by Scott Young
“She come in the front, I go out the back,” Delphine said, looking serious. “That for sure.”
Apart from his innate boorishness, Oscar, when addressing me, spoke very loudly, slowly and clearly; a non-nostalgic reminder of my childhood when seismic crews and summer groups of artifact-hunting archeologists and some crew members or passengers on the supply ships usually seemed to figure that if they spoke loudly enough we Natives would understand.
There was no more than a path into their place so I had to park on the road, presumably not far from where Pengelly had been the time he came out to deal with his noted case of the near-lethal guitar.
With Oscar talking and laughing loudly at his own jokes (“You know what we call siphon hoses where I come from? Indian credit cards, haw haw!”) we walked maybe two hundred yards into the bush, lighting the way with two flashlights. The snowmobile stood where it had stalled after using the few drops of gas the siphon couldn’t reach.
Inside, the log shack was one well-cared-for room. Blankets and patchwork quilts were laid neatly on a double mattress and springs set on peeled poplar logs in one corner. There were two old overstuffed chairs, three or four wooden ones, a table covered with red-and-white oilcloth, a battery radio. Delphine lighted two kerosene lamps and started a fire to heat water for tea. Oscar came outside with me while I shone around with my flashlight.
I couldn’t see much except the imprint where the snowmobile had been parked, halfway inside the woodshed. I checked the sight line. It could have been seen from the road, meaning the intruder would have recognized this as a place where snowmobile fuel almost certainly would be available. Right beside it, Oscar said, had been the two red five-gallon gas containers, one full and one empty.
“The bastard must’ve come in last night,” he said, repeating himself for the third or fourth time. “I wasn’t out here yesterday. Delphine was, to get wood, and she noticed the gas cans weren’t here but didn’t mention it, says she just figured I’d moved them somewhere else, the dumb prick. So the way I figure, whoever did it siphoned all the gas out of the snowmobile into the gas can that was empty and then took both it and the full one.”
“You seen anybody around lately that you didn’t know?” I asked.
“Hell, no. I see anybody I don’t know I ask their name.”
Then a thought suddenly hit him. “The cans have my name on them in black paint. You should be hunting around in town, dammit. That’s probably where the guy who took the gas went from here, right?”
“Hard to say,” I said.
“Where the hell else could he be unless he came from the bush and went back into it? He’d be in town, and red gas cans with my name on them can’t be that easy to hide unless he ditched them somewhere in the snow.”
I decided it wouldn’t be fair, even to Oscar, not to let him know why we were taking the trouble.
“He might have been someone we’re looking for,” I said. “You heard about the guy that killed Morton Cavendish at Norman Wells. He got away on a snowmobile that had no extra gas containers.”
Oscar’s mouth fell open as he got the drift.
“He might have had gas stashed somewhere on the winter road and couldn’t find it, or did find it and holed up for a couple of days, then got lost and used up too much gas, and knew if he wanted to get away from here, wherever he was headed, he needed a lot more gas. If it was that guy, he would have been desperate enough to take a chance on stealing some. He had a gun, too, remember. A Colt .45. And knew how to use it.”
On Oscar’s face as it showed dimly in my flashlight beam, a dramatic change of expression was taking place, from know-it-allness to something I really couldn’t read. “Jesus,” he said.
I drove back into town. So, this was something. But if it was the first sign of the man who had shot Morton Cavendish, there was still all the bush and tundra to think about in trying to figure out where he’d go from here. From now on I could be looking for two snowmobile tracks, William’s and one other.
At noon the next day, Sunday, I was sitting in the passenger seat of a clean trim Beaver flying south along the Big Smith River. Ian Stothers in the pilot seat to my left was wearing, astonishingly enough, a shirt and tie under a couple of sweaters. I’d liked him immediately, one of those Englishmen whose sharp edges had been rubbed off and was just easy to be with. He had thin longish hair to his collar and a straggly growth of facial hair that started at his cheekbones, flowed easily into his moustache, and seemed untrimmed without being untidy. He wore horn-rimmed spectacles, which he took off occasionally, letting them dangle around his neck on a loose leather thong that looked like a retired lace from an old workboot.
