Primal Scream Read Online Free PDF

better than anyone, so that's why Spann was now in the cockpit with him.
    The white waste under the plane today was a sea of clouds, with mountain peaks jutting here and there like the tips of icebergs. Hidden below the surface were the Pacific and Kitimat ranges of the Coast Mountains, which hugged the ocean from Vancouver to Prince Rupert. Above Squamish and Anahim Lake and the Nechako, the flight to Kispiox took four hours plus before they broke through the clouds over Totem Lake.
    "The frying pan beneath your seat. Pass it to me," said Dodd.
    The pilot turned it upside down, then wedged it in under his ass.
    "What's, that for?" asked Spann.
    "Billy Bishop's trick." Bishop had been Canada's flying ace in World War I, with seventy-two shoot-downs to his credit. "We're coming in over the camp, and I don't want my balls shot off."
    "What about me?"
    "You got balls?" said Dodd.
    Of all Canadian-built bush planes the De Havilland Beaver was the best. This all-metal, high-wing monoplane powered by a 450-h.p. Pratt & Whitney Wasp Jr. engine was used in sixty countries around the world. Its excellent short-field takeoff and landing got you into and out of the wildest, most dangerous spots on Earth. The Beaver descended sharply into the valley around the lake, Dodd zipping over the treetops to skim the snowy ice, intent on catching shadows cast by any snowdrifts, for hit one of them while landing and the plane could flip. Then up they zoomed over the tents on the northern shore, Spann gazing down on the tepee and snowed-in sundance circle below as the Beaver banked in a tight arc and flew over them again. Bffum . . . bffum . . . bffum . . . went both skis with retracted wheels, Dodd skipping the struts over the icy lake like stones to see if the skids behind turned dark from seeping water.
    Like Wop May on the Eagle River, the Beaver skated to a halt near the lake's southern shore in a billow of powder crystals.
    "The snowmobile in back. Help me unload it," said Dodd.
    The spew from the landing settled, but the snowfall went on, the rain storm washing Vancouver freezing up here in the north, gaps between the fluffy flakes filled with eerie silence. A silence soon deafened by the noise pollution of an approaching motor.
    The last dog patrol had been made in 1969 from Old Crow in the Yukon to Fort McPherson—where Johnson rafted—in the Northwest Territories. In the same way that cars replaced horse patrols in 1916, from 1955 on snowmobile patrols replaced dog sleds.
    The Mountie coming toward the plane was Staff Sergeant Bob George, whose Indian name was Ghost Keeper. A full-blooded Plains Cree from Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, he was a native medicine man strengthened by his spirit quest as a boy when he was sent alone into the wilds to learn who he was. Though not descended from one of the West Coast tribes, he was veteran of many a sweat lodge held with troubled Indian kids sent to him by elders of the totem people to rediscover magic known before white colonization. Behind such conquest had come Residential Schools, run by churches for cultural genocide, and now the Force was closing in on nearly a hundred pedophiles who'd preyed on children seized from native families in the name of God.
    George was on that task force.
    Like Spann, he was bundled up in the Mounties' winter dress. A hefty man with black hair, bronze skin, and wide cheekbones, he wore a beaver-skin cap with ear flaps tied above, a navy fur-lined parka with a yellow bottom stripe, and whipcord trousers stuffed into sealskin mukluk boots. His gloves were thick and awkward, so in climbing off the snowmobile he merely banged palms with Spann and Dodd.
    "Kathy."
    "Sir."
    "Bush."
    "Bob."
    Greetings completed.
    He helped them lower the snowmobile from the plane and unload the other supplies in the hold. "Got a block of ice for you to fly back. Mad Dog used a blowtorch to cut the corpse from the freeze."
    "How'd you get close?" Spann asked.
    "Trust," said George. "We're in