Exile Hunter (45 page)

But against Linder’s
advice, Rhee finally persuaded Browning to accompany him on a raid
shortly after dusk to capture a lamb from an isolated homestead they
had passed. It was a cold, misty night when Linder draped a sleeping
bag over the farm’s electrified fence and stood watch as the two
men strode across the meadow toward a stout ewe and her twin lambs.
Upon reaching the closest lamb, Browning grabbed it and set off at a
trot toward the fence, but seconds later an unseen dog raised the
alarm. The men were still at least fifty meters from their goal when
the Border Collie caught up with them. Having been forewarned by
Linder, Rhee stopped the dog with a savage martial arts kick and the
two men made it over the fence with their bleating quarry. But before
Browning reached the tree line, two distant rifle shots rang out.

Linder watched Browning
fall and roll, holding the lamb close to his stomach with both arms
like a football. Then he rose slowly and limped toward the tree line
with Rhee supporting him. Once safely behind a tree, Rhee seized the
lamb, silenced it with a savage twist to the neck, and rolled
Browning’s trouser leg up to the knee.

“In the army, we’d
call this a lucky shot—enough to get you a medevac but not enough
to kill or cripple you,” Rhee pronounced. “Good for you that it
was a small bore round and passed clean through the meat of your
calf. Does it feel like it might have hit a bone or a tendon? Any
sharp pain?”

Browning shook his
head.

“Aches like a
sonofabitch, but I think I can walk on it with some help,” Browning
answered. “Let’s try.”

Rhee wrapped the wound
hastily with some gauze and a compression wrap he had found in the
ranger’s cabin, then unrolled Browning’s trouser leg and helped
him to his feet.

Next Linder lowered
Browning’s backpack onto his shoulders, letting the rancher lean on
him while he ventured his first few steps. At that moment a steady,
drenching rain began to fall.

“Hand me my walking
stick and let’s get out of here,” the Montanan declared. “If I
bleed out, take my stuff and leave me behind, do you hear? I mean
that.”

“We’ll carry you
till either your heart gives out or ours do. But I don’t think it
will come to that. Our sheepherder is not going to come after us on a
night like this. He probably has a wife and kids holding him back and
pleading for him to wait till morning.”

Rhee’s prediction was
a good one, for the fugitives trod on unmolested for another three
hours through the rain before stopping for the night under an
overhanging rock in a steep-sided ravine. Since the mist hampered
visibility and the forest was dense, they risked lighting a small
fire to warm up and dry their clothing. While Linder prepared the
fire, Rhee unwrapped Browning’s wound and cleaned it before
applying fresh gauze and tape.

Meanwhile, Browning
kept his mind occupied instructing Linder in how to butcher the lamb,
and before long they were feasting on roasted lamb chops. They ate
every last bite of flesh and sucked on the bones before drifting off
to sleep around the banked fire.

In the morning, though
Browning’s leg had swollen, he declared himself fit to walk, and
the three men set off again to the south. With each hour on the
trail, however, Browning’s pace slowed. During their midday break,
Linder watched closely as the Montanan drank his mug of hot water and
noticed droplets of sweat break out on the man’s forehead.

“Managing to stay
warm?” Linder asked.

“For the moment,”
the older man replied, looking away. A few minutes later, Browning’s
face had gone ashen and his shoulders trembled.

“We need to spend
another hour or two on the road, Will,” Linder coaxed, holding
Browning’s feverish hand in his. “It’s important to make it to
the next valley so we can pitch camp without being seen. Do you think
you can do it?”

“Sure thing,”
Browning answered in a strained voice. “I’ll feel better once I’m
moving again.”

“Okay then, let’s
go,” Rhee said, pacing nearby.

They plodded on for
more than two hours before reaching the steep banks of a small river,
less than a mile from an old wooden bridge across the main highway.
By the time they reached a secluded spot to settle in, Browning had
stumbled more than a few times and could no longer walk without
assistance. When Rhee removed the pus-soaked bandage from Browning’s
wounded leg, he found the injury dark and grotesquely swollen, with
red streaks leading up the thigh. Though Browning was barely
conscious, his breathing was rapid and he moaned with pain when Rhee
tried to wash the wound. Rhee stepped away from his patient and
gestured for Linder to follow.

