Primal Scream Read Online Free PDF Page A

leave tracks, or by trudging in ever widening circles until he seemed to vanish, wearing his snowshoes backward to baffle the hunters. On January 30, smoke was noticed twisting up from a deep ravine, investigation of which led the cops to Johnson behind a fallen tree barricade. Twilight was upon them as the Mounties plowed through deep snow into the gorge, where a marksman's shot from Johnson dropped Constable Millen dead. By dawn next morning, the killer had escaped.
    The manhunt in the Arctic caught the public's imagination. The Canadian press tagged Johnson as the "Mad Trapper," and millions more followed the chase over the new medium of radio. American newspapers had corned the motto and printed: Will the Mounties get their man this time? Inspector Eames was livid. Johnson had twice outwitted the Force, and by now could be anywhere along the Arctic Circle. By traveling solo and living off the land, the quarry, not the hunters, had logistics on his side.
    That's when the call went out for Wop May.
    Lieutenant Wilfred "Wop" May had earned his reputation flying Sopwith Camels in World War I, where he and Roy Brown, another Canuck, shot down and killed "Red Baron" Manfred von Richthofen. (You thought it was Snoopy?) He returned a hero to Edmonton in 1919 and began the first commercial bush operation in Canada, doing wing walking over rodeos for promotion. Eames asked May to track Johnson from the air, so on February 3, 1932, he pulled the starter of his Bellanca Pacemaker to whirl the propeller into a blur, easing the throttle ahead until the skis began to slide along the snowy runway, and he took off to bank north through a blizzard to rendezvous with the Mounted Police at the junction of the Rat and Peel rivers.
    In her imagination, Spann sat in the seat beside Wop May. The plane flew low to crisscross the white waste as she tried to spot Johnson's tracks with field glasses. Then she saw them, almost eroded by snowdrifts, heading west toward the mountains dividing the Yukon from Alaska. It took weeks to follow the trail, as Johnson used caribou tracks to hide his own, but finally May spotted the Mad Trapper on the frozen Eagle River.
    Police dogs barking, the Mounties closed in. Then-quarry shed his snowshoes and made for the bank, trying to claw his way up the steep slope. When Staff Sergeant Hersey of the Signals Corps neared, Johnson shot him in the lungs and one knee. The police fanned out along the riverbanks, and opened fire as Johnson struggled across the open ice. Burrowing into the snow with his pack for a rifle rest, he answered the Mounties' demands he give up by blazing back. Bullets ripped into his shoulders, hip, and legs; then he was killed by a shot which shattered his spine.
    May landed the bush plane in a billow of snow and waded hip-deep to the body. The emaciated, twisted face was frozen in a grimace. The gaping mouth in a matted beard seemed to laugh at the police. A tin can tied about his neck held $2,410 in U.S. and Canadian bills, along with several gold teeth. Who Johnson was and where he hailed from remains a mystery, and the Mad Trapper secured the myth of the Mounted Police.
    Yes , thought Spann with a mental sigh. Those were the days.
    She glanced at Dodd and knew he yearned for such a hunt, too.
    It occurred to Kathy she might have been too hard on Hollywood, for had she not cast Lee Marvin as Dodd, and nothing was more Canadian than fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants bush pilots.
    The plane droned on.
    The hunt for the Mad Trapper demonstrated the need for police air support, so that same year the RCMP used RCAF planes to arrest rumrunners smuggling booze to the States parched by Prohibition. Flying 3,600,000 miles a year, Air Services now owned twenty-eight aircraft coast to coast, but those in E Division were all requisitioned to fly emergency response teams from B.C. detachments north to reinforce the Mad Dog at Totem Lake. Bush Dodd's Beaver was chartered as backup because he knew the area