by Scott Young
I’ve seen gunslingers in the movies do that. But was I good enough to be accurate in mid-roll?
When he rounded the end of the snowmobile about twenty feet away with the same black Colt held ready in his hand, the big edge I had was that I knew he was alive. He wasn’t sure about me—and besides, I was in the snowmobile’s shadow. I squeezed the trigger, pumped, shot again, pumped and fired one more even after the first shot into his chest jolted him convulsively backwards so that the second and third shots got him on the way down.
The Colt has a device which stops the trigger cold as soon as the handgrip relaxes. This must have happened a split second after my first shot, because his only shot was high and wild, a danger only to low-flying aircraft.
I stayed crouching, listening for other sounds. There were none. Then I walked over for a look at Billy Bob Hicks, or what was left of him after three shotgun hits from a range of about twenty feet. He should have stuck to bartending. That shotgun really did make a mess.
That night I mainly lay awake imagining a lot of things. I didn’t want to sleep because I felt I was still in danger, with a lot to figure out. Yet, drowsing once, I thought I heard a wolf howling far away then snapped awake and couldn’t hear it and decided it must have been a dream because wolves generally sang in chorus.
I had left Billy Bob Hicks precisely where he had fallen. He wasn’t going anywhere. Ground-drift snow soon covered some of the stains of death. Splashes of blood were frozen to the cowl of my snowmobile, which I had not moved. If anyone or anything came upon him and thought of doing something rash, they’d have me to deal with. I thought of those movies where nobody can move the body until the police doctor, usually an old grump, arrives and makes notes about the cause of death and possible time of death, and says things like, “I can’t answer that, inspector, until we examine the stomach contents on Monday.” Meanwhile the lower classes in the police force are taking photographs and admiring the dear departed’s taste in period furniture, kinky sex or whatever. Another guy shows up looking glum. “The murder weapon has no prints on it except Mrs. Thatcher’s,” he states, and the inspector snaps, “Try the loo.”
No doubt about it, I really know my business, but I was preposterously short-staffed. The only regret I had was that dead murderers tell no tales. If I’d got him alive he might have been persuaded to clear up matters still pending, then in jail write his memoirs about an underprivileged life as a hit man. But that was a very mild regret. Leaving him alive would almost certainly have left me dead, an option I always tried to avoid.
Right after Billy Bob died and I lived, I had a few moments of indecision. I could run for the hills to guard against having Billy Bob’s clients show up and win the next round. Or I could do nothing and wait for Pengelly sometime tomorrow morning to assume that my radio silence meant I was in trouble, and send help. Or I could keep on doing what I had been doing: trying alone to get the answers in what so far stood at a score of two dead, and counting.
I found myself nodding, even smiling. That last option was it.
For some reason then I thought of No Legs and his account of how to trap a wolf—the basic principle being that you bait the trap with something the wolf finds irresistible, like meat rubbed with beaver castor. What I had for bait was the body of Billy Bob Hicks and if any wolves showed up I’d have to shoo them away, but what I had in mind as possible arrivals was any or all of Albert Christian, Benny Batten or Harold Johns.
So I moved my outfit nearly a hundred yards back on the trail and into a few wispy trees where I could see without, I hoped, being seen. At this distance I’d need the rifle, so I unlimbered it. Then I rigged my tent in such a way that the snowmobile was the anchor wall to windward. The other side stretched sideways to where, parallel to the snowmobile and four feet or so away, the canvas crossed, and was anchored by, the loaded sled, which I’d unhitched and moved for that purpose. Although inside and snug, ground sheet and sled cover and anything else usable between me and the snow, I was somehow without appetite for boil-in-the-bag pemmican. I boiled snow, made tea, and kept warm in my sleeping bag while occasionally peering through a tiny but drafty slit in the flap of the tent. I’d lined everything up so that my sightline commanded any approach from the west.
