MADNESS

Chasing a Legendary Killer
Across the Last Frontier

CHAPTER TEN
The Siege

Leaving Blake's Post, the posse of eight men and forty-two dogs fought their way through a blizzard toward the Rat River. The temperature was forty-two degrees below zero on the Delta. Both men and dogs were already tired from the trip to the trading post from Aklavik which, due to the weather and the enormous amount of supplies necessary for such a large party, had taken them two entire days of cold, hard traveling. Thus eight days had already passed since the shooting of Alfred King. Inspector Eames and the other men in the posse had to be wondering if they would still find Johnson waiting for them on the Rat.

If Johnson had run, it was possible that - despite the more or less continuous blizzard - he could already have crossed the mountains via McDougall Pass. Once down in the Yukon Territory, he would have only a hundred miles to travel westward across a largely uninhabited and heavily forested plateau to escape into Alaska, outside the Mounties' jurisdiction. They could only hope that the same terrible weather that was so severely punishing them had kept him holed up in his cabin.

Wallowing through the deep snow in a near white-out, the posse managed to reach the junction of the Rat and Longstick Rivers on the night of January 7. They built their camp here, on the edge of the Delta and just below the first rising hills of the Richardson Mountains. Johnson's cabin was only eight miles away.

To the south of them the Rat River cut through the foothills, forming a wide valley. The walls of the valley were steep and forested, as high as six hundred feet. The frozen river itself was quite broad, but willows choked its banks and created barriers on the many islands. If Johnson intended to ambush them, then the party would be horribly exposed every step upstream. Eames was unwilling to run that risk. Johnson already demonstrated a proclivity for ambush, having shot King through the door of the cabin without uttering a word of warning.

Instead the inspector asked Charlie Rat, the Gwich'n guide who best knew the area, to lead the party up onto the flat-topped mountain behind Johnson's cabin. Eames' plan was to approach the cabin from above, unexpected and far safer from a surprise attack.

After a bitterly cold night camped on the Delta, on January 8th the party followed Charley Rat off the river. The guide led them a few miles north and then directly up the mountainside. Here, on the leeward side of the range, the snow was incredibly deep and loose. The party was forced to almost swim through the snow as they wound their way uphill among the thick stands of skinny spruce trees. Pulling the dogs after them and dragging the heavy sleds was brutal, exhausting labor.

When they finally reached the broad plateau that was the mountain's summit, Charlie Rat claimed that they were just five miles from Johnson's cabin. It quickly became evident, however, that the guide was lost. They marched for hours across the edge of the treeless plateau but were unable to fix their position. Because of the blowing snow, when the men attempted to gaze down into the Rat River's valley they could see almost nothing, and certainly not the cabin five hundred feet or more somewhere below. Adding to their difficulties was the fact that the slope below them was so steep and choked with willows and trees that it would be dangerous to descend in any event, and yet while traveling on the treeless plateau as they searched they were fully exposed to the cutting wind.

Eames soon was forced to abandon his plan of a sneak attack. The rest of that day, their fifth since leaving Aklavik, and their fifth of temperatures averaging forty degrees below zero, they spent returning to the previous camp where the river met the Delta.

Profoundly cold, worn-out, and low on food, Eames realized that the posse was already in serious trouble. There were only two days of supplies left for the men and the dogs and they hadn't even come close to Johnson's cabin. Now there would not be time for the planned siege, either. There was barely enough food left to make the return journey to Aklavik. Yet returning without arresting or killing the man who had shot a constable was unthinkable. The men would have to run the risk of an ambush after all, and approach upriver on the Rat.

While the exhausted party busied itself setting up yet another dismally cold camp, two of the volunteers, Knut Lang and Karl Gardlund, reconnoitered upriver on foot. Unhindered by dogs, sleds and heavy loads, yet moving as cautiously as they could, the trappers snowshoed the entire eight miles up the valley and found the cabin. Smoke was still drifting from its chimney - Johnson hadn't fled. The scouts hurried back to the camp to report the news.

On January 9th, their sixth day since leaving Aklavik, the entire party headed upriver in the midmorning twilight. Near noon the dogs were tied just a half-mile from the cabin. The men approached on snowshoes with their rifles uncovered and ready. When they reached the three-sided promontory above the river on which the cabin stood, they spread out to surround it, their weapons pointed at the low structure just fifty feet away. Only the back of the cabin couldn't be manned, as there was no place to hide between it and the steep, unclimbable hillside behind it.

When everyone was in place, Eames shouted into the Arctic silence, "Come out, Albert Johnson. We are determined to arrest you."

There was no response. Eames called out again, stating that resistance was useless, and explaining that King was still alive - Johnson wasn't facing the charge of murder, which was at the time a hanging offense. Still no sound or movement came from the cabin.

Eames studied it in the short-lived daylight. It was indeed a small fortress, just as McDowell had described, only eight feet long by ten feet wide. Standing at height of just four or five feet out of the snow, it had to have been dug down deep into the tundra beneath it, especially with the standard two feet of frozen sod covering its roof. The walls appeared to have a double-layer of logs, probably with more frozen earth packed in between for added insulation. It would be exceedingly difficult to assault, as even the bullets from their high-powered hunting rifles might not penetrate the frozen logs and dirt.

But with the men growing colder every minute they stood motionless, Eames had to take action. His plan was for the Millen and McDowell to climb over the riverbank, rush the cabin, and break through the small door - the cabin's only weakness - while the other Mounties and trappers laid down a covering fire. Once inside, Millen and McDowell were to either arrest or shoot Johnson if he resisted. It was a dangerous, possibly even fatal plan. But there was little choice. Johnson had to be taken, and continued exposure to the cold might prove just as deadly for Eames and his men.

At the signal, Millen and McDowell charged. But before they could make more than a few steps they were fired upon from the cabin. They zigged and zagged across the fifty feet of exposed snow in the clearing, trying to find a place that was out of Johnson's range, but it became apparent that Johnson had carefully prepared for the attack, having knocked loopholes all around the walls of his cabin.

Yet the Mounties ran closer, and even managed to kick and hammer at the door with their rifle butts before sprinting off for the cover of the bank. Other Mounties made the same perilous dash to no avail.

Knut Lang, the trapper who had been constantly on the move for the past forty-eight hours, offered to make an attempt. The big man charged the cabin alone under a hail of bullets from both sides - friend and foe alike - and slammed into the door with his shoulder, bursting it open. He got a glimpse of Johnson inside, lit by the warm glow of his woodstove and standing in a dug-out pit nearly five feet deep, almost completely protected from the Mounties' bullets. Johnson had a gun in each hand, and he whirled to fire at Lang. Lang ducked aside and ran for the bank, bullets whizzing past him before he heard the door slam shut.

The posse had grown so cold that they could no longer risk taking off their heavy fur mitts to fire with wool-gloved fingers. The sweat they'd produced on the march and during the wild sorties was now freezing to their skin. Worse, they were hungry, having been without food for many hours, and the hunger fed and intensified the cold. Eames had the dogs brought closer along with the little food still among their supplies. A fire was lit so the men could take turns attempting to warm themselves and eat.

As darkness fell in the early afternoon, flares were lit and thrown near the cabin in the hope of blinding Johnson. But he kept up his relentless return-fire, much of it disturbingly accurate. It was amazing that none of the Mounties or trappers had yet been wounded or killed. They were suffering badly from exposure, however. The exchange of bullets went on for several more frigid, increasingly painful hours in the hope that a lucky shot would strike the fugitive, or that he would run out of ammunition. Neither hope was borne out.

As a last-ditch effort, Eames ordered the men to thaw out the twenty pounds of dynamite he'd purchased at Blake's Post. This required several more hours, the men warming the thoroughly-frozen explosive by placing it under their clothes, next to their skin. When the process was finally thought to have been completed, the dynamite was carried to the river bank.

The inspector leapt up on the bank while his men opened fire, hoping to keep Johnson pinned down. Stick after stick of explosive was hurled at the cabin, but the dynamite proved all but useless. Perhaps incompletely thawed, or perhaps wetted by the vapors from the men's bodies, the charges either went off with a quiet pop and hiss or failed to explode at all. Meanwhile the flares that illuminated the cabin slowly burnt out, the temperature seeming all the colder for the near-total darkness.

