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CHAPTER
FIFTEEN They
have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preachings, - Robert Service, from The Call of the Wild Because of the short and savage nature of our defeat two years earlier, this time Justine didn't send me off with just a smile, a kiss and a wave. She had become too aware of the risks of what I was undertaking and, I suspect, too aware of my limited abilities. She said little as I packed up my truck one snowy night in early February, but it was clear by her unusual silence that she wasn't happy. Needing to focus on checking off my lists, I didn't pay much attention. Therefore, as I pulled away from home early the next morning - filled with anticipation and a bit of dread - I was clueless about the depths of her concern. I'd done my best to reassure her over the proceeding months. Despite my brittle spine, this time Taylor and I were far better trained and far better prepared. We were going to enter the mountains in mid-February, when there we could hope for almost eight hours of daylight and even some actual sunlight, rather than mid-January, when there had been little to none of either. This time, I believed, we knew what we were getting into. Taylor hadn't been able to get the time off from work to make the 7,000 mile round-trip drive with me, a drive that takes a minimum of a week in each direction. Instead he would fly to and from Inuvik on a very expensive ticket I bought for him. To avoid having to make the drive solo, I'd enlisted the help of my non-climbing friend Johnny Rico, a soldier recently returned from Afghanistan. I picked Johnny up in an ice-filled alley behind his mother's Denver townhouse. He'd flown in from his new home in London just for this trip. Although he'd traveled all over the world, to every third-world nation I could name, he'd never been to Canada. My primary enticement to him had been the promise of a Sour Toe Cocktail in Dawson City. That was enough for him - single, childless, and nearly a decade younger than I, Johnny was devoting himself to adventure and living in a way that I couldn't help but envy. He had just sold a memoir of his years in the Army to a major publisher and now was working on a new book about international borders. Talking non-stop about book projects, publishing, politics, travel and dreams, we blew out of Denver, crossed the Red Desert on I-25, paused to throw in Taylor's gear in Sheridan, viewed the Indian casino at Little Big Horn (apparently the natives were still scalping tourists at Custer's Last Stand), traversed some Montana mountains in a snowstorm, and spent our first night on the road at a cheap motel in Great Falls. On the way I expounded on my primary theme to a receptive audience. "The world's getting so small. A helicopter recently touched down on the summit of Everest. Another one plucked a solo climber off a virgin Himalayan face from which he was blogging about his imminent death. Ice-breakers are patrolling the Northwest Passage. Sailors and mountaineers now carry Personal Locator Beacons so they can be rescued from anywhere on the planet. Politicians in Oregon are considering requiring climbers to carry them. And more and more dweebs climbing in the Yosemite and the Tetons are using their cell phones to call the rangers and ask if their route should go this way or that." "You want adventure?" Johnny asked. "Try Afghanistan, where people will shoot at you. But you'll still find Burger King and KFC on the base in Kabul." Beers late into the night caused us to start late the next morning for Canada, just two hours away. Despite twenty-four hours totally immersed in each other's company (well past my usual limit), Johnny and I were still talking and laughing when we pulled up to the border. I failed to see how we must look in the Canadian custom agent's eyes: a dirty white truck hauling a lot of weight in its covered bed with two unshaven men inside, both wearing sunglasses and hats pulled low on their foreheads. "Good morning. Your passports, please." We dug them out and I briefly admired Johnny's - it was dog-earred, the pages swollen with foreign sweat. Mine looked embarrassingly sleek and clean. Johnny, who was driving, handed them through the border guard's window, and in doing so exposed a bit of the swirling tattoo that ran all the way down his arm to the wrist. The guard seemed to glance at the tattoo with distaste. "Purpose of your visit?" Johnny looked at me. Leaning over him, I said, "We're writers, working on a book." "Yes?" "Have you ever heard of the Mad Trapper?" The guard was unresponsive, flipping through Johnny's passport. But I knew from my previous trip that all Canucks know and love the story of the Mad Trapper. "I'm writing a book about him. We're going to ski the route he took over the Richardson Mountains. Up by Inuvik and the Beaufort Sea. In winter conditions." The guard stared at me for a long time, then announced, "All right, gentlemen. I'm going to need to hang on to these. Please pull into the lot just ahead and come inside the building. Someone will meet you there." Johnny put the truck in drive and rolled toward the parking lot. I shook my head and said with disgust, "When I came up here with my dad twenty-five years ago, they just waved us through." "9-11," he said. "The world's a different place, man." We parked the truck and marched inside the building to get our passports back. It was modern structure of glass and steel. Security camera tracked our approach to the clean white counter. Another different uniformed customs agent stood behind one of the computer consoles there. He stopped typing and looked up. "Good morning. What is the purpose of your visit to Canada?" I explained while he eyed us, polite but unimpressed. He asked Johnny, "I notice you've been in a lot of Arab countries recently. Could you explain what you were doing there?" "Killing people, sir. Hoo-ah." I laughed, but the customs agent didn't. "Just kidding. I was in the U.S. Army." Johnny explained in a meeker voice. After a few moments he turned to me. "And you used to be a police officer?" "I used to be a deputy district attorney," I said, wondering how he could know that. "What are you doing, checking us out on NCIC?" He acknowledged that indeed he was. How did the Canadians have access to the FBI's National Crime Information Center? The world suddenly seemed even smaller as he asked me to confirm at which of my last three addresses listed I was currently residing. He then turned back to Johnny. "Three years ago you were charged with an assault in Fort Benning, Georgia. Unfortunately, anyone convicted of a crime may not enter Canada for a period of ten years. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to pull around the building and return to the United States." "It was just a misdemeanor, and a deferred judgment," Johnny explained quickly. "There's not supposed to be any record of it." That, I knew from my days as a DA, was not entirely true. Well-heeled defendants regularly pay their lawyers thousands of dollars to have the records expunged. What they get is an addition to the listing of their misdeeds that simply reads, "Expunged." "I'm sorry," the agent told him. "It's the policy of the Canadian government." "Look, you may not know about deferred judgments," I explained, "But the conviction never formally enters. You plead guilty, but you aren't actually convicted unless you screw up probation or something. So he's never been convicted." "I'm very sorry. You gentlemen need to get back in your vehicle and pull around the building. Here are your passports." Johnny tried explaining that he'd just flown five thousand miles to visit Canada. I offered to vouch for him; C'mon, peace officer to peace officer, just let him in! The agent was efficiently immune to our pleas. "You can apply for a waiver, but it takes eight to twelve weeks. I'm afraid you'll need to re-enter the United States now." We couldn't speak except to mutter obscenities as we climbed back into my truck and made the turn around the building. There we suffered further indignity. Despite the fact that we'd just pulled around from the other side of the building, and the fact that we'd never even entered Canadian soil, the American agent took our passports, forced me to fill out a form about what goods we were bringing back from Canada, interrogated us inside the building, and then searched my truck. I dropped Johnny off at the airport in Great Falls. It looked like I'd be driving to the Arctic alone after all. * * * The lonely highway led north across the plains of Alberta through Calgary and Edmonton, then west and north for hundreds of miles more into the thick forests of northern British Columbia. Surprisingly, there was good cell phone service much of the way. Driving twelve to fourteen hours a day, I had lots of opportunity to talk with Justine. And she finally had my full attention. "Happy Valentine's Day," I said when she called on February 14th. "Clint, the bank just called. We're overdrawn." She was crying. I realized it couldn't be much fun, having been alone for nearly a week with a baby and a rambunctious boy, and with the prospect of many more such weeks to follow. I stabbed off the music that had been playing. "Shit. This is a little sooner than I expected. How'd we go over?" "All your gear for your trip. The new skis and boots. And Taylor's plane ticket. And the fact that you haven't written another book." I protested to her that I was, in fact, working on a book. "This is research, honey. This is work." "No, it isn't. You're just out having fun. Risking your life, but having fun." "I will write a book about this. It will sell," I promised. She reminded me that I'd already tried to sell this story and hadn't gotten anywhere. "I've got to make it over the mountains first," I explained. "And maybe eat Taylor. But it will sell. Especially if I eat Taylor." There no laughter on the other end of the phone. Just a long, profound silence. "Hello? Justine?" "Why are you doing this? Do you realize you might die up there? Do you realize how utterly foolish this whole thing is? How completely selfish?" I was stung into silence. After a long moment