In the reflected sunlight Sue’s long black hair, the dark warmth of her eyes, and her slender grace in peasant blouse and jeans evoked the girl he’d married … nearly a quarter century ago. Johnny only had to look at Sue for a while to understand that life had been pretty good to him, all in all, and that there was still a lot left to enjoy.
He toed the grass with his boot and felt the familiar blade of pain from his ankle. He hadn’t been much older than J.T., either, when he’d busted that ankle, at the Bitterroot Rodeo, early in the ’64 season. He’d drawn a big rank gray saddle bronc, and they’d had trouble with him in the chute. The arena was muddy and the ground pretty badly chewed up from the earlier events.
Trouble happens fast with a big horse. His neck rope snagged in the gate, and he had nowhere to go. So he threw Johnny sideways across his head and Johnny came down feet first in that gummy mud. He actually heard the ankle snap when he hit.
He’d hobbled out of the ring to find Doc Wheeler, his friend the vet, out by the stock pens. Doc sprayed the black, swollen ankle with some freezing chemical, taped it up tight, and helped Johnny pull his boot back on.
“Gotta ride the remount,” Johnny said between his teeth. “Need the money real bad.”
“She’ll take a cast, Johnny,” Doc warned. “You don’t get a cast on her, you’re gonna get crippled up, years from now.”
Johnny finished the day with his ankle taped and drew first money in the saddle bronc event.
And he completed the season without a cast. Every Friday night before he left for the weekend rodeo, Johnny visited Old Doc and got his ankle retaped. That’s when he was working as a cowboy over near Dillon. Kathy was three and J.T. was just a baby. He had a family to support on a wrangler’s pay. He needed that rodeo prize money. He had responsibilities. And that was something Johnny France took very seriously.
Now J.T. felt the same sense of responsibility. And Johnny could not fault him for that.
The lake was flat calm in the windless afternoon. Here at the northern edge, the massive heights of the Madison Range, from the Spanish Peaks above Beartrap Canyon, all the way down past Sphinx Mountain to the south, were nicely reflected in the water. He started past Sue, to the timbered silence of the mountains. On the other side of those rock summits was Big Sky—developed, Leisure Montana.
But this valley was still relatively untouched. He was proud to have been raised here, and proud that he and Sue could raise their own kids here. They’d certainly had their share of money worries and hard work, but they sure as hell didn’t want to live anywhere else.
“Well, Susie,” he said, summing up the way he felt. “Things’ll work out. You know me, I always find some way to get things done.”
“That’s the truth,” Sue smiled. “Lord knows how sometimes.”
“Yeah, well … maybe things’ll quiet down now at the office, and I’ll get some time with J.T. out on the river.”
Sue France gazed up at the silent mountains. “Well,” she said, “let’s hope so.”
3
Moonlight Basin
July 15, 1984
They must have made a strange procession through the tangled lodgepole forest, but there was no human present to observe their progress. The blond youth took the lead, with Kari stumbling along beside him on her short tether. Behind them, the old man guarded the rear, his rifle unslung as he scanned the trees.
Once they had crested the ridge, Kari saw that their route seemed to lead almost due north, paralleling the Jack Creek Trail toward the drainage called the Moonlight Basin. But, five minutes later she could no longer be certain of their direction because the timber was so thick. The dense geometry of the deadfalls cross-hatched the view around her, combining with the uneven terrain of ridges and draws to prevent easy orientation.
This difficult country did not seem to bother the two men, however. They picked their way skillfully through the tangled brush, avoiding open areas where the ground looked soft and they might leave obvious tracks. The ridge sloped into a hollow, and they negotiated an especially difficult area of deadfalls. On the far side, a small grassy swamp marked the course of a stream. Kari felt that they were getting further from any trail or logging road as they crossed this thicket. Soon it would not matter if they left tracks because they would be so far into the trailless country that no search party would ever find her. She also realized that every delay she could cause would increase her chances of eventual rescue. It was after three o’clock now, and Bob Schaap would no doubt start a search for her within two hours.
