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Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world. ~ Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby February
20, 2006 I'm mugged by the wind the moment I step out of the tent and into the blizzard. It heaves me into the air, body-slams me back down onto the snow, then squats on my back as it steals my breath. A few inches from my face the cheap thermometer clipped to my sled whips around and around like a pinwheel. Snatching it with a mitten, I aim the beam of my headlamp. The mercury is curled in a ball at the bottom, cowering beneath the last mark at forty degrees below zero. I don't have to check the tiny windchill chart printed on the back to know the temperature will add up to something around negative one hundred degrees or more. Chunks of ice pelt my backside and the wind knifes right through me despite layers of Polarguard and Gore-Tex. I'm shivering so hard it seems like I might shake apart. Not just from the cold, but also from an emotion that is rapidly approaching terror. I can't feel my hands or feet as I struggle up to grasp my little avalanche shovel and chop at the snow. The blade will barely pierce the snow's wind-packed surface, robbing me any hope of digging a cave. I stomp on the shovel with a neoprene-wrapped plastic boot and manage to pry up a piece of hard crust. This I lay against the side of the tent, which is quaking and bending and moaning right along with me. There is an expanding rip that must be covered or else the whole thing will soon blast off like a rocket. If it does, I'll be more than just cold and scared. I'll be dead. I hammer the shovel back into the snow, careless of shattering the aluminum blade. Another block of sastruga gets pried up and laid over the first. My breath comes in shallow gasps that burn my throat going in, then freeze to my face coming out. Even my eyeballs are icing up within their sockets. What am I doing here? I half-sob to myself as the shovel bites again into the unyielding snow. And then the gale eases for a few seconds. The ground blizzard suddenly drops away. Icy peaks lit by starlight swim into view. And there, in the black sky above, almost close enough to reach up and caress, is a neon-green aurora flapping across the heavens. It's so outrageously beautiful that I start to cry. The tears burn my cheeks as they freeze to my skin. The storm returns with a low roar that accelerates to a shriek. The glorious vision is blasted away and I'm thrown down onto the snow again. I crawl on hands and knees for the tent's door, peel up the zipper a few inches, and slither in. The blackness inside is filled with a dense fog of crystallized steam that sparkles in my headlamp's beam. The one stove we've managed to light is howling in chorus with the reinvigorated wind, a pot of snow smoking above the blue flames. My friend Taylor is hunched over the other stove, trying to ignite a burner full of slushy white gas with a butane lighter he's carried in his crotch all day. "I think I've covered the rip," I yell at him. "Good," Taylor shouts back, politely declining to add, How did I let you talk me into this? To the stove he mutters, "Come on, you bastard. Light. Light!" We need water and we need it badly. The snow we'd melted in the morning was either drunk or had frozen solid hours ago and miles behind us. Already our tongues are swelling within our mouths and the blood in our veins flows ever more sluggishly, unable to warm our limbs. Next to the cold, I suppose dehydration is our biggest threat. Or maybe it's frostbite, or avalanches, or starvation, or broken bindings or bears. There are so many ways to die up here. I've lost track of all the risks. We've been kicking our skis and dragging our sleds for just four days and forty miles and already my mind has been stripped of all but the most immediate danger. The others lurk in the shadows, howling and gibbering and waiting to pounce. "What else can we do?" I shout. Taylor's headlamp flashes at me through the sparkling black fog. "Pray. I just spoke to God for the first time in my life." Maybe I should give prayer a try. Isn't he supposed to have mercy on sinners and fools? But it seems disrespectful, suddenly begging for mercy and intervention after a lifetime of religious disavowal. But that doesn't stop me from silently beseeching the spirit of Morgan, my brother who left the world fourteen years ago. 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? "I guess this trip wasn't such a good idea. If we get blown off this mountain … well, I'm sorry, Taylor." His reply is lost as a gust nearly flattens the tent. It is the middle of winter, and we are camped on the northern edge of the world. There are few places as hostile or remote. We're clinging to a high col between the Yukon and Northwest Territories, about a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle and a vertical mile above the Beaufort Sea. It's a place among these peaks where, it is said, only one human being has ever ventured before in winter. And he had been a killer whose feats of violence and endurance once made headlines around the world. Clearly, this is no place for a pair of dissatisfied lawyers and weekend mountaineers with a well-established tendency to reach higher than they can climb. So, what the hell are we doing here? Taylor is here because he needed a great adventure in his life - he'd lived for thirty-five years and yet seldom journeyed outside the mountains and plains of Wyoming. And he knew that if he didn't come, I might have been foolish enough to try this alone. I'm here because of adolescent fantasies that have pursued me into adulthood. I'd wanted to see if the romantic Arctic of countless books and my imagination still exists, and I'd dreamed for decades about joining a legendary chase - the greatest the North has ever known. At the moment, though, none of it seems worth dying for. Not adventure, friendship or dreams. "Be careful with your fingers," I warn Taylor. He'd been flicking the lighter bare-handed for half a minute, desperately trying to fire the second stove. We've both read To Build A Fire a dozen times or more, horribly entranced by the sequence of mishaps leading to the death of the protagonist. We can both imagine how easily it can happen to us right now. And if one of us gets disabled by frostbite, we're both dead. Taylor shoves the lighter down his pants and yelps as it burns some very tender flesh. Yanking on his mittens, he starts frantically swinging his arms. For me, this dream - if I can still call it that - began when I was ten. That was 1979, the year my father took a rare vacation from his job as a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles and bought a pickup truck mounted with a camper shell, grew a beard, and took my brothers and me on a road trip to Alaska. As we'd rattled north on the then-still unpaved Al-Can Highway, he would read to us at night from Robert Service's The Spell of the Yukon over the hiss of a Coleman lantern. The higher the latitude, the farther the forest stretched between towns, and the more enchanted I'd become. Near Sam McGee's famous "marge of Lake Labarge" we met a pilot who flew us to a fishing camp more than a hundred miles from any road. It was there, at Wolf Lake, across a blazing campfire under the Midnight Sun, that I first heard a story that seemed like magic at the time but now, as I debate a trench conversion, feels like a curse. * * * In the winter of 1932, one of the most sensational and mystifying manhunts in history took place in the Richardson Mountains, where the great Rocky Mountain Range plunges into the polar sea. Here a lone man challenged the Royal Canadian Mounted Police by shooting down a constable in the "bush." During the seven-week chase that followed, the supposed madman outran dogsled teams that can travel one hundred miles a day and outfought vastly superior numbers of sharpshooters, trappers and native trackers. Despite temperatures that averaged forty degrees below zero, he had somehow forsaken the established mountain passes and made it across these mile-high peaks - a crossing that was believed to be impossible at the time. In the end it had taken what would be the first use of radios and an airplane in a North American manhunt to finally bring him down. The fugitive's motives, and even his real name, remain uncertain. But he was called the Mad Trapper. For me, a wide-eyed kid from the big city, weaned on stories of unspoiled lands, elusive villains, unconquered mountains, and the tales of the Malamute Kid, this wilderness epic was irresistible. It had everything a boy could want: adventure, gold, gunfights, murder, and the challenge of the impossible. Even better, every word of it was true. That night, and for years afterward, I snuggled down in my warm California bed while studying my battered copy of Dick North's The Mad Trapper of Rat River and endlessly fantasized about the Arctic and joining the hunt. In my dreams I was the resolute Mountie who "always got his man" no matter the suffering or the danger it entailed. I drove a team of snarling huskies and cracked a whip above their heads. I traveled with Indian trappers and Inuit seal