I managed a weak response. "This is what I have to do. It's what I've always dreamed about doing." "You have a family now. If you're this irresponsible with your life and our future, if you're willing to throw it all away for some fantasy you had when you were a kid, how can I count on you? How can I trust and rely on you?" I didn't have a winning argument. I felt myself getting angry, the last emotional refuge for someone lacking any defense. I'd never considered how it must be for her, my running off on these adventures, taking joy in the danger I put myself in. Justine had never been anything but supportive, never voiced any objection. I had always taken it for granted that she just wanted me to be happy. And I assumed it applied at any cost. "What do you want me to do? Turn around?" "Yes. Turn around, come back, and grow up." "I'm not going to. I can't." "Then we might not be here when you come back. If you come back." I felt wounded and sick. All of my despairing self-analysis over the last two years, and I'd failed to see what a selfish, self-absorbed bastard I was. My heart had taken a sucker punch, and my pride had been kicked in the balls. I needed to stop - I wanted to vomit in the snow. But I swallowed the bile and kept on driving north. * * * It took me several days of hard solo driving to reach Laird Hot Springs near the Yukon border. On the way I listened to CBC radio and heard constant reports from Inuvik. A big conference was going on there. Politicians and environmentalists and industry representatives had flown into the town from all over Canada to fight about the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. Its construction, and the massive proliferation of oil and gas wells it would service, was expected to bring unheard of riches to the Delta region. It was the Klondike Stampede all over again, one reporter said. It was predicted that some of the construction camps alone would dwarf any of the existing native communities. The caribou herds might be pushed off their centuries-old migration routes, some protested, but others answered that easements could be made for them. They would build tunnels under the new roads for the caribou to cross. I found myself wishing I could drive faster. It was ten o'clock at night when I approached the turnoff for Laird Hot Springs. My entire body hurt. I'd been on the Alaska Highway for something like sixteen hours, and my back, neck and legs ached from sitting, my eyes felt raw from so many hours of watching nothing but trees, rocks and snow pass by, and my head pounded from having to concentrate so hard on the icy turns, the logging trucks blowing past, and the constant danger of some very big animal - like some of the woodland buffalo I'd passed - stepping on to the road. At the Laird Springs turnoff I hesitated, knowing a lodge was just a few miles up the road, weighing rest and a warm bed against a swim at twenty below zero. You only live once, I told myself. And I swerved off the icy pavement and rolled into rutted snow. Taking a dip in Laird Hot Springs is practically required for all drivers on the Alaska Highway. Particularly for the streams of tourists going north in the summer. In the winter, with all the darkness and the temperature always well-below zero, it's a little more optional. The campground lot and the parking lot were entirely empty, and tonight it was exceedingly dark. As I hoofed down the boardwalk, nose and cheeks and eyes burning from the cold, I was reminded of something I'd heard about the springs. Taylor had told me about a friend - a seasonal fisherman heading home from Alaska after a brutal summer's work - who had made his regular stop at the springs eight years earlier. For hundreds of miles he'd been looking forward to soaking in the hot water, dreaming of washing away the stench of thousands of pounds of salmon with a long, sulfuric soak. But he too had found the parking lot empty, and a chain across the trail reading "Closed." "Screw this," he thought, and ducked under. It was eerie, he told Taylor, because the springs were always packed in the summertime. And it got eerier. As he walked across the marsh on the boardwalk, there were clothes and litter scattered everywhere. He paused to look at a discarded boot and saw that it was covered with blood and flies. Must have been a hell of a party last night, he thought. Just then a female ranger stepped out from behind some trees a short distance away, startling him. She had a rifle in her hands and a pistol on her hip. "The springs are closed!" she shouted at him. "Return to your vehicle immediately!" Taylor's friend later found out, and I'd since confirmed, that earlier that morning a thirty-seven year old woman from Texas and her two sons had been walking on this same boardwalk in midsummer daylight. They surprised a bear that was prowling the berry bushes off to one side. The bear leapt out and knocked down the mother and immediately began feeding on her. Her thirteen year old son, acting with unbelievable courage, grabbed a stick and began swinging it at the bear. A man heard the screams and came running. He, too, grabbed up a log and stuck the bear in the face. When that didn't work, he jumped on the bear's back, trying to wrestle it off the woman. The bear turned on him. With its claws and teeth, the bear tore off his head. Then it began eating him. Other people ran up and fought to try and drag the bear off the headless corpse. They struck it with sticks and threw shoes and water bottles until someone finally sprinted up with a rifle and shot the bear dead. My senses were hyper-tuned as I walked that same lonely path in the dark, my breath forming wreaths of smoke in front of my face. In my pocket I grasped a can of bear repellent and wondered how well it would work in the cold. Bears are not true hibernators - they often come out of their dens in winter, and when they do, they're often grouchy. That was a little bit of knowledge I wished I didn't possess. I was alone. Very, very alone. And suddenly it didn't feel very good. I reached the springs after ten minutes of walking on the planks across the frozen marsh. The pools were smoking furiously, coating the trees around them with an armor of ice crystals that blazed in the beam of my headlamp. Shivering hard as I stripped on the dock, I kept the bear spray close at hand. I wore my headlamp into the water despite the fact that its beam merely reflected off the writhing ghosts formed by the steam. Crouching deep between the scalding currents, I thought about my family. God, I loved them. Their faces intermingled with the ghosts. Was I outrageously selfish to have left them for this quest? The fact seemed indisputable. Should I turn around and go home? That would certainly be wise. But could I live with myself for the next forty or fifty years knowing I'd come so close, only to chicken out again? No, I couldn't.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN Without a sled to carry Constable Millen's body out of the narrow canyon, the three volunteers - Frank Riddell, Karl Gardlund and Noel Verville - were forced to abandon the corpse on a hastily-constructed platform just one hundred feet from Johnson's camp. Hungry, half-frozen and dismayed by their friend's death and their defeat, they retreated through the night back to their camp on the Rat River. They found Riddell's Signal Corps colleague, Earl Hersey, and a guide, Lazarus Sittichinli, waiting for them there with desperately-needed provisions. In a thin canvas tent, crowded around a small stove, it was decided that Riddell would carry the news of Millen's death to Inspector Eames in Aklavik. Despite two weeks spent in the open at 40 below zero with little food, his dog team was still the strongest. Sittichinli would go with him, as conditions were so bad due to heavy snowfall and the long series of blizzards that it wasn't safe for even a veteran Northern traveler such as Riddell to undertake the one hundred mile journey alone. Riddell and Sittichinli left immediately, intending to travel all night and all through the next day even though both men had been without sleep for twenty-four hours or more. Hersey, Gardlund and Verville stayed on the Rat to guard the canyon where Johnson was hiding. The Army sergeant and the two trappers had determined that they would not attempt to attack Johnson again without more men and at least one Mountie among them. It was hoped that Johnson's determination and apparent vigor would be weakened by a few more days of brutal cold with no shelter or supplies. Yet there was one task the three volunteers must accomplish while awaiting reinforcement: that of retrieving Millen's body before it could be destroyed by bears, wolves or wolverines. The next morning, January 31st, the three men crept up the canyon. When they reached the platform, they found Johnson's tracks in the snow all around it. During the night the fugitive had ventured out of his side-canyon hideout to examine and perhaps search the dead Mountie for food or ammunition. Meanwhile Sittichinli and Riddell forced their way north across the Delta to Aklavik. The trail Sittichinli had broken just the day before with Hersey and the supplies they carried had already been covered with heavy snow. The two men, already burdened by the news of Millen's death, had to stomp a new trail with their snowshoes for the dogs and the sled to follow. With an exhausting effort, they reached Aklavik in a single day. They reported the gunfight in the unnamed canyon to Inspector Eames. The Mounties had now lost three men - Millen killed, King still hospitalized with a bullet wound through the chest, and McDowell incapacitated by his twice-injured knee. Johnson's determination and endurance stunned the Northern community, and the report radioed to the outside world fed the growing media frenzy. The inspector, who had been toiling for days to equip a new and larger posse, now realized that an even-greater force than what he had previously imagined was going to be required, as well as something innovative and unprecedented. He radioed his commander in Edmonton, who telegraphed his request to Ottawa, the Canadian capitol. "EAMES REPORTS ALBERT JOHNSON