|
|
||||
|
|
CHAPTER
TWENTY Hearing rifle fire, sharpshooter Frank Jackson, trapper Karl Gardlund, and Constable Sid May came charging up the river. As they swung around the tight bend, they found Earl Hersey by his sled, weakly using one arm to try and bury himself with snow. Johnson was still firing at him from 250 yards away, the bullets kicking up tiny plumes of snow all around the downed man. The men frantically braked their sleds before they, too, came within the range of the killer's gun. Constable May shouted for the men to get up on the river banks and surround Johnson. Jackson threw on his snowshoes and ran for one bank, while Gardlund, already on skis, sprinted for the other. Lazurus Sittichinli and another trapper soon raced up from behind and tore along the banks after Jackson and Gardlund. Spotting the overwhelming number of his pursuers, Johnson turned and began loping away upriver. Gardlund and Jackson, among the thin trees on their opposite banks, ran so fast that they were soon outstripping Johnson. They fired down on him as they ran. Johnson stopped every fifty yards to check their progress and fire back. When he discovered he was being outdistanced, he veered toward the lower bank which Jackson possessed. The sharpshooter and the killer traded shots as Johnson lunged through the heavy snow. Meanwhile Noel Verville rushed to Hersey's aid. The Signal Corps sergeant was in tremendous pain, with his knee and elbow shattered and the bullet lodged in his chest. His legs were paralyzed. With Wop May having been grounded for the last three days in La Pierre House by storms and ice fog, it was almost certain Hersey would die long he could see a doctor. The nearest was Dr. Urquhar in Aklavik, more than two hundred miles over the mountains. Nevertheless Verville tried to staunch the bleeding and wrapped Hersey in a sleeping bag to keep him from freezing to death. Eames arrived, and along with him the rest of the posse. The volunteers clambered up onto the high banks with their rifles to join Garlund and Jackson, while Eames and Carter - besides Sid May, the only two Mounties present - shouted over the gunfire for Johnson to surrender. Eames, armed only with a pistol, must have realized how lucky he had been. Minutes before he'd been leading the entire party on snowshoes before Hersey had driven his sled past him. Realizing he was surrounded, Johnson threw himself down in the deep snow near the center of the river. He burrowed into it, placing his big pack in front of him as a shield. As he aimed at his pursuers over it, a bullet struck an ammunition box in his pockets. The spare cartridges stored there exploded, one of them tearing a gaping hole in his hip. Another shot struck him in the shoulder, and a third in the side of his chest. But he didn't stop firing. He paused only to frantically reload. Frank Jackson, the huge former U.S. Army sharpshooter, ran out of ammunition. He set his rifle aside and calmly walked down the bank toward Johnson, using his arms and powerful voice to range the shots of the other men. Watching where the bullets punched into the snow around the killer, he boomed out, "Too high!" or "Too low!" or "Too far to the left!" From overhead came a roar. Wop May and the Bellanca arrived in the middle of the gunfight. Finally able to dig out of La Pierre House, the famed pilot had been following the tracks of the posse. Over the noise of his engine he could hear the gunshots ahead. The Bellanca initially swept in high, taking in the scene below. After a couple of passes, Wop May sorted out the action, He swung the plane around and now came in very low, his skis almost touching the snow. They passed just feet above Johnson, in the hope of diverting his fire. Because the flying was so tense, and the men on the banks were so close, May didn't dare deploy one of his teargas bombs. But he used the plane as a distraction, almost as a weapon, sweeping in again and again just over Johnson's head.
(Photo of the gunfight taken by Wop May from the Bellanca) The fight went on, lasting another ten minutes. On one low pass May noticed that Johnson appeared to be no longer firing. The fugitive lay face down in the snow, his right arm outstretched but still clutching his rifle. Determining the man was finally dead, May waggled his wings at the end of his pass to signal that the manhunt was finally over. He brought the plane down on the river and began taxiing toward where Hersey lay. The firing from the banks fell off. Constable Sid May stepped out of the trees and cautiously climbed down the bank. The other men aimed around him in case Johnson flinched to lift his gun. May kept his own rifle trained on Johnson as he approached. Closer, he saw how awkwardly the fugitive was lying, and noticed the blood staining the snow all around him. Closer still, he used the barrel of his own rifle to guardedly reach out and flip Johnson over. The Mad Trapper was finally dead, having been shot between seven and seventeen times. After seven weeks of running in the dark and cold of the Arctic winter, it had taken a bullet severing his spine before he quit fighting. All of men felt a grudging awe for the man they knew only as Albert Johnson. Wop May, coming up and joining the men standing around the corpse, would later say of the killer's face, "I got the worst shock I think I've ever had. Johnson's lips were curled from his teeth in the most terrible sneer I've ever seen on a man's face. The parchment-like skin over his cheekbones was distorted by it, while his teeth glistened like an animal's through his day's-old bristle of beard. It was the most awful grimace of hate I'll ever see - the hard boiled, bitter hate of a man who knows he's trapped at last, and who has determined to take as many enemies as he can with him."
