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"All
men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses
of their Seventy-three years and six months later, on January 5, 2004, three more strangers appeared in Fort McPherson. They stormed in through the door of the village's only gas station/café/motel, their faces burning and their eyes watering as they were assaulted by a sudden one-hundred- degree temperature change. Four weary Mounties sipping coffee at a Formica table eyeballed them suspiciously. The plainclothes policemen had only last night arrested a local man for stabbing to death his 23-year-old wife. The blood-stained perpetrator had a history of drug use and domestic abuse - he'd just been released from a stint in Yellowknife's prison for killing another woman in a drunken rage. While the fact that he killed again wasn't a surprise, the murder was a very big deal in this community of 900 Gwich'in Indians. There had been two other murders in the Mackenzie Delta region in the last two weeks - a man beaten to death outside a bar in the boom-town of Inuvik and a fatal stabbing in Fort Good Hope. It was a record-breaking murder spree for the Arctic. The policemen suspected all three killings had been fueled by a load of crack cocaine someone brought in from the Outside. In recent years drugs and alcohol have been ravaging the native communities like the influenza viruses of the early twentieth century, and everyone knows it is soon going to get worse with the inevitable arrival of methamphetamine. The Mounties at the table believed that this particular load of crack had been transported via the Dempster - bringing the narcotics in by plane from Edmonton would have been far too risky for the smugglers in this post 9-11 world. The policemen were sitting there drinking their coffee and wondering who could be responsible, and then these three white strangers barged in out of the cold. As the trio stood stomping the snow from their boots and shaking blood back into their fingers, the Mounties continued to watch them closely. Fort McPherson is a dry community, but the strangers reeked of last-night's beer. Two of them were quite tall - about six-and-a-half feet, while the third, of only average height, looked much shorter standing between his towering associates. All three of them had half-assed beards, something all newcomers to the Arctic feel obliged to grow. From the way the girl at the counter glanced at them then quickly away, it was obvious these white men hadn't been in here before. One of the Mounties quietly got up from the table and headed out into the forty-below-zero cold. The strangers hesitated then chose a table on the opposite side of the empty room from the remaining policemen. While shedding his fluorescent green parka, the shortest of the three looked out a frosted window into the noon-day darkness as the Mountie outside scraped snow from the license plate of a Toyota Tundra. Then he pretended to study a menu that had only two items on it - a choice between hamburgers or grilled cheese sandwiches. The Mountie returned from outside, his own face now burning from the cold. He sat back down at the table, pulled of his wolf-skin mittens, and pushed across the scrap of paper on which he has scrawled the license plate number. He had underlined the word Colorado. They all raised their eyebrows. Someone made a wrong turn somewhere, eh? The shortest of the strangers was furtively watching the Mounties over his menu. Mumbling something to his friends, he pushed back his chair. He walked over to the Mounties' table with a nervous grin on his face. The policemen casually took their hands off their coffee cups and placed them under the table, closer to their sidearms. "Excuse me," the stranger said. "Is one of you Sergeant McKay? My name's Clinton McKinzie. I emailed you with some questions about the Mad Trapper? We're trying to repeat his route over the mountains." The Mounties sighed collectively. These guys are dangerous. Very dangerous. But only to themselves. * * * We were told that we needed the permission of the tribal elders before journeying up into the Richardson Mountains. As a result of an agreement with the Canadian government in the 1970s, the Gwich'in Band had been given control of a good portion of the Mackenzie Delta, as well as the Northwest Territories-side of the mountains. We also needed to file a "wilderness report" at the RCMP post. "Do you get called to do many rescues?" Taylor asked with professional interest. This amused the Mounties. "It's mainly so we'll know where to look for your bodies next summer," one of them explained helpfully. Leaving Taylor and Mark to their grilled cheese sandwiches, I put on my parka and dodged snow machines on the street outside as I ran across to the tribal offices. Contrary to what the Mounties had told me about getting permission, I'd been advised by a local missionary to forego the tribal bureaucracy. It could take weeks, he'd warned me in an email, and why bother? After all, no one goes up into the mountains in winter - the rare hunting parties always stick to the passes. No one will ever know you're there. But with the Mounties in town and on heightened alert, that seemed like a bad idea. Besides, I didn't want to offend the people who have learned to survive in this brutal climate. And these people had also been a part of my childhood fantasies - it was the Gwich'in, after all, who led the Mounties in their pursuit of the Mad Trapper. I wanted to know what they remembered about Albert Johnson and what they thought of his legacy. Inside the hot tribal offices, however, with the death of the village daughter the night before, it was clear no one was quite ready for an out-of-season tourist asking questions about historic crimes. The ladies in the lobby all had red eyes above their high Gwich'in cheekbones. Pulling off my boots and leaving them alongside fantastically beaded mukluks, I only asked if I might see the chief. One of them beckoned for me to follow her, and we padded down a hallway to a large office. I'd never met a chief before. I'd been worrying about that, and what the protocol might be. Should I shake hands? Bow? I was relieved to find an unprepossessing man in an old ball cap, plaid shirt, and worn jeans standing from behind a cluttered desk to greet me. I introduced myself, and he shook my hand with his calloused palm. He allowed me to stumble over the reason for my visit without a word. Then he led me to a map on the wall and asked about our intended route. I traced it uncertainly: up the Rat River to the Barrier, up the Barrier to the highest peaks of the Richardson Mountains, then over and down - somewhere, somehow - into the Yukon, where hopefully a ski plane would pick us up. He didn't laugh, swear, or call over to the café for the Mounties. Nor did he deny us permission, or grant it either. He only explained that the mountains are a "no man's land" where nobody travels in winter save the two passes, one north of the high peaks and one to the south. And even the passes require large, experienced parties on snow machines. He offered to have his brother Ski-Doo us in to the Rat River and let us use a cabin there while we explored. But he expressed grave doubt that we'd make it over the high peaks I'd indicated between the passes. When I babbled on about our mountaineering qualifications and reasons for wanting to attempt the high peaks in winter, he shook his head and repeated that it is a "no-man's-land." "But the Mad Trapper crossed, didn't he?" He gave me a long, assessing look then said, "That Johnson, he was one tough bastard," and rather kindly left unstated the rest of the comparison. * * * At about six o'clock, the two young women who'd been cooking at the Teetl'it Co-op took off to help arrange the funeral. While I'd been gone, Mark and Taylor had attempted to chat them up and told them of our plans. My friends reported that the women had said little in response to this but had shown some signs of alarm in the way they suddenly ended the conversation and scurried away. "It was like we told them we were going to shoot ourselves in our rooms tonight," Mark reported with a grin. Their final words