It was time for the last, desperate attempts. Under a fusillade of bullets from the posse, the ever-willing and heroic Knut Lang ran into the clearing and pitched several sticks of dynamite onto the cabin's roof. This time there was a solid, ear-splitting BANG. The smokestack was blown off the cabin, and a small hole appeared in the log roof. Lang immediately leapt up and peered inside. What he saw this time in the orange glow of the scattered sparks from the stove shocked him: the man inside didn't even appear stunned by the blast. He was alert and ready, raising his guns to shoot Lang in the face. The trapper had to dive aside and race for the riverbank with Johnson's bullets tugging at the air around his head.

Finally, at three o'clock in the morning on January 10th, Eames prepared for what would have to be the final assault. He carefully tied the four remaining sticks of dynamite together while Garlund readied a flashlight with which to blind Johnson if he was unaffected by a second blast. Under a covering fire, the two men ran at the cabin as Eames heaved the charge. The bundle landed squarely on the roof. When it detonated, the entire roof caved in, the log walls buckled and partially collapsed, and the door was blown out into the snow.

As the debris was still raining down on them, Garlund switched on his powerful flashlight. For a brief moment it illuminated the smoking, ruined cabin. Then a ghostly figure rose up among the shattered logs, incredibly still holding a gun in each hand. There was a quick flash, and the flashlight was shot out of Garlund's hand. Awestruck, he and Eames were forced to turn and flee.

For an hour the shooting continued, but the Mounties were finished. The siege had lasted for fifteen hours now, and despite having destroyed Johnson's shelter, the fugitive was undaunted. One stranger, of whom the Mounties knew nothing, not even his real name, had held off eight of some of the North's hardiest, best trained, and well-armed men. Just as he'd defeated King, McDowell and their native guides ten days before. And yet this second skirmish would mean little in comparison to the feats of violence and endurance the lone man would soon be shown capable of performing.

The Mounties stowed their guns and hitched up the cold, hungry dogs. They began a long retreat back to Aklavik.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Defeat on the Delta

Literally drowning in snow, all I could think was, How pathetic! All this way to die only one hundred yards into the Arctic wilderness! I heaved and bucked and fought while choking on snow and panic and humiliation. But my skis and ski poles all but immobilized my limbs, the aluminum rods connecting me to my sled acted like twin staves shoving me headfirst and downwards, and my pack was like an anchor tied to my back. From all sides the evil unseen willows grasped at me with long, thin, unbreakable fingers as I wrestled myself ever-deeper into the bottomless snow.

The end was quite near - either from suffocation or cardiac arrest - when, with a tremendous mental effort, I caught hold of the panic and managed to stuff the howling, wriggling banshee far back into some unused cabinet of my mind. With a clearer head, I unclasped the sled's harness, bent my back in half the wrong way to release my skis, and shrugged out of my pack. After an eternity of swimming, rolling and clawing, my head rose free of the snow. Finally I could suck in some frigid air.

Oxygen - even chilled to seventy degrees below freezing - had never tasted so good.

Drenched in sweat and shivering with lingering fear, I dragged the sled back down onto the ice. I panted for a while and then reluctantly dove back into the snow and willows in order to retrieve my skis and pack. I had just finishing fishing these out when I heard the distant but rapidly approaching sputter of an engine. Hallelujah! The little Cessna was returning with Taylor and Mark. But I wasn't thinking of companionship or commiseration or safety-in-numbers. No, I was thinking of only one thing: I've got to get the hell out of here.

With my eyes on the blinking lights in the air, I took a purposeful stride in the direction of the landing zone - and promptly slipped and landed with a painful thump on my ass and elbows. I'd forgotten how slippery the rock-hard ice was against the plastic soles of my boots. Only by putting on my skis with their attached fabric skins could I hope to navigate my way back across the lake. I knelt and attempted to position the toes of my boots into the devious bindings of my super-expensive, super-lightweight skis. Even in the best of conditions, this is no easy task. It's especially difficult when you're gasping for breath and shot through with adrenaline and fear.

There is a hole on each side of the toe of the boots that must be placed precisely in order to get the binding pins to clamp into them laterally. I could see the plane now as it descended from out of already-darkening sky. After a couple of frantic tries, I managed to snap the bindings on. With trembling, frozen hands I dragged on the sled harness and buckled the waist-belt and leg straps. The plane was now on the ice, skidding across the lake toward where I'd left Taylor's and Mark's sleds.

I heaved on my pack. But when I lifted a foot to drag a ski forward, the ski fell off. The binding pins hadn't been seated properly. I cursed, threw off the pack, unhooked the sled harness, and started trying to align the evil pins all over again. Meanwhile the engine howl settled to a rattling idle. Risking a glance up, I saw the plane resting where it had dumped me ninety minutes earlier and just one hundred yards away. I snapped the binding shut and missed the holes on the sides of my boot. Another glance - Taylor and Mark were jumping out of the plane and flailing their arms quite comically as their feet skated on the ice. I flipped the binding up again - and missed.

By the time I finally managed to place the binding pins where they belonged, the plane was turning on the ice, spinning away from me. In horror, I looked for my friends. Mark and Taylor stood off to the side by their sleds. They had their cameras out like a couple of tourists, snapping pictures of the plane as it accelerated away into the Arctic night.

"Hey!" I yelled. "Wait! Goddamnit! Wait!" They didn't hear a thing over the shriek of the engine. The plane slid away faster and faster and then leapt up and off the ice. The noise faded, the blinking lights disappeared. Mark and Taylor noticed me and waved happily, flash bulbs blinking, as I stomped and lurched toward them.

"Hey, man, we're here at last!" Mark shouted to me. "The Arctic wilderness in the dead of winter!"

"This is awesome!" Taylor added, squinting around through his already thoroughly iced spectacles.

The poor fools. I felt like crying.

Unable to bear the sounds of their idiot excitement, I put my head down and listened to the shuss of my skis on the ice as I came up to them. Then I heard a small pop. I paused mid-step. One of the plastic buckles on my "Everest-rated" mountain boots lay spinning on the ice. I plucked it up and stuck it in a pocket. After another few steps there was a second pop, and another buckle lay on the ice. Everest-rated, my ass.

Upon reaching Mark and Taylor, I didn't mention the details of my attempt to break a trail off the lake. Or that my boots already seemed to be disintegrating. Instead I just said, "Well, I tried that way, and believe me - it won't go." They saddled up their sleds and packs and we headed for a spit of trees to the south. I ignored Taylor when he checked his compass, pointed to the north, and mentioned that the Rat River is that way. "Just follow me," I ordered curtly, snapping on my headlamp.

We began breaking a trail through willows and black spruce. It was impossible to find a trail, or even a straight line, and those hateful willow branches kept reaching out and grabbing my sled. Mark, following just behind me, continually had to disentangle it and heave it into line. And then Taylor, behind Mark, would have to wrestle Mark's sled into place. Taylor had to fight his sled and battle the willows on his own.

Each step took quite a bit of effort. I had to pop the tip up out of the snow, lift the whole ski high, kick it forward, then stomp it down hard. Even when the sleds weren't snagged by branches, they tilted and dragged on their sides through the deep path I was making. As I began to sweat, and notice the hoarfrost building up on clothes, I kept hearing the advice of everyone I'd consulted about traveling in the Arctic forest: skis are worthless in deep snow - take snowshoes. But I considered myself a "ski mountaineer," and snowshoes had just seemed so uncool.

When I tried to force my way through a particularly dense thicket of willows, I heard another soft pop. Looking down, I saw a third buckle had broken off a boot. A few minutes later, a fourth. I didn't bother to pick them up as there was obviously no way to reattach such a vital piece. And each boot, I noticed, only had one buckle left now. With each high step through the deep snow the willows tried to tug the boot from my foot.

"This sucks!" Taylor gasped. "I can't see a thing!" I glanced back at him and saw that the lenses of his glasses were opaque sheets of ice. His beard, too, was matted with frozen breath. Mark, for once, didn't appear quite so effusive. His nose was bright red all along its length except for a scarily white tip - a harbinger of frostbite.

We traveled on this way, at a painfully slow pace, trying to circle back to the north but the thickets kept herding us south, only occasionally allowing us a little westward progress toward the foothills. After an hour even the twilight was gone. A moonless night cloaked the sky - and it was only three o'clock in the afternoon. We came to a modest-sized clearing, perhaps thirty feet across. By unanimous consent we agreed to camp, reorganize ourselves, and attempt to repair my boots.

In the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming, it was our practice to stomp out a tent platform on the snow then let it settle while we sorted our gear or melted snow for water. Here in the Arctic forest, however, we quickly discovered that it was impossible to stamp down the snow. It refused to consolidate, never having seen sunlight or felt wind or warm days. After nearly a half-hour of stomping and yet still wading thigh-deep in fluffy snow, we finally decided to throw up the tent anyway before we froze to death.