Kari dug in her cleats, scuffing a mole mound. She breathed heavily, as if winded by the trek from the lake. “Can we … can we sit down a minute and talk about this?”
The old man was beside her. His face was mottled from the exertion of the climb, and he seemed almost relieved to be stopping. “Sure,” he said. “We’ll get a drink of water.”
Again they repeated the awkward process of unlashing the line from the boy’s wrist. Kari now knew that the young man was named Danny, but she had no clue as to the old man’s identity. Once the packs were off, the old man scanned the green circle of the swamp and pointed out a shallow pond, twenty yards to the left.
Handing the line to Danny, he strode toward the pond, unconcerned that he was leaving clear boot tracks in the soft ground. “I’ll get some water.”
Kari stared at the sluggish stream, at the gummy compost of the swampbed. “Don’t you worry about drinking the water?” The question was obvious to her. Most of these swamps were infected with protozoan parasites, especially the debilitating giardia.
The old man stopped. “Why worry about the water?”
“Well,” she said, trying to sound sincerely concerned, “you can get very sick from drinking the water up here … from giardia.”
As she spoke, the old man assumed an expression of annoyance. “Oh, no, no, no,” he scolded, shaking his head impatiently. “We don’t worry about that kind of thing.”
He was wrong, of course, but she saw that there was no sense arguing with him. This man was a tyrant, even about something as obvious as infected swamp water. When he answered her, it was as if she had had no right even to comment about conditions in these mountains, as if, somehow, he and the boy were specially privileged. They did what they pleased up here, when it pleased them to do it, and that included shooting game out of season, drinking bad water … and taking any woman who happened to come along the trail.
When each man had gone to drink, Kari kept her place, seated on the grass. The longer she stalled them, the greater her chance at rescue. “Look,” she finally said, “you really do plan on raping me, don’t you?”
“No, no, no,” the old man insisted, impatiently shaking his head. “That’s not what we’re interested in at all.”
He spoke in normal tones. “We just want a female to be with us in the mountains, that’s all.” He sounded as if his demand was absolutely justified, as if they deserved to have a female to share their weird life.
Danny had already pulled on his pack. Once more, it was he who was most concerned about making their way deeper into the forest. “Come on,” he said, “we’d better keep moving because we’re not very far from the lake yet.”
The old man rose from his squat and dragged on his own pack, then jerked Kari to her feet. Her right hand was puffy blue and her wrist numb from the tightly hitched line. “Could you, you know … loosen the line a little? It’s getting very uncomfortable.”
“No, no, no,” the old man muttered. “She’ll be able to wiggle away from us.”
Once more, Kari literally dug in her heels, both to show her resistance and to leave clear tracks in the swampbed. “You know people are going to start looking for me,” she said, not trying to hide her outrage, “so I don’t understand why you guys are keeping me. They are going to find me.”
The old man spun on her, his own stubborn anger obvious now. “You just better keep quiet,” he hissed. “If anyone comes up on us that�
��s looking for you—” He shook his head, his eyes hot. “—or anyone just happens to walk into our camp, we’ll shoot them.” He thrust his face close to hers. “Anyone tries to rescue you or comes up on us, we’ll shoot them, understand? We’ll kill them.”
Before Kari could answer, they tugged the line, dragging her forward into the dense timber.
After ten minutes crisscrossing the ridgetop and clawing through draws choked with young fir and deadfalls, Kari was more confused about their route. The sun was behind the shoulder of Lone Mountain, so they now moved in the shadows of the higher ridges. Mosquitoes and sticky buffalo flies were a nasty presence. But she was more preoccupied with what lay ahead when they reached the “camp” about which the old man had spoken.
There were more snaking mole tunnels right before her. Without obviously looking down, Kari kicked the clods aside and ground her distinctive cleat marks into the exposed earth. To any experienced search team, such a track would be like her signature.
“Hey!” the old man shouted from behind her. “Let’s stop that right now. Remember what I said. You really don’t want any of your friends finding you. We’ll shoot anybody who comes after you.”