to them were said with darting, averted eyes: "I'm sure you'll have a nice time." We were left in charge of the café and attached motel, with run of the kitchen and its entire supply of old cheese, gray meat and doughy white bread. Taylor and I called our wives on the radio payphone and tried to sound enthusiastic. "It's going to be a piece of cake," we lied. "It doesn't even feel all that cold outside." As we morosely debated who should go to the truck for one of our emergency flasks of Jagermeister - and how frost-bitten that person's ungloved hands might get groping through the sacks of dehydrated food and climbing gear - the door of the café flew open. A big man stalked in stomping snow from a fabulous pair of mukluks. He pushed back his wolf-trimmed hood, and I could see he had strong Gwich'in features - the high cheeks and flat nose. He looked tough and lean, like he was straight out of a Jack London story. "Any coffee?" he asked. We introduced ourselves while rummaging around the kitchen for grounds and filters. His name was Neil Colin. He was seventy years old but looked and moved more like he was only half that. He seemed to know exactly who we were and why we'd come. He said he'd driven over on his ski-doo to talk to us. "So you want to know about that bad man, Johnson?" I did indeed. And for the next two hours he told us stories. Although he'd been born two years after the manhunt, as a child he had known all of the Gwich'in men involved and heard their tales. But William Nerysoo, the man who started the whole thing, refused to ever talk about his argument with Johnson over the sprung traps or the chase it sparked, and the details of the confrontation died with him. After a while I expressed my concern about being able to find the right rivers to take us up into the mountains, and Colin told us that his people had once put up signs, "But the grizzlies tore them all down." He warned us that the Richardsons are full of grizzlies, and that we'd better not camp close to a den because they don't appreciate being woken up. He sang us a song about the Peel River in the Gwich'in tongue. He told us the Gwich'in names for rivers and mountains. He said some people still trap in the foothills in winter, but not many. He himself had driven a team of dogs up the Rat River one winter in the 1950s. Johnson's cabin, he'd discovered, was all but gone then, most of it having fallen into the river as a spring flood had radically undercut the bench it was built upon. And he told us about how the land is changing. It is so much warmer, he said. There are trees all over the Delta and the Yukon where there didn't used to be any. "You used to be able to see a man walking up a hill. Now you can't see him at all." He also confirmed that no one before or since Johnson had ever crossed the Richardson's highest peaks in winter. He seemed to think the idea that we were going to try it a joke. Shaking his head, he said, "No one goes up there. Maybe some white men hunting sheep in the summer." Then, looking past me and into the blizzard outside, he added, "Well, I'm sure you'll have a nice time." And as abruptly as he'd come, he shook our hands, zipped up his parka, and disappeared into the cold. * * * Pushing a few tables together, we spread out our ten big 1:50,000 topographical maps that contained the relevant portions of the Richardson Mountains. Even more uncertainly than in Chief Wilson's office, I traced over our intended route with a finger. If we could find a ski plane to take us in, we would begin our trek near the site of Destruction City at an elevation of fifteen feet, just fifty miles to the northwest of where we were right then uneasily sipping our coffee. From there, we'd ski up the Rat River past where Johnson's cabin had stood, climb out of the river valley and then cross hills and canyons heading southwest on the Barrier River before finally entering the maze of mostly nameless peaks that leap up more than a vertical mile off the Delta. Our highlighted route was just uncertain dashes here, as the 100-foot contour intervals on the maps, bunched so close together, didn't really suggest much of a way across - only sheer rock and ice walls as much as 2,000 feet high. Our route became a solid line again on the Yukon side of the Continental Divide, where it followed the La Chute River valley down to the ghost village of La Pierre House, then continued along the Eagle and Bell Rivers to finally reach a large frozen lake where a plane equipped with skis might be able to extricate us. The rough way I'd figured the mileage, it came out somewhere between 100 and 125 miles. I'd spent weeks poring over the maps in Colorado and thought I knew them well, but, looking again, they seemed to have changed. The proposed route I'd inked and highlighted didn't look quite so do-able now that we'd gotten a taste of the cold and the dark, not to mention the natives' doubts. The bunched contour lines made the mountains look bigger, the canyons deeper. We were used to the mountains in Colorado, Wyoming, and even the Alps. When it got cold or stormy in those places, we were never more than twelve hours of slogging from a warm truck or a motel bed. We could bail whenever things got too uncomfortable. And there was always the last resort of rescue - as humiliating as it would be for a SAR (Search and Rescue) instructor like Taylor. Up here in the Arctic, though, such a thing apparently didn't exist. "I don't like it," Taylor said, speaking for all of us. "It's forty degrees below zero outside. Do you really think we can go a hundred miles or more over those mountains in this kind of cold? There's no telling if there's even a way over those mountains." "There'll be a way over. These aren't the Himalayas," I tried to argue. "The Himalayas aren't this cold," Taylor pointed out. "You think we've got enough stuff to stay warm?" Mark said, for once sounding a little anxious. He nodded at the ice-encased window. "It's like friggin' outer space out there." "We've got that collapsible wood stove for the tipi." "Look," Taylor said, "The maps don't show any green once we get above two thousand feet. Down on the Delta is the northernmost limit of trees anyway. There's probably not going to be any wood to burn." "Then we can carry it in our sleds. Or just somehow do without for a night or two and try to travel really, really fast." Each concern confirmed and heightened my identical fears, but, at the same time, felt like a slap in the face. I'd wanted to hunt down the Mad Trapper's ghost and cross these mountains so badly, for so long, that each apprehension raised - no matter how sensible - stung like a betrayal. In the ten years I'd known Taylor, he'd always been good-naturedly and cautiously amenable to the climbing trips I proposed. But now, after coming all this way, he sounded more than reluctant. His tone was almost adamant. "I don't know about you guys, but I'm feeling a little freaked out," Taylor concluded. "I don't know if we're up to this." Mark said nothing but appeared to agree. And I found myself wishing for some excuse to cancel the trip. Someone getting sick, a problem back home, the Gwich'in denying us passage - anything. I looked up at my reflection in the icy window and wondered what the boy who'd dreamed for years of coming here would think if he could have known he would grow into such a coward. I made another attempt at playing the role of a fearless leader. Just as with the Sour Toe Cocktail, it turned out badly. "The route looked okay when we went over it at your house, Taylor. And, like Neil Colin just said, 'I'm sure we'll have a nice time!' Let's not even talk about wimping out." Then, feeling guilty for being hypocritical and sounding a little harsh, I added the words that would all but determine our defeat. "Besides, the Chief told me about this cabin on the Bear River down near the Delta. If things look bad in the mountains, then we can haul ass for it and use the sat phone to call for a ski plane pick-up. At least we'll get to see what the mountains look like where Old Albert crossed." Maybe that, I thought, will be enough. But when you're chasing hard on the heels of a dream, you should never have a contingency plan.