hunters and dispensed mail, medicine and justice in far-flung villages. I crossed impossible mountains on the heels of a superhuman killer and finally brought him down. It all became so real that it seemed like something I might actually do, someone I might actually be, if only I could hurry up and grow older. Questions about the hunt for the Mad Trapper obsessed me. And not just the obvious ones, like Who was he? and Why did he do it? Instead I spent countless hours pondering how had he run for seven weeks of Arctic night, crossing mountains believed impassible, without ropes or axes or even modern camping gear. And I wondered about the limits of the human body, how far intellect and emotion can push those limits, and how dreams of gold and adventure can twist them. But the most important question of all was always about myself. Could I take the Mad Trapper? That was the subject that invaded my dreams and occasionally changed them into nightmares. Twenty-five years later all those dreams had failed to become memories. All my questions remained unanswered. I found myself to be a writer and lawyer approaching middle age who had never ventured out on a epic journey, never truly challenged himself in the wilderness. With a family to provide for and a damaged spine that was already making me feel old and infirm, I had to wonder what the little boy who was once me would have thought if he had known the truth - he would never do any of those things he fantasized about. Would it have broken his fervent little heart? Even worse than that betrayal, I began to realize that I no longer dreamed much any more. Age and responsibility, it seemed, had been robbing me of my imagination and my passion. I felt victimized. It seemed so unfair. But then as a prosecutor I had learned that there isn't much justice in this world, and then as a writer of popular fiction, I'd learned that the most satisfying justice is that which you grab for yourself. So I began to fantasize about stealing back my youth and my dreams. With age comes a bit of wisdom - this time I wouldn't just dream. I started to plot and train for a belated trip north. I would finally join the hunt for the Mad Trapper - albeit seventy-two years behind the men who had fought him across an arctic wilderness in the dead of winter. I would track him down and kill him. The anticipation, for a time, was wildly liberating. But that was before Taylor and I had arrived in the villages of the Mackenzie River during a crack-fueled murder spree, before my boots had shattered and my courage failed on our previous attempt to get over the high peaks, and before my marriage and my writing career had faltered upon my return. And it was before I'd discovered that oil and gas development, rapid climate change, and instant communications have all but destroyed this legendary last great frontier. And that was before we'd reached this mountaintop - dehydrated, exhausted and frozen - to be blasted by this monstrous wind. It is nothing like my worst nightmares had ever conjured. Imagining the Mad Trapper up here, without fire or food or even a tent and yet still defiant, I now have to face up to the fact that the man I've become can't take him. Right now I am more than willing to admit defeat. But there is no place and no one to whom I can offer up my surrender. Taylor lifts up his sleeping bag - the entire six-and-a-half foot ice-sodden length of it rising from one hand - and yells, "What are we going to do about this?" Focusing the beam of my headlamp, I see that the zipper has come apart. There's no chance of making a delicate repair in this cold. We are so fucked, I think to myself. But I shout back, "Well, partner, I guess it's Brokeback Mountain time." Taylor laughs. His freckled face, smeared with ice, frozen mucous and frost blisters, cracks open with a grin and he lets out a guffaw. I have to laugh, too, at the hubris that had gotten us into this pathetic state. One stove won't light, his sleeping bag is all but useless, mine's rapidly become a solid sheet of ice, and our tattered tent may achieve lift-off at any moment. We don't even know if - in the event we do somehow live through the night - we'll find an avalanche-free and cliff-free route over the last peaks and down into the Yukon. And worse, in a burst of reckless optimism, I had cancelled the ski-plane pick-up on the other side of the mountains. When we'd flown in four days ago to the foot of the mountains, it had been only ten degrees below zero. That was record-breaking warmth for mid-winter in the Arctic. I figured we could save some of my dwindling funds by skiing an extra sixty or seventy miles over the Yukon plateau to the Dempster Highway, then hole up in a maintenance shed until a snowplow crew came along. Plainly put, 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'm aware that I'm taking my best friend down with me - a friend too true to let me pursue my tragic Quixotic journey alone. I have to force away images of our soon-to-be-fatherless sons, and the voice of my wife someday explaining, Well, son, your dad sure loved you, but the man was starry-eyed, a little reckless, and, quite frankly, not all that bright. But at least I've finally found the wilderness. I can 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, is 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 so many explorers, recluses, adventurers and fools. Yes,
I am a fool. But self-recrimination and renouncing my fantasies won't
make me safe and warm or get us over these goddamn mountains. I don't
have a choice anymore. I'm either going to hunt down my dreams or die
trying. CHAPTER
ONE January
2004 "Which one do you want," the bartender asked me, meaning which one did I want plunked down into my double shot of whiskey. "It's got to touch your lips or it doesn't count." "I need a beer first," I told her. "Actually, I might need two or three." She popped the caps off a half-dozen Chilkoot Ales and fanned out the bottles before us. "We don't see many new faces in town this time of year. Where are you fellows headed?" "North. All the way. To Inuvik." "Oh? You had better be careful. There's been some murders in the Delta. People are going a little crazy up there. So, what kind of work do you do?" Mark looked down at her from a height of six-and-a-half feet and gave her a steely, blue-eyed stare. "We're bounty hunters, ma'am." It was January 5, 2004. At this latitude, at this time of year, it was dark all day except for a few hours of twilight around noon. Mark, Taylor and I were the legendary town's only tourists and the saloon's only customers. It wasn't hard to figure why - it was, after all, winter in the Yukon Territory, even if the temperature was relatively mild for the season at only thirty degrees below zero. My hands, nose and cheeks were still stinging from the short walk from the parking lot. I tried to snap some blood into the tips of my fingers and shake a worry about already having gotten frost-nipped. It had been below zero for a week, ever since we'd crossed the Canadian border from Montana. Continuous snowstorms had blasted us as we plowed our way north and west on the Alaska and then the Klondike highways. Each degree of latitude we climbed cost us dearly in sunlight and warmth. We'd been in four-wheel drive for 3,000 miles now, and had to plug in the oil pan heater each night or do like the locals and just leave the engine running. When we started driving each new "day," my brand-new Toyota Tundra would howl like a dying animal and the frozen tires would thump and thump for miles. The world we'd entered - the one that had dominated my childhood dreams - was already proving uncomfortably exotic. Just two days earlier we'd leapt naked into Laird Hot Springs on the southern Yukon border when it was twenty-below. Getting into the eerily smoking water, surrounded by glittering trees armored with frost, had been initially exhilarating. We'd laughed and shouted as our wet hair and beards crackled into nests of ice within just a minute or so of exposure to the air. Getting out had been less thrilling, as we'd foolishly hung our clothes on the very edge, far too close to the clouds of steam. The frozen boardwalk planks had ripped chunks of flesh from the soles of our feet as we tried to hop into pants as stiff as steel while beads of water turned to ice on our bare skin. How the hell were we going to ski and climb and camp in these temperatures, I wondered, much less track the Mad Trapper on his unrepeated winter crossing of the high peaks of the Richardson Mountains, when we couldn't even get out of a hot spring or stroll into a bar without worrying about frostbite? The bartender splashed my chosen toe - a big one - into the shot glass and Mark maliciously reminded me that my lips had to touch the toe in order for me to be admitted into the Sourtoe Cocktail Club. But I wanted to do better than that. I needed to show Taylor and Mark that I was tough enough to lead them in the hunt for the Mad Trapper. I needed to prove to them - and, more importantly, to myself - that we could chase his ghost over the mountains. After all, we were well-conditioned athletes, semi-experienced weekend mountaineers, and expensively duded out with