The design of my tent bears a mention here. It wasn't really a tent at all but a tipi made out of a super light-weight parachute nylon and supported by a single collapsible aluminum pole. Erected on hard grass in my backyard, it stood nearly seven feet high, allowing even Taylor or Mark to stand upright in the center. It didn't have a floor, and thus required no boot removal or brushing out of snow - the snow, properly packed down, was supposed to be the floor. And you could dig down deeper inside, essentially raising the roof still higher, and even crafting benches and sleeping platforms. You could scoop snow to melt for water or even relieve yourself without ever having to step outside. Best of all, it came with a collapsible wood stove constructed out of sheet metal, complete with a long piece of aluminum that could be molded into a stovepipe. I had been quite excited about this innovative tipi. Years of neck pain made spending possibly weeks in a little mountaineering tent resemble a torture chamber in my imagination. Especially with two other people pressing in on you at all times.

But it soon became evident that I hadn't practiced setting it up enough. We had to study the directions by headlamp. And trying to work the long snow stakes securely into the loose snow was difficult - as soon as we stretched out one side of the tipi, the other would come loose and fall in. After perhaps two hours of working in the dark at forty degrees below zero, incredibly thirsty, cold and starving, we finally had it standing more or less erect. We waded inside, dragging what branches we could find in after us.

Soon the stove was stuffed full of wood and ignited and two pots crammed with snow were hissing on top of it. We leaned in close, basking in the warmth as the stove began to glow, and belatedly noticed that the hoarfrost on our clothes was melting, then re-freezing into solid ice as soon as we leaned away. For centuries, millennium, perhaps, arctic travelers had known to avoid sweating, and to brush off all hoarfrost before entering a warm shelter. Or, more simply, take off all your clothes. But I'd dismissed this bit of historical information, choosing to rely on the much-publicized "wicking" capabilities of our Gore-Tex shells. The result was a wicking failure in the moist, intensely cold air of the delta. The insulating loft of our down jackets and down pants were reduced a good deal after just a few hours on the Delta. It wouldn't be long before they became about as useful as medieval armor.

Once we'd rehydrated with hot melted snow, I prepared a desultory dinner of dehydrated beef lasagna fortified with spoonfuls of olive oil (for fat). More than a little uncertain and scared, we talked little before slipping into our sleeping bags.

I shivered all night despite a bag that was designed for -40. I couldn't get warm, even with an insulated bottle of boiling water between my feet and chemical hot packs in my groin and armpits. Lying on my back, my heels, butt, elbows and upper back would grow painfully cold within minutes despite a foam mat and a thermarest pad. On my side, the same would happen to my hip and shoulder. With my face inside my bag my breath would freeze to the fabric then melt, dripping onto my neck. With my mouth exposed, my lips and teeth would ache and the exhalations would freeze to my skin.

Could the posse of seventy years ago have suffered this much?

As uncomfortable as I was, I didn't want to get up when my watch said it was eight o'clock in the morning. It was still pitch black outside. But someone had to get up and light the stove. It just wouldn't be me.

After another hour Taylor finally half-crawled out of his bag - without cursing too much. His headlight's beam showed that everything inside the tent was coated with inch-thick hoarfrost from our breath. Anytime he happened to touch the sides of the tipi we would be pelted with little chunks of ice. A half-hour later, however, the stove was glowing red and bacon was sizzling in a pan. Things were looking up a little bit. Mark and Taylor even shared a laugh when Mark's sleeve inadvertently touched the hot stovepipe and down feathers burst into the air. That was when I, the expedition's fearless leader, finally managed to emerge from my frigid cocoon.

Sitting on my bag, as close to the stove as I could get, I put my feet into my frozen liners and grabbed the plastic boots. When I went to pull the first one on the boot's plastic tongue snapped off in my hand. Taylor and Mark stared at my boots, aghast. Buckle-less and tongue-less, it was quite evident that they were utterly useless.

We spent a few hours huddled by the stove while attempting inventive repairs. But duct tape is incredibly brittle and un-sticky at more than forty below, superglue simply couldn't be thawed, and no amount of straps could hold the boots on my feet well enough to kick skis for a hundred miles over the mountains. The attempts, and a few tries at traveling toward the Rat River, exhausted the day's few twilight hours. Finally beaten down, we returned to the tipi and Mark liberated the emergency flask of Jagermeister.

I'd spent decades dreaming of being here, doing this. I'd spent thousands of dollars on gear and transportation. I'd bragged and boasted over countless dinners and beers about how I, man among men, was going to live out my fantasies. And now, less than 24 hours into the wilderness, less than a mile from our drop-off, and still thirty or forty miles from the actual peaks, I was inserting the satellite phone's battery in my armpit for the long warming process before trying to reach the pilot for a pick-up the next day, far, far earlier and far, far closer than anticipated.

It was over. I'd come here to chase down my dreams and conquer my nightmares, but I was running away before the fight could even begin. In my imagination the Mad Trapper ran on gleefully on his swift snowshoes, having forced yet another retreat.

"I'll be back," I swore to my friends, who averted their eyes. With better boots, snowshoes, knowledge and, most importantly, real determination. But the promise sounded empty, even to myself.

CHAPTER TWELVE
The Hunt

They were of many breeds, but their common life had formed of them a certain type,
- a lean and wiry type, with trail-hardened muscles, and sun-browned faces,
and untroubled souls which gaze frankly forth, clear-eyed and steady.
They drove the dogs of the Queen, wrought fear in the hearts of her enemies,
ate of her meager fare, and were happy. They had seen life, and done deeds,
and lived romances; but they did not know it.

- Jack London, from An Odyssey of the North

Exhausted, defeated and bewildered, the posse that had consisted of five Mounties and four volunteers staggered in to Aklavik on January 11, 1932. Inspector Eames immediately broadcasted a dispiriting message to Edmonton via UZK, the Signal Corps' long-wave radio; despite their best efforts, Albert Johnson was still at large. Yet at least the Mounties were fortunate in that only one man had been injured during the second attempt to capture Johnson. Robert McDowell, whose knee had been damaged while hauling the critically-wounded King back to Aklavik, had re-injured it during the posse's retreat. Now both King and McDowell, two of Eames most reliable men, were out of commission.

News of the shooting of Alfred King and the subsequent manhunt had leaked out a week earlier. Newspapers and radio shows all over Canada had been eagerly awaiting the announcement of Johnson's capture. Now, with the news of the Mounties' defeat, the media's interest in this strange police drama unfolding north of the Arctic Circle began to deepen and expand. Journalists in the United States and even across the Atlantic in Europe picked up the story. Johnson - whose true identity remained a mystery - soon became known by a far more sensational alias: "The Mad Trapper of Rat River."

The headlines included one on the front page of the New York Times. It read, "ROUTS MOUNTIES IN ARCTIC BATTLE - Trapper, Thought Demented, Holds Cabin on Yukon Trail after Two Attacks."

The pressure on Eames to capture or kill Johnson must have been intense. The R.C.M.P.'s unofficial but popular motto, "The Mounties Always Get Their Man," was being ridiculed. Men and women throughout North America were second-guessing the Mounties' and, more particularly, Inspector Eames's actions. Why hadn't the Mounties simply laid-in-wait for Johnson to come out of his cabin? Why hadn't they burnt him out? Worse, people were starting to sympathize with the criminal. Like Jesse James or John Dillinger, the masses often grew to romanticize those who battled and triumphed over authority and overwhelming odds.

After three days of rest, on January 14th the Inspector sent Edgar Millen and Karl Gardlund back to the Rat River on an intelligence-gathering mission. Before planning and equipping a third force to go after Johnson, Eames needed to know if the fugitive had remained in his cabin or had fled. And if he had fled, he needed to know in which direction.

The next day, as Millen and Gardlund sledded back south across the Delta on what was now becoming a well-worn trail, they were almost immediately struck by another blizzard. The storm would last for three days. Despite its ferocity, the two men fought their way through to the Rat River Canyon. Near midnight on January 15th, they dug a camp down into the snow only a mile downriver from the cabin. It must have been a frightening night for the two men, not knowing if Johnson might be prowling about and would hear their dogs or spot their fire. As soon as there was a little twilight the next morning, Millen and Gardlund set out on snowshoes for a cautious surveillance.

The snow, still falling heavily through the dim daylight, completely covered everything. Not even the week-old tracks of the posse's retreat could be seen. Moving carefully, one man covering the other, Millen and Gardlund slipped closer to the destroyed structure above the high bank. A blanket of fresh lay over everything. They could see no sign of recent tracks or the smoke from a fire. After watching for a while, they decided that Johnson was either dead inside or on the run.