LOCATED IN ENTRENCHED POSITION THIRTY MILES UP RAT RIVER WHEN ATTACKED HE SHOT AND KILLED CONSTABLE E. MILLEN STOP EAMES REQUESTS AIRPLANE BE REQUISITIONED TO CARRY SUPPLIES AND ATTACK POSITION STOP IMPOSSIBLE TO MAINTAIN PARTY IN POSITION WITH PRESENT EQUIPMENT STOP PLEASE AUTHORIZE BY WIRE" The Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Minister of Justice approved the use of a plane. In addition, they noted in their confirmation, "As supply gas bombs may be useful … endeavor to borrow from Alberta Provincial Police before plane leaves Edmonton." A ski-mounted plane was immediately leased from Western Canadian Airways, to be armed with tear gas bombs and piloted by W.R. "Wop" May. Thirty-five-year-old Captain May was already well-known throughout Canada. In the First World War he had flown the plane being chased by Baron von Richthofen, a.k.a. the "Red Baron," when that notorious German was finally shot down and killed. May had gone on to personally down thirteen enemy planes - a feat for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1918. He was famous in the North, as well, for having flown an antitoxin serum to northern Alberta during a diphtheria epidemic in early January 1929. He made the 600-mile trip in an open-cockpit aircraft despite the ground temperature being thirty degrees below zero and the wind-chill far exceeding that. Upon arrival in the desperate village, May was so numb he had to be carried from the plane. May had been following the manhunt in the newspapers and on the radio from his home in Fort McMurray, Alberta. He eagerly agreed to participate. A load of tear gas bombs were ferried to him from Edmonton. When they arrived on February 2nd, May was already in the enclosed cockpit of his black-and-orange Bellanca monoplane with the engine idling. With him were his mechanic, Jack Bowen, and an R.C.M.P. constable named William Carter. The three men immediately began the 1,500 mile flight north across all-but-unpopulated forests. Eames had sent out another message via the radio on January 31st, this one to the entire Mackenzie Delta district and the Yukon villages of Rampart House, Old Crow, and La Pierre House. It stated: "Quartermaster Sergeant Frank Riddell arrived here today after making a one-hundred mile trip and reports that Constable Millen was shot and killed by Albert Johnson, thirty miles up the Rat River. Constable Millen and party came on Johnson in dense brush. Inspector Eames requests that every available man, carrying rifle, ammunition, food and dog feed with dog team, proceed immediately to a point seven miles up the Rat River where he will meet them. Albert Johnson is described as follows: age … thirty-five to forty years; height … about five feet eight inches; build … medium, walks with a habitual stoop; hair … light-colored; eyes … pale blue; usually clean-shaven; speech … talks with a slight Scandinavian accent, is a good workman and good shot. Inspector Eames wants every available man as soon as possible from all districts fully equipped. Johnson is to be shot on sight." * * * Well-armed, trail-toughened men began driving their dog teams to the Rat River. From Aklavik, three men were sent to relieve Gardlund and Verville and to support Earl Hersey. Hersey, despite not being a policeman, was at least a Sergeant in the Canadian Signal Corps and was nominally in command on the Rat River. The three replacements were R.C.M.P. Special Constable Hatting, Ernest Sutherland, a trapper and veteran of the siege on the cabin, and Thomas Murray, an Anglican missionary. From the Yukon side of the mountains came twenty-six year-old Constable Sid May (no relation to Captain "Wop" May) and a native guide, Special Constable John Moses. They brought with them nearly five hundred pounds of frozen fish for dog food and four volunteers; two natives and two local white trappers. One of these trappers, Frank Jackson, had been a sharpshooter with the United States Army in the First World War. Inspector Eames had specifically requested his enlistment over the radio. Although basic survival required most men in the North to be a very good shot with a rifle, it was thought that Jackson's skills would be particularly useful in killing Albert Johnson. This Yukon party traveled over the mountains via McDougall Pass, at the headwaters of the Rat River and descended the eastern side of the mountains to the rendezvous. Other men, living and trapping in the bush, responded to Aklavik to place themselves at Eames' disposal. Arriving with them were families from all over the Delta, fearful of the supposed madman prowling about the wilderness. All the northern communities in the vicinity - Fort McPherson and Arctic Red River on the Delta, and Old Crow and La Pierre House in the Yukon - received a similar influx of refugees. Inspector Eames himself left Aklavik in the early darkness on February 2nd, still not having heard whether his request for a plane would be granted. With him this time were Frank Riddell and Lazarus Sittichinli (both having received only a single day's rest, food and time for thawing out), as well as Knut Lang, who had repeatedly demonstrated tremendous courage during the siege, and five of the hardiest of the new volunteers. On his sled Riddell carried the portable radio which he and Earl Hersey had earlier constructed. Just miles outside of Aklavik, they were hit by a blizzard, the most powerful yet that winter. It dropped four feet of snow on the ground, once again obliterating the trails broken by the previous parties. The storm turned Inspector Eames' return to the Rat River into a four-day nightmare. According to Eames, for the entire journey their field of vision was limited by the blowing snow to just ten or fifteen yards. He and his men had to laboriously feel their way the entire one hundred miles. Wop May, his mechanic Jack Bowen, and Special Constable Carter flew north into the same storm. Their 1,500 mile trip, navigating by sight and compass alone down the Mackenzie River, was expected to take two or three days, over-nighting and refueling in villages. But the blizzard turned it into a five-day epic, one that they, too, barely survived. May later wrote, "We bucked snowstorms and terrific north winds all the way down the river. Near Fort Norman, at four thousand feet, the wind had increased to hurricane force. Although, at times, I had my throttle wide open, we were being blown backward over the ground; and then a blizzard blotted out the earth and left us bumping up there, completely blind." On February 5th, Eames and his party of eight reached the rendezvous at Hersey's camp high on the Rat River. Hersey, Constable Hatting, Reverend Murray and trapper Ernest Sutherland had been guarding the canyon as best they could amid the storm, patrolling around it for any sign of fresh tracks. Despite being utterly exhausted, Eames immediately took advantage of a lull in the storm to surround the side canyon that was Johnson's last known camp - the place where Millen had been killed. Rifles at the ready, they cautiously approached, up the main canyon and from the ridges on either side. But Johnson was long gone. They only found his bullet-riddled pots and pans buried deep beneath the snow. They were able to observe the hole from which the fugitive had killed Millen - an impenetrable nest dug down among fallen logs. When they searched for his trail, they discovered it led straight up the nearly vertical ice-cliff at the rear end of the short side-canyon. They were astonished to discover that Johnson had cut hand- and foot-holds in the ice with a hatchet. Using these, and carrying his guns and remaining camping gear, he had somehow scaled the nearly eighty-foot wall. Once on top he'd shoved heaps of snow down the cliff to conceal his ascent and cover the holds. His tracks led ever-higher into the hills before disappearing on a wind-swept ridge. A base camp was set up at the edge of the Delta, at the confluence of the Rat and Husky Rivers. Eight miles upstream on the Rat, at the base of the canyon, the advance camp was enlarged and improved in the brush on the side of the river, where there was a bit of meager protection from the wind. Here the men set up several more canvas tents, floored them with spruce boughs, and layered them with caribou skins. Portable stoves fed with willow branches and what wood could be found were kept alight 24 hours a day to warm the men and dry their clothes. The next day, February 6th, the storm finally blew itself out. Wop May and his passengers, flying west from Arctic Red River, searched for Eames and his men on the Rat River. Unable to find them, as both camps were covered by so much new snow, the Bellanca continued to Aklavik for the night. The Signal Corps headquarters there radioed to Riddell that the plane had arrived, and Eames radioed back the positions of both camps. Captain May left the next day loaded with supplies. When he was again unable to find either of the posse's camps, May followed the Rat River upstream toward the mountains to where it met the Barrier River. Below him he saw four men crawling up a hillside toward a clump of bushes. It would turn out to be one of Johnson's abandoned camps. With the Bellanca's skis almost touching the snow, May traced tracks leading upriver on the Barrier. After five miles the tracks circled back. The tracks then cut away westward up into the mountains, where they disappeared altogether on the wind-scoured snow. Returning to lower elevations, May finally found the advance camp, where he made a difficult landing on the river to report what he'd seen. More particularly, he warned Eames about the way Johnson's tracks doubled back, the fugitive apparently hunting for his pursuers. On February 8th, with the temperature at 45 degrees below zero and a wicked wind stabbing out of the north, Constable Sid May and his party of six arrived after making it across McDougal Pass from the Yukon. Aside from the 500 pounds of dog food, the most valuable thing they carried was the information that they'd seen no sign of Johnson in the Yukon, on the pass, or all the way down the Rat River. It was clear that Johnson was still on the eastern side of the Richardson Mountains, somewhere