the latest high-tech camping and climbing gear. So I intended to ignore any foreshadowing of cannibalism, take the shriveled appendage into my mouth, drain the whiskey in which it swam and, after a suitably dramatic pause, spit the foul thing back onto the bar. It was now or never, I told myself. With the first scratch of that yellowed nail on my upper lip, however, my courage faltered. It took everything I had just to hold the whiskey down and not vomit across the varnished wood of the bar. The toe never passed my teeth. It would prove to be an ominous sign. * * * Just a few months ago the trip had seemed like such a good idea. But that had been in Colorado, in the heat of summer, a crisp blue sky blazing outside my office window and with only the prospect of another day banging my head on the keyboard. In 2003 I'd been desperately trying to write a legal thriller, a sequel to the previous two I'd somehow lucked into getting published. I needed to keep putting them out or else I'd end up as a lawyer again. But I was rebelling against my publisher's instructions: more plot, less character, and no one really gives a damn about the prose, Clinton. I wanted to be the next Ernest Hemmingway, not the next low-brow action pulp master. And already the thrill of writing for a living had worn off. I felt imprisoned in my office while the world moved on outside my window. Lately I had noticed that I fell asleep at night not dreaming anymore but worrying. About my increasingly uncertain writing, about my three-year-old son and the planet he'd be inheriting, about the unborn son already kicking at his mom's tummy when I whispered The Cremation of Sam McGee to her belly button. I was worried about my marriage and mortgage payments and health care. I was self-employed but hardly free. And my only employee - my imagination - had stopped showing up for work. Then one day I'd received an email from Taylor, who I hadn't seen since we graduated from law school six years earlier. Through the grapevine I'd heard that he was a recovering lawyer, just like me. After a few years as a judge's clerk, and then a stint as a divorce attorney, he'd gone back to banging nails. That had been his job before he'd incurred tens of thousands of dollars in college and law school debt. His message was an invitation: Let's climb something this winter, get outside like we used to. Anything you want to do? When we'd been in school together at the University of Wyoming, classes had always been second to climbing for me. Each peak we attacked in the Snowies or the Tetons had seemed like a death-defying adventure out of one of my favorite mountaineering books. Sometimes they really were, too - not because of the difficulty of the well-trod "classic" routes we generally chose, but because of our chronic incompetence. It had been the freest time of my life, when I had no responsibilities other than my studies. Ever since I had looked back at those days fondly, yet at the same time wishing I'd accomplished more. I responded: Remember that story I was always babbling about, the one about the Mad Trapper in the Canadian Arctic? I can't stop thinking about going up there and retracing the route the dude took over the Richardson Mountains with the Mounties and their dogteams on his trail. In the original conditions, meaning winter north of the Arctic Circle. Sound like fun? Far as I know, it's never been repeated. My pitch didn't seem all that persuasive even when I wrote it. I expected Taylor, who had always been cautious and was now a father himself, to chuckle and politely decline with something like, Um, Clinton, I was thinking more like Longs Peak, or maybe a weekend on the Grand. So I was startled by his response: When do we leave? I let out a long, long breath. I had held the dream far too close for far too long, and I didn't really think it was possible anymore. Suddenly I was dreaming again as I fell asleep at night wrapped around my wife's slim, tan limbs and growing belly. The world for me turned back to when I was thirteen-years-old and it alive with prospects for adventure. Taylor had always been my steadiest climbing partner. Tall, strong and gregarious, he was also a Search and Rescue instructor in Wyoming's Big Horn mountains. This would prove an important selling point when presenting the plan to my wife and parents. Best of all, I knew from a previous year's Christmas card that he could grow a full red beard capable of putting a Viking Berserker to shame. This inspired confidence in me. From all my reading of historic Arctic travel, it seemed a robust, manly beard was a necessity for any aspiring Arctic adventurer. While corresponding and plotting our heroic return from the fabled North (should we have T-shirts made for family and friends commemorating our trip?) we discussed how having a third member of the team would be a good idea. Not for going after help if someone got injured - because there would likely be no help up there - but for our psychological well-being. I knew it wouldn't take long before Taylor and I would come to blows or ice-axe combat in polar isolation. I tended to brood and get cranky after a single tent-bound day, while Taylor liked to talk and talk whenever the going got tough. Over a dinner in New Jersey two years earlier, I had told the tale of the Mad Trapper to a student and aspiring mountaineer named Mark. With a few beers in me, I'd let slip my childhood dream of making the second winter crossing of the Richardson's highest peaks in the killer's footsteps. "Awesome! If you ever decide to do it, let me know," Mark had said. "I'll be your Sherpa." He had to be smart to study at his Ivy League university and, being so much younger, yet as tall and fit as Taylor, he would surely be able to haul a lot of gear. Plus he'd been an Eagle Scout, so I figured he could provide good judgment and bring a clean standard of living to the escapade. He was currently teaching climbing and outdoor skills to students in Zermatt, Switzerland. Warned by his parents that he didn't check his email for weeks at a time, I sent him an invitation anyway. He phoned an hour later, from somewhere in the Italian Alps. "Dude. I'm in." Suddenly, without even really trying, I had a team. It appeared to be a relatively safe and experienced team, too. My God, I told myself with mounting enthusiasm, We're really going to do it! My enthusiasm only increased as we began planning and training. I couldn't stop talking about the trip. I told and re-told the Mad Trapper's story and related our plans to everyone I knew or met. It was my excitement, I suppose, that was so infectious. They all wanted to sign on and join us. Taylor reported the same thing. It was as if everyone needed a dream - a great adventure - as much as we did. It was weird. Normally I had a hard time recruiting partners into doing a weekend trip to an alpine wall in nearby Rocky Mountain National Park. Now everyone - from outdoor-store sales clerks to the lawyers I used to work with - wanted to have a piece of it. I had to talk people out of it. I had to invent explanations of why they couldn't come. Taylor and I giddily promised our wives that we would eat the young and unmarried Mark first if starvation threatened. A few days after Christmas I loaded up my truck with plans to pick up Taylor in Wyoming and then Mark, who would fly north, all the way up to Whitehorse. But looking at my three-year-old son for what would be the last time in many weeks, perhaps months - hell, perhaps forever - I started choking up and questioning whether this was really such a hot idea. "I'll miss you, Dada. I wuv you," Colin said, hugging me. Crying a little, I detached his skinny arms from around my legs and climbed into the truck. Justine, oh-so-tolerant of my eccentric enthusiasms and looking even more beautiful than I'd ever seen her, called out for me to wait as she ran toward the street. I tried to formulate a passionate, poetic reply to the endearing words that were surely coming. I imagined myself an adventurer of olden days, making a final farewell before a dangerous mission with an uncertain return - a little like Odysseus taking leave of Penelope on the eve of the battle at Troy. Putting her lips to mine, she murmured, "You remembered to boost the life insurance, right?" "Yep," I choked out. "Good," she smiled. "Have a good time!" I started north into a never-ending blizzard. And now, three thousand miles later and just five hundred miles from our jumping off point at the literal end of the world, it all seemed in danger of unraveling. Taylor admitted his beard had been photo-shopped in the Christmas picture. The one he was growing now was full of pale holes. Mark was proving himself to be most un-Eagle Scout-like by tossing back every fermented beverage we came across and ogling anything that might have a pair of breasts under its layers of wool and fleece. I already missed my family and felt as if I were barely hanging on to the ethereal dream of my youth. And the increasing cold and dark were scaring us all. But at least one thing was right. This definitely had the feel of an adventure. We were in the North at last, near the boundary of what I fervently hoped was still a wilderness.