“It’s blood
poisoning,” Rhee said quietly. “He’s gone into shock and we
have nothing to treat him with. Without antibiotics, he could be dead
by morning.”

“You stay with him
and do what you can to keep him comfortable till I can get a fire
going,” Linder told Rhee. “Then I want you to get some rest. I’ll
stay up and do what I can for him.”

During the night
Browning slipped into a coma and Linder drifted off to sleep soon
after. By the time Linder awoke, Browning’s body was cold. Though
he reproached himself for not having done more to save the Montanan,
Linder realized that the most he could have done was offer comfort,
and perhaps not even that if the man never regained consciousness.
Having grown jaded in the camps to men dying before his eyes, he
thought of going back to sleep but instead tapped Rhee gently on the
leg to wake him.

Rhee emerged from a
deep sleep, took in the news that Browning was dead, and without
saying a word began helping Linder to strip the corpse, weigh it down
with Browning’s rock-stuffed backpack, and toss it into the swollen
river. Linder stayed and watched the body sink while composing a
silent prayer to the God of Browning’s Protestant forefathers. Then
he and Rhee divided the dead man’s belongings between them, burned
the excess, and put out the fire. The two men set out on the road
without even stopping to eat.

Though Linder held his
tongue, the sight of Browning’s lifeless body had brought to mind
Scotty’s description of Mark Rhee as an unlucky one who would be a
burden to his teammates. It also reminded him of Browning’s warning
to Rhee not to make a third mistake after having murdered the truck
driver and run off to steal sheep. Clearly, it was Rhee’s second
sheep-stealing raid that had caused Browning’s death. Yet Browning
had gone along willingly and the fatal bullet could as easily have
struck Rhee. But try as he might not to pass judgment, Linder could
not help blaming Rhee for nearly everything that had gone wrong since
their escape.

It did not take long
for Linder’s feelings about Rhee to rise to the surface. When
encamped or during breaks, Linder often avoided eye contact with the
younger man. Before long, the stretches of silence between them grew
painfully long. From time to time, when Rhee’s back was turned,
Linder cast baleful stares at him that lingered just long enough for
Rhee to catch out of the corner of his eye. Over the ensuing days,
the weight of Linder’s blame, and possibly Rhee’s own remorse,
seemed to bring out a paranoid fear in the Korean that Linder
intended to do him in. Linder knew that the tension was near the
breaking point but he no longer cared.

* * *

Shortly before
reaching Dawson Creek, the two men agreed to follow Browning’s
suggestion and proceed due east toward the north-south rail line with
the objective of traveling through the heavily populated
Edmonton-Calgary corridor aboard a freight train. Leaving the Alaska
Highway outside Fort St. John, they headed east along the Peace River
Valley with the sky black as pitch but for the glittering of stars
and the soft glow of the Milky Way.

As they headed back
into the wilderness with scarcely a bite of food in their rucksacks,
Linder remembered something that Scotty had said at the start of
their journey: that man has more endurance than any animal. Man
drives on, Scotty had said, not from hope, which he eventually
abandons, but by a relentless drive for self-assertion, a persistent
striving for something more, a drive both physical and insubstantial,
to which he harnesses the awesome power of his consciousness. Though
man may live in the wild on the same rations as a wolf or a bear, he
clings even more ferociously to life than they and, if he chooses,
can endure greater suffering than any beast.

By this point, nothing
more than each man’s naked endurance and will to live kept them
together on their journey to the south.

For the next week they
put mind over matter as they drove their bodies relentlessly across
hill, valley, and stream, navigating by the North Star and surviving
on fish, assorted roots and shoots, wild greens, boiled acorns, and
raw pine nuts. Having learned the rudiments of winter foraging from
old-timers on the timber-felling squad at Camp N-320, and having
practiced the art under Scotty’s tutelage, Linder and Rhee brewed
their pine-needle tea each night and wished they had paid closer
attention to their old guide’s instructions.