But I didn’t expect any visitors. If anyone was close enough to have heard the shots and had a mind to investigate (which was by no means certain: shots affect different people different ways), they’d had lots of time.
Thinking over what I’d do the next day was fairly easy. I hadn’t ventured from my position to try to find where Billy Bob had left his snowmobile. I didn’t really care. I had to assume that he hadn’t reached his colleagues, or clients, or whatever Christian, Batten and Johns turned out to be, or there would have been more of them dealing with me. Somewhere between here and the river I still might find the Cessna and its occupants, alive or dead or some of each. The matter of William’s trip out here seemed more and more to be the key to a lot of things.
At the first grey light of morning I did one useful thing. When this was over, I certainly didn’t want to be playing body, body, who’s got the body. With the axe I cut a spindly sapling and to it tied a blue towel. I stuck the sapling as far into the snow as I could by Billy Bob’s now rigidly frozen body and braced it further with blocks of snow, some of them on top of Billy Bob. Then I made morning tea, ate some biscuits, stuck some chocolate in my parka pocket and embarked on Plan B—or was it Plan C? This was to go south slowly. As Billy Bob presumably had got no farther than right here, I was hoping to find again William’s snowmobile tracks which I had abandoned the day before.
As I traveled, watching for any human sign, I wondered again how long it would be before someone in Fort Norman—Pengelly or Ted Huff if he was still there—would begin to feel that their continued inability to raise me by radio might mean I was in trouble. Somebody then might make a command decision to send out an aircraft. The thought depressed me. It would be an interruption. The body of Billy Bob was one thing, but not all. I was on to something that I wanted to do by myself.
Like always, Matteesie, I thought.
When I was in my late teens out alone in the Barrens on a trapline, isolation was happiness even when I came back famished, tired, with little or nothing to show.
Or I’d be out alone hoping for a caribou so that I could drive my dogs back into camp with the skinned carcass on the sled and see everybody run out into the open to welcome me, smiling men and women and children dressed in caribou skins yelling, “Eeee, eeee, Matteesie,” while I, the great hunter, shared out the meat.
I had gone less than a half-mile south looking for the extension of William’s tracks when there they were.
Ground drift had covered many of the signs but they were still easier to find than they’d been when I’d followed them along the caribou trail, which must have turned elsewhere. The greater visibility was because from time to time there were two distinct trails, one going west and the other east. Some overlapped but not all. William had come out here, reached some objective farther west, and later had gone back. I stayed with his older westbound track.
I’d been going slowly for an hour or so when William’s track turned at right angles and uphill. The highest hills in the Franklins were behind me now, the land gradually dropping and flattening out the nearer I got to the river. Today I had crossed a half-dozen frozen ponds, some with stumps and skeletons of stunted trees sticking up through the ice. When I came to the crest of this hill, something made me stop.
It was a sound, the clamor a dog makes when it is part wolf, as huskies are.
I couldn’t see it but I could hear it. It was nearly impossible that this was the sound I’d heard the night before and thought I’d been dreaming. A trick of the wind might carry it that far, but I didn’t think so. I had an eerie feeling that I’d occasionally had before, when premonition had told me something that actuality couldn’t. I ha
d been thinking about William’s dog not long before I had dozed, falling off into brief sleep and then been convinced I’d been dreaming.
I was still convinced I’d been dreaming then, but I wasn’t dreaming now.
Below me was a pond that differed importantly from others I’d crossed in the last little while. This one was maybe two hundred yards long, more like a stretch of river except that its surrounding unbroken hills were not only along both sides, but closed off the ends. It was shaped more like a stadium than some stadiums. All it needed was a football team and a considerable rise in temperature.
Nothing showed on it but what I took to be the usual animal tracks. When my binoculars showed more detail, I could see no break at all in the snow covering. Most lakes or rivers will have a few windswept spots but not this one: it was totally protected by the hills.