south of McDougal Pass. Again using the innovative, sled-mounted radio built by Hersey and Riddell, Eames was able to request that patrols be sent out far to the south, from as far away as Dawson City and Fort Norman, in case Johnson should attempt to flee that way. That same day Captain Wop May flew in more supplies from Aklavik. After unloading them, Frank Riddell climbed aboard the Bellanca, and he and May went hunting from the air while the other men combed the foothills on snowshoes and by dog sled. In poor light and windy, snowy weather, May and Riddell saw no trace of Johnson's tracks despite circling some one hundred and fifty miles along the eastern breadth of the mountains. With the coming of the afternoon twilight, May dropped Riddell off at the advance camp. Then he and his mechanic wrestled Millen's frozen body aboard for the flight back to Aklavik. For the next two days it stormed, forbidding any search. The men on the Rat River were pinned in their canvas tents while May's plane was buried beneath the snow in Aklavik. When May was finally able to dig it out and fly again, the plane nearly sank into the deep snow upon landing on the river. To get back into the air, he had Eames' men tie a rope from the plane to a stout tree. Gunning the engine, he signaled for the men to cut the rope. Lunging suddenly forward, the Bellanca was just able to heave out of the snow and into sky. This was just one of the amazing feats May performed - nearly every flight would find him at some point blinded by snow, avoiding flying into the Richardson's walls by instinct and luck alone. Venturing high up in the mountains between storms, Special Constable Johnny Moses, the Gwich'n who had come over the pass from the Yukon with the 500 pounds of fish, found a trace of Johnson's tracks. The snowshoe prints showed shorter strides than what had been observed before, with a twist of one foot. It appeared that Johnson was finally weakening. Up to this point the man had seemed superhuman, having lived in the open for five weeks with the temperature averaging forty degrees below zero. And he had done so while constantly moving about, rarely able to fire his rifle at the little game to be found and unable to light a large, warming fire. It was an astounding feat of endurance, but it couldn't last forever. Yet the Mounties were no closer to catching and killing him, as they were beaten back by the ferocious winds and cold every time they went up into the mountains. The media began to describe the events in the Richardson Mountains as the Arctic Circle War. On one side was the closest thing to an army that could be assembled in the far North - a force of Mounties, Signal Corp men, Gwich'n natives and white trappers - and, on the other, a lone man, his name and motives unknown.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere […] Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever […] There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, - to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we […] What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, - that my body might, - but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! - Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? - Henry David Thoreau, from Ktaadn Taylor and I grinned at each other as the ski plane waggled its wings merrily then faded away over the Delta. We're back, baby. And this time we're going to kick some arctic ass. At almost noon the sun was hovering just above the southern horizon. The great yellow sphere threw no discernible heat our way, tilted away from it as we were here on Earth in midwinter north of the Arctic Circle. But just the sight of it gave us comfort and boosted our confidence. We congratulated ourselves for having been wise enough to schedule this, our last chance, a few weeks after the end of the thirty days of complete polar night. This trip we could expect to have five or six hours of actual sunlight each day. At least if we stayed on high ground and it didn't storm. We stood together in total silence on brilliant white snow covering a frozen lake. This unnamed lake was the farthest west of any in the Delta's Rat River region. It lay atop a treeless plateau directly above the Rat River Canyon - the place where the failed siege had begun and where Constable King had been shot. Just by landing here, instead of down on the Delta, we achieved more than we had on our 2004 misadventure. We were already a few hundred meters higher than the Delta and it's ridiculously deep snow. I turned away from the east and the Delta and gazed westward up at the Richardson Mountains. From this perspective they didn't look that intimidating. All that could be seen were rows of scattered ridges and peaks, each growing slightly higher than the one before it. A straight line drawn through the air from our boots to the highest peaks 5,000 feet above would rise at a gentle grade. The peaks within view were round-ish rather than jagged, having been worn down by timeless exposure to wind, snow and temperatures that each year ranged some 150 degrees. But we knew from the topographical maps we had so tediously studied that deep canyons and 1,000 foot-high walls lurked among the crests and ridges. A light wind was blowing over the mountains from the Yukon, sending streaming flags of spindrift into the dark-blue sky. For the first few minutes, as we strapped on our sled harnesses and packs, the breeze didn't bother us at all. I felt freer and stronger than I'd ever felt in my life. I sucked in big breaths of cold air, each inhalation expanding me, filling me with vigor and excitement. "The wind seems to be picking up," Taylor commented as we clicked into our ski bindings. "I spit in the wind." "Just don't piss into it. It looks like it will be a lot windier when we get higher. I sure wish you'd brought the tent instead of the tipi." As I've mentioned before, we had spent months debating several items on the gear list. The last great lingering debate was tent versus tipi. The tent was bombproof. Staked down with skis, ice axes, or ice screws, it could withstand a hurricane. But it was heavy, almost 12 pounds, and so small and low you could barely sit upright in it. It would be intensely claustrophobic with the two of us huddled inside, wearing our fat down suits. I'd learned from the numerous training trips how short my temper can grow when, every time you make the slightest move, you're bumping against your partner. And merely brushing the taut fabric of the tent's walls, where steam from our breath and cooking gathered and turned to frost at below zero temperatures, would convey the moisture to our down clothing and cause it to lose its insulating capacity. Bumping a wall at below zero would turn the tent's interior into something resembling a briskly shaken snowglobe. I suspected my damaged spine would revolt from too many hours and too many days hunched over. The tipi, on the other hand, weighed less than half of what the tent did, and yet you could actually stand up inside once you'd dug down into the snow a little. It was floorless, so there was no concern about removing your boots and brushing out the snow. It was so tall, though, that we doubted it would hold up very well in a big wind. But the weather had looked so promising … and I figured if things got really nasty, we could always just dig a snow cave. It hadn't been a confidant decision. Taylor had finally left it up to me, and I'd left it in the air until packing my truck. Then I'd said to myself, Screw it, we're going light and fast, and heaved the tent back into the garage. Doubt about that choice had chased me north on the long, lonely drive. Taylor irritated me further by also mentioning another tender subject. "And I'm a little worried about canceling the pick-up in the Yukon. Are you sure that was a good idea?" This was another nagging topic, and a quite recent one. I'd told the pilot to forget about picking us up in the Yukon - after crossing the mountains, we'd just ski another fifty to seventy miles south, re-cross the mountains where they were lower, find our way down to the Dempster Highway and, hopefully within a few days, catch a ride back to Inuvik. "No worries. If something goes really wrong, we can always get down out of the mountains to some lake and call for a plane on the satellite phone." "But all the lakes big enough to land a plane on are twenty to fifty miles from the peaks. That's a long way to go if one of us gets hurt. And I remember having some problems with the phone working two years ago." "That's because the battery kept freezing. But check the thermometer - it's almost ten degrees out. The advertisement said that the lithium batteries will work to minus twenty." It was true. At least the part that it was currently nearly ten degrees above zero (the other was a dangerous lie). Almost unbelievable here in the wintertime, but true. We were in the midst of an arctic heat wave - it was no colder than a blustery day skiing at Vail. At the moment I felt quite pleased with global warming. Maybe it wasn't so bad after all. So what if cargo and cruise ships could soon ply the Northwest Passage? The Russians were already excited about planting crops in the rich ground of Siberia. Someday European tourists would sunbathe topless by the Beaufort Sea. I imagined Taylor shooting a little video of me shirtless, looking badass with my hard-earned muscles, kicking my skis and dragging my sled over the "unclimbable" and "impossible" mountains. We were going to kick old Albert right in the balls. This time I was quite certain. We locked down our bindings, faced the wind, shoved off with our poles and started kicking toward the mountains. * * * Gripping the steering wheel for up to 20 hours a day, I'd arrived in Aklavik two days ahead of Taylor. Solo-driving 3,500 miles directly north in the middle of winter seemed like something of an accomplishment in itself. An even greater triumph was that my neck felt just a little stiff but otherwise okay despite all those hours with my fragile spine hunched over the steering wheel and held rigid as I white-knuckled every slippery, snow-covered turn along the Alaska, Klondike and Dempster highways.
