by Scott Young
“Yeah,” I said. I could see the whole sonofabitching thing in my head, plainly. Too plainly.
“If” Charlie said, emphasizing, “that’s all if the guy we’re talking about wasn’t just some other guy who might not have come this way at all, but just kept right on going along the D.O.T. road to some shack out in the bush, into the arms of some husky dusky maiden.”
“Let’s pretend we’re talking about the murderer,” I said. “It’s more fun.” It also supported the idea that somebody masterminding this thing had arranged for him to come in here either from Edmonton or Yellowknife on the morning flight, and had phoned well ahead of time to arrange a snowmobile rental.
He started the van again. “I want to show you something else.”
We went uphill a few hundred yards further. Now I could see great chunks of windswept stone ahead and to the right; obviously, the quarry. Before getting there he turned left on what wasn’t more than a rough trail, deep ruts in the snow, the kind of place only a four-wheel drive vehicle like this one could go and hope to get turned around and out. Charlie went along that trail maybe a hundred yards, then braked and reversed into a sharp turn so that the back end of the van headed uphill and we were looking downhill.
Even with the snow I could see that we were on a shelf overlooking the Mackenzie. Below and to our right I could dimly see the airport lights, blinking through the squalls. Between us and the airport, even though there wasn’t much light yet, we could see a straight white line cutting through the bush like a chalk mark on a blackboard. It vanished in the distance in both directions. Everyone flying in the North along the Mackenzie sees miles of these straight white cutlines through the bush. Many were cleared originally in the 1960s for Canadian National Telegraphs but now were shared here and there by International Pipelines and in some places from about mid-January to mid-March, by the vital winter road. That’s the only time when ice at the river crossings is thick enough to hold big transports.
I stared at the outline, nodding, saying to myself, yeah, yeah. When he got that far after the murder, which way did he turn? I didn’t ask it but Charlie answered it anyway.
“Ned Hoare picked up the guy’s trail coming off the airport property,” he said. “He could do that because nobody else goes across the airport on a snowmobile. But the farther Ned went, the less he could be sure he was following the right track. At the cutline, of course, it was game over. Snowmobile tracks in both directions.”
These cutlines in summer are too rough to travel except on foot with a backpack. Winter is another matter. I knew the geography. If a cutline connects one community with another, like Fort Norman and Norman Wells, or even comes close, almost automatically it becomes a winter road. Transports large and small, normally limited by strictly local road systems, move supplies and equipment. Places that don’t have a winter road, like Fort Good Hope a hundred miles north, downriver, near the narrow part of the Mackenzie where it runs between high cliffs called The Ramparts, sign petitions and beefs to their legislative members. They feel that civilization is passing them by.
“So which way do you think?” I asked.
“Hard to say. If you weren’t trying to fool anybody, Fort Norman would be a piece of cake. Can’t ignore north, of course, but jeez that road north is tough. A truck slid off a cliff once this winter already.”
Anyway, Mountie detachments along the river both ways had been alerted. Any stranger would be getting very searching looks.
I asked, “Did you manage to fly the cutline yesterday at all?”
“Got a chopper up for about an hour before the weather forced us in. Saw some snowmobiles towards Fort Norman. Pengelly from the detachment there came the other way on his machine and checked them out. All local. Saw nothing to the north. Like I say, can’t rule north out, but if the guy went south, what time’s the murder, around five-thirty, he could have been in Fort Norman by midnight, except that he wouldn’t be that dumb.”
We were on the same wavelength. The fugitive couldn’t have expected to last long unspotted if he stayed in the open. If he ran without lights, which he probably did, he couldn’t make good time. If he ran with lights, say toward Fort Norman, anyone out to intercept him could stop and turn out his own lights and spot anything coming.
“I don’t think the guy would be heading for a settlement at all,” I said.
“So where?” Charlie asked.
“Some hideout, even a place he’d specifically fixed up himself in advance.”
“If he knew the bush,” the corporal mused, emphasizing the if, “he could stick it out for weeks or maybe months. I mean, an experienced trapper could, easy. Some of them do. Go out after freezeup and come back starving, eating ptarmigan and their goddamn dogs and, and, well, girl friends—”
“Charlie . . .” I protested, although none of the possibilities he had suggested was unprecedented. The old barren land trapper in Inuvik who’d declared in favor of dogteams over snowmobiles on the grounds that he couldn’t skin and eat a snowmobile had been making a fairly limited assessment of the disaster plans he might consider if the need arose.
I reran those few seconds frozen in time, the shots that killed Morton. “The guy was no trapper. Hell, I know trappers, how they smell, how they take half a day to decide to blow their nose. He was a killer, a guy with a plan. Now, what kind of a plan could a guy have to make sure that he got away fast and safe?”
“You tell me,” the corporal said.
I opened my mouth and then shut it again. I’d had the idea first the day before in Ted Huff’s office and hadn’t mentioned it, and still didn’t want it to sound like the solution until I’d thought about it more.
But the corporal was reading my mind. “Out with it,” he said. “When you get an idea you do everything but throw your arms in the air like a goddamn hockey player and do a little dance.”