CHAPTER
SIX As the Arctic winter of 1931 strengthened its grip on the land during the month of September, the weakening sun swam lower and lower laps across the sky. It sank beneath the surface of the horizon for a final time in the Mackenzie Delta on the sixth day of December, not to appear again for thirty days. Since the arrival of the first white men in the Canadian Arctic, the holidays - arriving in the deepest abyss of cold and darkness - had been celebrated with desperate intensity. The best tins of food were pried opened, the best wines and liquors uncorked. Often the natives were invited to join in festivities that could last for days. Music, generally in the form of a fiddle, would take the edge off the cold and one's mind from the darkness. And with the music came dancing. In The Last Gentleman Adventurer, Edward Beauclerk Maurice describes the 1931 party at a Royal Canadian Mounted Police barracks in the Arctic: "The dancing was a serious matter. The Eskimos lined up in a row to bounce up and down for some time before moving into a turn of some kind. Some of the older ladies remained jigging on the same spot indefinitely, their bosoms rising and falling with the rhythm, their faces devoid of expression other than that caused by the exertion of energy. Undoubtedly they were enjoying themselves immensely." At Spike Millen's post in the tiny village of Arctic Red River, just such a party was underway on Christmas Day. Young Millen surely would have been showing off just why he was known as "the best step dancer in the north country." He likely would have also been exhibiting his abilities as a pastry chef - he was so good at baking that he'd once been called to Aklavik to bake for a visit by the Governor-General of the province. The local Gwich'in would, in turn, be showing off in their fur clothing with the fabulous beadwork for which they were famous. The party was in full swing when a native trapper named William Nerysoo arrived to cut short the celebration. A portrait of Nerysoo, taken by William Firth of the Hudson's Bay Company post in Fort McPherson, shows a shy but smiling elderly man standing in front of a log cabin. He has typical Gwich'in features: a broad, flat nose, slanting eyes, high cheeks and a prominent chin. His thin shoulders are hunched, and he appears uncomfortable with being photographed. But he seems to be enduring it good-naturedly. He looks like a man it would be difficult to anger. The day before, on Christmas Eve, however, he was riled enough to hitch up his team of huskies and drive them more than seventy miles in twenty-four hours - all the way across the Mackenzie Delta - to the village of Arctic Red River and its police post despite deep snow, darkness, and minus-40-degree temperatures. He complained to Millen that the man known as Albert Johnson had been dislodging his traps and hanging them from the branches of trees. It was a traditional means of disputing one's right to trap in the area. Johnson also was accused of breaking down deadfall snares placed by Nerysoo and his brothers. When approached and accused, Johnson was said to have made threats and ordered the Gwich'in off "his land." Nerysoo told Millen that he suspected the man had gone bush-crazy. Rumors that Johnson had remained in the Northwest Territories had filtered in to Millen over the preceding months via the "moccasin telegraph." The stranger had stayed despite the fact that he had refused Millen's offer to issue him a trapping permit. Apparently he had built a small, squat cabin above the Rat River in the foothills of the Richardson Mountains. The "Rat," as it's called to this day by the locals, rushes down from the high peaks of the Richardsons into the western edge of the Delta. A relatively low pass divides the mountains at its headwaters, one the Gwich'in have used for centuries to trade with their relations in the Yukon. This was the same route on the same river that the one hundred Klondike Stampeders had attempted at the turn of the century, after leaving Fort McPherson and wintering at the Rat's mouth in the bitterly cold camp they called "Destruction City." Those who were successful in getting across to the Yukon reported it had taken them twenty-eight days to travel forty-eight miles - and this was in summer, with a midnight sun and pleasant temperatures to aid them. Thirty-two years later, this entire region on the east side of the Richardson Mountains was only occupied by four men: William Nerysoo, Jacob Drymeat, William Vittrekwa, and, now, the man known as Albert Johnson. Spike Millen ordered the entire company under his command - Constable Alfred King and his native interpreter and dog driver, Special Constable Joe Bernard - to mush out to the Rat River and have a chat with Johnson about his behavior. Although King was the only choice for the job, he was a good one. He was said to be quiet, outrageously strong, and an unbeatable wrestler. A picture of him from the previous year shows a dark-haired young man with wide-set eyes and a full face. His exposed forearms are as muscular as a rock climber's as he poses with a six-shooter in one hand. He appears to have the good looks and the confidence of a football hero. Like Millen, he'd requested an assignment in the North immediately after his enlistment in 1926. He'd already served in Old Crow and Dawson City, where he'd learned to patrol by horse and dog team. King and Bernard set out with a spruce-framed sled on December 26. With the dogs harnessed single-file, they traveled on ice and through snow the same route to Fort McPherson that Millen had boated the previous summer when he interviewed Johnson - twenty miles down the Mackenzie to the confluence of the Peel, then up the Peel for thirty miles to the village. There they over-nighted with William Firth, the Hudson's Bay Company manager, who invited them to his famous New Year's Eve party in just five days. The party had the reputation of being the best and wildest in all the North. King and Bernard promised to be there. The next day the two constables mushed twenty-five miles northwest to the mouth of the Rat River. It wasn't an easy trip. At very cold temperatures like the ones they were experiencing, the snow is as abrasive as sand on the runners of the sled. Every few hours the runners had to be re-iced by spitting onto them mouthfuls of water. King and Bernard also had to break a trail through three feet of snow almost the entire way. With no sun or warmth in the dead of winter, the snow never consolidates. Moving through it is like trying to wade through flour. The dogs, Mackenzie River malamutes, some with a strain of wolf in them, were big and strong, weighing up to 150 pounds, but could not push through the deep snow alone. Wherever the wind hadn't swept the snow from the river ice, either King or Bernard had to break a trail on snowshoes for the dogs while the other constable rode or pushed from the back of the sled. Even at 40-below they could stay relatively warm as long as they kept moving. But each exhaled breath froze to their faces and, when they exerted themselves, their sweat gathered as ice in between their layers of clothes, making the wool and fur garments uncomfortably stiff and increasingly less insulating. And they risked frostbite each time they removed their fur mitts to tie a snowshoe lace or adjust a dog's harness. And even more immediately dangerous, the deep snow hid open breaks on the river ice beneath them. In winter, this far out in the Arctic bush, they might as well have been in outer space. The hostile elements required constant attention; any lapse could, and often would, kill. There was no hope of rescue if a mistake were made. Somewhere around the mouth of the Rat River, the two tired men decided to camp. The dogs wolfed down their allotment of two pounds each of dried fish then were allowed to burrow into