The two men searched the wreckage of the cabin. It was so thoroughly damaged - the walls stove in, the roof collapsed - it was hard for them to believe anyone inside had survived the blasts of dynamite. Yet they could find no sign of Johnson. Nor could they find any sign of his identity. There was not a scrap of paper or hint of the man's identity anywhere within the ruins. There weren't even pelts or traps to indicate that the "Mad Trapper" was indeed a trapper. Odder still, the destroyed cabin had been thoroughly cleaned. Johnson had even picked up and disposed of the shell casings left over from the siege.

Millen and Gardlund circled wide around the cabin, searching for any indication of the direction Johnson might have escaped. But the blizzard covered any tracks. Knowing the Inspector would desperately need the information that Johnson had indeed fled, and could be just about anywhere - either running or waiting in ambush - Gardlund and Millen traveled back out onto the Delta and found the cabin of a Gwich'n family. The head of the family agreed to carry a note to Eames in Aklavik. Millen and Gardlund then returned to the Rat River to continue searching for some sign of Johnson.

* * *

Upon receiving Millen's note, Inspector Eames sent out new broadcasts on the Signal Corps' powerful long-wave radio. One warned people living in isolated communities or alone in the bush that Johnson was on the move. As a result, frightened families from all over the northern Yukon and Northwest Territories began flocking into the nearest villages for their own protection. Eames' second broadcast announced that the Mounties would once again be going after the fugitive, and he was asking for more volunteers. With King still critically wounded and McDowell incapacitated by his re-injured knee, Eames had only a handful of Mounties left to conduct what would likely be a huge and exhausting search.

Among those in Aklavik who stepped forward was Ernest Sutherland (who had been present for the siege), John Parsons (a former Mountie), two new civilian volunteers and trappers named Frank Carmichael and Noel Verville, and two members of the Canadian Army's Signal Corps. The youngest of these, Staff Sergeant Earl Hersey, was a former Olympic distant runner. The elder, Quartermaster Sergeant Frank Riddell, was already well-known as one of the North's great veteran travelers.

The Signal Corps' men set about constructing a radio they could carry on a dogsled. The ability to instantly notify Aklavik of any trace of Johnson's movements would obviously be invaluable. And in case Johnson barricaded himself in another cabin, crafty Riddell also fashioned a variety of bombs made out of beer bottles and the engine cylinders of discarded outboard motors. These "goose eggs," as he called them, were filled with gunpowder and sulfur and each equipped with a fuse.

The search party of eight men under Eames' command got underway on January 16th. They, too, were soon engulfed by the blizzard that had been bedeviling Millen and Gardlund near the Rat. Yet the next day the party reached the ruins of Destruction City, where the Rat River meets the Delta and just eight miles down-canyon from Johnson's cabin. Here they dug out their old camp and set up a sort of permanent base. The following day they were approached and joined by eleven Gwich'n hunters and trappers who had heard of Eames' radioed request for help.

Over the next four days the men divided into groups and sledded, skied or snowshoed in different directions, scouring the Rat River Canyon and the steep hills surrounding it, searching for any sign of Johnson. The task was enormously difficult due to the heavy snowfall, the few hours of light each day, and with the temperatures always hovering around negative forty degrees.

All of the men were used to such traveling in the Arctic winter. What they weren't used to, and what proved far more stressful, was that they expected to be attacked at any moment. When Johnson had shot King through the door of the cabin, he had proved that he could be both vicious and aggressive. The canyon of the Rat River and the foothills surrounding it were choked with snow-covered spruce trees. The violence of the Arctic seasons, with heavy snowfall and intense summer storms, made the forests all the more tangled, as dead and downed trunks mingled with the living, and nearly every square yard of the river bottom and the hills on either side was a potential point of ambush.

By January 21st, Eames was all too aware that the large party's supplies were running out. He decided to call off the eleven Gwich'n volunteers and send them back to their homes in Fort McPherson and Arctic Red River. Further weighing his options, he also determined that there was only enough food for four men to remain and continue the search. The chosen four should be able to last nine days without resupply. Millen, of course, needed to be one of them, as he was the only member of the party who had seen Johnson face-to-face (when he'd briefly interviewed him the previous summer). Sergeant Riddell, Karl Gardlund, and Noel Verville agreed to stay with him. Eames and the others would return to Aklavik and prepare to ferry fresh supplies and men to the mouth of the Rat.

Eames hoped to keep Johnson contained on the eastern side of the Richardson Mountains, this side of the Yukon border. If Johnson managed to cross into the Yukon, he would only be one hundred miles from Alaska and freedom. To this end the Inspector radioed to the Yukon communities of Old Crow and La Pierre House requesting that men monitor the two known passes, watching for the tracks of anyone descending from the mountains.

Meanwhile the pressure from Mountie headquarters in Edmonton was increasing as the media storm continued. "MAD TRAPPER FLEES INTO ARCTIC NIGHT," read a headline in the New York Times. The Canadian press was even more vocal. "R.C.M.P. Fights Crazed Trapper," wrote the Vancouver Sun, and the Toronto Globe derided the Mounties with a headline stating, "Trapper Gives Slip to Mounted Police."

For the four men still searching on the Rat, nearly a week went by with no sign of Johnson despite wider and wider explorations of the hills and valleys forming the base of the Richardson Mountains. At one point the search party discovered a food cache - frozen meat placed on a high log platform to keep it safe from the reach of bears, wolves and wolverines. The searchers spent several days in hiding nearby, watching for Johnson to return to it, but the fugitive never appeared. It was frustrating, dangerous, and horribly cold work. Aside from traveling through the deep snow, often fighting their way through thickets and forests, hours had to spent each day chopping wood, building and maintaining fires, melting snow for water, cooking and drying clothes. The temperature by this time had dropped to forty-seven degrees below zero. Their sleeping bags were becoming encrusted with their frozen sweat, causing them to be less and less insulating. And their rations soon dropped down to little but hardtack, bacon and tea.

Then on January 28, the Signal Corps quartermaster and Arctic veteran Frank Riddell, roaming while his companions prepared for yet another frigid bivouac, spotted Johnson's huge and distinctive snowshoe tracks on a ridge where the old snow had been exposed by the wind. Amazingly, the tracks seemed to head toward neither the Rat Pass nor the Barrier River Pass thirty miles to the south. Instead the faint prints appeared to led westward and up, straight toward the highest peaks of the Richardson Mountains.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PART 1
Return to Reality

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half. Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh. Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win; He's a rolling stone,
and it's bred in the bone; He's a man who won't fit in.

- Robert Service, from The Men That Don't Fit In

It was good to be back. Or at least it should have been good.

Home again in Colorado, I was embraced by Justine's thin, strong arms, with Colin's far skinnier arms wrapped somewhere down around my knees. Two pairs of eyes - my wife's bright blue-green and my son's soft gold - stared up at me adoringly, ecstatic that I'd returned to them healthy and alive even if the expedition had been an utter failure. They wanted nothing more from me. Happy as I should have been to see them, I couldn't help feeling hollow and empty. In all my recent dreams I had returned triumphant; a made man at last in my own mind, a true Arctic adventurer, a slaughterer of childhood bugaboos.

At least I tried, I repeatedly told myself. The inner echo was always the same: and I failed.

I returned to work at my small office. My fourth book, CROSSING THE LINE, was due out in May, just a few months away. I believed it was my best book. It starred the same two conflicted brothers of the three earlier books and continued their tragic adventure. In CROSSING, the "good" brother, the cop Antonio, did some increasingly bad things, while the "bad" brother, the criminal and drug-addict Roberto, sought redemption. Together the siblings battled out-of-control federal agents and a vicious Mexican drug cartel. I had solidly researched the plot while writing it the previous year, basing much of it on the stories told to me by two law-school friends. Their stories were better than any fiction I could make up. One of them worked for the Department of Justice, extraditing drug kingpins from Latin America, while the other essentially worked for the cartels, defending the drug mules they employed. The book had been written with all my heart in it. And, at the time, as I prepared to go North, it seemed I'd had a lot of heart to write with.

My publisher loved my manuscript enough to offer me a third two-book contract. This despite the fact the sales of the three already-published books had never quite lived up to the marketing department's expectations. When writing CROSSING THE LINE, I'd been certain that this would be my break-out book. Along with a victorious crossing of the Richardson Mountains, it would fulfill me. I would finally be a real adventurer and a real writer with a solid future. But the adventure had ended ignobly, and now my publisher announced they only intended to print 25,000 copies of CROSSING, a few thousand less in hardcover than the previous book. Without much enthusiasm, they also reminded me that I owed them a manuscript for the next book.