“And here I thought I was pretty inscrutable,” I said.
“Out with it.”
I’d been hoping that he wouldn’t insist, because even while I’d been talking the idea had been developing some more.
Suppose the Komatik Air flight now listed as missing, but which had taken off with no stated destination, had been supposed to land somewhere not far from here and wait for a murderer arriving by snowmobile. Of course, that would mean the murderer was absolutely part of the drug gang on the run.
I said, “This guy would have had to have a lot of help, even on the basis of what we know of him. He knew he’d been seen, so no alibi would stand up for sure.”
“Yeah, go on.”
“So he’d have to have a deal where he’d get to a lake somewhere or someplace along the river, fast, and be picked up.”
“No goddamn plane is gonna land and take off in the dark!”
“It doesn’t have to be dark,” I said. “A plane could have been out there waiting for—hell, twenty-four hours. There’s hundreds of lakes and ponds. Maybe thousands.”
The possibilities didn’t really have to be spelled out. Charlie got the Komatik Air connection, or possible connection, right away, the one plane we knew of that had been down this way a day before the murder and maybe wasn’t missing at all, just misplaced.
“Shit,” Charlie said. “That’s too far-fetched.”
“You got a better idea?”
“No.” After a while he said rather respectfully, I thought, “So tell me more, oh shaman.”
“We ask the rescue people to go on with what they’re doing, as soon as they can fly, except to keep in mind that maybe these guys don’t want to be found. That would explain the lack of radio signals. Along the same line of thinking, if they landed on purpose rather than crashed, they might have camouflaged the aircraft with trees, snow, sheets, whatever, to make it less visible from the air.”
“Jesus,” Charlie said. “And I could be missing all this if I hadn’t resigned from th
e choir.”
“That’s not all,” I said. “Just in case the bunch from Inuvik isn’t in on it at all, maybe we should ask up and down the river if there’s any pilot who is, or was, supposed to meet somebody at a certain spot.”
With most trappers carrying two-way radios these days such pickups are common for a wide variety of reasons, from death in the family to a suddenly unbearable case of hemorrhoids to which the owner wished to bid farewell.
“That makes sense,” Charlie said. “Let’s get on it.”
He put the van in gear and started back down the road. By then it was near ten and there was a pre-dawn lightening of the landscape, a greying of the snow-filled overcast.
We rode in silence until we got to the police office and sat a moment outside. I was thinking, what’s next? So was he.
“I’d better go to Fort Norman,” I said.
“Anything particular in mind?”
“Well, it doesn’t seem fair to have two great brains in the same place, where some places haven’t got any at all.”
Grinning, “Too true. But what do you really have in mind?”
“Somebody has to find William Cavendish.”
It had been confirmed by the Fort Norman detachment that William had landed there Wednesday morning. Then he seemed to have vanished. Of course, he was on his home turf, relatives and boyhood friends sometimes being willing accessories to this and that. It wasn’t certain, either, that anyone would talk to me. The farther you get south the farther you are from Inuit country, and although we and the Dene got along a lot better than we had in olden times when they felt they ought to kill us because we looked different, and we thought we should kill them first, to avoid that fate, we still don’t always bend over backwards for each other.
“Nothin’s flying,” Charlie said. The radio weather forecaster had been droning on about the weather getting worse before it got better. Charlie waved a hand at the windshield bashing sleet and snow as evidence.
“Can you let me have your snowmobile?”
“Better you than me. But I can’t spare anybody to go with you.”
“Did I ask?”
I looked off to the south to where now, ever so faintly, I could see more signs of dawn. “Let’s get moving. I can use all the daylight I can get.”
That was good enough for him. “I’ll drop you at Mack House first and then go check for phone calls and load the snowmobile,” he said.
In my room I unpacked and got out the stuff I didn’t use unless I needed it. I needed it now. Stripped down, I regarded with regret my little brown pot belly. “The great lover,” I muttered aloud. I pulled on thermal longs, a thermal top, heavy socks, a wool shirt, then the wool pants I’d been wearing. My kneehighs were the best, leather with rubber sales and a felt liner. Down vest. In my parka pocket I tucked goggles and a new face-mask I’d bought, better than the old-type woolen balaclava. Designed much the same, with eye slits and a mouth-nose opening but made of some material that didn’t absorb moisture and fitted almost skin tight. Some things I didn’t have to worry about. Helmet, rifle, snowmobile tools, spare parts and other equipment would be in the machine or available. I packed the rest of my stuff in my carry bag. I might be in and around Fort Norman a while.
I felt no foreboding, only excitement. For a long time, it seemed, I’d been with people, most of the challenges, if any, cerebral. Now I was going out on my own where the challenges were the kind that come at you out of the blue. It had been years. I missed that.