the snow. King and Bernard dug out their own pit, laid willows across the bottom for insulation, and then tied a tarp to the willows in order to cut the wind and reflect the heat of a fire. They spent the night huddled in their sleeping bags, scarcely sleeping because of the intense cold and the need to monitor the fire. On the morning of December 28, the constables drove their sled past the old Stampeder's camp at Destruction City, where the Rat River begins its sinuous path up into the mountains. Here the river enters a valley with three-hundred-foot-high steep slopes on either side. The slopes are thick with willows and spruce, as is the valley bottom wherever the river's annual break-up hasn't ripped out the vegetation. Seeing a thin trail of smoke drifting up into the sky, King and Bernard found Johnson's cabin eight miles upstream from Destruction City. The cabin was set on a small bench jutting out above the frozen river. With a short bluff down to the river on three sides, the fourth was set against the steep slope of the hillside. The cabin itself was tiny, only eight-by-ten feet, with walls just five feet high. Obviously it had been excavated down on the inside. The gaps in the log walls were plugged with frozen dirt. The roof was covered with another two feet of dirt and moss for insulation. As the constables approached, King hollered a greeting so as not to take the reclusive man by surprise. People could easily get spooked after living alone for months at a time with the weight of all that cold and darkness pressing down on them. But there was no response despite the fact that Johnson was obviously home, with smoke still drifting up from a stovepipe and a pair of snowshoes leaning against one log wall. The snowshoes, King noted, were homemade and enormous. They looked as if they'd been fashioned for a giant. They easily weighed ten pounds each. Coming closer, King could see that there were two small windows, just twelve inches square, on either side of the door. They were covered by burlap sacks on the inside, however, and no light was visible through them. He didn't hear anything, either. In the Arctic, at temperatures like these, the tiniest noises can be heard for unbelievable distances. The brittle cold makes the air seem almost crystalline, and it magnifies sound rather than muffling it. But the only thing King could hear was the squeak of his snowshoe bindings and the rhythmic "hooooo" of his own exhaled breath. He later said the silence seemed scary, but that he couldn't say exactly why. King reached out and knocked on the low door. There was no response. Puzzled, King knocked some more and called for Johnson to open up and talk to him. But still no reply or noise came from inside the cabin. King leaned over to try and look in one of the small windows. What he saw gave him a shock. A man's face was peering up at him. They stared at each other for a moment. Then the burlap curtain was dropped, sealing off the window. King was startled, but he maintained his composure. He again patiently explained his mission and that he was only there to check on the man and talk. "All I wanted to tell him was to leave the Indians' traps alone," King said later. Frustrated and a bit spooked, King finally called out that if Johnson didn't open up and talk to him, he would return with a search warrant. After a wasted hour of knocking and talking futilely in the freezing cold and midday gloom, King and Bernard returned to where they'd left their sled and dogs on the river. Something was definitely not right with the man inside the cabin. Whatever the reasons for his self-imposed isolation and his dispute with the Indians, there was something potentially dangerous, even sinister in how he refused to respond to travelers standing outside in 40 below cold. Especially when the travelers were constables of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The only thing to do, King and Bernard decided, was to seek the instructions of Inspector Eames in the Inuvialuit village of Aklavik, eighty miles up the Delta to the north and only a day's further sledging from the Beaufort Sea. Traveling hard, it took them all that day and the next to make the trip to what was then the RCMP headquarters for all of the Western Arctic. They arrived late on December 29. The post's commander, Inspector Alexander Eames, was angered when he heard King and Bernard's report. It was upsetting that the stranger was trampling on the rights of the native trappers, and it was an insult to his authority that Johnson would not open his cabin door to speak to his men. More than that, it was an affront to the RCMP's official motto: Maintiens le Droit - Uphold the Right. He issued a warrant for King to search Johnson's cabin. He also assigned two other constables, Robert McDowell, an Arctic veteran and one of the fastest dog-team drivers in the region, and Special Constable Lazarus Sittichinli, a Gwich'in who was also renowned for his traveling abilities, to accompany King and Bernard. The Inspector believed there was a good chance that trouble would ensue and that King would need to arrest Johnson. Eames wanted the extra men there to assist with the arrest and to help guard the prisoner on the return journey. Leaving early on the December 30 the foursome, with their two teams of five dogs each, traveled hard and fast. They were all determined to take care of their business with Albert Johnson and then make William Firth's New Year's party in Fort McPherson. The constables reached the cabin in the midday twilight of noon on December 31. The gigantic snowshoes were still propped outside the cabin and smoke still drifted from the stovepipe. All was the same; as eerie and silent as it had been three days earlier. Before approaching the cabin, McDowell prowled around the riverbank that surrounded it on three sides to make sure there was no chance of an ambush. Then he and the two special constables scrambled up into the willows to cover the cabin with their rifles. Once they were in place, King, alone and unarmed, climbed up the bank and pushed his way through the deep snow towards the cabin door. "Are you there, Mr. Johnson?" he called. Again, there was no answer. There was no sound at all but for the constable's dogs whining and barking down on the river. King approached cautiously, stopping at the tiny door. A quick glance down at the windows showed that the burlap curtains were in place, sealing off any view in or out of the cabin. Positioning himself to one side of the door, King reached out and rapped twice with his left hand. At the same time he called out again, telling Johnson who he was. Nothing happened. Then
the silence was shattered by a rifle shot. A bullet tore out through
the door at an angle, striking King squarely in the chest. He was blown
off his feet and thrown backwards into the snow. CHAPTER