After traveling so long
on so little nourishment, their swollen legs tired easily now. They
decided to cover a shorter distance each day to allow more time for
foraging and to avoid the increasing risk of detection from local
settlers, traveling only during the long-shadow hours around dawn and
dusk. While they valued the added rest and greater security, they
slept fitfully while they lay concealed from mid-morning through late
afternoon each day. With travel increasingly hazardous the closer
they came to Edmonton, they scouted carefully before crossing open
ground or streams, as even a single report of suspicious activity
might trigger a search that could escalate into a full-blown manhunt.

On the afternoon of the
seventh day, they spotted a rail line from high ground some three
kilometers distant. They approached through the trees to within a few
hundred meters of it and hid in a niche under a massive rock to watch
for patrols. From their map, they expected that this would be the
Great Slave Lake Railway, Canada’s northernmost rail line that
connected Edmonton and Calgary with the rich Peace River Oil Sands
complex to the north. And it meant that they had come within two
hundred miles of Edmonton’s outskirts. If, as Browning had
proposed, they could catch a train in one of the rail yards ahead and
ride it all the way to the U.S. border, Montana might be only a
couple of days away.

From behind a
protective screen of conifers along the western side of the tracks,
they kept watch until sundown, seeing a half dozen trains pass in
each direction, but no police patrols. Shortly after dark, Linder and
Rhee advanced toward the rail line at a place where a bend blocked
the view to either side. There they crossed the tracks and headed
south, just inside the tree line and parallel to the tracks. As they
walked, Linder listened carefully for the sound of approaching trains
but heard nothing except the wind whispering through the treetops.

They had walked for
nearly an hour when Rhee suddenly grabbed Linder from behind and
pulled him to the ground. Confused at this, Linder turned around and
noticed over his shoulder the brilliant headlamps of a train coming
at them from around the bend.

As the train thundered
by, Linder saw the silhouettes of travelers through the cars’ grimy
windows and guessed that these were workers returning to Edmonton
after weeklong stints in the mines, oilfields, and logging sites to
the north.

“Do you think anyone
noticed us?” Rhee asked nervously once the train went by.

“I don’t think so,
but everybody on that train probably works for one state-owned
company or another, so you can bet they’ll know about the cash
rewards being offered for escaped prisoners. If they did see us, I
wouldn’t put it past them to report it.”

“Oh, shit,” Rhee
muttered.

“All they’d have to
do is jot down when they saw us and the Mounties could be back here
with dogs in a few hours.”

“Wait a minute,”
Rhee broke in. “Remember what Scotty taught us once about walking
the rails?” Rhee asked

“Something about
using a walking stick or a branch to throw them off our scent?”

“Yeah,” Rhee
brightened. “Let’s go back to the tracks and give it a try.”

Along the way, Rhee
broke off a long straight branch from a tree, shortened it to a man’s
height, and carried it to the top of the embankment.

“Now, mind your
balance and keep pace with me so we don’t fall off,” Rhee
cautioned, standing atop one rail and holding the branch out for
Linder to grasp. “Meanwhile, keep your eyes and ears open in case
there’s another train headed our way.”

For nearly an hour,
under the light of a full moon, the two fugitives stepped lightly
along the rails without setting a foot on the ground until they
reached a narrow wooden trestle over a frozen river.

“Wait a second,”
Linder spoke up in alarm as they approached the abutment. “You’re
not proposing that we walk all the way across that thing, are you?”

“No, just part way,”
Rhee replied, slowing his pace to match Linder’s. “Why, can’t
you handle heights? You seemed okay with that back in the mountains.”

“Yeah, but there I
always had something to hang on to,” Linder confessed, slowing
further. “I’ve been terrified of heights all my life. It’s not
so bad any more, but this one is way too much.”

“Okay, then, here’s
what we’ll do,” Rhee answered in a soldierly, take-charge sort of
way. “We’re going to walk out just far enough until we’re over
the ice, climb down the timbers, and then cross the river on foot.
That way, if any dogs still manage to follow us, they’ll lose our
scent over the trestle and, with any luck, won’t know where to pick
it up on the ice. Are you with me?”