Most days I found myself sitting in my little office hour after hour, day after day, accomplishing little or nothing. I stared at my dim reflection in the window past my desk and conducted a brutal self-evaluation. The early reviews of CROSSING were flowing in - very good reviews for the most part - but when only 25,000 copies were to be printed, it was hard to take much pleasure in them.

As a general rule, a novel has little chance of making the national bestseller lists without a serious push from the publisher. And making those lists is about the only way to propel a book to great success. I couldn't manage to focus on the hope that this would prove the exception. My pessimism became overwhelming when I was sent the cover for CROSSING - an abstract swirl of the palest yellow, the title and my name all but invisible. I lacked the energy to fight for something a little more exciting.

Only one thing was certain to me: I was not the man I had once thought I would be. Hell, I wasn't even the man I had thought I was before going north.

No, I was a fraud. A fake. A wimp.

The realization was a kick to the groin. Sometimes I felt it so powerfully it put me on the floor, my arms wrapped around my knees, utterly immobilized.

Attempting to shake my depression, I returned to occasionally skiing and ice climbing in Colorado's mountains. Only high up could I truly feel free and happy again. Skinning up toward the peaks, I could wear just a shirt as I sweated along a winter trail, greeting the snowshoers and cross-country skiers I passed. I took pleasure in their company and tracks and even their litter. I appreciated the well-placed signs marking the trails. I enjoyed staring up at the bluebird skies above the Rockies as jets left vapor trails in every direction. And I loved the deep sense of relief I felt flying down the trail to my truck, always conveniently parked in a nearby lot.

At least I wasn't back in the dark, frigid, forlorn and barely-mapped Richardson Mountains, I told myself. But still, when I returned home, I couldn't write or dream. And the despair would engulf me again.

Bills were coming due and our savings were dwindling. My second son, already named Gavin, and conceived in far more hopeful days, was set to arrive in early June. It was imperative I finish a manuscript, that I get the next payment for the fifth book. But I found I couldn't write even a sentence without self-doubt washing over me. Every line that appeared on the computer's screen looked false. Every word was painful. I didn't even think I was a writer anymore. When strangers asked me about my profession, I returned to saying that I was a lawyer. At night, falling asleep, worry had replaced the once-constant dreaming.

I grew more and more isolated as the depression grew more profound. It was difficult to meet friends and have to explain my failure in the Arctic. Recollections of all the bragging I'd done (I'm going to hunt down the Mad Trapper and live out a childhood dream!) haunted every conversation. Weeks went by without talking to Taylor, my very best friend. It seemed we'd both been around each other far too much on the trip north and our friendship was tainted by our mutual humiliation.

And Taylor, at his home in northern Wyoming, wasn't faring much better. Although he'd laid aside his roofing hammer and accepted a more lucrative job as a law clerk for a local judge, he'd spent nearly $2,000 on his Arctic outfit and, like me, had come back with nothing to show for it. Then his truck - with a newly-refurbished engine - was creamed by an old lady doing 80 down a hill on Sheridan's main street. A few weeks later the engine of his wife's van crapped out. And then their furnace burned out just as their roof nearly blew off. And their college-loan bills kept coming every month.

Taylor was luckier than I was in one respect, though. It was during this difficult time that he had a brief epiphany. He joined the local Search and Rescue team in order to find new climbing partners close to home in the Big Horn Range. To his surprise, he fell in love with it. All the training - the complex rigging of backboards on crags and dragging them through caves, orienteering and getting medical certificates, the midnight calls to track down lost hikers and drunken snowmobilers, even the body retrievals. Cautious, deliberate, thoughtful work in the outdoors. He was born for it. But his dream of a new career was brief. He talked to the local Fire Department about signing up full-time only to learn that, at thirty-three, he was already past their maximum age limit.

And things just got worse for me.

While skiing that spring, I leapt off a fifteen-foot cornice and somehow landed on my head. Apparently unhurt once the static faded from my vision and I could finally suck some wind back into my lungs, I skied back in-bounds for the chairlift. But by the time I reached the bottom of the mountain, I couldn't turn my head, my fingertips were buzzing, and every turn and bump caused me to gasp.

At the resort's emergency room they tapped my joints with small mallets, had me squeeze their hands, and X-rayed my neck. Fortunately, it wasn't broken. I left with a prescription for some really good drugs and lots of rest. The injury wasn't all that severe, just a slipped disk, although for a few days I wished I were dead whenever I had to move. In a week I was much better. But there was something ominous about how my spine felt. It seemed my body wasn't as indestructible as it had once been. For the first time in my life, I was aware that I was getting older.

A few weeks later my brother and I blasted through feathery powder at Alta to the edge of a small cliff. I skied to the lip to study the drop, wondering if I was still young and strong enough to huck it. As I leaned over the edge, balancing on my poles, I somehow lost my balance. I plummeted down the rock face and crashed into a tree growing off a ledge near the bottom. My skis were suspended in the branches and wouldn't release. It took a long, long time for my brother to stop laughing and pick his way down the cliff to jab at my bindings with his ski pole. When I was dumped unceremoniously in the snow and rocks below - headfirst again, of course - my neck wasn't feeling too good.

It had always bothered me, ever since I can remember. After a bad wipe-out surfing or climbing or skiing, I would be all but immobile for a few days, and then, for a week or two after that, I could move around as long as I didn't try turning my head too far to one side or the other. This time the stiffness didn't go away.

Just a few weeks after the second skiing accident it was time for my second son, Gavin, to enter the world. But he refused to come out, stubbornness being one of his most powerful character traits even as a fetus. The nurse-practitioner who was to deliver him scheduled the beginning of June to induce labor. The night before the inducement, I rolled out of bed to piss and groggily noticed that my neck felt funny. Tighter than usual, and a little numb, like it was about to go out on me again. It seemed strange, because I hadn't done anything particularly violent in weeks. It must be the stress, I figured. I just needed to move carefully. I shuffled into the dark bathroom and stooped to raise the seat. An audible pop sounded from somewhere in my upper spine. Then a tremendous crack and explosion of red light as my forehead struck the toilet. I regained consciousness staring up at Justine's belly as she shouted my name.

The inducement was cancelled. Instead of my over-pregnant wife, it was me who was rushed to the doctor's, and then to the hospital for an MRI, moaning and cursing at each bump in the road. Gavin was born two days later while I was still in a Vicodin haze. I cried with happiness and not a little pain as he writhed in my arms. I could barely hold him to me. I wondered if I'd be in a wheelchair by the time he reached wrestling-age.

We were still in the hospital when the doctor called with my MRI results. "You have a very nasty neck, my friend," began his diagnosis. "There's extensive disk degeneration all the way from C-2 to the thoracic. And, well, there's severe impingement of the nerves just about everywhere, especially on the left side. A recent injury probably caused a large bulge at C-6 and C-7. But the whole thing resembles the spine of a badly-used man in his seventies."

He referred me to a spinal specialist and surgeon, but thought that surgery was unlikely to help because the damage was so wide-ranging and involved so many disks. Instead he recommended experimentation with pain medication and muscle relaxants, epidural injections, chiropractic manipulation and acupuncture, and, most importantly, a drastic change in lifestyle.

"No more skiing or climbing, Clinton. That's over for you. Even jogging or biking is probably not a good idea. With a spine like yours, you need to be sedentary. You need to change your lifestyle."

The one fantasy I'd been trying so hard to grasp over the last six months - a return to the Arctic for another try - slipped from my hands and broke on the floor.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PART 2
Dreams Die Hard

The winter! the brightness that blinds you,
The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
The silence that bludgeons you dumb.
The snows that are older than history,
The woods where the weird shadows slant;
The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
I've bade 'em good-bye-but I can't.
There's a land where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There's a land-oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back-and I will.

- Robert Service, from The Spell of the Yukon

It seemed a little ridiculous to be so unhappy with two healthy, joyful sons and a loving wife. Despite the fact that we were nearly out of money, we weren't hungry or without shelter. And my damaged spine didn't exactly qualify as a fatal disease, either. We had two cars, decent furniture, a small but comfortable home in a nice neighborhood, and there was always my law license to fall back on if things became truly desperate. The DA's office would probably take me back.