SEVEN The angry-looking Inuit was as tall as both Mark and Taylor but was built much more solidly. He weaved silently on his feet in front of us, staring down at me. His pupils were jet black pebbles swimming in narrow pools of blood. Mark stood on one side of me, Taylor on the other, and my back was pressed against the sticky bar. A rowdy crowd of drunken natives had all three of us hemmed in. There was no way to slip away. I fervently hoped my buddies were sober enough to pull him off me when the blows started raining down. He raised a meaty fist in front of my face. I held my breath and readied for a desperate knee-strike to his crotch. But he only punched himself lightly in mouth as he mimed throwing back a drink. I shook my head as I stared into his hot red eyes. I might get my ass kicked, but I wasn't going to be intimidated into buying him a round. It wasn't principle I was willing to suffer and perhaps die for - it was pride. "I sing for you, you buy me whiskey. Okay?" His voice was surprisingly soft, barely discernable over the voices and music and the blood pounding in my head. I found myself nodding an affirmation. It sounded fair, after all. Better than an ass-kicking, anyway. At least I would be getting something out of the deal. The big Inuit spun around, let out a whoop, and staggered through the crowd toward the Karaoke machine at the other end of the bar. His friends roared out their approval as they made way for their hero. I was too intoxicated to remember if a spotlight was aimed on me, but it certainly felt that way as the giant grabbed the microphone and began serenading me with a George Jones song, "White Lightning," sung in Inuvialuit. At this point in the evening we'd been in Inuvik only about ten hours, and I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or run like hell. After driving north 3,500 miles from Colorado to the far edge of North America, fervently hoping to find a wilderness and realize my boyhood dreams, instead all I was experiencing was a growing sense of danger, desperation and dread. It was hard to imagine that just fifty years ago this place, the very ground on which we stood - beer-soaked, reeking of vomit, and possibly soon-to-be blood-spattered - had been as wild and free as any on Earth. For centuries this eastern edge of the Delta had been a sort of no-man's-land between the usually warring bands of Inuit (to the north) and the Gwich'n (to the south). The place where they did meet when they wanted to trade or battle was Aklavik, thirty miles to the west on the opposite side of the Delta and just below the Richardson Mountains. When white men flooded into the region seeking whale blubber and fur and then gold and oil, Aklavik became the de facto capital for all the Western Arctic. But the island on which that village stood was too small to accommodate the arrival of the big extraction companies in the 20th century. It was also too prone to floods and erosion. In the 1950s the Canadian government went searching for a new, larger town site with plenty of room for deep-water docks for shipping from the Beaufort Sea and enough permanently dry land for a commercial airport. Inuvik (Inuvialuktun for "living place" or "place of man") was officially created in 1958. Although the Dempster Highway wouldn't reach here for another twenty years, the town soon became the largest in the world north of the Arctic Circle. Every structure had to be built either on pilings or gravel pads as the natural ground was a combination of permafrost and ice ponds. With the current onset of global warming, the town now risks sinking into the earth. A few summers ago a section of road plummeted twenty-five feet when the ice beneath it melted. Right now Inuvik has about 3,500 residents enduring the thirty days of totally sunless winter and the fifty-six days of mosquito-infested summer when the sun never sets in the sky. An increasing number of them - and already a majority - are non-native, mostly employees of the extraction industries. The population is soon expected to double. And this is not solely from oil and gas development, but also transportation and tourism. Most scientists agree that within twenty to fifty years the once-fabled Northwest Passage will be ice-free all year round, shaving 10,000 miles or so off the Asia-to-Europe trade route and allowing cruise ships to meander about. Within a few decades tourists will be sipping daiquiris garnished with flowered umbrellas at the very same locale where Sir John Franklin and crews of the HMS Erebus and Terror once consumed each other's flesh after a third year trapped in the dreadful, impassible ice. Taylor, Mark and I had arrived in Inuvik during the sunless midday gloom. After checking in to a hotel near the town's only stoplight, we'd wandered down the main street, skating in our boots on the exhaust-stained and cigarettes butt-littered ice and shivering hard in the minus-forty degree cold. Among the sights was a large and modern school, a typical supermarket, a very nice library (a couple of my books were on its shelves), and an enormous white church shaped like an igloo, lit up with blue/green lights in the afternoon darkness. Everywhere diesel trucks idled. In the supermarket parking lot there was row upon row of trucks with tailpipes blasting smoke, doing their best to melt the Arctic's ice as fast as possible. Outside the town's health clinic stood a pack of juvenile smokers with tubercular coughs. Inside, new mothers were being warned not to breast feed their babies. A few years ago a university professor in Quebec went North seeking samples of "pure" breast milk to compare against that of women in the industrialized world. The samples the researcher obtained from the Arctic were shocking - the chemical components of breast milk contained twenty to fifty times the PCBs and mercury levels as those of women in the United States or Europe. Further studies revealed that the bodies of Arctic people contain the highest human concentrations of industrial pesticides and chemicals anywhere on Earth. Apparently the pollutants are carried north in rivers and sea currents to the Arctic Ocean, where they have no chance to break-down in the cold, especially with little or no sun six months of the year. The effect of all these chemicals is starting to be revealed. An inordinate number of babies suffer infection, impaired brain development, and reduced memory and intelligence skills. Not long ago, at about the time of my grandfather's birth, heart disease was unknown among the Inuit. As was dental decay - because there was no sugar. Now heart disease is the biggest killer, and the dilapidated teeth of some of the natives can make one shudder. The average life expectancy in the Arctic is already three years shorter than other Canadians and dropping. After our brief exploration of the town, my friends and I drove back down the Dempster a few miles to a log house on the edge of a frozen lake in order to meet with a pilot. He was the only one I'd been able to find who was willing to fly us in to the vicinity of the Rat River for what was promised to be a "discount rate." Over beers in his cabin's home-office, we pointed at maps and talked latitude and longitude. It would take two trips, the pilot finally determined, for the three of us and all our gear. And it would cost $1,500, a number that made me shudder. My writing career certainly hadn't been going that well lately. A pick-up on the Yukon side, should we live to reach it, would also require two additional trips and cost $2,000. But we'd have to wait for the wind to die down and the temperature to warm up above minus 38. And that could take days, possibly weeks. Somewhat despondently, we'd put on our hats and parkas and mitts and walked out onto the lake to take a look at the plane. It wasn't easy to find, as it was half-buried in a drift. The pilot promised us more beers if we would help dig it out. Once we'd uncovered the fuselage, it turned out to be a tiny two-seater with a little cargo space in the back. The pilot opened the door so we could peek inside. There were no seatbelts connected to the tattered seats, but there was a hula dancer mounted on the dash. "Just thinking about getting in that thing makes me want to throw up," Taylor whispered to me. I wanted to throw up, too. The plane was a Cessna 175, the same make and model as the one my little brother died in twelve years earlier while pursuing his own dreams. "I'm pretty sure that we'll be able to land on one of the lakes near the Rat," the pilot told us. "How close we'll get depends on how high the drifts are on the ice. There's been a lot of snow this year, and a lot of wind blowing it around." "Any chance you can put us down higher in the mountains, closer to the summits?" I asked, hoping to shorten the trip. It would be cheating, I knew, but we could still claim to have