(Puffy crossing the Arctic Circle) I'd forced myself to do a little training along the way, stopping once in the Yukon to ski up an isolated valley. The two-hour exercise turned out to be more mental than physical, as the utter isolation sat like a brooding weight on my back. The way the snow collapsed with a "whoopf" at every step in a wide circle around me - signaling extreme avalanche danger - didn't help, nor did the sight of some fresh and truly enormous grizzly tracks. The warm temperatures had drawn at least one of the beasts out of its den, probably to prowl about for a mid-winter snack. But I persevered and gained confidence, as well as perhaps a touch of hubris, from the effort. I'd skied alone again off the Dempster Highway, just after crossing the southern end of the Richardson Mountains, near a highway maintenance shed and an adjacent trailer. Here the snow was hard-packed as I kicked my way up a valley alongside Sittichinli Peak. But the wind was intense. My hat, clear goggles, and face mask had to be constantly readjusted so that every millimeter of skin was covered. Anything exposed would start to burn within seconds, screaming a warning of impending frostbite. Still I managed to cover almost eight miles round-trip in just a few hours, giving birth to the idea that we could re-cross the mountains here and return to the Dempster, thus doing away with an expensive ski-plane pickup. The two days in Inuvik waiting for Taylor had been well-spent. Olav and Judi, my hosts at the Arctic Chalet, had years before traveled over the Richardsons on snowshoes and by dogsled in the late spring via McDougall Pass. They were able to provide me with valuable information about the conditions we might find now, in mid-winter (heavy, heavy snow and high winds). During the day I skied the dogsled trails they'd broken down to the Mackenzie River. I also became a acquainted with a fifty-year-old local businessman / aerobics instructor / Arctic socialite named Andre who knew everyone in town. Both nights he took me out drinking and introduced me to a circle of friends that included bush pilots, hotel managers, social workers and local Inuit. One of the concessions that Andre managed was the maintenance of the northern end of the Dempster Highway. He was quite familiar with the shed at the southern end of the Richardsons, and it was people who worked for him who sometimes stayed in the adjacent wind-blasted trailer. Returning to the Arctic Chalet with too many drinks in me, I studied the maps, added up the mileage, and committed Taylor and me to a one-way trip, my dangerous cost-saving plan. I determined that when Taylor arrived the next day, we could shuttle my truck to the shed with a rental 4x4 and abandon it there. Back in Inuvik, we'd fly in a ski plane to the Rat River as planned, race across the "impossible" peaks in Albert's footsteps, then march south on the Yukon side for about sixty miles, re-cross into the Northwest Territory via the lower peaks on the southern end of the range, and descend the valley I'd already skied to the shed and my waiting truck. It would cost, I surmised, only a few days to, at worst, a week of additional effort. Taylor arrived on February 17th, feeling as gung-ho as I did. After dinner in town, I spread out the maps in the Arctic Chalet and explained the new plan. He cautiously approved, but seemed to be withholding some deep reservations. The next morning we rented a truck from Olav and Judi and began the shuttle down to the shed. After the first 50 miles, however, a nasty wind started streaming snow across the Dempter and rocking our vehicles. By the time we reached Fort McPherson, the road was closed. We turned back to Inuvik, yet I wasn't done with the plan. I arranged with my new friend Andre to simply send a ride for us once we reached the shed in a week or two. And the next day we were off - waiting around and debating our decisions would only weaken our will. We flew into the mountains in a bigger plane than two years before. This one, a Pilatus Porter, would only have to make a single trip and could land in a lot smaller space than the Cessna we'd previously flown. It was capable of setting down on a patch of flat snow no longer than a soccer field. The pilot had shown no concern when I'd pointed down at the little lake above the Rat River and asked him if he could drop us there. We'd circled once, gauging the snow depth and drifts and the direction and strength of the wind, then landed almost as if in a helicopter. After we finished heaving out all our gear while the propeller continued to sing, the pilot shouted to me, "Where and when do I pick you up?" "You don't need to. After we cross the mountains, we're going to ski down to the Dempster." He paused as he climbed back into the Porter and stared at me. "You sure about that?" I gave him a steely stare, choosing to take his apparent unease for avarice rather than concern for our well-being. "Yep. But thanks." He shrugged, slammed the door, and spun the plane about on the snow. The propeller bit hard into the breeze and the Porter all but leaped into the air. Taylor and I were here at last, alone at the foot of the Richardsons. Before the Mounties blew it up and the river dragged away the ruins, the cabin - the place where it had all begun - would have been in the Rat River Canyon just a half-mile to the east and a few hundred feet below us. We turned westward instead, eager to find a location that still existed. Our plan was to head for Millen Creek and find the place where Edgar Millen had been killed in the canyon shootout. I wanted to ice-climb the wall that Albert Johnson had scaled using only a hatchet to cut holds for his hands and his feet. But first we had to find a way down to the Rat, then ski a few miles upriver to its confluence with the Barrier River. The small, steep-sided canyon carved by Millen Creek should only be a mile or so above the confluence. Dragging the sleds, we skied to the edge of the plateau and gazed down on the Rat River. It was perhaps one hundred feet wide, with a solid wall of skinny black spruce and snow-covered willow bushes rising abruptly on either side. In the silence I could almost see Albert loping along the open snow on the river. I could imagine the teams of huskies and nervous Mounties following his tracks while scanning the trees for an ambush. "Geez. How are we going to get down there?" Taylor asked. The slope down to the river was steep and appeared to be quite cliffy below us. Worse, it was choked with trees and some very deep-looking snow. Trying to navigate our way down would be impossible with our sleds riding twelve to fifteen feet behind us on their rigid poles. We probably stood at the very place where Inspector Eames and the first posse had attempted to sneak up on the cabin, led by the fallible guide Charlie Rat. I now understood why the men and their dogs teams had been forced to return to the Delta and make their way up the Rat. We skied west along the plateau's summit, toward the mountains, until we found a narrow valley that seemed to lead down to the river. The angle of descent was still steep and thick with trees, but at least there didn't appear to be any cliffs. I pointed my skis into a gap, snowplowing mightily as the weight of my sled shoved me from behind. The snow was indeed deep, rising to my knees despite my super-fat skis. Gravity and the sled drove me faster despite my attempts to turn and brake. My ski tips caught under an unseen willow and I flipped face-first into the snow. The sled's weight drove me down deeper still. After ensuring I wasn't hurt, then having a little laugh at my expense, Taylor took off his skis and swam to my rescue. The descent to the Rat became very unpleasant. The buried willows tripped us constantly. The trunks of trees snared our sleds. The branches raked our faces. By the time we reached the open snow of the river, we were exhausted and humbled. I checked my watch, then my GPS, and then my map. We'd been battling for an hour and a half and were still imprisoned by the printed bars of the same square kilometer.
