“Please let me go,” Kari said, looking up again. “You don’t want to get involved in something like this.”
The old man did not answer.
She turned to directly address the boy for the first time. “You’re young,” she pleaded. “You don’t want to get involved in this. It doesn’t make sense.”
Mosquitoes swarmed on her legs and arms now, but she was powerless to brush them off. For an uncertain moment, no one spoke. Finally, the old man asked: “Well, Danny, what do you think, shall we keep her?”
The boy nodded decisively. “Yeah. Let’s keep her.”
Kari thrashed out with her elbows and lurched backward, but the old man was not taken off guard. “All right,” he shouted, “get the rope, and let’s tie her up.”
When she saw the boy extend a dirty white nylon cord, she screamed and dragged backward from the old man’s grip.
His reaction was fast and shocking. Seizing both her wrists in one hand, he turned and clubbed her hard with his fist, striking her near the left temple. His blow knocked her to the ground, where she lay, stunned silent by pain and outrage. Never before had Kari been struck in anger. She came from a social world where people did not employ physical violence. But before she could protest, he was on top of her, his sweaty green sleeve across her throat as he gripped her in a painful necklock. Kari kept her wits. Instead of exposing her arms to the boy’s extended rope, she thrust her hands beneath her to hide them. The old man dragged her head harder to the left. Twisting her mouth, she tried to find exposed flesh to bite, but he only cranked her head more sharply, and she bit into the side of her own cheek.
“You keep screaming like that,” the old man shouted, “and we’re gonna beat you up. You want a couple black eyes, a broken nose? Is that what you want?”
Wordlessly, Kari shook her head.
“Wouldn’t matter to me at all that you’re a woman,” he went on in his bullying way. “I’ll do it anyway … no problem.”
Kari stopped screaming.
“We want you to come up in the mountains with us for a couple of days,” the old man said in an almost normal tone. “We just want you to come on up and try living with us.”
The boy had several tight hitches of nylon line about her right wrist now. They dragged her to her feet, and the boy added two more hitches, then turned to the old man for instructions. Without speaking, he nodded to the boy’s own wrist, and the young man wrapped the cord tightly about the cuff of his Levi jacket.
“Why do you want to take me with you?”
“Well,” the old man began, smiling nervously again, “we never get any female companionship up in the mountains. I was married back a few years and I could never talk my wife into coming up and even trying it up in the mountains.…”
The shock of the struggle started her shaking.
But the old man didn’t seem to notice. He just babbled on. “See … we need a woman for Danny. That’s the only way he’ll travel with me up here. If we get him a woman, he’ll stay on.…”
“Don’t you know that there’ll be people looking for me, tonight, when I don’t show up at work?”
Now the old man’s voice reverted to his bullying flatness. “We don’t care if people are looking for you. We are going to take you off in the mountains anyway.”
During this exchange, the younger man became increasingly agitated, jumping back and forth on the path to scan the lake shore trail in both directions.
“Come on,” he finally shouted. “Let’s get our gear and get out of here before someone comes along.”
The old man nodded, and they struggled awkwardly into their packs. The boy had to untie the line from his own wrist to shoulder his large green backpack, but the old man gripped Kari tightly again while this maneuver was completed. When they were ready for the trail, the old man again nodded silently, and the boy dragged Kari ahead. Instead of following the trail, however, he struck off directly through the brush and deadfall trees, up the slope of the pothole lake, away from the trail, away from the managed sections of this wilderness.
Kari had no choice but to follow, bound like an unwilling Siamese twin. Behind her she could hear the old man puffing as they struggled up the incline toward the ridge. Ahead, there was only tangled timber and distant sky. They were heading northeast, she realized, into the forest of the Spanish Peaks.
Two hundred yards from the pine thicket where Kari Swenson was seized, the trees opened on a sunny glade beside Upper Ulerys Lake. Bark had been cut from the trunk of a tall, straight lodgepole that stood alone in the corner of the glade. On the smooth exposed surface of the wood someone with a bold but disciplined hand had written these words with indelible artist’s marker:
Dan
and
Don
Nichols
Live in
These Mts.