crossed the highest peaks in the Mad Trapper's footsteps. "Nope. There's far too much wind up there this time of year. It would be a waste of my time and your money to try. Besides, we're only going to have a couple of hours of light to get into the air, fly across the Delta, and find some ice to land on. There's not going to be much time for hunting around higher up." Taylor inquired, "So if something goes wrong, there's no way for a rescue in the mountains?" The pilot chuckled just as the Mounties in Fort McPherson had when Taylor asked them the same question. "Not very damned likely," was his identical response. Taylor and I fell deeper into the funk that had been increasing with the latitude, while Mark remained seemingly confident - of what, I wasn't sure. Or maybe, as a recent college graduate, he was just better habituated to all the beer we'd been drinking. The three of us drove back to Inuvik in total darkness and went looking for a place to eat dinner. Mark spotted a dingy-looking pizza parlor with a neon-lit sign promoting a salad bar. We were desperate for vegetables after a week on the road - I hoped, vitamins would put me in better spirits. After parking back at the hotel and plugging the truck in, we put on parkas and hats and gloves and walked briskly to the restaurant past drifts of snow stained with urine and littered with beer cans and vomit. But before I could open the pizza parlor's door, a woman flew out and sprawled in the snow at our feet. "They're all liars in there!" she shouted in drunken outrage. "They say I'm drunk! They throw me out!" "Well, any place that would threw her out sounds awfully good to me," Taylor announced. We stepped over her and entered. The place was absolutely empty, with no sign even of the employee who must have propelled the drunken woman out into the cold. There were only dirty tables, a floor as filthy as the snow outside, and even the promised salad bar had little in it but a few wilted leaves of lettuce and some brown shredded carrots. We retreated back into the minus-forty-degree night. Eventually we found a place that was reasonably clean and that served freshly-caught arctic char with a side of what were probably canned veges. After a few drinks we were cheered up enough to pay homage at the Mad Trapper Pub next door. This was a place I'd been looking forward to visiting ever since I'd learned of its existence on the town's website. It turned out to be Inuvik's largest bar and, it was rumored, the wildest. But we found it all but empty despite a decent band playing live music. "You're too early," bartender informed us. "You need to come back at about midnight." I was quite happy, however, to wander about the tables, heavily carved with knife-point graffiti, and stare at the photos on the walls. Most of them were the same blown-up photos of the manhunt that we'd seen in Millen Lounge in Eagle Plains. Staring at them, I again felt like I was back among people I'd known for a long, long time. There was Constable Alfred King, grinning his cocky grin and Inspector Eames with his wise, gentle smile, and all the other heroes of the hunt. But in the two days since I'd seen the same portraits - two anxious days of white-knuckle driving through the darkness on the Dempster - the men seemed to have grown larger. Dressed in frosted furs from head to toe, they appeared so confident, and even pleased, to be daily risking their lives traveling in this frigid, deadly land while chasing a killer. So why was I, with all my Gore-Tex and down garments, my GPS and satellite phone, my high-tech and super-lightweight tipi with its collapsible stove, my indestructible plastic mountaineering boots, and my years of experience with winter mountaineering and technical climbing, so scared to head into the bush? They looked like men, and I felt more than ever like a child. The only customer, a Gwich'in named Willy even though his hat said "Mack," was shaking his snow boots on the lonely dance floor. Willy offered to show us a better bar for this early hour, a place called Frosty's. We declined his offer but soon headed for Frosty's anyway with a dejected Willy sneaking along the frozen street behind us. It was at Frosty's where I was accosted by the giant Inuit singer. And where, after his performance ended with much applause, I bought him the promised drink. We retreated back into the night when he demanded a similar deal from Mark and Taylor. Outside it was now closer to forty-five degrees below zero. As we staggered along, we picked up the prostrate forms of those who had proven unequal to the task of skating across the frozen street with a bellyful of booze. Then, when we finally made it back to our hotel, we had to deal with an attractive Inuit girl sobbing in the mud room. The back of her head was matted with blood. When I asked if she was all right, she told us a rambling story. Apparently she'd been at the hospital to get some stitches earlier in the day (I could see ripped-apart stitches on the back of her skull - and I could see the whiteness of bone, too). Then she'd gone drinking. Her sister had hit her over the head with a bottle. Then someone had stabbed her in the back. We notified the night manager at the hotel desk. The woman sighed and said, "These people," and then called for an ambulance. When we went back to the mudroom to tell the young woman that help was on the way, she had disappeared. The only sign of her was blood on the bench and floor and more blood outside on the snow. The trail ended by the ice road, where we could only hope someone had picked her up. The hotel bar turned out to be much more to our liking, although it lacked the festiveness of either Frosty's or the Mad Trapper. It closely resembled a Red Lobster or Appleby's with its dark wood, fake ferns and brass rails. We were the only customers for the moment, and there was no bad rock band or Karaoke. Mark flirted with the barmaid as she poured our drinks - we'd long switched from beer to gin. Wearing just jeans and a black vest, her lean, bare arms had us all drooling. It was the most flesh we'd seen in a long, long time. She flirted back a little, and offered to let Mark choose the channel on the satellite TV, but then lost all interest in us when Mark exhibited very poor taste by choosing a TV movie called King Ralph. "What are we going to do?" Taylor asked. I tried to formulate a bold reply, like, "We're going to kick the Mad Trapper's ass, that's what we're going to do!" but with it so cold and dark outside and my spirits so low I just couldn't work up the enthusiasm. Despite all the years of imagining it, it just didn't seem credible any more to think we'd actually gear-up, climb up into what the Gwich'n chief had called "No Man's Land" and - over what could be days or weeks - somehow repeat the Mad Trapper's unrepeated crossing of the highest peaks. Instead I just shook my head and ordered another gin. I wasn't trying to plan the expedition anymore. I was trying to plan a face-saving retreat. Mark alone seemed happy as he laughed at the TV. He had nothing invested in this but the promise of an exotic mountaineering trip. I wondered if it was his youth and lack of responsibility that made him braver than Taylor and me. And I wondered if, at age thirty-five, I was too old to challenge myself, too aware of my shortcomings to even try. A few drinks later other entertainment arrived in the form of a young man named Mike. He proudly announced he had a metal plate in this head. "Want to see me break a bottle on it?" "Yes!" Mark shouted. "No." Taylor said. "Sometimes I lie down on the floor and let my brother stomp on it." "Is your brother around?" Mark asked, looking around hopefully. Before Taylor and I managed to shoo him away, we learned that he could also attach magnets to his forehead. A little later, back in the room, with a very expensive 6-pack