[A note to anyone reading this unedited version: As the refracted sunlight started to fade into darkness at about 3 p.m., the wind began to rise. It sliced through our Gore-Tex shells when it gusted, or more often simply pressed its thirty-degree-below-zero weight onto our faces, chests, groins and thighs. The little bit of sweat our bodies managed to generate froze hard into the layers of fleece between packs and backs. The valley we had been following upward and westward continued to narrow. It was uncertain whether we were still on the Barrier River or above its headwaters, as the best maps from the Canadian government could provide showed no river but only 100' contour lines at this elevation. Ahead were more rounded peaks, unnamed and noted only as "UNSERVEYED" on the map. Each time we passed between a pair of them, we fervently hoped to have reached the crest - and the start of the descent into the Yukon - but each time we were disappointed as another line of peaks appeared rising higher still. We searched for a place to stop as night descended and our fatigue increased. Seriously dehydrated, as well as perhaps hypothermic, we were on very dangerous ground. I was starting to feel quite scared. But we had traveled high above treeline now, and there was no protection from the wind, nor a drift into which to dig a snow cave. The best we could do was a low spot amid a sparse patch of bare willows on a tilted plateau. Taylor and I dropped our packs and unhitched the sleds. The snow had been packed by the wind into nearly solid ice - for once there was no need for the hour-long chore of stomping out a platform. We should have used ice screws to erect the tipi, but we were too exhausted to dig out the climbing gear. We simply hammered in the long aluminum snow stakes with our ice axes. The tipi tried to drag us across the plain like a sail when we raised it. It was a noisy battle to make it stand on the center pole then hook the sides over the stakes. The wind was still rising. It was with a combination of relief and trepidation that we finally crawled inside with the cooking kits and our sleeping bags. Our labored breathing made a dense fog of ice crystals that became thicker once we'd managed to light one of the stoves. The fog, the roar of the ignited white gas, and the shuddering of stretched nylon caused an almost immediate sense of claustrophobia. "I really, really wish you'd brought the tent," Taylor shouted at me. "I know! I know!" The fog of crystals suddenly began swirling about us, resembling a whirlpool. The tipi expanded like it was about to explode. Our headlamp's beams darted about the walls, then settled on a foot-high rip that had appeared low on the windward side. "Oh, shit!" Taylor whipped out a sewing kit, but his bare hands numbed into useless claws before he could thread the needle. "I'll try to build a wall of snow in front of it," I yelled, scrambling out the leeward door. I was mugged by the wind the moment I stepped outside. It heaved me into the air, body-slammed me back down onto the snow, then squatted on my back as it stole my breath. A few inches from my face the cheap thermometer clipped to my sled whipped around and around like a pinwheel. Snatching it with a mitten, I aimed the beam of my headlamp. The mercury was curled in a ball at the bottom, cowering beneath the last mark at forty degrees below zero. I didn't have to check the tiny windchill chart printed on the back to know that the combined numbers would add up to something around negative one hundred degrees or more. Chunks of ice pelted my backside and the wind knifed right through me despite layers of Polarguard, Gore-Tex and down. I was shivering so hard it seemed like I might shake apart. Not just from the cold, but also from an emotion that was rapidly approaching terror. I couldn't feel my hands or feet as I struggled up to grasp my little avalanche shovel and chop at the snow. The blade barely pierced the snow's wind-packed surface, robbing me of any hope of digging a cave. I stomped on the shovel with a neoprene-wrapped plastic boot and managed to pry up a piece of hard crust. This I laid against the side of the bent, quaking tipi. The whole thing felt like it would soon blast off like a rocket. If it did, we would be more than just cold and scared. We'd be dead. I hammered the shovel back into the snow, careless of shattering the aluminum blade. Another block of sastruga got pried up and laid over the first. My breath came in shallow gasps that burned my throat going in, then froze to my face coming out. Even my eyeballs were icing up within their sockets. What am I doing here? I half-sobbed to myself as the shovel bit again into the unyielding snow. And then the gale eased for a few seconds. The ground blizzard suddenly dropped away. Low, icy peaks lit by starlight swam into view. And there, in the black sky above, almost close enough to reach up and caress, was a neon-green aurora flapping across the heavens. It was so outrageously beautiful that I started to cry. The tears burned my cheeks as they froze to my skin. Then the storm returned with a roar as it flung ice at me and battered the tipi. The glorious vision was blasted away and I was thrown down onto the ground again. I crawled on hands and knees for the door, peeled up the zipper a few inches, and slithered in. The one stove we had managed to light was howling in chorus with the reinvigorated wind, a pot of snow smoking above the blue flames. Taylor was hunched over the other stove, trying to ignite a burner full of slushy white gas with the butane lighter he'd carried in his crotch all day. "I think I've covered the rip," I yelled at him. "Good," Taylor shouted back. To the stove he muttered, "Come on, you bastard. Light. Light!" We needed water and we needed it badly. The snow we had melted in the morning was either drunk