July 14, 1984
2
Ennis Lake Shore Lodge
July 15, 1984
Johnny France poured himself a glass of wine from the green jug on the picnic table and sat back in the lawn chair. Pete and Bonnie Cox had one of the best sites in the campground. Their shiny Airstream trailer was a fixture here under the tall cottonwoods, at the edge of the water. There was deep shade on an afternoon like this, but they still had a view of the mountains rising across the lake.
The Coxes pulled their trailer up from Oklahoma every summer. They took real pleasure in the cool valley evenings around their campfire. And they also enjoyed some of the best trout fishing in the country. But most of all, Johnny suspected, they looked forward to the casual social life and genuine hospitality of the Madison Valley. Over the years, Peter Cox’s birthday in mid-July had become an annual celebration among the half-dozen regular couples who parked their trailers along this shore.
Hands down, Johnny and Sue France were the most truly Western couple at the party. They lived in nearby Ennis, with a population of six hundred, the largest town in the Madison Valley. Ranching was the primary industry here, with summer tourism and outfitting for the fall elk hunters pretty far behind. Madison County was still an authentic corner of the American West.
As a young man, Johnny had been a cowboy. And he knew a thing or two about the pain and pleasure of the rodeo circuit. Mostly the pain. For the past three years, though, he had served as sheriff of Madison County. And, as the people drinking gin and tonic and chablis around the Coxes’ fireplace could attest, he certainly looked the part of a Western sheriff.
At forty-four, Johnny France was lean and wiry. His face was lined from decades’ exposure to the high country sun. His hands were strong, calloused, and rippled with accumulated scars. He probably owned a dozen wide-brimmed cowboy hats, and he was not usually seen by anyone other than Sue and the kids when he wasn’t wearing one.
But Johnny’s most notable feature was his eyes. Pale blue and luminous, they were seldom still. Johnny had grown up on ranches, just down Beartrap Canyon from Ennis Lake. From the time he was a little kid, he’d spent a lot of time out in the open, working cattle, fixing fences, trapping and hunting. All his life, Johnny had looked for things … stray calves, coyotes, an eagle across the canyon, a sow grizzly up a timbered draw. Before he’d been in law enforcement, Johnny made a living breaking horses and riding rodeo. He had learned young to look real hard at horses. As a young town constable and later as a deputy, he discovered that his life might depend on exactly what he saw, how quickly he saw it, and what his mind did with that visual information.
People who didn’t know Johnny well sometimes thought that he wasn’t attentive to conversations because his eyes ceaselessly scanned his surroundings while he spoke. But that was just his way. He always heard what you were saying and responded appropriately. He just liked to see what was going on around him.
This afternoon, for example, Johnny was simultaneously aware of the couples before him in their lawn chairs and of the fishermen in that aluminum boat a quarter mile up the shore, and of the pickup truck’s dust p
lume on the Cedar Hill Ranch road, three miles across the lake. He was also conscious that Bonnie Cox was about to remind him that he’d promised to tell the story about the big gray horse in Helena who had stamped on his face during his last summer of rodeoing.
“Johnny,” she began with mock affront, “you never did tell me about that old belt buckle you always wear.”
Johnny fingered the cool metal buckle. The sterling and gold oval was large, rich, but not gaudy. Out here, it was about as proud a possession as a man could own.
“Montana Rodeo Association,” Bonnie read, prompting him. “Champion Bareback Bronc Rider, 1967.”
Sue was up at the trailer, helping Linn with the appetizers, so Johnny decided to have a little fun with Bonnie. She was an attractive blonde with a sardonic sense of humor who truly did enjoy a party. Back home in Oklahoma Bonnie worked with victims of sexual abuse, so he understood her fondness for jokes and laughter. She surely didn’t get too much of that in her job.
“Yeah, well …,” Johnny began, “you shouldn’t put too much stock in belt buckles.”