of beer, we had a serious meeting. "I think we're screwed," I began, trying not to slur but no longer feeling the need to play the fearless leader. "We'll never make it over the mountains." "Screwed," Taylor repeated gloomily, sitting hunched over on the bed and holding his head in his hands. We discussed our options as best as our functioning brain cells would allow. The plan that had sounded so good in Colorado seemed like idiocy now that we'd viewed the terrain. Actually, we hadn't even seen the terrain - we'd only had a glimpse of the Richardson Mountains when we'd driven across the range's southern terminus on the Dempster. But we'd gotten a feel for the environment, the weighty darkness and the brutal cold. It seemed, as the Mounties and natives had said seventy-five years earlier, impossible. Even to contemplate from a snug and safe hotel room. "You know what we should do?" Mark said. "We should parachute in. I've jumped a few times. I could show you guys how to do it." Taylor goggled at him with glassy eyes. I popped caps and handed them each another beer. Our wisest option, Taylor and I decided, was to forget it. Keep drinking, and maybe take a nice little drive in my warm truck out on the ocean ice to the nearby village of Tuktoyatuk. That would be plenty of adventure for most people, driving 3,500 miles north to the edge of the world in the middle of winter. At least I'd gotten to see what the land of the Mad Trapper looked like. That was enough, right? I'd come to the land of my childhood dreams, taken a good look, and learned I wasn't man enough for it. I
wanted to go home. But that night, despite the ever-increasing sense
of loss and depression, as I fell asleep I found could still dream a
little about the land and the manhunt that had haunted me for so long. CHAPTER
EIGHT The crack of the shot lingered long, echoing off the steep hillsides on each side of the river. The puff of dust from the bullet punching through the door lingered too, floating just above Alfred King as he lay sprawled on his face in the snow. It was an astonishing scene for McDowell, Bernard and Sittichinli, all three of whom were watching from the river's bank. They'd been anticipating trouble, but nothing this sudden or violent. For several long seconds they could only stare - at the clearing, the cabin, and the body of their friend - all lit up by the brief midday twilight. Movement returned when McDowell recovered from his initial shock and fired his rifle at the cabin's door. The twenty-three-year-old Mountie realized he needed to distract Johnson so that he couldn't shoot King a second time at point-blank range. King stirred as McDowell's bullets tore into the door just above him. Then he began to crawl toward some willows on one side of the cabin while McDowell kept up his fire from the river's bank. Johnson returned it, nearly striking McDowell with one particularly well-aimed shot. As Sittinchinli's and Bernard's own guns began to crack, it became evident that Johnson had prepared for this fight by cutting loopholes to shoot from in the walls of his cabin. Crawling and sometimes staggering on his feet, King struggled through the deep snow to the edge of the bank and tumbled down it. McDowell instantly saw that his colleague was gravely wounded. King had been shot clear through the chest, from the right side to the left. It was hard to imagine how he had survived long enough to make it to the river bank, or how he was still breathing and coughing even now as he lay on the ice. McDowell overturned one of the sleds, spilling out their supplies. With Bernard and Sittinchinli still firing at the cabin, he wrapped King in their heavy robes and lashed him to the sled. The dogs strained against the ice-hooks, eager to be away from the sound of so much gunfire. Fort McPherson was only fifty miles to the east but the nearest doctor was all the way back in Aklavik, eighty miles to the north. The Mounties had no radio or other way of calling for help. There weren't any options for the three men still standing. The only thing to do was run the dogs and themselves as hard as they could for Aklavik and pray that King would somehow survive what was normally a two-day trip. The odds were very much against them making it in time to save King's life. Especially with both men and dogs already half-exhausted from the fast day-and-a-half trip south - some thirty miles that morning alone. Even when still, their bodies were burning calories by the thousand just to stay warm. The men surely regretted having skipped breakfast in the hope of reaching the grand party in Fort McPherson that night. But there was no time for fueling themselves now. Unless King died and gave them a chance to rest, they would have to run eighty miles on already tired legs and empty stomachs. Within the first few miles the sunless midwinter twilight left them to the darkness. Worse, a wind was rising, rushing down on them from the mountains at a speed of twenty knots and accelerating. It was already forty degrees below zero, but the wind-chill temperature soon dropped to ninety-below. Any exposed skin - cheeks, eyes, and mouths - had to be warmed every few minutes with bare hands to keep them from freezing solid. Even as they raced back down the canyon of the Rat River they had to constantly stop and press their hands to King's suffering face, kept somewhat exposed to prevent his own ragged breath from forming a suffocating mask of ice among the robes they'd wrapped him in. And things still got worse. Once down on the Delta's maze of rivers and lakes, the wind blew fresh snow over their day-old track, causing the men to have to trudge ahead of the sleds and dogs on snowshoes and re-break the trail they'd so exhaustingly broken the day before. Time and time again they had to lift King and the sleds over river banks and force their way through willow thickets. It was a nightmare for the Mounties. The blowing snow blotted out even the starlight as their friend and colleague pumped out his blood in the sled. Yet they trudged on, stomping down the fresh snow, the wind slashing at their faces, the exhausted dogs moaning and whimpering and sometimes dropping in their traces. One dog died of exhaustion along the way, and McDowell tore the tendons in one of his knees. It was an agonizing, terrifying trudge; a true death march. But through an astounding feat of endurance, the men staggered into Aklavik after just twenty hours on the trail, having been forced to re-break trail for the entire eighty miles. King, somehow still alive, was rushed into the small hospital of Doctor Urquhart. There the doctor examined him and discovered that the rifle slug, despite have completely traversed King's chest cavity and breaking four ribs along the way, had somehow missed the heart, lungs and other vital organs. It appeared he might live. After sending a telegram to Edmonton that one of his men had been shot, Inspector Eames immediately began putting together a large force to go after Johnson and either arrest or kill him. In the end it consisted of himself, McDowell, Bernard and Sittichinli, the three still-exhausted veterans of the first attempt to arrest Johnson, as well as three local trappers and hunters, Ernest Sutherland, Karl Gardlund and Knut Lang, all volunteers, as well as some forty-two dogs to pull their sleds and equipment. Eames also radioed to Arctic Red River for Spike Millen, the only Mountie who had ever met Johnson face-to-face, to meet their party at the mouth of the Rat River. The
posse left Aklavik on January 4, 1932. Two days later they found Millen
and a Gwich'n guide, Charley Rat, waiting for them at Blake's Post,
a tiny trading post on the Husky River. Here Inspector Eames, evidently
wondering if his force of nine men would be enough to compel Johnson
out of the fortress-like cabin, purchased twenty pounds of dynamite.