People all over the world suffered a lot more, and for a lot better reasons. Yet I just couldn't help it. I was suffering too. Attempts to put it in perspective - What are my broken hopes next to the war, famine and death I read about in the newspaper? Hell, in my old job, I saw people who'd been shot, stabbed, beaten and raped on a daily basis! - brought me little relief.

At the urging of Justine, who managed our finances, making money became my first priority. I owed my publisher two books, and they would release additional payments only upon receipt of the manuscripts. That was our best and quickest hope for replenishing our accounts. The advance money had long-since been eaten up by our mortgage, taxes, medical insurance and, of course, the disastrous trip to the Arctic.

Everyday that fall and winter, weekends included, I headed to my office early and stayed late. Ten or twelve hours a day spent mostly with my head resting on my arms, only occasionally being lifted in order to tap another painful, uncertain sentence. There was little or no climbing or skiing. But the next manuscript, BADWATER, finally got spit out. Looking back, it's a pretty good book - the despair I was feeling is artistically transferred to the troubled characters. But at the time I lacked anything near the confidence to be actually proud of it.

Returning home each night, I would walk in the door and pour myself a full glass of wine. A second followed as the kids were bathed and dressed in their pajamas. Once baby Gavin was down for the night, I laid in Colin's bed with him and traded bedtimes stories. His eyes shining in the dark, Colin told me about the wild places he would visit someday, the exotic animals he'd romp with, and the monsters he'd capture. Night after night, I had to marvel at the way his world was so big and open, still a place where anything was possible. And I had to realize with dismay just how much my own had shrunk.

Before I'd close the door he'd say to me things like, "I'm really going to do it, Dada. When I'm bigger. You'll see."

As I drove back to the office each night for a few more hours of brutal labor, I wondered: Should I tell him? Should I tell him that there may not be any exotic lands or wildernesses left, that you will find McDonalds and internet access in damn near every far-flung corner of the world? Should I tell him the monsters and dragons he hopes to befriend or capture are all extinct, and the last of the wild animals will soon live in parks and wear electronic tags? Should I tell him that no matter how hard he works and perseveres, he will eventually trip across his own limitations? If my parents had told me the truth instead of "You can do anything you want, Clinton, you can be anyone you want to be," maybe I wouldn't feel so unfulfilled.

Back at my office, I would find myself drawn up to the roof. Sitting Indian-style on tar paper in the dark, looking west toward the mountains over the lights of the city and trying not to torque my fragile spine, I would question who I was, how could I live with myself, and how would I support my family in the years to come? I checked that my pre-Arctic life insurance policy was still in effect - maybe I should throw myself over the edge? Suicide never became a serious consideration, but the fantasy of it did linger at times.

There was no epiphany over the following months. There was just a slow building of pressure. The resulting squeeze forced me to focus.

I couldn't go on like this, laden so heavily by my failure. I needed to prove to my sons - and myself - that those childhood fantasies aren't just ephemeral; that you can track down your fugitive dreams and triumph over them. That if you're tenacious enough, willing to suffer and fight, you can make anything happen. And even if you utterly fail in the end, you damn well ought to go out swinging.

I emailed Taylor, who I hadn't spoken to in months.

"I'm going back," I wrote.

He instantly replied, "I'm coming, too."

* * *

Damning the doctor's advice, I started running again. Slowly at first, walking whenever my spine began to tighten to an intolerable level. I started lifting weights. Due to the nerve-impingement, I discovered one arm to be far weaker than the other. My attempts at the bench press were pathetically lopsided. But after a few months the weakness faded and the strength came back. I dragged out my climbing skis and the rest of my gear and began driving once a week up to Loveland Pass. Even if the conditions were blizzard-like, with the temperature ten-degrees-below-zero and a savage wind cutting through my Gore-Tex, I would slog along a ridge that connected 13,000' peaks - traveling a little further each week - until I reached the summit of Torres, at just over 14,000'. On subsequent trips that winter I added a few more pounds of weight to a pack already heavy with survival gear.

Physical setbacks came and went, but I waited them out then continued training again, always upping the ante. It was suffering and drudgery. I hated it - I hated everything. But I managed to convince myself I didn't have a choice. If it wasn't too late already, this might be the last time in my life my spine could undertake a serious adventure.

One winter day I stood in a gale atop Grizzly Peak. It was blowing so hard it forced me to lean and stagger. Despite the frigid cold, I badly needed to piss, so I took off my gloves and let the wind fling them about on the straps connected to my wrists. My hands turned numb then burned as I relieved myself. This will toughen them, I thought, recalling an article about how the exposure of bare skin to extreme cold increases the flow of blood through one's capillaries. Your devoted arctic adventurers often "trained" in ice-filled bathtubs. When I pulled the gloves back on, I discovered I'd managed to fill them both with urine. To my surprise I started laughing, wishing Taylor were here with me. Holy shit - I was having fun again.

Along with my physical and mental health, the dreams began to return. And not just the one about running down the Mad Trapper. I started to dream about writing a book about it - a book that would sell millions of copies. The manhunt was a great story, after all. One that had been written about a dozen times, and even had some very bad movies based on it (Charles Bronson's Death Hunt is one sorry example). And the story about the changing Arctic, the death of the wilderness, wasn't bad either. Nor, I hesitantly flattered myself, was my own story of pursuit. Provided, of course, I actually made it.

It was no longer just the adventure I'd be going North to find. No, I was becoming more like the Stampeders and even, possibly, old Albert himself. This time I was going for the gold as well.

* * *

That spring, more than a year after our defeat in the Arctic, Taylor and I met at the Longs Peak parking lot at midnight. Our goal was to climb Dream Weaver, a beautiful, narrow ribbon of snow and ice running 1,500 feet up the north face of Mount Meeker. In the cold March darkness we unloaded our skis and axes from our trucks by headlamp and talked about our kids, our sad careers, and, very hesitantly, our plans to return to the Richardson Mountains.

"What's that?" I asked, noticing a strange glow to the north, beneath the stars but above the black horizon. "Is that Cheyenne, or did you pass a forest fire on your way down to Colorado?"

Taylor stared too. "I don't know. There weren't any fires, and Cheyenne's farther to the east. Weird. It's more green than orange." Then, after a minute, he said, "Oh my God! It's the Northern Lights! It has to be! I didn't know you could see them from Colorado!"

We dug out our compasses and checked. The glow did indeed come from due North.

Excited, we stepped into our skis, hefted our jangling packs, and kicked our way up the trail. By two a.m. we were above tree line, standing on a boulder field swept clean of snow. Again we stared to the north. It was the Aurora Borealis. Definitely. The pale green lights were dancing away just above the black horizon, calling to us from a long, long way away.

As the eastern horizon began to turn pink we ditched our skis alongside the avalanche debris that spilled out of Dream Weaver's ragged chimney. Strapping on crampons, cinching the leashes of our axes to our wrists, we tied ourselves to each end of the rope and began climbing. As I front-pointed on the ice, the rope trailing down to Taylor one hundred feet below me, I remembered why I loved climbing so much. The beauty and the danger forced out all other thoughts. My mind could focus on nothing but moving higher, placing protection in the rock walls on either side, and breathing deeply the cold, clean air. I didn't think of my spine and how it might soon prevent me from ever doing this again, or my troubled writing career, or my failed dreams. There was nothing but the here and now.

I was drunk with exhilaration when we climbed out of the couloir and staggered over loose rocks to Mt. Meeker's 13,500' summit. After unroping, shaking hands and grinning at one another, we started down a knife-blade ridge leading the steep snow slope that would take us back to our skis. This 1,000' slope, known as the Loft, wasn't nearly as steep as Dream Weaver, yet several people had been killed trying to climb down it.

My focus on the here and now remained intense as we started down. The snow was disturbingly soft atop a layer of far harder snow. We had to kick our crampons deep and then bury the shafts of our axes to keep from tumbling down backwards. There was a real danger of avalanche with the full weight of the Spring sun leaning on the soft snow. We debated roping up again, but since there was no solid ice in which to twist our screws, and no solid rock to place chocks, a fall could mean the likely death of us both, as the one who fell would certainly pull the other off. We were scared and, without the protection of the rope, the fear was no longer so delicious.

A third of the way down we had a momentary reprise on the ledge of a rock outcropping. Even here the rock was too loose and shattered to offer any protection in which to rig a rappel. I picked a line where the snow looked the most stable and started down first, with Taylor agreeing to wait for me to reach the bottom so as not to risk falling on me from above and carrying me down with him.

Down I climbed, hearing only my ragged breath and Taylor's crampons squeaking on the granite ledge above as he shifted his weight uneasily, looking for a better descent. When I was a hundred feet below him, I heard a shout.