(Taylor making contact with the Rat River) "At least we're on the river now." I told Taylor as he picked himself up from a final crash onto the river. "The snow is harder here. The going should be a lot faster." But it wasn't. It turned out that there wasn't much good, wind-packed snow on the open river. What we found was either ice - too slippery for our skins to grip - or deep drifts along the banks. And these drifts were knee-to-thigh deep, with every forward kick requiring an effort. But soon we came to where the river made a "Y" and gave a cheer. We had reached the Barrier River. Our enthusiasm and optimism had definitely taken a punch. But we were still strong, and it was still relatively warm. Despite a rising wind we were traveling in just shirts, fleece sweaters, and vests. When I looked down to readjust my harness I saw that my vest was covered with frozen sweat and respiration. Checking the thermometer on my sled at a break, I saw the temperature had already dropped to zero. The sun had disappeared when we dropped down to the river. Dusk fell just an hour or so later, at about three o'clock. We pressed on. Albert's route lay up near the headwaters of the Barrier, but Millen Creek was a mile or so up the Rat. Taylor wanted to skip it, and I did too, but, with the cabin gone, I needed to view at least one place where a shoot-out had actually occurred. Besides, I wanted to test myself on the ice wall Albert had scaled with just his hatchet. We found the shallow canyon formed by the creek just a little way up the Rat. Supposedly some decades ago Mounties had come in the summer and erected a stone monument to Millen at the entrance. But the snow was so deep I suspected it would be buried. We couldn't find any sign of it as we broke a trail into the canyon. It was an impressive place, dark and forbidding, with high, sheer walls and, where the creek's banks meandered away from the cliffs on either side, impossibly thick stands of willows. We found the dead-end side canyon where Albert had set up his secretive camp. Through the huge tangle of willows and spruce, we could see the ice wall Albert had scaled with his hatchet. It looked nearly vertical, but wasn't the ice-wall I'd imagined. It was perhaps seventy-five feet high with protruding rocks and bushes for handholds. Still, it looked damned hard and dangerous to climb. I debated whether to break out my ice gear. But it was near night now, and getting colder. Taylor had no desire to sit for an hour or more just to belay me. The tangle of skinny trees in the side canyon appeared all but impenetrable. I could see the difficulty of shooting Johnson in there, and the danger Millen and Gardlund had been in when trying to approach. Somewhere, within a few feet of us, was the place where Millen had been shot through the heart seventy-four years before. Instead of digging out my axes, crampons, ice screws and ropes, I just lay down in the snow and pointed a ski pole like a rifle. Taylor snapped a picture. Then we turned around and headed back down canyon. It was getting colder, and starting to get a little dark. And I wasn't feeling quite as confidant as I had when we'd been able to see the sun. Speed was everything, I told myself. Momentum can't be lost.
(Shootout in Millen Canyon) * * * We made good time through the long twilight as we skinned up the Barrier River. It was wide and more or less straight as it flowed down through the foothills. The snow was quite deep, however, and breaking trail was tough until we came upon some tracks. A big Mackenzie Valley wolf had broken a trail for us with his enormous paws - bigger than my hand with outstretched fingers. I prayed to see him, just a glimpse, so I could howl out my thanks. My only complaint was that the soles of my feet were starting to burn. The closed-cell liners kept in all my sweat, pruning my feet. I could feel blisters forming on the soft, damp skin of my soles. That was bad, but we were moving, it was getting very cold, and I refused to stop to deal with them. We traveled through the evening until the cold began to creep into our joints and bones no matter how hard we kicked our skis. Our minds were growing dizzy from dehydration and exertion. My feet felt as if the wet soles were sloughing off. We began looking for a place to make our first camp. There was a little open space on one side of the river, between some trees that blocked a little of the wind. For twenty minutes we stomped the bottomless powder to make a platform that would hold the snow stakes for the tipi. As we'd learned on our winter training missions, we backed off for a cold hour to let the packed snow settle. We were efficient with this time, making a shelter with the sleds while we waited and lighting the stoves to start melting snow. Our hot water bottles - filled in Inuvik - had either been drunk or had frozen hours ago despite their bulky insulated covers. It seems strange now, but we scarcely spoke. Efficiency and speed were everything. We went about our tasks like pros, quickly throwing up the tipi, carrying the hissing stoves inside on our shovels, inflating sleeping pads and stuffing sleeping bags into Gore-Tex bivy sacks. I didn't think about my wife, my kids, or anything but doing what needed to be done.
(Taylor melting snow) With a warm meal of dehydrated lasagna in my stomach, two liters of hot water thinning my thick, cold blood, and couple of melatonins under my tongue to top it all off, I slept surprisingly well. Every half hour or so required turning over as my downward hip and shoulder, or buttocks and back, would start to grow numb, but I still managed five or six hours total. Only once did I have to make a somewhat risky pee into the special bottle (marked with big Xs) I kept with me in my bag. The next morning we awoke to find that it was now far colder - almost twenty degrees below zero. And I noticed that even after a night in my sleeping bag I still had a stripe of frozen sweat down the middle of my back, frozen hard into the fleece vest I never took off. But we weren't deterred. We pulled on down parkas and pants, cooked oatmeal, melted more snow into boiling water for our bottles, tore down the tipi, packed the sleds, peeled off the down clothes so they wouldn't get soaked by our sweat and were on the trail again within two hours of waking up. The peaks ahead grew larger, the hills confining the Barrier River bigger and steeper. Every time I checked my GPS for our latitude and longitude and then found the position on the map, I saw that we were, slowly but surely, sliding south and west through the square kilometer boxes. On our first day we'd covered almost ten miles - a pitiful distance compared to those traveled by the Mounties and Albert Johnson - but really, not too bad for a couple of lawyers. Now, on the second day, we were making almost two miles an hour, and could hope for a twenty-mile day if the snow didn't get deeper. We could conceivable be among the highest peaks in just two more days if the conditions remained this good. To take my mind off my blistered feet, I tried listening to an audio book on my MP3 player. I'd carefully chosen one of Carl Hiassen's comedic thrillers about South Florida in the hope that it would distract me. But the story - including scenes with fresh fish boiling in butter and garlic, and attractive young women sunbathing naked under a tropical sun - only made my mouth water, my stomach cramp, and my mind continually ask Why am I here? I switched to music - the Clash and the White Stripes, to power me along. On the long drive north I'd listened to an audio book about Robert Falcon Scott's fatal voyage to the South Pole; the thousands of miles they traveled at far higher latitudes with their primitive gear. I recalled it now, and it helped to put me in my place. So did the recollection of the news reports I'd been following on-line about two modern adventurers attempting to ski to the North Pole in winter - something like 1,000 miles across the ice, fending off polar bear raids and swimming in dry-suits across the open leads - at the same time we were attempting to cross a measly 150 miles over a small mountain range just one hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. "Cowboy up," I said aloud whenever my body or will started to flag, using the unofficial motto of our alma mater, the University of Wyoming. "Git 'er done," Taylor would growl in reply.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN Outside
of the few passes in the area, the Richardson Mountains represent a
formidable obstacle ...
