“Well,” Johnny said, “either our guru’s a lot better than all of us, or he’s got himself a lot of brass.”
That night, Johnny called a police officer back East, whom the tracker had listed as a reference.
“Has this fella really been able to find a lot of missing people for you?” Johnny asked.
“Let’s see,” the man hedged. “I’ll just say that he’s had some success, all right?”
That same night, Johnny received a report from a lawman staying with the tracker at Buck’s T-4, that the young man was regaling the patrons of the bar with tales of his celebrated career. Far from keeping his presence here in Montana a secret, the tracker seemed to revel in the admiration he received from the locals in the barroom.
I wonder, Johnny thought, if his bar bill will go on the expenses he charges the Goldstein family?
The next morning, they left Gallatin Canyon early and drove around the northern end of the Spanish Peaks to approach Cowboy Heaven from the Spanish Creek road. They formed a fairly large party and drove in three vehicles, Jay Cosgrove’s Blazer and Brad and Johnny’s Eagles. Dave Wing had replaced Bob Morton as the Forest Service law enforcement representative.
The plan had not changed, despite Johnny’s mounting reservations about the tracker’s expertise. They would drive to within a mile or so of the cow camp, form a skirmish line of armed lawmen, and let the tracker search for signs. After the previous day’s tracking, he claimed to have an indelible image of the two fugitives’ footprints, so, if they had come out north, after stealing the food, the tracker might be able to spot their trail as the posse moved in.
Wherever they crossed the Nicholses’ track, however, the plan called for them to have almost fifteen hours of daylight to follow the trail, and maybe even run Don Nichols and his boy to ground up there in the rocks and timber above the Beartrap.
But this plan began to unravel early in the day. Coming up from the open rangeland to the steeper country, Jay’s Blazer slipped off the ruts above a big mud hole in the track and went belly-deep in the soupy muck. Then, to exacerbate the problem, his right rear tire spun into a sharp rock and broke the bead. Now he was stuck in a chest-deep rocky mud hole with a flat tire.
Grimly, the men set to work to free the Blazer. To Johnny’s surprise, the tracker suddenly shifted from his role of aloof guru to become a brute-force laborer. He seemed to relish wading waist deep into the mud to force slabs of rock under the Blazer’s axle. The young man struggled steadily over an hour, digging out the rear axle, adding more stone ballast to support the wheels, and finally jacking up the car, so that he could change the tire. All they had to work with was a little Handy Man jack and a one-prong lug wrench.
Johnny watched the tracker working down in that gooey pit. Son of a gun, Johnny thought, this fella’s full of surprises. However, just when Johnny was about to concede that he’d been wrong about the tracker, the young man called his assistant, and again the acolyte presented his master with a ceremonial glass of water in the folding cup.
By the time they got to the high plateau and were formed up on a skirmish line to scout the approaches to the cow camp, they were three hours behind schedule.
Entering the spruce and lodgepole north of the Cowboy Heaven meadows, a tall gray timber wolf loped off through the trees. To Johnny, that was a clear sign that the Nicholses were not in the immediate area. Wolves had become so spooky about people that they rarely moved through a piece of country that a man had even crossed within twenty-four hours.
The posse worked up the approach road to the cow camp, strung out wide on each flank, with the tracker and Johnny France taking the hard ruts of the road itself.
It was Johnny, not the tracker, who found the first clear footprint. About three quarters of a mile from Cowboy Heaven, the track branched, and just past the branch, Johnny discovered a clear boot track and a print very similar to the chain-link tread tennis shoe sole print he had seen in the crime scene camp. From later interviews with Kari Swenson, Gallatin County detectives had established that Danny Nichols wore a kind of soft-upper tennis shoe the day of the crime.
Johnny called the tracker to the prints, and the young man went to work with his measuring sticks and note pad.
These tracks, the young man stated, were made by the Nicholses within the past twenty-four hours. Johnny passed the word over the radio for everyone to keep a sharp watch.