Even more telling, from when we met in the frosty dawn of ten a.m. and minus forty-two he never once said old chap, or old boy, or right-o. Certainly he’d never make it socially among the English transplants I’d observed in Victoria, B.C. back in the 1970s when I’d been part of security on a Royal Tour.
When we were moving the engine-warming heat-pot and pulling off the heavy canvas cover that kept the heat in where it would do the most good, I even kidded him a little. “I thought the only pilots who wore shirts and ties were flying 747s,” I said.
“A nasty habit, I admit” he grinned.
Airborne with the heater going full blast, he in his sweaters and I in my old goose-down vest with Maxine’s red nail polish dotted here and there to stop the down from escaping through holes made by pipe ashes, back when I used to smoke more, we were fairly comfortable.
Our parkas were stashed in the back on top of my supplies and his standard emergency gear, including some extra fuel.
At first we flew at around 500 feet. No more than ten or twelve minutes from the airport we’d picked up the heavy double north-south trail of William’s snowmobile and Edie’s dogteam, easily followed from this altitude. The Beaver could cover in that short a time what had taken the dogteam a couple of hours. In another few minutes I pointed down to where we had stopped the dogteam and held our little nature-study session over the wolverine tracks before we saw William approaching. Stothers eased down a couple of hundred feet to circle the place before following again what was now the less distinct single trail left by William’s snowmobile.
“I flew down here, y’know, the first day we could fly after the murder,” Stothers called over the engine noise. “I thought of this river right away as one place Harold Johns might try to make if he was in trouble. He’d know it. I also swung farther east to Lac Ste. Thérèse and flew south to Blackwater Lake, and Keller, all places you could put down a Cessna 180 on.” Those were just names on a map, to me. “But of course it isn’t that Cessna you’re thinking about so much . . .”
He let that trail off, but looked sideways at me. “Unless maybe young Cavendish was looking for the Cessna, too.”
“That’s my guess,” I said. Maybe I had a valuable assistant, here. “What about landing places farther right, toward the Mackenzie?”
“But we’re still following the snowmobile track, I take it?”
“Yes. I was just wondering.”
“I think Johns was too good to try over there if he was in trouble. If he wasn’t, and knew where he was heading, maybe. I’ve met him a few times, y’know. He picked up the gen on bush flying a lot faster than some new ones do. The mountains along this side of the river are no picnic. There’s one peak not a lot west of us right now that’s better than 4700 feet. Not the way anybody with any sense would go, looking for an emergency landing.”
I looked off to my right toward the rougher country of the Franklin Mountains, and wondered.
William’s snowmobile track ran steadily along the narrowing river. There was really very little to see except the track, and a few animals from time to time. Once Stothers banked and pointed down at a wolverine running across the open tundra. Neither of us had to say the word. There’s no mistaking that distincti
ve humping bear-like gait.
Soon we came upon a herd of caribou, maybe 200 animals, crossing the river diagonally. On the other side of where they were crossing we could see no resumption of William’s track
“We’ll circle and see if we can pick it up,” Stothers called, and again dropped the Beaver to 200 feet. It was while the Beaver went wide of the caribou herd that I could see the wolves. They’ll often shadow a herd like this. If you ever wondered where the phrase wolf-pack came from during naval warfare in World War Two, it would help to fly over a herd of caribou attended by wolves. Stothers pointed down at them, his jaw set in a way quite unlike his normal benign expression.