Suddenly the dogs began barking and howling, their smoking snouts pointing up the Rat. A team of haggard dogs was being flogged down the river in the moonlight. Quieting their own dogs, the posse gathered in the dark and the cold and waited for the sled to skid into the camp. "That man, he came!" the exhausted musher shouted. The musher was Pete Alexie, a Gwich'n hunter from La Pierre House on the Yukon-side of the mountains. He reported that a hunting party had seen strange snowshoe tracks descending from the mountains. They came within a few miles of the village's three cabins. Staring at the tracks by flashlight before they could be covered by the falling snow, the men of La Pierre House were convinced they matched the descriptions of Johnson's distinctive tracks. They immediately abandoned their traplines and, with their families, fled to the post. In just sixteen hours, Alexie had driven his team of dogs more than 90 miles up and over McDougall Pass and through the blizzard to report the news. Johnson had done the impossible. He'd crossed the highest peaks of the Richardson Mountains in the midst of the raging blizzard. Now he was heading for Alaska. The men were dumbstruck. They'd been pursuing Johnson for six weeks now. For the last thirty-two days Johnson had been living in the open, with the temperature averaging forty degrees below zero. He had no supplies other than what he could carry, no shelter, little or no occasion to shoot game or light fires to melt snow for water or dry his clothes. The whole time he'd been on the run, moving about the canyons and ridges to avoid his pursuers, traveling two miles for every one they managed. He had only his snowshoes, while the men chasing him had fast dogteams and some, such as Gardlund, even skis, not to mention Wop May's plane. It was awesome enough that Johnson had merely survived this long without dying of cold, hunger, thirst, or gunshot. Or that he hadn't simply surrendered. Or killed himself. But to have crossed the mountains, over the highest peaks, in the middle of a blizzard, and journeyed some ninety miles beyond … it was a truly superhuman feat. That next morning Wop May got the Bellanca back in the air. He flew Inspector Eames and Constable Carter, as well as two of the toughest and most devoted of the volunteers, Karl Gardlund and Frank Riddell, into Aklavik with the news. Constable Sid May, Special Constables John Moses and Lazarus Sittichinli, and a handful of volunteers loaded their sleds and raced north up the Rat for McDougall Pass. By the next afternoon, on February 13th, the entire posse was in the Yukon. While the men on the ground were forcing their way across the pass and down through the western-side of the Richardson Mountains, Wop May carried Eames and his party to La Pierre House, flying through the same pass. An ancient trading post, La Pierre House consisted of just three structures near the Bell River. It was so remote that it took four years for supplies and mail to arrive from the Outside. Now Eames found it crowded with fearful Indians. The Inspector immediately began organizing a new posse, borrowing dogs and sleds and guides. Meanwhile Wop May taxied his aircraft up and down the Bell River, plowing a runway through the snow so that he could get in the air again and search for tracks. May soon found Johnson's tracks further down the Bell River. He followed them for twenty miles, through the many twists and turns of the frozen river, until they reached the even-larger Eagle River. The tracks, however, disappeared here among those of a herd of caribou traveling along the same river. It was evident to the pilot that Johnson had taken off his snowshoes to mingle his tracks with those of the herd. May flew back to La Pierre House to report, and to suggest that Eames take a shortcut to reach the Eagle River. It would save them a day, or possibly two, in following Johnson. Eames and his men immediately set out on snowshoes and skis. There was no time to waste. If Johnson made it into Alaska, just a hundred miles away, he would be out of the R.C.M.P.'s jurisdiction. There were few if any radios for thousands of square miles in that direction. Even if Eames could get word to the United States authorities there, Johnson could still conceivably pass through the remote Alaskan villages, as the only Mountie who had seen his face and could describe him was the murdered Edgar Millen. It was possible that Johnson could even keep traveling west through the winter, maybe even crossing into Siberia. On February 14th and 15th it stormed again, grounding Wop May and the Bellanca. But Constable Sid May and the dogsled party finally arrived in La Pierre House. Despite their long, difficult journey over the pass, they instantly set out after Eames and the advance party, catching up with them near the Eagle River. The re-assembled posse continued following Johnson's tracks, and then those of the caribou herd, while combing the sides of the river for any sign that Johnson had veered off into the forest. Occasionally tracks were found. It was evident Johnson was finally tiring, as his prints seemed to weave about like those of a drunken man. They suspected he no longer had any food. For a month now he'd been living largely on the squirrels and other smalls animals he could snare, all the while burning somewhere around 10,000 calories a day traveling in the cold. Such a diet led to what the local Inuit called "rabbit starvation." The small animals provided protein but little or no fat, and fat was the fuel that kept one warm and moving at forty below. One could eat all the rabbits and squirrels in the world but would still die within a few weeks in the Arctic winter. A heavy ground fog continued to keep the Bellanca grounded on the 16th. Hoping for re-supply, but unwilling to turn back, the posse cut spruce boughs into arrows on the river for Wop May to follow. They believed they were close to Johnson now - within a day or two. The men of the village of Old Crow, near the Alaskan border, were contacted by radio. Another posse was formed and began patrolling far to the west. They were advised by an elderly shaman to stay in the village: "You no go look. One more sleep and he die." Far to the south, hundreds of miles away in Dawson City and Whitehorse, Mounties and volunteers headed out into the mid-winter cold in case Johnson tried to cut that way. On Febuary 17th the weather was much better, although the temperature was still forty degrees below zero. Johnson's tracks had again been found, still mingled with those of the caribou herd as the Eagle River wound westward through the Yukon. The tracks now appeared to be less than 24 hours old. At one point they could see where Johnson had stopped to climb a tree, endeavoring either to plan his route ahead or check behind for pursuers. The party was astounded that he still had the strength to climb a tree, and couldn't help but be quite aware that they could be rushing into an ambush. Yet the Inspector refused to slow their progress. He was too close to the killer, after far too long. He snowshoed ahead of the party despite only being armed with his service revolver. It was nearing noon when Earl Hersey - the young Signal Corps sergeant and former Olympian - and his team of seven huskies managed to pass Eames while following a good trail of Johnson's tracks. Running fast, the Hersey's team slid around a hair-pin curve in the river. Two hundred and fifty yards ahead a lone man was walking in the center of the broad river. The man was coming toward Hersey, stepping carefully in his own footprints. It was Johnson. There could be no doubt.
(Earl Hersey and his lead dog, Silver) Hersey instantly braked the sled and snatched up his .303 Lee Enfield rifle. At the same moment Johnson unslung his snowshoes from around his pack. The sergeant shouted for the man to surrender but Johnson began hurriedly lacing up his snowshoes. Hersey knelt in the snow, taking careful aim. He fired a single shot as the killer sprinted for the cover of the trees above the river's bank. The crack of the rifle was followed by a distant metallic ping and Johnson fell. Hersey guessed he'd hit a pan in Johnson's pack. Johnson staggered to his feet and took a few more steps. Hersey fired again. Another crack, another metallic ping, and again Johnson collapsed. But in an instant he was back on his feet. Hersey saw that the bank Johnson was heading for divided the hairpin turn in the river. If the killer reached the top of it not only would he be within the cover of the trees, he could also fire down at point-blank range on the men behind Hersey. Firing a third time, Hersey knocked him down again. This time when Johnson stood, he whirled toward Hersey, his own rifle now in his hands. He fired at Hersey without bothering to aim. The bullet's impact lifted Hersey off the ground and sent him sprawling into the snow. Johnson's single snap-shot had smashed through Hersey's elbow and knee, then pierced his chest.
Stripped to the bone. Stripped to the bone. Stripped to the bone. These words rose up from some dark corner of my brain and echoed through my head for hours. The cold and the wind tore everything else away. The phrase seemed to mean something both literal and figurative when I managed to force myself to think about it. Literal, in that it had taken only three days to peel me down to my core. Three days of non-stop aerobic exercise for twelve hours at a stretch, each session to be followed by another 12 hours of shivering in the tipi and my sleeping bag. Whatever fat I'd had on my frame after months of training and purposeful overeating had been burned away by all this sled-dragging and constant quaking. My ribs, when I shoved a hand under my layers of fleece and tried to warm my frozen fingertips in an armpit, seemed to be pressing up through my skin. The Arctic Diet. Maybe I should market it. Figuratively, I felt stripped in that my mind had been laid bare of almost all thoughts but survival. I was no longer able to listen to music or my audio books on my MP3. I didn't even bother to put the earbuds in my ears. It took everything I had to put down my head and kick and haul into the wind. Taylor and I barely had the energy to speak. At the end of every hour, when I started to feel dizzy and faint, we stopped in our tracks for two or three minutes to suck at packets of crotch-warmed energy gel called Gu. In the early hours of each day we still had hot water in our insulated Nalgene bottles to wash it down with, but the water would be getting slushy and low by midday. Whoever wasn't breaking trail stopped bothering to come alongside for a chat - it took too much energy to step out of the other's tracks.
