they had to survive, to bring all their kids out safe.

  McGill and Phil Donald work their way through the Lost Person Questionnaire, completing the Place Last Seen, Subject’s Trip Plans, and Subject’s Outdoor Experience sections. Stephens scored high on that one. Most of that subsection’s check boxes—from “familiar with the area” to “will stay put”—are marked in the affirmative. McGill hastily completes the Contacts Upon Reaching Civilization, and Actions Taken So Far sections. After speaking with Doug Hirdler at Sommers Canoe Base, he has completed the Search Urgency Chart. The Chart comes up with a score of 11—Emergency Response.

  Scores on Search Urgency Charts range from 7 to 21. The lower the number, the more urgent the search. Scores of 7 to 11 merit an Emergency Response. Scores of 12 to 16 require a Measured Response. And 17 to 21, Evaluate & Investigate. The only reason Stephens’s score isn’t lower? Outdoor knowledge and alleged character—so far as McGill can ascertain. If you disappeared in this part of the world, it was good to be Dan Stephens—providing he could walk and he had no other serious impairments. What didn’t make sense was his absence. An Eagle Scout knows to stay put. It deepens the mystery of his disappearance, and makes McGill wonder what complicating factor has occurred.

  After a couple hours and the compilation of the necessary data, McGill hands over the forms to Staff Sergeant Phil Donald. McGill recommends an immediate ERT response. Donald reviews it, then forwards the information to Duty Officer Hugh Dennis with the same recommendation. Hugh Dennis and Inspector Dave Wall give McGill and Donald’s work a cursory review. Dennis and Wall are familiar with ERT triggers. It only takes a glance at the paperwork to see that an immediate effort is warranted.

  Back on his escarpment, the light has all but drained out of the western sky. Dan Stephens descends to a near creek and forces himself to drink water. He climbs to the hillside and rechecks his stick marker pointing east and west. He breaks off another and aligns it perpendicular with his east-west marker, pointing due south. Then he forages on the hillside for broadleaf. He takes off his boxers, ties the legs closed with pieces of
twine, and stuffs them with leaves. He lines the birch bark rolls with the broadleaf and with black spruce boughs. This time he vigorously shakes everything lining his bed, careful to make sure it’s bug free. There isn’t much grass up on this hillside, and after last night he knows better than to use it. The spruce and broadleaf is a whole lot less comfortable, but at least it’s not a mosquito housing complex.

  He lies down on the scratchy, makeshift bed, carefully pulling the huge coils of bark around him. He aligns their seams so they overlap. If it rains, he should stay dry enough. The leaf-stuffed shorts are near his head. It is dusk, and the bugs are starting to swarm. As darkness comes he lies on the ground, staring through a narrow slit into the night sky.

  There are so many stars. He is always amazed by the thick Milky Way and profusion of starlight. He stares into it, trying not to think of all the people he suspects may be searching for him, of his parents and their worry.

  And then he has a sudden, disturbing thought. Why are there no search planes? Not that they’d be able to see him. In order to find him in this brush they would have to be right on top of him, and it is doubtful they would even see him then. Where are the aircraft? It is a question as prickly as a cockle burr. On the one hand it implies his disappearance hasn’t yet been reported. That is good. He can get himself out, and he doesn’t want to worry people, particularly his folks.

  On the other hand, why isn’t his absence yet known? Where are his Chattanooga friends? Their plight worries him. He is still their guide, even if he isn’t with them. Still, it would be nice to be located by air and picked up. He is hungry. He is damn hungry. He has never been hungrier. He stares into the glittering night sky. So many stars. So many questions. The night is blazing with them.