Now the tracker was in his element. With his two assistants, he moved quickly down the road, almost leaving the armed escort behind him. When the group came to the large fenced horse pasture before the cow camp itself, he stated that the tracks ran across the pasture and into the camp.
Very carefully, Johnny glassed the cow camp with his binoculars, then dispatched Jay and Brad to circle the pasture and take up perimeter positions on either side of the big tan wall tent.
The tracker, however, did not seem concerned. He led his men right across the open grass to the camp, seemingly unaware that he could be sniped on at any moment.
In the tent, the tracker found a faint impression of the chain-link tennis shoe sole.
When he spoke, his tone was a dogmatic proclamation. “This,” he said, “is the boy’s track.”
Up a side trail from the tent, they found more tracks near a small pipe spring that supplied water for the camp. Here they rested a few minutes, drinking the chill spring water and washing the sweat from their faces. It was after midday, and Johnny was beginning to feel that the tracks were too old for there to be a chance of contact before dark.
Unless, of course, the Nicholses were lying in one of their rocky ambush positions up ahead, scanning the lower slopes with their people watchers.
Ten minutes west of the spring, they came to an open sage brush flat. Here, the tracker stated, the Nicholses had crossed. He said he could see clear “heel marks” leading out into the open flat.
Maybe, Johnny thought, but it went against everything he knew about the Nicholses for them to go ambling across such an exposed clearing in broad daylight.
Once more, he and his men guarded the perimeters while the tracker and his crew moved straight across the open ground.
They climbed west, up the timbered backslopes of the Beartrap’s ramparts, right toward the steep gorges of Barn and Fall Creeks. The tracker was leading the posse into the inner sanctum of Don Nichols’s secret kingdom. Furthermore, Johnny knew, the tracker had no way of realizing where he was taking them. If the guy was a phony, he was a lucky one.
An hour later, they came to a steep, jumbled piece of country where huge boulders rose up from the thick lodgepole forest. Among the rocky outcroppings, they found a deeply hollowed depression, a kind of missing-tooth socket in this giant jawbone of a ridge. This was the only opening among the steep deadfall timber and the sheer rock formations. Obvious game trails converged on the hollow, revealing the tracks of deer, elk, and smaller animals who used the depression to cross from this slope to the other side of the ridge.
Down in the shady hollow, the sparse soil was almost as hard as the surrounding granite. Earlier in the day, the trench must have been a sun-baked oven, Johnny saw. An army could cross those rocks and not leave a clear track. But he also saw that this depression dropped off on the other side, right onto the top ridge of the Beartrap Canyon itself.
The tracker rooted around in the hole, then climbed back up and examined the dry grass that had survived on the margins of the converging game trails.
He rose to his full height and generated his presence to the law men. “This,” he said, pointing into the depression, “is their gateway. This is where they cross back and forth from the Beartrap to that country down around Spanish Creek and Cherry Creek.”
Johnny had to admit that the young man’s argument had merit.
But then the tracker dropped his real bombshell.
He stooped to examine the grass again. From the way this grass was bent, he proclaimed, he could tell that they moved through here with great ste
alth, six hours ago.
“They went down that way.” He pointed once more into the rocky trench. “They crossed six hours ago. They’re six hours ahead of us.”
Johnny and Dave Wing hunkered down to examine the brown grass. Sure the stalks were bent and twisted. Elk and mule deer moved through here all the time. But this young guy was saying he could see from the way the grass was bent that the Nicholses crossed here “with great stealth” six hours ago.
Johnny got Dave aside for a private word. No track that he’d seen, Johnny said, looked newer than a day old. Dave concurred. Those tennis shoe tracks back at the camp, he added, were probably the boy’s when the tent was robbed. But he sure hadn’t seen any tracks coming up here that were only hours old.
They returned to the edge of the depression and stared down into the Beartrap. It was almost four in the afternoon. If they took off through that trench now, and tried tracking down into that terrible broken country around Fall Creek and Barn Creek, they’d get caught out by dark. Worse, they would be bushwhacking those steep slopes, right in Don’s home country in the dark, making God knows how much noise, easy prey for snipers.