Every now and then I made a conscious effort to try and imagine Albert Johnson up here, all alone, stomping along through the deep snow on his enormous snowshoes. What would he have been thinking? Surely he would have been thinking about the cold. It pervaded everything. It is all around you, even inside of you, insidiously seeping into every cell of your body and swelling them with frost. Each breath you take draws the frigid air deep into your lungs and each exhalation plasters itself to your face. The only way to keep from freezing is to keep moving. Yet in an environment like this, where you're burning 25% to 50% more calories than you would exerting yourself in a more temperate zone, it's damned hard to do. He would have been in far worse shape than we were. By the time he reached this spot in the mountains near the headwaters of the Barrier River, he had already been living in the open for nearly four weeks at temperatures far colder than the negative twenty we were experiencing (thank you, global warming). World-class endurance athletes in multi-day events like the Tour de France burn through about 7,000 calories a day. And that's as many as your body can absorb if you're eating and drinking careful mixtures of protein and carbohydrates. His only calories came from mostly the rabbits or squirrels he'd been able to snare. Johnson wasn't eating anything but meat at this point, and probably very little of that. But what he really needed were carbohydrates. You have to eat about a pound of them a day for optimal physical performance. When carbs start running low, which they do after an hour or two, your body starts burning fat for fuel. There's a much greater supply of it, even in the skinniest of people. But fat doesn't burn as cleanly as carbs. It takes even more energy to fire and it gives off a smell like nail polish remover. When you run low on fats after a week or so, your body starts shutting down its nonessential functions. Your metabolic rate slows, and you stop producing cells to fight infection or repair wounds or rebuild muscles. Then you start burning muscle. Dr. Kenneth Kamler says in SURVIVING THE EXTREMES, "it's a lot like burning your house down to keep warm […] The body is eating itself alive." But the cold and starvation probably weren't the worst of it for Johnson, not even considering the armed policemen, dog teams, and the airplane on his heels. The worst, and the likeliest thing to kill him, was dehydration. It's a bitter, bitter feeling, being surrounded by snow but tortured by thirst. "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink," lamented the Ancient Mariner, and I could emphasize. It's a simple physiological fact that you shouldn't eat snow. Doing so just lowers your body temperature, costs you more calories in trying to melt it in your stomach, and quickly leads to increased dehydration. Humans are about two-thirds water. If you're 155 pounds, there are about 42 liters sloshing around within your skin. If you spend the day in warmth and comfort, watching golf on ESPN, you might lose and need to replace about 1.5 liters, or a couple of six-packs. If you're stupid enough to put on skis and drag a sled up a mountain range north of the Arctic Circle in winter, you're losing about 1.5 liters an hour. I couldn't imagine how many liters Albert would have needed as he struggled to break a trail with his twenty-pound snowshoes, weapons, and heavy backpack. Studies have shown that when you are down three to five liters, you becomes dizzy, exhausted, prone to collapse, increasingly susceptible to cold, and seriously thirsty. When you're down eight to nine liters, you are having convulsions, going into shock, losing your sense of sight and sound, and can no longer swallow. Your blood grows thicker, making your heart have to work harder to pump it through your veins and arteries. Down ten to seventeen liters, you're supposed to be dead. Unless you're Albert Johnson. That he was still moving at this point amazed me, just as it had the Mounties and the hardy northern travelers who joined them. He couldn't light a fire to melt snow for water, at least not very often. In the perpetual darkness, it would have been smelled by his pursuers as it blew eastward, or spotted by Wop May in his plane. Besides, there was almost no wood except for the ragged willows. Even before the trip Taylor and I had spent a lot of time worrying about dehydration. We had made a plan to maximize our fluid intake. Each evening, while packing down snow and waiting for it to harden, we made a little shelter from the wind with the sleds and fired up the white gas stoves. Drinking the snow as fast as we could melt it, we'd later carrying the stoves into the tipi on our shovels. Another liter would be drunk with our dehydrated dinner. Yet another before crawling into our sleeping bags. The next morning, after drinking even more, we spent an hour in the dark brewing up two boiling liters each to carry in our heavily-insulated bottles. It wasn't enough. After the first night, I no longer had to urinate in the bottle in my sleeping bag. When I did urinate during the day, the color was a dark yellow. But we simply couldn't take the time to melt more snow. On the trail we went through our two liters within hours, both out of thirst and because it soon started to freeze into a solid block of ice. Even after our water was imbibed or frozen, we had still been traveling on for six or seven more hours. We knew it was time to camp when we started to stagger with fluid loss, exhaustion and dizziness. How had Johnson managed? It didn't seem humanly possible. I was slowly dying, burning down my own "house," and I had a partner, a sled, and all the benefits of modern technology in the form of lightweight gear. Perhaps because he is so much bigger than me, or maybe because he had treated people in the Big Horns near death from dehydration, Taylor was a water fiend. He told me he drank close to a gallon a day even sitting quietly in his office at the courthouse in Sheridan. On the trail now, he emptied his bottles an hour or two before me. And he suffered the more for it. At a mid-afternoon Gu-break on the third day, with hours and hours yet to go, Taylor called from behind to ask if I had any water to spare. "No," I said shortly. But nestled inside my shell, inside my fleece, inside my vest, and shoved halfway down my underwear right next to my skin, there was close to twelve ounces of slushy water remaining. I didn't pull it out and toss it to him. I didn't even make a show of a reluctant offer that would surely be refused. I told myself we might need it later. The truth was, I might need it later. He shouldn't be drinking his so fast. If he's suffering more than me, it's his own damn fault. Feeling both angry and guilty, I kicked a ski forward and continued breaking trail. I refused to think about the risks Taylor was taking by joining my on my quest. I refused to think about how fine a friend he was. I refused to think about how terrified I would be right now if I were up here alone. Like Albert Johnson. * * * The scenery became more impressive - and more threatening. At least when I could summon up the energy to notice it. We'd been following the wide valley of the Barrier River south and west and higher over the past three days. Now it had begun pinching down into tight canyons. The vertical walls were mostly rock and frozen mud festooned with steel-hard icicles. Where they weren't vertical, the walls were carpeted by willows buried under snow. Although the rock walls looked more intimidating, it was the snow slopes we feared. With so little sun, and without any above-freezing temperatures for the last four or five months, the snow just piled deeper and deeper and the wind dumped more on top. The slopes never got a chance to consolidate. Every one of them was a ticking time bomb, an avalanche hungry for a trigger.
We skirted wide of them as best as we could. But in the canyons it was often hard to get wide enough. Several times we were forced to cross avalanche debris as high as six feet that spilled across the river, from wall to wall. When we couldn't get wide enough, or when the slopes threatened on both sides, we had to tiptoe forward as stealthily as possible. Our beacons were as useless as bricks, the batteries having been frozen for days. Our avalanche avoidance/rescue system involved simply putting some space between us, so maybe one of us could find and dig out the other.
We also tiptoed as quietly as possible when passing the small caves that were occasionally visible on the slopes around us. The Richardson Mountains are known to have a large population of grizzly bears. And grizzles aren't true hibernators, even in the Arctic. We'd been warned by a bear researcher at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks that the beasts often get up and scout around for a snack in the wintertime. And they've been known to eat people who accidentally wake them up. I often checked that my can of pepper spray was loose in its chest-mounted holster under my Gore-Tex shell. But I was aware that, in this environment, it would do little good. It had almost certainly frozen, like our water and batteries. The manufacturer had told me that below zero the propellant force would be drastically diminished. It might just shoot out a foot or two instead of the ideal thirty. I hoped it would just be enough so that if a bear did come charging toward us, I could at least spray myself in the face - then I wouldn't have to see what would happen next. The thirst and the exhaustion and the fear of an irate and hungry griz would cause me to forget about my feet for a few minutes. But too soon I would be reminded again. The soles of my feet had blistered and burst a dozen times, as each sliding step forward on my skis caused them to rub against the insole of my boot, grinding in salt and forming new blisters. I was grateful when my watch chimed again for the hourly fuel stop. My stomach was hollow with hunger and howling for calories. But I was annoyed when Taylor pulled up alongside me. I couldn't drink my precious remaining water with him standing next to me. Well, I decided, I'll let him break trail for awhile and drink on the sly, when his back is turned. I heard a ripping sound. I glanced up fearfully at the nearest slope, but the sound had come from Taylor, who held an orange wrapper in his hands. Reese's Peanut Butter cups. Suddenly my mouth was full of sticky drool that froze on my chin when I tried to spit it out. My God, nothing had ever looked so good. I watched him with almost lethal envy as he slipped one of the cups in his mouth. The ice in Taylor's beard crackled when he smiled at me. "Want it?" he asked, holding out the remaining cup in his bare hand. Hell yes! "No, no. You eat it," I managed to say. I knew how badly he wanted it, needed it, and how much it must have cost him to make the offer. I wanted it so badly it nearly made me sick. I could taste it - I could feel its sugary calories flaming in my stomach. Taylor's fast-whitening hand remained outstretched. "Take it. It's for you." I tried to refuse again. But his hand stayed outstretched. Trying to convince myself that if I didn't accept it he was going to get frostbitten, I plucked up the little chocolate cup and shoved it into my mouth. The pleasure was instantaneous, and so was the return of my guilt. "Thanks," I mumbled. "Hey, I just remembered I've got a little water left. Want some?" That peanut butter cup, offered up so freely, it said something about Taylor. And my initial withholding of the water said something about me. For the first time I really saw how selfish I was … dragging him up here … leaving our families … not to mention risking our asses. I swore to myself that I would make it up to him, and that if we made it over the mountains alive, I would become a better person.
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