I swept every foot of it for signs, however old and snow-covered, of an aircraft’s skis. Nothing. Then I moved the glasses carefully around the shores, which had here and there a sparse growth of trees. Again, I saw nothing. The dog howled again. The sound echoed around the hills so that pinpointing its source was impossible. But it was down there and if it was William’s Smokey it must be chained or William never would have gotten away without it. Why leave it behind? Even if William was planning to come back, there must be another reason. From what No Legs said, the dog had made trips out and back many times, alternately running or riding William’s sled.
I considered going down by snowmobile to investigate, but instead unloaded my snowshoes from the sled, looped the tapes swiftly around my feet and ankles and calves, put the clip in the rifle, more shells in my pockets, slipped the safety catch off, and started slowly downhill.
Going down a steep hill in deep loose dry snow on trail shoes is no cinch. Wider shoes get a better grip, but trail shoes were what I had. Once, putting my right foot into what looked like safe snow the foot started to slide out of control from a hard crust a few inches below the surface. I got my other foot up fast to a parallel position so that when I slid for six or seven feet I was more skier than snowshoer, but kept my balance.
I could almost hear Pengelly yelling, “For Chrissake, Matteesie! You’ll give me heart failure!” I went on more carefully.
The dog still was singing its wild song, the howling somewhere between an excited welcome and a threat.
By the time I reached the flat surface of the pond, I was nearly sure where the sound was coming from. Then I saw the Cessna. My eyes went by it and then did a double-take. My first glimpse was only of the shape of a window, barely discernible through the aircraft’s cover of branches and whole trees. I could see that great care had been taken to keep it unseen from the air. Even someone flying low might not have seen it, tucked in against the bank and covered from above and from all sides.
I stopped the instant I spotted that window shape. In a few seconds I saw the dog. He fitted No Legs’ description of William’s onetime lead dog, the dark ruff along his shoulders fading to lighter brown on his flanks, a Greenland husky snout. He was chained to a tree a short distance from the aircraft, as if he’d been left on guard. He was plunging again and again toward me to the full extent of the chain.
Apart from him there was no sign of life.
I yelled, “Hey!”
My voice echoed from the hills around “. . . hey, hey, hey . . .”
“Is anybody there?”
“. . . dy there, there, there . . .”
I would have liked a coffee and a camp stool right then, to think this over. I held the rifle ready, my mitted left hand holding it by the stock, flexing my bare right hand constantly to keep it limber if I had to pull a trigger. I yelled again and then started toward the aircraft. I don’t mind admitting that I was in a high state of nervous readiness. If anyone had opened up on me right then I would have been shooting yet.
But I heard no sound except the half-crazy dog.
When I got to maybe fifty feet from the Cessna I yelled again.
At that precise instant the dog fell silent and I heard what sounded like the weakest cry in all creation: a faint, faint, “Help!”
I still didn’t storm in. It wasn’t the situation for “away dull care”, and so on. I took one step at a time, cautiously, stopping to check the hills around. I noticed that whole trees, although small, had been cut and jammed into the snow a few feet offshore from the Cessna, part of its shield. It was all so well done that there wasn’t even a clear path through to the aircraft. Yet I could see that all this camouflage could have been taken away in a matter of moments for the aircraft to warm up and taxi out for takeoff.
I had to move a couple of eight-foot trees in my careful approach to the door on the pilot’s side. The dog was the next problem. He’d be in the way. I turned deliberately and pointed the rifle at him. Any northern dog knows what comes next when a gun is pointed, He whined and slunk back. As I moved forward watching him I heard the faint human sound again, this time a muffled groan. It was definitely from the Cessna.
The dog started up again. Dogs don’t get on my nerves normally but I wanted to be able to hear other things right now. I turned and snarled at it in Inuktitut, which it translated as, “Shut up!”
It shut up.
Two or three feet from the Cessna I called loudly, “I’ve got a gun, safety off, full of dum dum bullets, and I’m corning in.”