“Oh, no?” Bonnie replied, rising to his bait. “Didn’t you do anything heroic to earn that one?”
Johnny gripped his chin in his thumb and index finger as he often did when asked to talk about himself. “No,” he said quietly, as if owning up to a somber truth. “Fact is I had an old boy in jail one night … pretty good old cowboy from up around Missoula … seems he had a little too much whiskey and drove his truck off the road. Yeah, well …” He paused for effect here, aware that he’d actually ensnared most of those around the fireplace, not just Bonnie, then continued in his best cowboy drawl. “… old boy had his hearing before the J.P. and couldn’t make his fine. So I allowed as how I might be able to help him out with some cash if he could cut loose of that there fancy rodeo buckle.” Johnny gazed at Bonnie with his pale blue eyes, waiting for her to speak.
“So?” she finally exploded, “what happened?”
“I bought it off him for twenty bucks.” Johnny remained as deadpan as he could. “Old cowboy hated to give her up, but he had his back right to it, you know.” He nodded sharply, as if at some unpleasant, but morally edifying memory. “I took to wearing it when I was out of town, so as my friends wouldn’t see me with it. Then, well … guess I just got fond of it because I …”
Bonnie saw now what he was doing. “Johnny France! You rotten …” She threw a slice of lime at him, but Johnny ducked and let his pent-up laughter burst.
“Well … yeah,” Johnny smiled warmly at Bonnie and rubbed the belt buckle. “I guess maybe I got a little lucky that year.” He knew that he would have to talk some about his rodeo career, that people kind of expected it. Unconsciously maybe, people who came up here in the summer were looking for the real West, for Cowboy America, a civilization distilled from childhood Bob Steele matinees and adolescent years of “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza.”
“I hear you got a little lucky the year before that, too,” Pete Cox offered.
“Yes, sir,” Johnny answered, “I … ah, I took the all-around championship that year.” Beneath the cottonwoods the circle of faces turned expectantly, and Johnny slowly recited his impressive list of rodeo titles, accepting the fact that he fulfilled a certain symbolic function, combining as he did two of America’s mythical heroes in one person. A real cowboy and a real Western sheriff.
He finished his recitation, dumped some more ice cubes in his glass to chill and dilute the wine, and chatted his way out of the group. Johnny could work a crowd with natural grace. That was part of his job. In rural Montana, a sheriff was elected not just to enforce the criminal code and assure public safety, but also to serve as a tangible symbol of legal authority, proof that legally structured civilization prevailed in this isolated corner of the West.
In a little while he would rejoin the group but right now he saw Sue coming down from the trailer and he wanted to have a few minutes alone with her, to enjoy a quiet glass of wine and the chance to speak quietly with his wife in the shade by the water’s edge. He would use part of this peaceful Sunday afternoon to examine the week past and make plans for the week ahead. That was a luxury he and Sue had not been able to enjoy for a while now.
In theory, the sheriff was free of duty obligations from noon Saturday until eight Monday morning. That was the theory. In reality, the summer tourist rush always overwhelmed the limited personnel at his disposal, and Johnny found himself working weekends from early June until after Labor Day.
This year the Ennis Rodeo on the Fourth of July had started a crush of work that had Johnny on the go from dawn until after midnight each day. He not only had the department to run, but also his river-float business was entering the busiest part of the season. Johnny was one of only two outfitters licensed to work the nearby Beartrap Canyon, just below Ennis Lake on the Madison River, one of the most exciting and dangerous stretches of white water in America.
But his obligations as sheriff did not end just because he had to spend seven hours a day out on the river with his clients … not to mention another two or three hours servicing the boats for the next day’s group.
One of the problems with the department was that Madison County was over thirty-five hundred square miles, almost as big as the whole state of Connecticut. And Johnny only had himself and seven full-time deputies to enforce the law, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. In summer, the tourists spilling up from Yellowstone en route to Glacier Park and the rafters and trout fishermen swelled the county’s population. During the rodeo, the drunken college kids always took on the local cowboys, so drunk and disorderly arrests shot up. All summer his officers had to contend with a much higher rate of DUI’s, traffic accidents, stranded motorists, and sundry other headaches that people expected the sheriff to handle for them.