CHAPTER
TWO We weren't the only unlikely adventurers to journey to this part of the world. All I had to do was look through blurry eyes at the black-and-white photographs on the saloon's walls to be somewhat comforted. Just a hundred years ago a hundred thousand amateur adventurers had stormed this way, forty thousand of them actually making it all the way to these same frozen streets. Their pictures - mustachioed swells in wool suits and ties and plump young ladies in layers of skirts - bore testimony to the fact that they were just as unsuited to this environment as we were. And they'd had to endure a lot more than just bad roads, bad cheeseburgers, and bad music blasting from the stereo in order to reach it. But then they'd had something even more powerful than mere adventure to spur them on: what the Greek poet Virgil had called Auri Sacra Fames, the cursed thirst for gold. In 1896, in the midst of an economic depression that was shorter but more intense than what would be suffered in the 1930s, a pair of ships called the Excelsior and the Portland had docked in Seattle and San Francisco two days apart. Both ships carried close to a million dollars in gold that had been brought out of the creeks around this eight-by-ten block town. "Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!" shrieked the headline of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Within hours news of gold in the Canadian Arctic had been telegraphed around the world. Six days later a Seattle reporter sent this dispatch east: "The news [of] the wonderful things of the Klondike, in the land of the midnight sun, has opened the floodgates, and a stream of humanity is pouring through Seattle and on to the golden Mecca of the north." The mayor of Seattle promptly resigned and packed a kit, as did half the motormen of his former city. From all over the Western World, dreamers of all classes and nations quit their jobs (if they were lucky enough to have had them), mortgaged whatever property they owned, and kissed their families good-bye. They all headed here, for Dawson City, the new El Dorado, despite hardships and dangers that were well-publicized: at least 1,000 miles of carrying a ton of gear over raging rivers and trails that had to be hewn out of rock and ice, not to mention blizzards, avalanches, hunger, scurvy, rapids, floods, grizzlies, and, worst of all, a guaranteed nine-month stretch of crushing cold. Since the time of the Ancient Greeks and their vision of a polar paradise they called Hyperborea, the Arctic has always drawn the imagination like the needle of a compass. There is something about its inhospitable starkness and dangerous beauty that acts as a lure. The discovery of the New World heated it to a fever-pitch in the public's mind as explorers searched for quick access to the true Orient through a fabled Northwest Passage. ("They cannot help it, these Arctic fellows. It is in the blood," wrote Lord Brougham, after Sir John Franklin announced he was again going to undertake a tragic quest.) The fascination had been interrupted over recent decades by the discovery of gold in the Western frontier, not to mention the roiling cancer of the Civil War, but with the cancer lanced and the western lands settled, the North was taking its place again in the forefront of popular imagination. And imagination is a particularly meaningful word here because, when the forty thousand survivors of the journey dragged themselves into Dawson City, what did they find in this sudden metropolis besides gamblers, dance halls and whores? That the goldfields were all staked - they had been since before even the Excelsior and the Portland reached the docks of the West Coast first carrying the news of the strike to the outside world - and the only riches left to be made were in saloons and bordellos. It turned out a handful of men had been prospecting the region for years, and that word of the strike had traveled fast over the rivers and winter dog trails in their huge but insular world. The great wash of Outsiders to the North receded as fast as it had rolled in. Men and women went home stripped of all but muscle and bone, and the harsh land of the Yukon remained hollow and cold. The dream had only been an illusion; all their exertions and suffering had been for nothing. But, strangely, just having lived the dream was somehow worthwhile to many of those who had charged north and survived to return. Countless memoirs were written about their efforts, and countless boasts were made of what they'd endured. They had lived larger than those who were either too smart or too complacent or too cowardly to join in. They'd followed a dream to its bitter end. They were like Teddy Roosevelt's Man in the Arena, "who, at worst, if he fails, at least failed while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." * * * Just thirty years later, in the late 1920's, when America was again slipping into the grasp of a financial depression, the old dream - that siren song of gold and adventure and a great frontier - would call again. The song was just a whisper this time, almost drowned out by the din of 20th century life. But the faint rumor of "lost mines" in the Arctic was audible enough to lure north at least one man desperate for a dream to feed on. At the time he called himself, on the few occasions he was willing to speak at all, by the name of Arthur Nelson. According to historian and author Dick North, who has relentlessly pursued the man's past for decades, Nelson first appeared at a place called Dease Lake when news leaked out of a minor gold strike in the region. Powerfully-built, with sandy brown hair and ice-blue eyes, he seemed to come out of nowhere. He radiated hostility, or, to those who remembered him more generously, cold indifference. He was said to speak English and Swedish fluently, but this was seldom put to the test. When he worked briefly at the local sawmill, men who labored alongside him said he never spoke except to say, "Give me an axe," or "Get out of my way." For the next few years this Arthur Nelson wandered through the Yukon's immense wilderness, vanishing into the bush with the first snow and appearing again only after the Spring break-up with a load of freshly-skinned furs and even less to say. The traders he dealt with in the various communities he visited sometimes thought he was mute because he would only point at the items he wanted in return for his furs. Others were offended by his "silent arrogance." They commented that he never unslung his rifle, not even as he shopped. The only time he appeared interested in what anyone had to say was when they spoke of the rumored lost mines. There were a lot of these rumors floating around. One, the Lost McHenry gold mine, had been circulating since 1875, when a prospector named McHenry appeared in Dease Lake with forty pounds of gold nuggets. He claimed to have dug them up from beneath an unnamed mountain marked with a cross of snow. But McHenry never returned to work his claim, and instead headed "Outside" as fast as he could with his newfound wealth. Another legend had two miners pulling up gold "by the handful" far to the north, near the Mackenzie Delta on the far side of the Richardson Mountains, and displaying their nuggets to other prospectors before drowning in a boating accident on the Yukon River. The story of the Lost Powers gold mine comes again from further north, also near the Richardson Mountains. A nearly-dead miner named Powers was said to have crawled into Fort Alaska, Yukon, with eighty-three pounds of alluvial gold and the story of eighty-five pounds more buried with his partner somewhere back along the trail. He claimed they had found the rich strike beneath a waterfall that they'd sluiced until beginning to suffer from scurvy. The cabin they'd built still awaited re-discovery, their sluice box reputedly preserved on its roof. These legends seemed to be leading Arthur Nelson farther and farther north, ever deeper into the arctic bush. The Yukon Territory, an area of 200,000 square miles, or about three times the size of all the New England states combined, contained little at the time but vast forests, huge rivers, and largely unexplored mountains (including 19,000' Mt. Logan, the highest in all of Canada). Its total population in 1929 was just over 4,000, or one person for every fifty square miles, and even today it has a population of less than 30,000. Yet Arthur Nelson still managed to occasionally come into contact with humanity. And the men and women