"Rock!"

He repeated the warning as I stared straight up. "Rock! Rock!"

A football-sized stone wavered in the bright blue sky above. It grew larger as it descended toward me. Straight toward me. A jump out of the way would mean falling 600' down the face. All I could do was lean to my left, hoping, as the right axe took all my weight, that its pick wouldn't peel out of the snow. The falling rock anticipated me. It seemed to swerve a bit to the left, too. At the last moment I threw my weight to the right, now praying that my left axe would hold.

The rock slammed onto the head of my left axe, just inches above my hand. Somehow it ricocheted to the side without breaking my arm. But the axe was ripped out of the snow, and my entire weight was jerked onto the right axe. Somehow, miraculously, it held me.

Hanging from the one axe, I stared up at Taylor. He was leaning off his ledge, his face white with panic. "Are you okay! Are you okay!"

I kicked my crampon points back into the snow and tried to catch my breath. Nothing hurt. I looked at my horribly bent left axe, dangling uselessly from its leash. And then I started to laugh.

"I'm okay!" I yelled. "I'm fine!"

* * *

By the time my fifth book, BADWATER, came out in early 2005, my publisher had decided my series of suspense novels had come to an end. They had just never caught on in any sort of a big way, the movie rights had failed to sell, and the total number of copies printed this time was less than half of what the first book had been. I was advised to write a stand-alone thriller for the next book, but each proposal I turned in over the course of a year was summarily rejected. Then my agent gave me the really bad news - the publisher was canceling the sixth book. Even worse, they wanted their advance money back.

Despite these set-backs, or perhaps because of them, I continued my hasty flight into my fantasy world - the rematch in the Arctic. It was either that or re-immerse myself in dreamless depression.

I poured my energy into putting together a proposal for a book about the hunt for the Mad Trapper. When a few chapters were ready, I sent them to my agent.

"It's dynamite!" he shouted over the phone.

I was almost beside myself with excitement when he submitted the proposal to a host of nonfiction publishers. I remember that very night going to a local Mystery Writers meeting (one where I, somewhat ironically, was the guest speaker) and all but pounding the table with enthusiasm as I told them frankly of my publishing travails yet boasted that I was down but not out. I was going to make my dreams come true. Hell, they should all rise up and follow me!

The editors in those big nonfiction houses liked it. They really did. But once their initial interest wore off, and once they realized I hadn't yet actually finished stalking the Mad Trapper's ghost across the Richardson Mountains, and once they saw that my first attempt had been such a complete disaster that I would surely die trying a second, they weren't exactly eager to throw money my way. If I didn't come back from the Arctic, their money wouldn't either. Some of the more decent editors even said something about not wanting to encourage me to kill myself. One less decent editor mentioned in an aside to my agent that if Taylor or I died up there … wow, now that would make a great story! Especially if the survivor had to eat the other's carcass.

But no one was willing to bet on it.

* * *

For months I composed lists of gear in my office. Taylor and I communicated constantly by email, passing the lists back and forth and adding, deleting, or just commenting on even the smallest item. This time we were determined to go light and fast and resolute. The next time we stepped off a ski plane on the Delta, we'd take off running up into the mountains. Movement would keep us warm, and that decision alone allowed us to cross item after item and pound after pound off the gear list.

A few debates lasted weeks, like whether to take skis or snowshoes, or the four-pound floorless tipi as opposed to a bomb-proof twelve-pound mountaineering tent. In the end we decided to rely on the speed skis offered, but we would each carry lightweight snowshoes in our sleds in case the skis again failed us. The tent decision hung in the air for months, and at the least minute was left entirely up to me (quite unfortunately, as my choice of the lightweight tipi would nearly get us killed). Yes, this time we would be prepared. If our skins failed to stick in the extreme cold, we would bring small woodscrews with which to permanently attach them. If my new boots once again disintegrated, we would have strong straps to bind them together. Just in case, I bought brand new boots as well as the fatter skis, spending over $1,000 that my family quite clearly couldn't afford. The comfort of the little collapsible woodstove was rejected - instead of spending time assembling it and scrounging for willow branches and constantly feeding it, we'd spend our time moving, breaking trail, pounding out the miles.

We devised a meal plan for maximizing fat and calories for warmth and energy and minimizing cooking time. Breakfast would be a mug of oatmeal and butter, then coffee poured into the same mug. Every hour on the trail we'd suck down Gu packets or energy drink, and every other hour we'd add a nutrition bar that we would thaw in our underwear. At the end of a minimum eight hour day of constant skiing and climbing, never allowing our heart rates to dip below the aerobic range, dinner would consist of a dehydrated meal saturated with olive oil and served in the bag in was packaged in. A candy bar or two would serve for dessert. I carefully added it up to more than 5,000 calories a day - not nearly as much as we'd be burning, but enough to keep us alive for one to two weeks.

Part of the preparation was a mental toughening. I read book after book of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, noting carefully not only how the parties had survived or died, but also how much they endured and suffered. I imagined myself enduring and suffering with them. I can do it. I can do it, I endlessly repeated.

And we were forced to consider what would happen if I slipped a disk in the mountains. We placed a solid stock of painkillers in our emergency kit. If I couldn't simply endure, then Taylor could load me on a sled like Alfred King and drag me down to the Delta for an emergency ski plane pickup. That was a luxury - mentally, at least - the early Arctic explorers and even the posse chasing Johnson didn't have. Taylor and I agreed that taking the satellite phone in the first place felt like we were cheating. But, with families counting on us, we decided it would be just too utterly stupid not to take one. Besides, even Inspector Millen had finally resorted to the use of sled-mounted radios and Wop May's ski plane.

I made copies of all the maps for Taylor. Already notated on them was the Mad Trapper's likely route over the highest peaks. But now we plotted out the passes to the north and the south - the Rat and the Barrier. Using UTM tools, we plotted waypoints every few miles along the way and recorded potential emergency back-up routes into our GPS units.

The training went on. In June, Taylor and I drove with friends to Washington to climb Mt. Rainier's famous Liberty Ridge, a steep spine of ice and rock protruding from a mile-high wall capped with continually collapsing icefalls. We approached it by tiptoeing across a massive glacier on ice bridges spanning bottomless crevasses, occasionally falling in and catching one another with the rope. Frontpointing on soft snow and rotten ice, we climbed for thousands of feet up the spine. At one point a slip by a friend nearly pulled our entire rope team off the mountain. After that we climbed solo, unroped, as again we found few or no places to anchor the rope to anything but ourselves. Finally a storm and high avalanche danger forced us to make a hazardous down-climb from the mid-way point on the face. The experience only made us stronger.

We climbed in the Big Horns, Rocky Mountain National Park, the Yellowstone's Absarokas in winter. Through it all, despite nearly being de-limbed by rockfall, swallowed by crevasses, falling en masse thousands of feet, and buried by avalanches, we continued to ski and climb hard. All fall and winter, I hammered my body and my mind like they'd never been pounded before.

Each time I'd start to feel strong and confident, my neck would go out and leave me immobile for weeks. The nightmares would return, as would the day-time fear and panic. But the pressure would ratchet up a notch. I knew if I didn't do this, I would never be happy or whole again.

It was all or nothing. There would not be a third trip to the Arctic.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Battle of Millen Creek

"… each day mankind and the claims of mankind slipped farther from him.
Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call,
mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back
on the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest,
and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why,
the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest."

- Jack London, from The Call of the Wild

The light was fading fast when Sergeant Frank Riddell, the Arctic veteran, found the tracks on top of the ridge. Examining them closely, he soon became certain they were Johnson's. The fugitive's gigantic snowshoes and the distinctive pattern they planted on the snow had been described to Riddell many, many times. Before him was the first sure sign of Johnson's movements since the failed siege weeks earlier. Based on his lengthy experience tracking game in the North, Riddell was able to estimate that the tracks were perhaps two days old.

The Signal Corps sergeant followed them for a short distance to a point at which they disappeared. Riddell began circling down into the wooded valleys on either side of the ridge. Soon, just as the light disappeared altogether, he picked up the snowshoe trail again on the windswept ice of a small creek. Then he hurried back to where his three companions were setting up a bivouac for the night.

The next day, January 29th, the temperature dropped to forty-nine degrees below zero. Constable Edgar Millen and Karl Gardlund had been living in the open for more than two weeks now, and Riddell and Noel Verville for almost as long. They'd been expecting to be relieved for days, but still no dog team from Aklavik had arrived. Although tired and cold and all but out of food for both themselves and their dogs, the men once again packed their gear onto the sleds, laced on their snowshoes, and took up the chase.