or had frozen solid hours ago and miles behind us. Already our tongues were swelling within our mouths and the blood in our veins flowed ever more sluggishly, unable to warm our limbs. Next to the cold, I supposed dehydration was our biggest threat. Or maybe it was frostbite, or avalanches, or starvation, or broken bindings or bears. There were so many ways to die up here. I had lost track of all the risks. We'd been kicking our skis and dragging our sleds for just four days and forty miles and already my mind had been stripped of all but the most immediate danger. The others lurked in the night, howling and gibbering and waiting to pounce. "What else can we do?" I shouted. Taylor's headlamp flashed at me through the sparkling black fog. "Pray!" I thought that maybe I should give prayer a try. Isn't He supposed to have mercy on sinners and fools? But it seemed disrespectful, suddenly begging for mercy and intervention after a lifetime of religious disavowal. But that didn't stop me from silently beseeching the spirit of Morgan, my brother, who had left the world fourteen years earlier. If there is such a thing as a guardian angel, he would be it. Bro, I screwed up again. What a surprise - I know. Any chance you can bail me out one more time? "Sorry about not bring the tent. I guess this trip wasn't such a good idea. If we get blown off this mountain … well, I'm sorry, Taylor." His reply was lost as a gust nearly flattened the tipi. None of it seemed worth dying for. Not adventure, friendship or dreams. "Be careful with your fingers," I warned Taylor. He'd been flicking the lighter bare-handed for half a minute, desperately trying to fire the second stove. We'd both read Jack London's classic story To Build A Fire a dozen times or more, horribly entranced by the sequence of mishaps leading to the death of the protagonist. We could both imagine how easily it might happen to us right now. Taylor shoved the lighter down his pants and yelped as it burnt some very tender flesh. Yanking on his mittens, he started frantically swinging his arms. An image of Albert Johnson came to me. Dug into a trench, wrapped in his frozen sleeping bag and tarp, utterly alone, and waiting for the monstrous wind that would cover his tracks as he crossed the "impossible" mountains and ran for Alaska. How was he still defiant after more than thirty days of this? Why didn't he surrender, or simply shoot himself in the head? I faced up to the fact that the man I had become couldn't take him. I was more than willing to admit defeat. But there was no place and no one to whom I could offer up my surrender. Taylor lifted up his sleeping bag - the entire six-and-a-half foot ice-sodden length of it rising from one hand - and yelled, "What are we going to do about this?" Focusing the beam of my headlamp, I saw that the zipper had come apart. There was no chance of making a delicate repair in this cold. We are so fucked, I thought to myself. But I shouted back, "Well, partner, I guess it's Brokeback Mountain time." Taylor laughed. His freckled face, smeared with ice, frozen mucous and frost blisters, cracked open with a grin and he let out a guffaw. I had to laugh, too, at the hubris that had gotten us into this pathetic state. One stove wouldn't light, his sleeping bag was all but useless, mine was rapidly become a solid sheet of ice, and our tattered tent might achieve lift-off at any moment. We didn't even know if - in the event we did somehow live through the night - we would find an avalanche-free and cliff-free route over the last peaks and down into the Yukon. And worse, I recalled that in my burst of reckless optimism in Inuvik, I had cancelled the ski-plane pick-up on the other side of the mountains. Plainly, that was idiotic. Maybe this entire quest of mine was stupidity magnified by a mid-life crisis or some kind of Peter Pan complex. You can't dream when you're dead, Clinton. Soon you'll be nothing but a meat Popsicle awaiting the summer thaw and the licks of a hungry bear. More painful still, I was aware that I might be taking my best friend down with me - a friend too true to let me pursue my tragic, quixotic journey alone. I had to force away images of our soon-to-be-fatherless sons, and the voice of my wife someday explaining, Well, boys, your dada sure loved you, but the man was starry-eyed, a little reckless, and, quite frankly, not all that bright. But at least I had finally found the wilderness. I could take a little pride in that. Despite highways bulldozed through the forest and over the tundra, despite snow machines and ski planes and satellite phones and satellite imagery, not to mention global warming (which, at the moment, was really letting us down), there are still places you can go where there is no rescue, and where the arctic cold can still crush your soul just as it had done to those of so many explorers, recluses, adventurers and fools. Looking back on my life, I realized that although I had always flirted with the extremes and even death while surfing big winter waves in sharky waters or, later, climbing in the Tetons and elsewhere; creeping up to the edge and occasionally hanging over. But I'd never before made the leap into total risk, total irresponsibility. The closest moments had been more than half a decade before, just short of my thirtieth birthday, and before the birth of my sons, when I'd soloed an eight-hundred foot ice climb in Rocky Mountain National Park and quit my job to try and write a book. Then I'd been young and strong and free. But I was none of those things now. Yes,
I definitely was a fool. But self-recrimination and renouncing my fantasies
wouldn't make me safe and warm or get us over these goddamn mountains.
I didn't have a choice anymore. I was either going to either hunt down
my dreams or die trying. CHAPTER
21 |
|||
|
...... Website
Updated July 2008 |
||||