According to Dave Wing, Don Nichols could be invisible up here in the daylight. What would he be at night?
Johnny signaled in the deputies from their flank-guard positions. “Boys,” he said, “I’m afraid we’re gonna have to call it a day. I don’t want to head into the Beartrap with only three hours of real daylight left.”
The men came to stand on the lip of the depression, gazing down into the long blue shadows of the creek gorges. One by one, they nodded.
That afternoon on the way out, another deputy’s car got hung up on the terrible gravel track that led down from Cowboy Heaven to Spanish Creek. They met FBI agent Bernie Hubley at the Spanish Creek cow camp, and he drove the tracker and his men to Belgrade Airport to catch their plane back East.
En route to the airport, the tracker told Bernie Hubley that he had tracked the Nicholses to an obvious “gateway” in the mountains.
He also told the FBI man that the sheriff had called off the search when the posse was only “two hours” behind the fugitives.
Two days later, Bernie Hubley phoned Johnny at his office.
“Johnny,” he said, “I got to talk to you.”
“What’s up?” Johnny said, anticipating some kind of trouble.
“Well,” Bernie began, “our tracking guru got back East and he told the Goldstein family that he was only twenty minutes behind the Nicholses, and that you called the search off.”
Johnny groaned.
“Listen, Johnny,” Bernie added. “The Goldsteins called me. They were furious. They said their money’s been wasted.”
“Well,” Johnny managed, almost sputtering mad. “I think maybe it has been … but not by me.”
“Johnny,” Bernie soothed. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to get that guru back here and give him a chance to show his stuff. But this time, the FBI’s going to pay for the trip, and, by God, he’ll have to work for his money.”
Two days later, the tracker returned. He traveled alone, without his cup bearer or the man who carried his “pressure point” sticks.
Dave Wing and Johnny France rendezvoused with the tracker and the FBI caravan down on Cherry Creek, and they drove up to Spanish Creek cow camp through the old Wiley and Butler ranches. The FBI group included an unsmiling eight-man SWAT team of men who appeared to Johnny to be tough, hard-time cops. He doubted if they were intrigued by the tracker’s theories of “manifested and potential universes.”
Johnny and Dave Wing left the group at Cowboy Heaven, and took off on a scouting trek of their own, down Beartrap Creek, looking for abandoned mine shafts.
That night, Bernie Hubley called to report.
They’d taken the tracker back to the depression in the rocks and let him try to locate the Nicholses’ trail again.
Somehow, as the armed team deployed west of the rocky “gateway,” the tracker had disappeared. For a couple of hours, the FBI men had anxiously searched for him, thinking that the young man might have fallen into a silent ambush.
Then, a couple of the SWAT party had returned to the vehicles to use the more powerful car radios. They found the tracker there, looking cool and fit, waiting for them in the shade. He had, he said, taken off alone in order to move faster. While tracking alone, he continued, he had “covered” both Fall Creek and Barn Creek, all the way down the two drainages. But the only tracks he found, he said, were three days old. They have, he added, moved out of this country. We should have gone in after them three days ago. We missed our chance.
A couple of the FBI SWAT party had been in the original night sweep of the area, two weeks before. They knew what kind of country lay in the Fall and Barn Creek drainages. And they also understood the superhuman effort it would have taken to “cover” those two timbered gorges in so short a time.
The FBI’s effort with the tracker was canceled before dark. There was no point in continuing under the circumstances.
The moon was rising dusty brown above the shoulder of Lone Mountain.
Don Nichols stood in the trees, trying to sniff the breeze that flowed down the draw from the black stone of Blaze Mountain behind him. His legs were bad tonight, crampy and sore.
This climbing in the dark was hard.