The next morning they left for the final leg of the journey to the Rat
River. CHAPTER
NINE The hotel phone exploded beside my head at nine the next morning. I threw open the frost-encrusted curtain and saw it was still - of course - night outside. Cursing, I switched on the table light and fished the phone off the floor. A cheery voice greeted me. "Morning, chaps. It's only 37 below on the lake right now. If you can get out here before the wind picks up, I can take you in. It might not be this warm again for a long time." "Are we sure we want to do this?" I asked after hanging up, hoping desperately that someone would have the good sense to say, "Hell, no!" Mark and Taylor sat up in their beds and averted their eyes. Come on, I thought, someone have the courage to throw in the towel! "Beats going home with our tails between our legs," Taylor finally mumbled. With far more apprehension than excitement, we began throwing our gear together. Packs and sleds and stoves and bags of dehydrated food were soon strewn everywhere around the hotel room. I tried to focus on my list and pack each item thoughtfully, where it would be handy when I needed it. But soon I gave up, shoving batteries and headlamps and lighters into pockets and toilet paper and fuel bottles into random stuff sacks. Taylor had a laminated label attached to each of his fluorescent pink sacks (easier to see in the dark, he claimed). My envy for his system of meticulous organization was translated into ridicule when Mark and I began calling him Martha Stewart. We put on the clothes we expected to be wearing for the next two to three weeks. On my list the outfit was confidently titled Action Suit. Polyprolene tights and shirt, heavyweight fleece pants, sweater and vest, liner gloves and balaclava, and Gore-Tex shells. Down overpants and jacket and heavy mitts were stowed where they'd be reachable. Then the sleds and swollen packs were carried down the hotel stairs and into the lobby. The people standing around think we're badasses, I told myself. In truth they probably thought we were morons. When everything was assembled before the reception desk, I pulled on a pair of big mitts, hefted a pack on my back, and grabbed one end of a sled while Mark grabbed the other. Keys handy - dangling from my mouth - I kicked open the door. I gasped at the morning air that smacked me in the face. The keys hung from my gaping lip, frozen there by my sudden exhalation. God, it was cold. Despite having been plugged in all night, Puffy groaned when I turned the key in the ignition. The truck continued to screech and thump in protest the whole way to the lake just outside of town. There we found our pilot waiting for us on the ice with wolfskin toque on his head and huge furry mitts covering his paws. The little Cessna's cowling was wrapped in blankets and tarps while a big gasoline-powered generator blew hot air on the engine. "Morning, chaps," he called to us. "Let's get your gear on board." The sleds wouldn't fit through the doors, so we knocked one door off at the hinges with a hammer and a screwdriver and then heaved up the sleds and wedged the skis between the seats. It was somehow decided that I would fly in first, alone, with two of the three sleds. The pilot would then fly back for Taylor and Mark and the other sled. If it didn't get colder, that is, and if the wind didn't pick up, and if nothing went wrong with the plane, and if the pilot could remember where he dropped me. I figured I'd only be alone on the Delta for an hour or two. Still, I was having a lot of chilling thoughts about being deserted out there. Sunrise had arrived by the time the pilot finally fired up the engine at eleven o'clock in the morning. It was evidenced by a pink and orange glow on the southern horizon, and the ability to see the trees a few hundred yards across the lake. A sliver of the actual sun would be visible for an hour or so before it set again in just three or four hours. I climbed up into the seatbelt-less co-pilot's seat. Taylor and Mark rocked the plane while the pilot revved the engine, attempting to break the skis out of the ice. With a sudden jerk, the skis came free and we were sliding. "Hang on, it's going to be bumpy," the pilot yelled as the plane skittered about, fishtailing over the ice. We clawed up into the air and over the crazy frozen river maze of the Delta. Within twenty minutes, I got my first real look at the Richardson Mountains. Through the mid-day gloom they didn't look that high or impressive. Any disappointment I might have felt was washed away by an immense surge of relief. But then another, higher range of peaks appeared behind the first. As we flew closer, I saw more peaks further back - and then more, piercing ever higher into the sky. The slice of the sun so far to the south beckoned to me, calling from Colorado, but it would be too embarrassing to surrender now. The only thing that kept me from telling the pilot, screw this, take me back to Inuvik, was the fear of the resulting humiliation. The pilot pointed out a wide river dividing two foothills just off the Delta. "There's the Rat," he shouted over the noise of the engine. Somewhere down there in that valley had once stood Destruction City, where the most foolhardy of the Stampeders, suckered into taking the so-called "Edmonton Trail," had wintered, tearing apart their boats and possessions for firewood and eating their bootlaces while dying of scurvy. And somewhere down there the Mad Trapper had built his little fortress just thirty years later. I looked for it even though I knew it had been dynamited and the clearing on which it had once stood had eroded away decades ago. I kept my eyes down on the ground because it was less painful that looking at that vast expanse of peaks looming to the west. The pilot circled near the mouth of the Rat, dropping down to just above the tips of the skinny black spruce as he assessed the snowdrifts on the Delta lakes. None met with his approval. They were all too drifted-over, he shouted. He finally chose a large lake where the snow has blown off the ice out in the middle. I guessed that it was maybe five miles away from the mouth of the Rat. No big deal, I thought. I can easily jog five miles an hour, and probably ski to the Rat River pulling the sled in two. I recalled how the Mounties and their dog teams had managed to travel eighty miles in just twenty hours, breaking trail the entire way. We came down with a thump. When we'd skidded to a stop, the pilot leaned across me and threw open my door. I hopped out and immediately began doing a comical dance as my boots skated on the ice. Unfortunately, I had no idea where my crampons were buried in my sled - I hadn't expected to need them until we got high into the mountains. With the spinning propeller blasting our faces with -40 degree air, producing a windchill greater than -100, the pilot knocked the hinges off the passenger door, and we dragged out the sleds and skis. Within three or four minutes everything was unloaded and the door had been hammered back into place. The pilot reclaimed his seat without a word to me. The engine revved higher and the little plane slid down the ice. Then it reared up in the air, growing smaller and smaller as it disappeared over the treetops. I thought its wings waggled once as it disappeared into the gloom. I kept watching, listening to the comforting sound of its buzzing motor, all my attention focused entirely on the plane, until there was no longer any sight or sound and there hadn't been any for a long, long time. Only then did I have to face the fact that I was in the wilderness. At last. Visions began to run through my head. I saw grizzlies charging out of the trees. A wolf pack gunning for me across the lake with tongues flopping out from between their grinning teeth. The ice shattering beneath my feet and the frigid water swallowing me. Old Albert himself loping toward me, unslinging his rifle. It was the cold that finally drove me to action. Gotta move, I told myself, Or else you'll be a popsicle by the time Taylor and Mark get here - if they get here. I dragged out the GPS on its lanyard from underneath many layers and noted the spot where I'd been dumped so unceremoniously. I risked frostbite to make a notation on one of the topo maps. The fancy plastic cover I'd bought for the maps immediately shattered in the cold. As did the little UTM navigation tool. Alarmed at how already my gear seemed to be self-destructing and at how hard I was already shivering, I unstrapped my skis, buckled on my harness, and started skinning across the ice. The spruce were thick above the steep walls of snow that hemmed in the lake. I headed for the smallest wall, which was about twenty feet high. Drifted snow on the ice made a sort of ramp leading up it. I expected to ski up onto this ramp but, oddly, my skis just slid in and under. Soon the snow was up to my knees, then my thighs. Breathing harder, and remembering the Gwitch'n elder's skepticism about skis versus snowshoes, I lifted each ski high and stomped down hard but the snow refused to pack beneath my weight. It soon reached my waist. I was starting to labor hard as I wallowed and, just a little, to panic. I plowed on, lifting and stomping, as the angle got steeper. The snow reached my belly, then my chest. Pushing on, panting hard, my ski poles stabbing down uselessly into the bottomless snow, I felt the skins start to lose their grip. Then I was falling. The little daylight there'd been suddenly turned black. When I pulled my head together and forced away the rising wave of panic, I found that I was buried, facedown, under deep snow. The aluminum poles of the sled had me pinned in this awkward pose, and my skis, which were still attached but floating somewhere above me, upside-down, weren't in a position to help. Thin, pliable branches gripped me on all sides. I reached for something solid to push or pull on but found nothing. I'd fallen through the willows under the snow, I realized. With each breath I was inhaling snow that had the consistency of loose flour. I tried to cough but couldn't draw a good enough breath. The panic returned and washed over me and I started to flail. At first tentatively, then with increasing violence. My only coherent thought was: What a pathetic way to die.
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