The van was waiting outside for me, the detachment’s snowmobile loaded on its trailer. Before getting into the van I climbed onto the trailer. Charlie watched me with a little grin as I opened the snowmobile seat and made my inspection; a flashlight, pipe wrenches, spare sparkplugs and flashlight batteries, spare drive belt, pliers, screwdriver, airtight container of matches, a light block-and-tackle with nylon rope and pulleys with which I could pull myself out of trouble if I had to and could find a nearby tree, stump or rock as an anchor. A spare fuel tank, full, was strapped on the sled hitched behind along with canvas saddlebags containing two Thermoses and some plastic containers of sandwiches. Held by clips alongside the right side of the machine was a loaded rifle.
The corporal watched me during this check.
When I nodded, he nodded.
“There’s a two-way radio under the sandwiches,” he said. “Use it once in a while. Tell me what’s happening. I’ll run you out to the cut.”
On the way mixed sleet and snow fell more heavily, drifting in spots. A snowplow was working the main road. Charlie told me he’d learned nothing new on his trip to the office. The weather was going to continue bad, canceling search flights, so on the missing aircraft front, nothing. G division headquarters in Yellowknife would know as much about what was going on as I did. Or more. They or Ted Huff would be keeping Buster informed in Ottawa.
When we stopped on the road where the cutline came in at right angles, Charlie tipped the trailer into its unloading mode and I backed the machine and trailer-sled off. I pulled on my face guard and over it the crash helmet and goggles, keeping the engine at idle so I could hear what Charlie was repeating to me, raising his voice: “Pengelly will meet you a few miles out of Fort Norman.”
I nosed the machine off the side of the road, down the steep bank, through the ditch, and gunned it up the other side. Then I waved and was gone.
The mind is not greatly involved in a trip like that. The daylight was meager, no sun showing although it was supposed to rise up there in the murk somewhere at a few minutes to eleven. When the wind blew snow into brief whiteouts, I’d slow to a crawl. I hardly even glanced at the trails that led off into the bush. This close to the town there were too many to worry about. Anyway, this was Charlie’s territory. They’d be combing the bush on snowmobiles, their own and volunteers. On my mind all the time was my guess about the guy maybe heading for a place where a plane could land and pick him up.
But it would be tricky. The plane had to find the prearranged spot. Then the guy, not from these parts, had to find it. And it had to be where no one else was likely to stumble across it and screw up everything. The North for thousands of square miles was littered with small lakes, most of them unnamed. If one of them was in the plan, wouldn’t it have to be a lake shown on normal navigation maps? But wouldn’t that increase the chance of discovery?
I was assuming that the guy would stay on this, the east side of the Mackenzie, but why, I didn’t know. From the map I had in my mind I knew that the prospect nearest to Norman Wells was Kelly Lake. Farther south and closer to Fort Norman was Brackett Lake. Both okay for aircraft, but no cinch for a snowmobile because reaching either would mean getting through the Franklin Mountains. It seemed more plausible to me that there’d be someplace easier to get to but not obvious, meaning it would be known mainly to those who knew the area intimately. More and more, there were reasons to find William Cavendish.
As I bumped along, a feeling of peace gradually came over me. Much of my life, both before I signed on as a special and after, I’d spent time out in the bush or the tundra with snow machines or dog teams. On long trips I might have an objective many days away but the important thing was always just to get through the next few hours before night and food and sleep. On such a trip the mind roams free. I hadn’t felt this good for a long time, leaving behind conferences, memos, reports, the trying to convince others that this policy was good and that bad, being polite with deputy ministers and deferential with the political ministers who came and went like migrating geese.
The snow continued. Sometimes in a whiteout I would steer by the straight lines of bush on either side of me. I was in no rush. I had six or seven hours of light to go fifty miles. Easy.
In places the track left by other vehicles, trucks and snowmobiles, was drifted over, only to become visible again where it had been swept by the wind. Animal tracks showed as b
lurred dents crossing the trail in some patches of snow, leading to other places where they had been snowed over altogether.
A little more than three hours out I figured I must be approaching halfway. The snow had changed again to sleet that rattled against my goggles. I stopped and turned my back to the storm, happy that I was alone, out in the bush, nothing between me and God but the wind and the snow. I had seen no living thing since leaving Charlie. Just to hear my voice, to reassure the storm that I harbored no hard feelings, I said aloud, “Time for a coffee break”
And then, suddenly, I was shown how free I was feeling. A raven flapped out of a gust of snow, saw me, came back for a look, then headed heavily away again, and I yelled at it, my voice tiny against the vastness, “Raven! Raven! Why art thou forsaking me?”
The raven came back and sat in a tree, probably not because of my appeal but on sober second thought realizing that where there was man there would soon be garbage, something to eat.
I conversed with the silent raven further as I drank strong coffee from the Thermos and ate two good salmon salad sandwiches, heavy on salmon, mayonnaise and butter on thick firm bread. Red salmon cost six bucks a small tin up here, but Nancy Paterson had spared no expense. The raven was still waiting. I pushed the transmit button on the radio and said, “Kitologitak here. All clear. Over.”
Charlie answered in seconds. “Roger. Go man. Over and out.”
I left half a sandwich for the raven, stowed the food and drink, and climbed aboard. As I started up I looked back and saw the raven flapping down to pick up its share of the lunch.