The wolves, eight or nine of them, perhaps one family or two, were in a mile-wide arc out of sight of the moving herd, just as submarines shadowed convoys in the Atlantic. If the herd changed direction and moved toward the wolves on one side, they would fall back, outwards, to adjust, staying approximately the same distance away, on all sides. They wouldn’t attack the herd itself but were alert for signs of stragglers. When a sick or injured or unwary animal fell behind or wandered off, they’d suddenly move in for a kill, all the wolves on that side racing in to attack simultaneously. From the air as we made a complete circle, the scene below looked like a gigantic target with the loosely-bunched herd in the middle the bull’s-eye.
Stothers pointed down again at a single wolf loping along, keeping station. Then Stothers lined up the plane with the course of the wolf and suddenly we went into the Beaver version of a screaming dive to come at the wolf from behind. We were hardly twenty feet above the snow when the Beaver rocked over to the right as Stothers tried to hit the wolf with the right-hand ski. From my window a few scant feet above I could see the wolf plainly as it flattened itself the way a dog will do to avoid a blow, head turned sideways, teeth barerd, as the ski skimmed by.
“Missed,” Stothers said.
My breath was coming harder than I generally allow to happen. “Not by far.”
“I rather dislike wolves,” he said.
“No kidding.”
“I should’ve warned you.” After a pause, “Well, back to business.”
We circled again, wider and wider, but couldn’t pick up the snowmobile trail again.
“Damn strange,” Stothers yelled at me.
Not really. A possibility occurred to me that seemed possible, even likely, but needed checking.
“Can you land here?” I yelled. “Right where the herd crossed?”
“Sure.” He went into a shallow bank, landed, and bumped along a bit to the outside edge of the caribou crossing where there’d be a smoother takeoff run.
I reached for my parka and pulled on my fur hat with the ear flaps down. It was warm in here but outside the cutting northwest wind seemed to be rising. He was unscrewing the coffee Thermos as I clambered out of my seat toward the door just behind me. The jump to the ground was easy enough and I turned and slammed the door shut. It would have been easier walking if I’d thought to grab my snowshoes, but what I wanted to see wouldn’t take that long.
I walked along in the thin sunshine with the silence of the north all around me, the moisture crystals from my breath whipped away on the wind in little white disappearing clouds.
Out here somewhere William had been, maybe looking for others not far away.
I wasn’t more than a few dozen feet into the churned snow-chunks left by the caribou’s passing before I found what I wanted. Caribou droppings are small, not much more than half-inch pellets, quite a bit like those of a deer. Droppings from the herd just gone by were easy to see because their soft freshness slightly stained the snow. When I stepped on a few of these they squished, with only a thin outer crust frozen so far. But mixed among them also were droppings frozen through, as hard as a hockey puck. They could be an hour old, three, five, possibly more. Kicking at the snow I uncovered other frozen droppings of much older vintage. Some were buried nearly a foot. They’d been there for days at least.
I clumped back to the Beaver, climbed in, secured the door and slid back into my seat. Stothers had a steaming cup of coffee in his right hand. The gesture with his left I later came to know. It was what he did when he had a question. He put his left hand alongside his face, the heel of his hand on his chin, the fingers together up towards his left ear, his expression quizzical.
“I guess you found what you wanted,” he said. “Old droppings. A regular caribou crossing.”
Exactly. William hadn’t turned merely so he could enjoy the ineffable experience of bashing along on a highway paved with caribou droppings. When he reached the crossing place two days ago he’d known the odds were good that there’d be more caribou along in the next hours or days, obliterating his snowmobile tracks. Moving caribou sometimes act as if they are going by road maps. “He must’ve turned on the same course as the caribou,” I said. “Either where they were coming from or where they went. He might have been heading for this crossing all along. He lived here long enough to know.”
So now we had two possibilities, that he had turned left on the course the caribou followed, or turned right to where they’d come from.
“Let’s try both ways,” I said. “It might be only a matter of a few miles before he’d branch off. If he branched off.”
“You’re the doctor.”