No answer.
I thought it would be nice if I could do like in the movies, wrench the door open and jump in with my feet spread solidly wide and all ten fingers on the trigger.
On snowshoes, forget it. I laboriously untied the tapes, opened the door and climbed in.
Chapter Twelve
The primus stove had been going not long before. I could smell it. Two candles were burning, stuck in the necks of empty bottles. It was standard, by the book, winter survival practice. Alone in the rear of the cabin Harold Johns was staring my way from where he lay in a sleeping bag on a pile of parkas and life jackets. Even in the bad light coming from the open door I thought he didn’t look any too healthy. His face was thin by nature. Now it was mottled and bruised, his mouth set in a thin line, the tip of his nose split and scabbed. Peering at me, trying to see who I was, his expression was one of fear.
I introduced myself: “Inspector Matthew Kitologitak, RCMP.”
At that he tried impulsively to sit up in his sleeping bag. He didn’t quite make it but did muster a fervent, “God, am I glad to see you! Can’t get up. Got a broken leg.” And confirmed, “I’m Harold Johns.”
I looked around but still couldn’t figure out what had happened. The radio had been trashed, wires everywhere, but there were no other signs of damage. The food box, close enough that Johns didn’t have to get up to reach it, was half full.
Then I noticed with a sudden rush of adrenalin that he had one hand on a gun. It was the aircraft’s emergency rifle, Komatik Air burned into its butt. I must have looked astonished. Johns followed my gaze and said, “William left it for me.”
Stranger and stranger. “When?”
“Day before yesterday.”
That was Saturday, the day Edie and No Legs and I met William coming back. A day later in Yellowknife had come William’s drunken claim to Gloria that he’d fixed “those two bastards” and would get the other one, too.
He’d also said he didn’t blame Johns, although obviously his decision not to impute blame didn’t quite extend to hauling Johns the hell out of here to safety. Which meant, in turn, that Johns knew things William did not want the world to know. But why leave the dog? Smokey was not only loyal, but not a threat to testify in a court of law. My confusion was mounting. I simply hadn’t expected to find only one person; or at least only one in evidence. What I really needed was the truth, the whole truth, the story from the start. But I might not have time now. So I asked the main question: “Where are Christian and Batten?”
I got something then, a roll of the eyes, a grimace, a look of remembered despair. I thought: until just now Johns thought that he was going to die before this thing was over: and that Christian and Batten were the heavies in his nightmare.
“They’re gone. I imagine with the money, or a lot of it.”
“Gone how?”
“I don’t know everything. When William arrived, what was it, Thursday or Friday, there was a lot of screaming, but mostly outside where I couldn’t hear what it was about. Then Saturday they all went out early, before it was really light—”
“All?” I asked. I wanted things spelled out.
“Christian, Batten, William and even the dog. I heard the snowmobile, the dog barking, and all that fading into the distance and after a couple of hours William came back and said he’d taken the other two on the snowmobile to where they could catch a ride, I guess on the winter tractor road. It isn’t far away.”
If he was being selective in his facts, how could I tell? “Then he tied up the dog,” I said, “and left by himself, right?”
“Right.”
“Did he say he’d be back?”
Johns nodded. “Not only for me, he’d have to come back for his dog.”
It suddenly occurred to me that Smokey couldn’t have eaten for three days. Rummaging in the food box I found a two-pound can of corned beef, stripped off the lid with the key provided for that purpose, levered the meat out with a knife, went to the Cessna door and threw it at Smokey. Down it went. Two gulps. Plus a tail-wagging vote of thanks and a couple of blood-curdling howls for more.
It seemed a good idea at that point to produce my rum. There were two cups on the floor, and a kettle on the primus with a little water in it. In the Arctic it isn’t hardship to do without ice. I poured two stiff ones, left the bottle beside him, and asked, “Is this where you were intending to land all along?”