For a moment, he regretted leaving the Beartrap after Danny got the food from the cowboys’ tent. But now, they were almost back on the Jack Creek side, and he knew they’d make their cache there before dawn. The gooseberries were ripe on these southern slopes. And they had raspberry jam in the cache. Tomorrow, they could eat biscuits with raspberry jam, then start harvesting gooseberries to dry for the winter.
This country was thick and steep, too difficult for mounted posses but good country for him and Danny. However, he wished they didn’t have to travel at night like this. Soon, he knew, the weather would start closing down, and they wouldn’t see any more posses.
14
The Beartrap
August
Johnny France’s obsession with the Nicholses slipped beneath the surface of his life. Like a jagged rock in a set of rapids when the river rises with the spring melt, Don Nichols and his son were there, just under the smooth skin of his daily routine.
After the tracker’s second trip to the Beartrap, Johnny had several long, serious conversations with Dave Wing, Bernie Hubley, and certain other lawmen who were as deeply involved in the case as Johnny himself. One grizzled old officer who’d observed the tracker at close quarters gave Johnny what he considered a fair assessment of the whole tracker-guru fiasco.
“If we could have gotten him alone, so he couldn’t show off to those two flunkies of his, Johnny … maybe we’d have had some better results.”
“Maybe,” Johnny agreed, thinking that Bernie Hubley hadn’t had much success with the guy alone.
“Well,” the officer added, “he might have been a dope-smokin’ son of a bitch, but that guy sure could track. If’n we’d have kinda got a bridle on him and kept him moving.”
“Yeah, well …” Johnny shook his head in frustration. He was sure now that the tracker actually had followed the Nicholses’ tracks from the cow camp to the “gateway,” not across the sage flats as he claimed, but somehow up to that jawbone ridge, maybe on instinct, maybe using some of the mystical powers he implied he possessed. The tracker had shown Dave Wing a tennis shoe print up there that could have been the boy’s. But Dave had felt the track was at least a full day old, not six hours.
“You know,” Johnny concluded, “they’re still in the Beartrap, and if we’re gonna find them, we’ve got to start thinking like they do.”
The old officer rubbed his face and nodded sourly. “Hell, Johnny, I don’t like the sound of that.”
One afternoon, Johnny drove down Highway 84, along Warm Springs Creek canyon, across the right-angle bridge over the Madison, and back up the old truck track on the east si
de of Beartrap Canyon.
He knew this country well. Just north of here on the other side of the river lay his Uncle Joe’s old place, and, a couple miles west of that was the Cold Springs Ranch, where he’d spent all those years as a foster child of Forrest and Betsy Shirley. If there was any part of the state that Johnny could really call his roots, it was in these dry rimrock canyons and timbered ridges.
He parked the Eagle in the shade of an overhanging spruce that was being undercut by the current at the edge of the bank. This was about as far as you could drive in from the north. The trail crossed Beartrap Creek ahead, and snaked up and down the granite spurs of canyon above the big sets of rapids, toward the hydroelectric plant.
From where he stood, he could study the high ridgeline that walked away south, cut by the deep side canyons of Goose, Fall, Barn, and Trail creeks. Those gorges rose almost three thousand feet in less than two miles from the river. Yet, three miles west of Barn Creek, the high plateau and broken timber began around Cowboy Heaven.
This was what the elk outfitters called “broken country,” steep rock bluffs, savagely bisected by near-vertical drainages. The whole top of the Beartrap was that way, a string of timbered islands, each with its resident population of big horn sheep, deer, elk and grizzly, hanging up there between the Madison River’s main gorge and the more open rangeland around Cowboy Heaven and Red Knob.
When Johnny was a kid, he’d seen a wonderful John Wayne flying movie about a World War II transport crew surviving on a frozen Labrador lake after their plane was forced down. The name of that movie was Island in the Sky, a haunting, evocative title that stayed with him, long after the details and images of the film had vanished.
Well, there was a whole chain of islands up there in the sky, an archipelago fifteen miles long and three wide, isolated from Madison County and the laws of Montana.
Incident at Big Sky Page 17