who met him in the bush were even more disturbed by his presence than those who met him when he re-supplied in town. One woman reported being terrified when her party came upon him suddenly on a trail. He leapt off into the trees and disappeared. Others in the region reported similar encounters. It was said that Nelson wouldn't tolerate anyone on a trail behind him. He would slip into the forest and occasionally reemerge behind the party that had been tailing him. He would sometimes appear in isolated camps, or his tracks would be seen in the snow after he'd examined a camp from a distance, or, even more frighteningly, prospectors or trappers would sometimes stumble into his. One such surprise guest had the audacity to pick up Nelson's 30-30 Savage and say, "Nice rifle you got here." When Nelson failed to respond, the man turned to see Nelson placing his right hand under his coat as if he had a pistol he was about to draw. It was a deliberate gesture, according the prospector. He put the rifle down very, very carefully. Nelson silently packed up his camp and departed. Before he left, though, he handed the frightened man an orange. Word spread that Nelson should be avoided, particularly if you were alone when you came across him. In a region that had more than enough natural dangers to keep anyone perpetually alert and nervous, he became a sort of bugaboo. The last time anyone saw Arthur Nelson was in the village of Keno - population of less than twenty - in the spring of 1931. A couple of trappers overheard him asking at the trading post for directions to Fort McPherson, a Gwich'in Indian village 350 miles to the north, close to the Richardson Mountains and the northern edge of the continent. The friendly trappers offered to show him the way for the first few miles. But when they set up a camp that night, Nelson refused to sit with them and instead set up a separate camp one hundred feet further down the trail. Crouched over his fire, staring fixedly into the dark, Nelson held his 30-30 rifle in such an ominous manner that the two trappers found it difficult to sleep. The next morning they were relieved to discover that he was gone. Then Arthur Nelson, or at least the use of that name, disappeared forever. But the man would soon be known around the world by another one. CHAPTER
THREE The next day, at thirty-five below and with a light snow floating down through the midday twilight, we set out to track the Mad Trapper to his next appearance in the Gwich'in village of Fort McPherson. The route he had taken is today roughly paralleled by the Dempster Highway. According to an article in Outside Magazine, the Dempster is the "longest, most adventurous road in North America" as well as "one of the gnarliest drives on earth." Outside was, of course, referring to the highway as it appears in the short summer, when audacious tourists in SUVs hauling pop-up campers undertake the journey under the Midnight Sun. Now, however, we were all too aware that it was the dead of winter in the Canadian Arctic. Construction of the Dempster Highway began in 1956. It was a monumental undertaking, one that wouldn't be completed for more than twenty years. Asphalt couldn't be used since most of the five hundred mile road from Dawson City to Inuvik (our final destination on the northern edge of the continent, near the Beaufort Sea) would have to be built on constantly shifting permafrost. Instead tire-slicing gravel was laid down, in some places twenty feet thick, to make for a somewhat stable platform. Where rivers intersected, ferryboat crossings were established for the summer months. In the winter, drivers just bounced down onto the ice and fishtail across. The highway was promoted as a "road to resources" by the conservative government that funded the project at the behest of oil and gas companies with interests in the Mackenzie Delta and Beaufort Sea. Detractors, decrying the incredible expense, described the Dempster as a boondoggle stretching "from igloo to igloo." But the detractors were wrong in at least one sense: once the road was completed in 1979, there were no more igloos. None, at least, anywhere near the new highway. Nor did anyone need to drive dogsleds anymore or paddle rafts or canoes. The Dempster stabbed the romance out of the Arctic, like a knife driven into the belly and ripped up toward the heart. New sub-roads were bulldozed in all directions so that seismic trucks could sniff out deposits of oil and gas. Snowmobiles were trucked in, along with marine outboards, fruit, vegetables, Pizza Hut pizzas, whiskey, cigarettes and satellite TV. Even crack cocaine could now be readily imported, as we would soon find out. The highway also parallels the dog-sledding route the Mounties used to patrol the Klondike and bring winter mail and medicine to the established Western Arctic whaling ports of Aklavik and Herschel Island. From 1904 until the 1930s, small parties of constables and native guides would undertake the three-to-four month round trip. It was a sort of twentieth century Pony Express, only without way stations, fresh mounts, changed riders, or warm desert temperatures. The difficulties of the journey were illustrated by the tragedy of the infamous Lost Patrol. In the winter of 1911, Inspector Francis Fitzgerald attempted to break the three-week record for the five hundred and ten mile trip from Fort McPherson to Dawson City. He and three constables (none of them natives, as Fitzgerald believed both the local Inuvialuit and Gwich'in traveled too slow) got lost in the perpetual dark in temperatures that reached 60 degrees below zero. They attempted to turn back near the southern ramparts of the Richardson Mountains, but all four of them died from starvation and exhaustion complicated by vitamin A poisoning from having eaten the livers of their dogs. The highway that now marks their route was named after Corporal W.J.D. Dempster, who set out on a rescue mission that became a gruesome body recovery. Pride and overconfidence had doomed the Lost Patrol. Thoughts of their disaster played uncomfortably in my mind. But we certainly anticipated having an easier time. Instead of two five-dog teams, we had 225 horsepower under the hood of Puffy, my big white Toyota Tundra, with ten gallons of spare petrol strapped down in the bed. The twenty-one day record Fitzgerald had sought to break we hoped to accomplish in just two days. But, with hundreds of miles of utterly empty land stretching off into the darkness on all sides, it still felt like an adventure. We only came across one other vehicle in our first day's driving. Pulsing muffled music, we rolled on packed snow and muscled over deep drifts through a never-ending night, seeing only stars, black spruce, and the distant silhouette of the Tombstone Range. Once a seven-foot-tall moose, burly as a linebacker, gave us a thrill by juking and jiving in the headlights as we slid past him, sideways, with Taylor and I screaming useless advice to Mark, who was then behind the unresponsive wheel. Later we got a taste of Fitzgerald's predicament when Taylor (who had just been lecturing Mark and me, both Los Angeles natives, about winter driving) misjudged the stark black-and-white world in the headlights and we plunged off the road and into a bottomless drift. Piling out of the hot cab, sinking to our waists, we learned a new sense of the meaning of cold. Previously, we had only felt what minus 35 degrees was like when dashing into a motel or a pub or when emerging from a scalding hot spring and sprinting for the idling truck. Now we faced hours of digging with our tiny avalanche shovels. The exertion warmed us only slightly, as did the curses we directed at Taylor. After just half an hour my budding beard was a mask of ice from my exhalations and my heavily-gloved and -booted extremities had gone from on-fire to dead-numb. Worse, our struggle to rescue ourselves was looking as fruitless as Fitzgerald's. After two hours we had only succeeded in making a giant pyramid of snow with the six-thousand-pound truck teetering at its apex. If a highway maintenance truck hadn't happened along - the first vehicle we'd seen in eight hours - we might have eaten Taylor's liver. In what our watches called evening, we rolled up on a mountain pass that would soon take us down to the Mackenzie Delta. Suddenly a neon-green tornado appeared overhead, swirling across a black sky. The Northern Lights. It was an apparition I hadn't seen since the trips I'd taken as an adolescent to Wolf Lake twenty years earlier. We