The faint trail Riddell had found on the creek ice was incredibly difficult to follow. It almost immediately became evident that Johnson was not only the hardiest man they'd ever come across - having successfully fought off two attacks on his cabin and now living for weeks alone in the open - but also the most cunning and dangerous. His trail zig-zagged continuously so that he could watch for pursuers. They found places where he'd waited in ambush. At numerous points the trail forked mysteriously, and when the men split up to follow each line, they soon met up again face-to-face. Johnson's trail climbed up cliffs, balanced along knife-edge ridges, crossed creeks only where the ice was clear of snow, and crawled through thickets of nearly impassable willows.

With four of them on his trail, the party was able to divide up and leapfrog ahead, guessing at the fugitive's direction. Yet even doing so, they couldn't believe the pace at which Johnson appeared to be traveling. Millen, Riddell, Gardlund and Verville were all seasoned travelers, comfortable trotting thirty miles a day behind a dog team, yet Johnson appeared to be traveling twice as fast as they could have in similar circumstances.

Millen and the volunteers came across several old camps where Johnson had dug deep down into the snow for invisibility and insulation. They noticed how, when he built small campfires to melt snow and cook, he always placed them carefully under snow banks where the overhanging snow would disperse the smoke. His tracks always initially went right past the places he intended to camp, then doubled back to them from another direction. Anyone following behind him would be forced to walk, completely unaware and totally exposed, just past his hiding place.

At midday the four men called a halt and gathered together. They were now high up on the Rat River, almost above tree line, and the tracks had run out. Although they'd been watching their own backtrail all day, the promised supplies and relief from Aklavik still had not arrived. It was time to decide whether they should continue searching or return to the base camp many miles away at the mouth of the Rat River. Possibly supplies would be waiting for them there. While they debated what to do, and which direction Johnson might be headed, a single dog team approached from up the Rat. The Gwich'n hunter driving it was one of the volunteers who had assisted with the search the week before. Now the man eagerly told the party that, the previous day, he had heard two rifle shots near the mouth of Bear Creek.

Millen, Riddell, Gardlund and Verville immediately turned about and headed in that direction. It was a region they had already searched, but that had been many days ago. It was quite possible that Johnson had observed the searchers move on, and then had been willing to risk bringing down a caribou to replenish his meat supply.

They found the freshest tracks yet seen near Bear Creek. Yet it's hard to imagine the men being very excited, as weary and as cold as they must have been. With so little food for so many days, it must have been difficult to stay warm even when moving. They were expending far more calories than they were taking in, and their dogs were now completely without food.

Yet they dutifully followed the tracks back down onto the ice of the Rat River, where the distinctive snowshoe prints disappeared again near the confluence of the Rat and Barrier rivers. The sources of these two rivers, the largest in this part of the mountains, diverged widely. The Rat ran down from a pass northwest of the highest peaks, while the Barrier flowed from another, less-often-used pass fifty miles to the south. Although the foothills between the two had been searched weeks before, the team divided again to begin seemingly endless loops and half-circles into the forests along the sides of each river. But before long, Riddell and Verville discovered tracks heading up an unnamed creek into a narrow canyon. Here they also found discarded pieces of a freshly-killed and quartered caribou.

Rather than following the trail into the canyon and exposing themselves to a potential ambush, the two men climbed into the hills on one side and paralleled the canyon from above. They silently followed its bends and corners for several miles higher into the mountains. One of them spotted a small wisp of smoke drifting out of the canyon somewhere ahead.

Approaching even more cautiously now, Riddell and Verville soon found themselves above a side-canyon that veered off from the main canyon they'd been following. This side-canyon was completely sealed off on three sides by vertical walls of rock and ice. In it, almost one hundred feet below, they could see rising smoke and the edge of a tarp amid a tangle of willows, snow and fallen tree trunks.

They had found Johnson.

Riddell and Verville took up positions and pointed their rifles at the visible fragments of the fugitive's camp. Without Millen, the only policeman in their party, they had no authority to mount an attack, yet they couldn't bring themselves to leave. They could hear Johnson moving about below them, and the sound of small sticks cracking as he fed a small fire. But they never saw him - he remained hidden under the canopy of broken trunks and snow. For two hours they waited, lying prone in the snow with the temperature at fifty degrees below zero, until finally they were too cold and it was too dark to have any hope of getting off a shot at him. The men were forced to silently withdraw back down to the Rat River where they rendezvoused and bivouacked yet again with Millen and Gardlund.

Early the next morning, on January 30th, a new storm tore in from the mountains and the Beaufort Sea beyond. Despite a powerful wind and blinding snow, the four men set off together cross-country in order to approach the box canyon as quickly as possible, before Johnson slipped away yet again. This time they approached from the other side of the canyon, intending to trap Johnson within the side-canyon's vertical walls.

A little way below the box canyon, Riddell and Gardlund descended into the main canyon and edged their way around the ice and rock walls until they were only fifty feet from Johnson's camp. They could hear him coughing in his lair and see his small campfire. Pointing their rifles, they waited for the others. Millen and Verville then scrambled down the steep slope opposite the side canyon. One of them slipped, however, and slid a short ways. Johnson must have heard the sound of sliding snow and breaking twigs - and, at such close distances within the walls of the narrow canyon, everyone heard the fugitive rack a shell into his rifle. Then there was the tremendous bang. Millen, moving between two trees, felt the bullet whip past very close to his head. Both he and Verville dove for cover and began shooting back.

As the canyon erupted with the thunder claps of the rifles, Johnson, evidently seeking better cover himself, dove across his fire. Gardlund saw his body flying through the air and squeezed off a shot. Johnson seemed to collapse behind the overturned trunk of a tree. Gardlund felt certain he'd hit him. The four men kept firing, though, thoroughly shooting up the camp. Their bullets banged into Johnson's pot and kettle, scattered his campfire, thunked into trees, and pierced the snow all around where his body had been seen to fall. No shots came back at them. Finally the men stopped pulling their triggers and instead listened intently as they reloaded.

After several minutes of total silence following the fusillade, Millen called out for Johnson to surrender. There was no reply.

The men waited in their positions for a solid hour despite the breathtaking cold. Still there was no sound or movement coming from Johnson's camp, just fifty feet away. No one dared approach - everyone of them had complete respect for the fugitive's vicious cunning. Instead they cautiously came together just to one side of the box canyon to discuss their next move.

Millen determined that they had to break the stalemate. As tough as he was, and as tough as were the men with him, they could not wait forever. Millen and Riddell decided the move closer for a better look although Verville protested that they would likely be killed. Yet Verville and Gardlund again took up positions to cover the two servicemen. Then Millen and Riddell began to slip through the thick trees toward the bullet-riddled camp.

They had only crept about ten feet into the side-canyon's thicket of trees when Riddell shouted a warning then dove behind a large spruce tree. A rifle cracked and a bullet slammed into the tree. Millen saw the muzzle flash and the rifle barrel poking from the snow. Kneeling quickly to aim his own rifle, he fired. A shot in return nearly struck him. Millen fired again, and then two shots came back so fast they sounded as one.

Edgar Millen suddenly rose up into the air. As he twisted around, his rifle fell from his hands. Then he fell face-first in the snow. While he lay unmoving, the other three men fired as fast as they could at Johnson's position.

Millen never moved despite long, loud minutes going by. If he was as seriously injured as he appeared, it wouldn't be long before he froze to death.

While Riddell and Verville continued to shoot at the camp, hoping just as much to keep Johnson pinned down as to hit him, Karl Gardlund wormed his way through the deep snow and willows to where Millen lay. He untied Millen's mukluks then tied the laces together again. With great difficulty, he slowly dragged Millen out of the line of fire.

Once around the side-canyon's wall, Gardlund and Verville discovered that Millen was dead. He had been killed instantly, shot clean through the heart. Riddell crawled back to them and together the three men stood over the young Mountie's body.

There was no point in another endless gun battle. Johnson was clearly too well entrenched to be killed. The three surviving volunteers needed food and warmth badly, and it was again getting dark. Although their own camp was not far away, they lacked the energy to carry Millen's body up out of the canyon and over the rough ground in between. It was decided that they would leave him there - in what would become known as Millen Creek - after erecting a platform that would keep his corpse from predators. They took his rifle, his sidearm and his snowshoes - anything Johnson might be able to use - and retreated yet again to their camp on the Rat River.

GO TO
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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