Today he’d told Vicki Hudson, his dispatcher, not to bother him unless there was a real emergency. He and Sue had been working hard all spring and early summer, and they hadn’t had a chance to just relax, away from the telephone and the police radio in the car. Beyond Johnny’s responsibilities as sheriff and Sue’s job at the McAllister Inn, there was the riverfloat business. Johnny’s skill on the river and his friendly way with clients brought him a lot of repeat customers and a regular stream of new people recommended by the old ones.
Normally, that would be fine. By working long hours, he could juggle the demands of both jobs. But above the pressure of their seasonal workloads, Sue and Johnny were deeply involved with their “place,” the small piece of valley range land they had bought the previous year and christened the Circle Four Ranch. For years they had wanted some land of their own, where they could keep their horses and build the big, handsome log home that was their dream. Just before the July Fourth rodeo, Johnny had finished the well and drainage ditches, and now J.T., their oldest son, was almost done with the fencing.
Johnny bit back a yawn and ducked under a cotton-wood branch to reach the water’s edge. He was tired, but he didn’t want Pete and Bonnie to see him yawning. In a minute, he knew, Sue would join him here, and they could talk about what was on her mind.
It was J.T., he realized. Not that the boy was a problem in any way. J.T. was a year out of high school and eager to pull his share of the load. Johnny had promised to train J.T. to take over the Beartrap Canyon trips this summer. In fact, he’d promised the boy he’d have him ready to lead the trips scheduled for late July. That would free Johnny up to work on the place.
But Johnny simply hadn’t had enough time to get out on the river with J.T. and run the canyon, over and over in the big rubber Avon riverboat. It was one thing to ride the river, hanging on and whooping and hollering with the rest of them when they were sucked down into the spray and spewing hydraulics of that big set of rapids called the “kitchen sink.” But it was something altogether different to control the boat, to actually sit there up on the high rowing frame with those two long fiberglass cars in your hands, watching the green curves of the curr
ent, the bulges of water that signaled dangerous suction.
The Beartrap was a new river every day, depending on how much water the power plant was letting through the turbines to meet the irrigation load downstream in the Missouri headwaters. He couldn’t simply explain to J.T. about the eddies and the setups for each section of the rapids. Johnny would have to be there in the boat, coaching him through. And, until he did, it was too dangerous to send J.T. out there.
Beartrap Canyon could kill you real quick, if you didn’t understand the river. Every year, it seemed, at least one inexperienced floater was drowned. And he was determined that would not happen to J.T. or to any of those who placed their trust in the boy’s abilities. Johnny knew that his son understood his concern. But J.T. was anxious to learn. He was a normal nineteen-year-old boy, a little bigger than some, certainly smarter than many. He wanted to make his own way as an adult. J.T. had learned a sense of quiet responsibility from Johnny, a pride in paying his own way, in doing his job well. Now he just wanted a chance to demonstrate those qualities, and Johnny couldn’t fault him for that.
“What’s up?” Sue asked, slipping between two trees to join him on the grassy shore. “You look so darn serious.”
Johnny rubbed his face, and muttered, “Yeah, well, about J.T.…”
“He has been asking again.” Sue nodded. “I told him I’d remind you.”
“Tuesday,” Johnny said. “We can get out there all day on Tuesday. Then work the Wednesday trip together, and …”
They talked slowly, each listening carefully to the other. For almost twenty-five years, they had worked through their problems this way, sorting out the possibilities, weighing their opportunities. They made a pretty good team. When they’d married, neither one had been much older than J.T., and Johnny’s worldly possessions didn’t amount to much more than a saddle and a quarter horse mare he’d bought off his Uncle Joe.
Incident at Big Sky Page 2