stopped (very carefully in the middle of the road) and climbed out. With a silent prayer, I killed the engine so we could find out if the aurora really does make a static-like sound. I was scared Puffy wouldn't start again and that, even with all our high-tech camping gear in the back, we'd freeze to death in the middle of the lonely highway. Mark whispered with unusual reverence, "Man, I half expect the Lorax to show up. This is straight out of Dr. Seuss." We walked a little ways up the hill to see the aurora better. All around us were skeletal spruce trees, almost branchless at this latitude. My friends and I stood there for a long time, shivering hard, as our noses and cheeks began to burn and an icy film formed on our eyeballs. There was no sound at all. The silence was so overwhelming that I could only hear my own heart beating, the blood in my veins moving the tiny hairs in my ears. I was scared, yes, but I was also thrilled. This was a holy moment, I told myself. I'm in the wilderness at last. Then the sound of a zipper intervened. "Hey guys! Listen to the way it crackles as before it hits the ground!" A friend (who shall remain nameless) called out, ruining the moment as he pissed onto the ice. He was soon punished for his sacrilege. Perhaps he leaned back too far in order to arc his stream higher into the freezing air. Whatever the cause, his boots skated out from under him and, still pissing, he slid on his back down the hill before coming to a stop beneath the truck. The Arctic winter, we were discovering, is no place to screw around. * * * By eight o'clock that night, after twelve hours on the road, we reached the oasis of Eagle Plains. It consisted of a restaurant/bar/gift shop, with attached logging trailers providing rooms for guests. In a nearby building was a mechanic's garage with a pair of gasoline pumps out front. A sign near the entrance to the parking lot warned that this portion of the highway doubled as a landing strip for planes. Just beyond the buildings a gate had been swung across the highway, blocking off access to the north, and a flashing sign bleated, "Road closed." We found a youngish woman with a pierced face and purple-streaked hair tending the bar. Other than a surly cook/mechanic, she was the only employee and we were the only customers. She brought us beer and split pea soup. Before sitting down with us - uninvited but really quite welcome (we hadn't seen an attractive woman in days) - she fixed herself a Big Gulp-sized screwdriver and lit a menthol cigarette. Then she proceeded to tell us how boring it was living up here, more than one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest village. How nothing ever happened unless a bear tried to break into the guest rooms. The only fun she ever had was when her replacement came in for her days off and she would hitch a ride to Inuvik or Dawson City with whatever trucker was passing through. But the in the winter the road could be closed for days, or even weeks, when winds off the Beaufort Sea swept in drifts of snow capable of burying the entire highway. Every other word she uttered was an obscenity. And there was something depraved and hungry in her watery but direct gaze. It wasn't hard to see how such isolation could start to twist someone. All the horror stories I had read and the movies I'd seen about travelers coming to a wanton end at such outposts became a little more realistic. God, what Stephen King could do with this place! Taylor and I soon excused ourselves but Mark, apparently quite charmed, remained at the table. We wandered the huge empty bar, staring at mounted heads of wolves, bears and Dall sheep along with ancient black-and-white photos, yet staying close enough to Mark that we might be able to defend him if the woman suddenly pulled a butcher knife and let loose with a banshee shriek. I was slow to realize, then a little shocked, to see that all the photos were from the hunt for the Mad Trapper. There was Inspector Eames, who led the chase, life-sized in a blown-up print, smiling benignly at me. And nearby were portraits of other constables, trappers, and natives whose names were all long-familiar to me. I belatedly noticed that the bar, in fact, was named the Millen Lounge in honor of Edgar Millen, both a hero and a casualty of the great chase. Studying the pictures with a three-beer buzz softening my focus, I felt like I'd suddenly run into old and cherished friends. In a dream-like state, Taylor and I roamed out into the dusty lobby, abandoning Mark to his fate. There were more photos, mounted heads, and a gated gift shop that hadn't been open for business since the previous summer. Peering through the bars, Taylor pointed out some certificates you could buy for having crossed the Arctic Circle. "You think they've got a certificate with her name on it?" Taylor wondered, peeking back into the Millen Lounge where Mark and the woman were leaning toward each other across the table, still talking and drinking. "They've probably got a disease named after her." Coming to our senses, we launched a rescue mission. Mark was successfully extracted and we retreated to a small room in the attached logging trailer. Two sagging beds and a sway-backed folding cot were allotted after a couple of rounds of rock-paper-scissors, and we retired under synthetic blankets well-ventilated with cigarette burns. "What do you think our odds are of getting out of here tomorrow?" Taylor asked. "Nil," Mark responded. "She said this storm's supposed to blow for days." Taylor made some unhappy sounds, but Mark didn't sound entirely displeased. I couldn't figure out how I felt about the possibility of being trapped here. My bed was under the window. A frigid stream of air from a crack in the sill stabbed at my cheek. Sitting up, I lifted the cheap curtain and peered out into the night. The wind was reshaping a drift around where Puffy was plugged into one of the exterior outlets. The "ROAD CLOSED" sign was flashing from beyond the plowed parking lot, the orange light bouncing off the snow. Beyond that there was nothing but white snow and black sky and a wind that could sink its icy fangs into your flesh within minutes. I sensed that the Mad Trapper was out there, daring me to pursue him into the cold and the dark. Despite all the years of dreaming, and the months of anticipation, it was hard to feel anything but dread. In what the natives call the Outside, when I told the story of the Arctic Circle War, people would often say things like, "I grew up in Minnesota. I've shoveled the walk at forty below. It's not that bad." I'd clung to their words. But now, for the first time, I realized that they'd talked about minutes, or maybe even an hour, out there in the cold. And they'd always had a warm home to return to. We would be sleeping out there for weeks, probably, if the road ever opened and we could find our way into the mountains. Taylor and I, on a training trip, had set up a camp above Aspen, Colorado a few weeks earlier when a cold snap sent the temperature plunging down to ten degrees below zero. Although we'd had all our Arctic gear with us, after two or three hours of shivering in our sleeping bags, we tore down the camp and retreated to the truck where we finally slept in the seats with the heater running. I'm not ready for this. But if not now, it's never going to happen. Eight days of cold and darkness were definitely getting to me. And to Taylor, too, I suspected. But tomorrow, with luck and an open road, we would finally reach Fort McPherson, the Delta village where the story of the Artic Circle War began and the starting point for all my fantasies about pursuing the Mad Trapper. I couldn't sleep. All I could think of were those faces in the photographs. They'd done it, hadn't they? Those men survived the cold and the wind and the mountains for seven weeks as the hunted for the killer. Surely we could keep up with them on our touring skis, with our Gore-tex and down clothes, chemical heat packs and white gas stoves. While they'd stomped along on snowshoes or run behind their dog teams, carrying wood and paraffin and often hunting for their food, we'd kick and glide above the snow and boil up a dehydrated dinner within minutes before retiring in Polarguard sleeping bags rather than stinking caribou fur. We had all the advantages of seventy-five years of an outdoor industry that made millions competitively marketing survival gear to dreamers such as us. I could do it, I told myself. I had to do it. I was so close now.