He scuffed aside her footprints and churned up the dry mole mound with his rifle butt, as if an animal had been rooting for the mole. “You watch her now, Danny,” he called. “We don’t want her doing that.”
The boy yanked on the line, cutting her wrist as she lurched ahead into the brush.
Only a few hundred yards further along the ridge, the old man called a halt. “I’m getting dizzy,” he muttered, removing his greasy hat. “We’d better set here for awhile.”
Indeed, he did look pale and queasy, his blue eyes sunken deeper into his bony face. He breathed slowly, as if his chest pained him.
Beside her, the boy looked anxiously back along the route they had traveled.
After dumping his pack, the old man wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve and flopped to the ground. “Kind of dizzy,” he repeated to Danny. “Don’t know what’s wrong with me all of a sudden.”
“Well,” the boy began, “how far you figure we can travel today?”
They spoke in seemingly calm terms about the best way to thwart a search team, discussing Kari as if she were a piece of burdensome, but valuable equipment they’d been entrusted to move across these mountains.
“So,” the old man concluded, “camp the night up ahead there, then cross the logging road real early before any hikers are on it. Then we can just head on up toward the Jack Creek cache.”
Danny wriggled his shoulders in his packstraps. “Well, come on,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.”
But the old man still seemed winded, dizzy.
Kari took the opportunity to delay them again. “How far will we have to go tomorrow?”
The boy smirked, as if her question was predictably stupid.
“Oh,” the old man said, considering the question, “sometimes we travel thirty, forty miles on a good day. I’ll tell you one thing, we sure want to get you far away from here, if there really are gonna be people out looking for you.”
“Can you actually travel forty miles in one day?”
Again, the boy smirked at her question, but the old man treated it seriously. “Well, we’ve lived up here for a few years and we know this country real well. We know how to travel, too. We’ve got our caches buried here and there, and we’ve got some real nice camps … winter or summer. Got one big old hole in the ground that’s real comfortable. You can sit out a blizzard in there and never be cold. There’s gardens and extra gear … you’ll be surprised how well we live in these mountains.”
“Yeah,” the boy volunteered, “we don’t have to go down much for supplies, just once and awhile to Ennis or Big Sky.”
“You … you shoot your meat?” She was pleased to be stalling them so well and wanted to keep the conversation moving.
“Nothing at all wrong with shooting your own meat in the mountains,” the old man said emphatically. “Those game laws are just for the bureaucrats. People have been living in the mountains a long time before they started the laws …” He glared at her with his chill blue eyes. “We don’t take anything we don’t need.”
Around them, the forest was deeper in shadow. In a few hours it would be dark and they would have her in their camp.
Ten minutes later, they pushed their way through some dense beetle-kill lodgepoles, and Kari let her bright terry cloth headband fall to the ground.
Almost without breaking stride, the old man bent to scoop up the red band and thrust it into the pocket of his stained work trousers. “Danny,” he called, “you gotta keep your eye on her better than that.”
Kari stared back at the old man and he spoke with slow, menacing tones. “You shouldn’t be doing that kind of thing, Sue.” He shook his head in disgust. “Someone might find us. Remember, one of your rescuers might just walk in on us, and we’ll shoot him.”
It was probably after six when they made camp. But Kari had no way of telling the exact time because they had confiscated her watch during their last rest. She’d been able to convince them to shift the nylon tether to her left wrist, and, during the transfer, she had dropped her digital watch to the pine-needle floor of the forest. But, as with the headband, the old man had instantly discovered her ploy and had again warned her against leaving behind “clues.”
Kari was surprised at their choice of camp. They had come down a wide draw, choked with deadfall, following a mossy streambed. Ahead, there was a low hummock that dominated the draw. All around, the forest was dense lodgepole and spruce. Once again, the combination of uneven terrain within the larger land form of the draw, as well as the confused angles of the naked gray deadfall trunks, made easy orientation impossible. But instead of seeking out the natural camouflage of the thickets, the two men dragged her up to the small grassy clearing on the rise above the stream.