West toward the Franklins and even into them a few dozen miles to where a winter tractor road ran along the Mackenzie, was rough country. In it were many places where someone flying over would have to be lucky to see what someone didn’t want seen. In the absence of any other possibility I could think of, if William had an educated idea that he’d find something or somebody out here, let’s say somebody who would prefer not to be found, to the west they’d be difficult to spot from the air. More so than in the big open spaces to the east.
I said, “East.”
Stothers looked surprised but said nothing, starting up. The engine roared instantly and we taxied for take-off.
“My hunch is west,” I yelled. “I thought if we try east for a while and get blanked, then we turn back and try west until you run out of gas.”
“Thanks a lot!” he yelled.
We found nothing to the east except the caribou we’d seen passing, and then stayed on the much older but still visible trail of earlier herds. The course wavered this way and that, depending on the terrain. Every time I thought of turning back west I kept thinking, just a few more miles, but there was never a snowmobile trail leaving the caribou’s route. Eventually Stothers raised his eyebrows at me and I said, “Yeah, let’s turn around.”
When we crossed the Big Smith again it was the same game, but the country more rugged, with the caribou trail winding among gullies, valleys and minor watercourses defined mainly by the few scrubby trees along the banks. By late afternoon, sometimes circling miles to either side, both Stothers and I were beginning to imagine things. The lengthening shadows made errors easy. When a trail seemed to lead off somewhere, he’d point or I’d point and we’d go down sometimes perilously close to the crests of hills to find an animal track, a shadow or nothing.
The Franklins aren’t mountains in the sense of the Rockies, but even the foothills that we now were in seemed high enough to two guys in a single-engine Beaver. Time was getting on. The shadows below were getting darker.
The sun had long been on its downward course and now was no more than four or five degrees above the horizon. I was torn, but still I could only go on my guess that William had come out here for some purpose so far unknown, but more specific than assuaging his grief. I was wondering if I should get Stothers to land me. But I really couldn’t think why. If there was something to go on, being out here on snowshoes might have some merit, but for all we knew William might have gone east all the way to the Johnny Hoe River south of Great Bear Lake, or west all the way to Blackwater Lake. Somewhere, there had to be a break.
“We’re going to have to turn back in a few minutes,” Stothers said. “Too dark on the ground to see anything clearly now anyway.”
I nodded. “Could you raise Fort Norman and ask whether William got on that plane to Yellowknife today?”
He did so, and got the reply: “Affirmative.”
“What are you thinking of?” he asked.
“Coming back out tomorrow. Can you do it?”
“Sure.” He gave me that sideways quizzical look. “I’m starting to get interested.”
“Okay,” I said. “Home, James.”
He banked the Beaver around the crest of a hill to head north. I think both of us saw at the same time the flash of a snowmobile headlight a thousand feet below. We saw it only for as long as it would take a watchful man to hear a sudden noise above the sound of his snowmobile, glance up, see the Beaver, and switch off his headlight and maybe his engine.
With the dark shadows below, the headlight beam gone, he was invisible. He could have stopped, could have steered into the meager cover. Anyway, the sign of him had vanished.
“I had a thought I could turn off my engine and see if we could still hear his,” Stothers said. “Then I had another thought. This machine is not a real champion at re-starts in the air.”
“Can we get back right here tomorrow?”
He was making marks on his map. “So young Cavendish is in Yellowknife, which means this is someone else.”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking of Oscar Frederickson and his missing gasoline.
Chapter Ten
The flight took longer going back. The northwest wind that had been on our tail outward bound had grown through the afternoon and was now a substantial headwind. We were being buffeted, bounced around. Some of the buffeting was going on in my head, as well. That snowmobile whose light we had glimpsed so briefly might be the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle. If it belonged to the man who had murdered Morton Cavendish, had hidden somewhere for a few days, then had stolen Oscar Frederickson’s gasoline—the intention could only be to make sure of enough fuel for a substantial trip—how did we manage to be out here with a dog team through most of yesterday, fly along more or less the same course and more today, and never see a sign of it? The answer obviously was that it had not been in any of the territory we had covered.