CHAPTER
FOUR On July 7, 1931, two Gwich'in brothers named Edward and William Snowshoes were paddling their canoe upstream on the sluggish Peel River about 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, just a stone's throw from where the Dempster would someday lie. For miles and miles around them the level landscape of the vast Mackenzie Delta showed little but green water and stands of black spruce and stunted birch rising out of tangled willow thickets. Except for the members of the Gwich'in Band and the few whites living among them, the only other large mammals in this part of the Delta were moose, caribou, wolves and bear, all relentlessly pursued through the summer heat by stabbing clouds of black flies and mosquitoes. Stroking around a bend, the brothers were surprised to see a stranger seated on the river's muddy bank. He was hunched up underneath a mosquito net with a rifle close at hand. Nearby lay a crude raft assembled out of just three logs. "Albert Johnson," the Snowshoes called to him. "Albert Johnson!" It was the name of the brother-in-law of a local white trapper. The trapper had told the Gwich'in that Albert Johnson, a railway fireman who drove a "great fire-breathing monster" across the plains of southern Canada, would soon visit. Since not many unknown white men came this way - only a handful since the chaotic Gold Rush days thirty years earlier - the Snowshoes thought that this must be that man. They beached their canoe in the mud and excitedly splashed out to shake his hand. But the stranger did not rise from under the shadow of his net to return their greeting. "What do you want?" he demanded instead. The brothers froze, taken aback by his unfriendliness. In the Delta there were fewer than a thousand people living in well over a thousand square miles, and most of those in just three small villages. People were usually delighted to come across one another in the wilderness. Especially people who were traveling alone and who, like this man, appeared to have very little in the way of provisions. Being kind to the rare parties one was lucky enough to encounter in this country meant more than just courtesy - it could very easily mean survival. "Are you Albert Johnson?" one of the brothers asked hesitantly. Either by a word or some vague gesture from beneath the mosquito net, he seemed to acknowledge that he was. Then, after a moment of uneasy silence, the stranger asked, "Is this the Porcupine River?" The Snowshoes might have laughed if the white man didn't seem so menacing. Just like that fool Fitzgerald, he'd gotten terribly lost. They explained that no, he was in fact on the Peel River. The Porcupine, which feeds the great Yukon River that runs through Alaska and into the Pacific Ocean, was over two hundred miles beyond the Richardson Mountains to the west. The mountains could easily be seen over the tops of the spruce, a great round-shouldered range that shrugged upwards a vertical mile off the delta. The man shook his head and cursed. He said nothing more. The conversation obviously over, the bewildered brothers pushed their canoe back out into the river. They continued upstream to the place they had set a gill net to catch char. On their return back down the Peel three days later, they would find the stranger's raft abandoned three miles above their home in the tiny settlement of Fort McPherson. * * * The Peel joins up with the massive Mackenzie River - the second longest in North America - at the southern end of the Mackenzie Delta, about a hundred miles from where the Delta merges with the Arctic Ocean's Beaufort Sea. This vast, peanut-shaped area is only a few feet above sea level. It's contained by the broad Ramparts Plateau to the east, the Peel Plateau to the south, and the Richardson Mountains to the west, and is situated roughly 3,000 miles north of Seattle. The entire Delta region is named for Alexander Mackenzie, a Scottish fur-trader-turned-explorer. He was the first white man to visit it and, a few years later in 1793, gained far greater fame when he crossed the North American continent (more than ten years before the Lewis and Clark Expedition). The Mackenzie Delta is a land of extremes. It has only two real seasons. Summers begin in late April or May, when rapidly melting snow floods into the region's lakes and rivers. By June the mounting pressure of all this snowmelt finally bursts up through the ice and sweeps it northwards into the Beaufort Sea. Soon there are fifty-seven continuous days when the sun never sets but revolves around and around in the sky. The summer ends just four months later, in late August, when the first snow settles on the ground. By October the rivers are locked down under the ice once again. In December and January there are about thirty straight days of endless night. Looking at the Delta on a modern topographical map, you see a water-world, with blue lakes and blue rivers squiggling everywhere. All this water is divided by thin green lines indicating stands of nearly impenetrable willows and black spruce. These colors, however, are misleading. With the lakes and rivers frozen eight months of the year, and while deep snow blankets the willows and spruce, what the map should show is nothing but white. For a couple of centuries Gwich'in Indians like the Snowshoe brothers have been living, fishing and hunting in the southern Delta. Before the introduction of motor-driven aluminum boats and snow machines, they traveled by canoe in the summer and by snowshoes and dog sleds the rest of the year when the rivers - their trails and highways - are frozen. Until the 1970s, they were known as the "Loucheux," meaning slant-eyed people, for that's how they appeared to the early French-Canadian voyageurs. Their facial features and genetics, as well as their language, suggests that their forebears may have only recently arrived in North America from an ancestral home in northeast Asia. The Peel River was "discovered" in 1839 when a Hudson's Bay Company trader named John Bell was ordered to explore the country to the northwest of Hudson's Bay. The Company's goal was to expand their fur-trading operations and to lay claim to the land for the Crown before the Russians or, worse, the Americans showed up. At the southern end of the Mackenzie Delta, about 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Bell built a small trading post on a willow-choked hill above the Peel. It was named after Murdoch McPherson, the chief trader of the HBC. Fort McPherson (now known officially by its Gwich'in name of Teetl'it Zheh) began to flourish when an Indian encampment moved upriver to share the hill with the brand-new post. A second store, Northern Traders, was soon erected to compete with Hudson's Bay in trading rifles, traps, tobacco and whiskey for the native's furs. In 1860 another pair of competitors arrived when both the Anglicans and the Catholics set up missions to vie for native souls. For a few weeks in the summer of 1899 the village experienced a brief population surge when a hundred half-starved "Stampeders" bound for the Klondike gold fields passed through. A far bigger contingent had started out from Edmonton the year before, but most turned back, froze to death, or starved the previous winter. There were three routes to the Klondike - all killers - and these ambitious dreamers had picked the most sadistic. The "Edmonton Trail" through Fort McPherson was not a trail at all but 3,000 miles of bushwhacking, rafting, and portaging. Jack London wrote that the Stampeders' planned route "took away the breath of the hardiest native, born and bred to the vicissitudes of the Northwest," and James Michener based a novel, Journey, on its many horrors. The gold-seekers endured another Arctic winter just 50 miles from Fort McPherson at a camp they called "Destruction City" before attempting to cross the Richardson Mountains the following summer. Twenty years later the village of Fort McPherson was nearly wiped out when another traveler from the Outside arrived with the Spanish flu. The Gwich'in people had never been exposed to a virus like it and succumbed by the score. Then, just ten years later, another influenza from the Outside ravaged the survivors a second time. There were so few people left in Fort McPherson that, long before 1931, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police abandoned the small outpost they'd briefly established during the Gold Rush years. The only law enforcement remaining was the occasional visit from the three-man patrol in Arctic Red River, more than fifty miles away. In 1931 this whole region was still a frontier - one of the last of its kind in the world. There were still a few places left where one could go to disappear and start completely over. But the recalcitrant stranger coming down the Peel would soon change that forever. * * * Two days after meeting the Snowshoe brothers, the stranger walked up the dirt trail that led into Fort McPherson. The village consisted of mostly ramshackle log-and-driftwood cabins, outhouses, and dog runs scattered around a white-washed Anglican church and the two trading posts. The stranger chose the smaller of the stores and pushed open the door. William Douglas, the manager of Northern Traders, found himself facing a robustly built man in his mid-thirties. The stranger was of average height with sandy-colored hair. The most distinguishing thing about him, Douglas would remember, were his remarkably "cold blue eyes." The stranger ignored Douglas's greeting and his polite questions. Like the Snowshoe brothers, the trader regarded this as very strange. By the time an ordinary traveler reached an outpost like Fort McPherson, more than five hundred miles from Dawson City by trail and river, he was desperate for human contact and full of questions about the country. And Douglas, of course, would be just as eager for news from the Outside, particularly about the economic depression that might soon render worthless the furs that were his primary currency. Fort McPherson was so remote at the time that it hadn't yet installed one of the new radios that were beginning to connect the northern communities. The only news that came in was via the so-called "moccasin