“Looks fine to me,” the old man said, eagerly dropping his pack. He glanced around the open rise and pointed to a tall lodgepole behind him. “Let’s chain her to this tree.”
Kari wasn’t certain she had actually heard the word “chain,” but then she saw the old man retrieve a heavy dog chain from his pack. At the end of the chain hung a thick brass padlock.
But they were almost blasé about chaining her; obviously, they had discussed this practicality, and the actual act of chaining a human being as they would a dog or a domestic animal did not seem to affect them. With a sense of bizarre unreality, Kari found herself standing in her jogging shorts and her old blue T-shirt, her back to the rough bark of a tall pine, a thumb-thick chain wrapped about her waist and the tree. She was somewhere up on the Moonlight Drainage, she imagined, but, given the thick timber and the confusing lie of the land, she might just as well be in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
The chain around her waist was not a work chain, a normal woodsman’s tool. They had bought this chain and lock specifically to chain a prisoner. Maybe they’d used it before, on other young women, girls they’d taken back here to rape and murder.
While she watched, the two men set to work constructing their spartan camp. The old man unloaded sooty plastic food canisters from his pack and began mixing biscuit batter in a greasy, fire-blackened skillet. While he worked at this chore, the boy stooped into a hollow thicket of small Christmas tree firs across from her and began smoothing the pine needle floor of the alcove into a soft sleeping platform.
When Danny finished with the sleeping chamber, he strode around the nearby trees, snapping off the dead lower branches people called “squaw wood.” This would burn with a hot, smokeless flame and quickly produce cooking embers.
Danny took out a stained and patched mosquito net and rummaged deeper in his pack. “Here,” he said, offering Kari what appeared to be a rolled-up magazine.
She leaned forward to take it, slightly wary of the offer. When she unrolled the tattered book, she found herself staring at the idiotic grin of
Alfred E. Neuman. Danny had given her a Mad magazine to read. Silently, she leafed through the pages.
The sun had disappeared now, even from the surrounding treetops. Kari was cold; the sweat had stiffened on her T-shirt, and the mosquitoes were nasty again. Near her feet, the old man squatted on his haunches, tending the coals around his biscuit skillet. The young man had been gone ten minutes, stalking a mule deer they’d heard crossing the stream forty yards below their camp. To Kari, it seemed fundamentally cruel to kill a two-hundred-pound animal, just to provide them a few pounds of meat. But the old man had dogmatically insisted that they had a right to “kill any animal that we want to eat.”
A few minutes later, they heard a shot, and then a large animal thrashed through the brush to their left, down the draw from the camp. Danny reappeared, his rifle slung, muttering that he had “just grazed” the doe, and that she had gotten away.
Neither man seemed at all concerned about tracking down the wounded animal. Instead they squatted before her and ate their wedges of scorched biscuit. Kari had worked the chain down the tree trunk, so that she could sit. She clutched the burnt crust of her biscuit, pretending to pick at the soggy interior.
The two men made domestic small talk as they chewed their food, but Kari did not join the conversation.
Then they heard the distant shout, a faraway human voice, faint but unmistakable.
Instantly, the old man was on his feet, scuffing out the fire with his boot sole. Danny grabbed his rifle and knelt at the far side of the camp clearing, peering intently toward the hidden ridge from which the yell seemed to have come. When the fire was dead, the old man took his rifle from its green nylon case and cocked the action.
He approached Kari and spoke again in a low, threatening voice. “You just better hope that’s not about you.” Because if anybody tried to come in here after her, he said, they would shoot him.
Sometime later, they heard the airplane. It was flying low, a single-engine plane, circling the surrounding ridges. Although the sun was hidden by the flank of Lone Mountain to the southwest, there was probably still enough light for an airborne observer to spot them in the clearing. As the plane circled lower and closer, the two men showed their first real apprehension.
Incident at Big Sky Page 3