telegraph" (meaning word of mouth passed from Indian to Indian) or from the monthly police patrol out of radio-equipped Arctic Red River, fifty miles to the east. "He knew what he wanted, bought it with no hesitation, and appeared to have plenty of cash," the clerk would later recall to police investigators and reporters. What the stranger wanted was a 16-gauge Iver Johnson single-barrel shotgun and twenty-five shells. It wasn't an odd purchase by any means. A shotgun like that would be useful for bringing down ducks and geese in the summer and arctic grouse in the winter. But what the stranger later did with the shotgun was definitely odd - sawing off both the barrel and the stock to create an easily concealable weapon no more than ten inches long. There was only one thing such a modification made the shotgun good for: blowing huge holes in another person at very close quarters. The transaction tersely completed, Douglas watched from the window as the stranger strode back down the trail leading to the river. The trader, and everyone else in the village, soon learned that the stranger had set up camp among some stunted spruce just a mile away. For the next three weeks he remained there, only occasionally venturing into the tight-knit community. But the more the stranger tried to keep to himself, the more he drew the residents' curiosity and apprehension. * * * A day or two after the stranger's arrival, the Snowshoe brothers returned from tending their gill nets on the Peel. They told of meeting the stranger on the river and of his apparent acknowledgement that his name was Albert Johnson. It soon became clear that he was not the brother-in-law of the local white trapper, nor the driver of a fire-breathing monster, nor was he really named Albert Johnson. But the name stuck, and it would be what he was called for six months until he came to be known around the world by a better but equally misleading one. Johnson returned to the village a few days after the return of the brothers. This time he walked into the Hudson's Bay Company store next door to Northern Traders but again ignored any greetings while he silently stalked the aisles. When he found something he wanted, he took it to the counter and paid for it with a brand-new $20 bill. A few minutes later, he would find something else and buy it, too, with another $20 bill. On one occasion he left some change on the counter and indicated that it was to be used for buying candy for the children playing on the dirt path outside. By the time he was done, he'd spent over $700. Combined with the more than $900 he'd spent in Northern Traders for the shotgun and shells and other items, it was obvious Johnson was carrying a small fortune. Some speculated it explained his hostility and apparent paranoia. But where did he get that much money in 1931? From his attitude, and the fact that he didn't seem to have any trapping gear about his camp, it seemed likely to be the proceeds of some sort of crime. And there had been a lot of people - mostly prospectors - who had gone missing in the bush over recent years. Some bodies had even been found in the Nahanni country to the south, two of them headless. But the frontier was so vast, the police so few, and the evidence so quickly destroyed by wild animals, that most of the disappearances and deaths could only be regarded as "suspicious." William Firth, the manager of the Hudson's Bay post, said Johnson was a good customer. But he also admitted that he found the man to be unnerving. A clerk at Northern Traders reported that Johnson asked him if there were "any white men" trapping in the vicinity of the Rat River, in the foothills of the Richardson Mountains. Apparently he was interested in going there. But no one could say why he continued to hang around Fort McPherson during those endless summer days. Aside from his occasional spending sprees at Northern Traders or Hudson's Bay, he seemed to spend the rest of his time secreted in his tent. On a day when a storm was blowing wind and rain across the Delta, a former RCMP native guide and a few other Indians walked down to the stranger's camp. They hailed him as they came close, and the stranger raised a flap of his tent to watch them but said nothing. They invited him to wait out the storm with them at a cabin nearby. All the stranger said was a curt "No." Then he dropped the flap, sealing himself back inside the tent. People began to say Johnson was "bushed" or "bush-crazed," and rumors spread that he must be a criminal on the run. One day he gave an impromptu shooting demonstration. The purpose seemed more to frighten than impress, but it may have been simply to test the balance of a pair of modified weapons. While some Indians watched from across the wide river, Johnson placed two three-foot-high willow sticks in the sand. He pulled out what were either a pair of revolvers or the sawed-off shotgun and a cut-down .22 (weapons that were later recovered), and then began to fire. The observers claimed that with the first simultaneous shots he blasted an inch off the top of each stick. Quickly crossing his hands, or possibly switching hands, he fired again, knocking another inch off the sticks. He repeated this until the sticks had disappeared. No record can be found of the distance he stood from the sticks, but the Indians clearly regarded it as an awesome feat of marksmanship. Johnson's eerie presence was disturbing enough to provoke the local Anglican missionary to report him during a trip to Aklavik, the RCMP command center for policing all of the Western Arctic. (Aklavik - a hundred miles north of Fort McPherson and close to the Beaufort Sea - had been founded seventy-five years earlier by the Hudson's Bay Company for trade with the Inuit. The white traders had found it necessary to establish this second Delta post because the Inuit were constantly feuding with their Gwich'in neighbors in the vicinity of Fort McPherson.) The inspector in charge in Aklavik used his new radio to call Arctic Red River. He ordered its commander, Constable Millen, to interview Johnson on his next patrol down the Peel. * * * Thirty-year-old Edgar Millen, often called "Spike" and "Newt," was a popular man throughout the Arctic. He was known for his easygoing nature, as well as his unparalleled abilities as a pastry chef and step-dancer. He had joined the RCMP at the age of eighteen despite a strong dislike for the regimentation he'd endured at a military school in Edmonton. Seeking freedom and adventure, he'd requested "northern duty" in the Arctic. He'd fallen in love with the wilderness and the few people who inhabited it. Earlier in the summer of 1931 he was offered a corporal's stripes and the command of the post at Arctic Red River. Millen accepted the assignment to the post but declined the honor of command and promotion, stating his strong preference for patrolling over paperwork. The bureaucrats in Ottawa weren't impressed or amused. He was given the command of the post and saddled with the paperwork anyway, but without the stripes and increased pay. Pictures of him show a tall, thin young man with an angular, smiling face. The nickname "Spike" may have come from his slenderness, but it also described his hardiness. In just eight years up North he'd become one of the best travelers around, capable of happily patrolling hundreds of miles by boat, snowshoe, or dog sled regardless of the conditions. On July 21, 1931, Millen boated down the Mackenzie River to its confluence with the Peel River and continued on fifty miles up the Peel. At this point he was probably thinking that the stranger he had been told to check out was just another desperate Outsider hoping to trap or prospect in the nearby Richardson Mountains. When such men showed up, Millen and the other Mounties tried dissuading them with a lecture about the coming months of darkness and minus forty degree mean temperatures, not to mention stories about starvation, scurvy, cabin fever, and marauding bears. If that didn't work, the Mounties tried to at least make sure they were decently equipped and sought to mark their location so that they could check on them (or recover their bodies) during the winter. But after arriving in Fort McPherson and talking to people in the village about the stranger, Millen would have likely been quite a bit more troubled. It's unclear exactly where he met Johnson, because Millen characteristically never filed an official report. Some accounts have them running into each other in the village when Johnson was purchasing more supplies, and others say Millen bushwhacked upstream through the willows to Johnson's camp. All accounts are consistent, however, on a few points. The stranger was uncommunicative and seemed - unsurprisingly, based on his reported behavior - quietly aggressive. He either gave or at least acknowledged the pseudonym of "Albert Johnson." When Millen asked where he'd come from, Johnson claimed he'd spent the last summer on the Canadian prairies, and that he had come into the Arctic on the Mackenzie River. Millen knew Johnson was lying about this, as he'd already learned in the village that Johnson had come down the Peel from the Yukon. But, perhaps a little intimidated by the stranger, Millen didn't press the issue. When he asked Johnson what his plans were, Johnson was evasive. He said something about maybe trapping in the mountains or crossing west into the Yukon. Millen told him that if he did stay and trap on this side of the mountains - the Northwest Territories side - he'd need a permit. He suggested Johnson get one from him now, as the only other places he could have one issued were in Aklavik or Arctic Red River. Johnson either ignored or declined the offer. According to one account, Millen finished the awkward conversation by saying, "Good-bye for now. I am occasionally on patrol duty in the Rat River district, and who knows? We may meet again someday." The same account has Johnson responding with what, given his attitude, must have seemed like a threat: "I'll be looking forward to that meeting." In less than six months, at their next meeting, Johnson would shoot the jovial young Mountie through the heart. GO
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