Exile Hunter (44 page)

At dusk, they spotted
the lights of Fort Liard from afar and spent the night in a stand of
spruce along the river’s steep banks. Though their new civilian
clothing was not as warm as their well-insulated prison jumpsuits,
their newfound sleeping bags kept them snug through the night.

For the next week, they
moved south at a steady pace, passing Fort Nelson, Prophet River, and
a handful of tiny hamlets in between. At times, they were sorely
tempted to come out of the forest and walk the shoulder of this
section of the famed Alaska Highway. With tourist traffic having been
reduced to zero by security measures imposed under the North American
Defense Treaty, most of the road traffic consisted of trucks serving
the oil and gas industry. And since that industry had been
nationalized, the drivers would be government employees who were
required to report any suspicious activity they spotted along their
route.

By the time the three
fugitives had reached the halfway mark between Fort Nelson and Dawson
Creek, they were running low on food again and halved their daily
rations. Though they had passed many small farmsteads, none of the
men had proposed poaching farm animals, until Browning smelled sheep
one evening before dusk and spotted a flock grazing a few hundred
meters away.

“Back in Montana, it
would be lambing season about now,” he commented idly.

“A broiled lamb chop
would be mighty tasty,” Rhee added. “Maybe we should do a little
recon.”

“No thanks,” Linder
replied. “I’m not hungry enough to get caught for rustling.”

“Will?” Rhee asked.

“I’m a rancher.
Where I come from, we shoot rustlers. Besides, where there are sheep,
there’ll be dogs. One wrong move and you could get us all busted.
Forget it.”

But Linder could tell
from the look in Rhee’s eye that he would not forget so easily. And
later that night, Linder awoke to the sound of a broken twig and
found Rhee creeping back into camp from the direction of the sheep
pasture. To Linder’s relief, the Korean was empty handed.

“No luck, eh?”
Linder remarked as Rhee unzipped his sleeping bag.

“Damned sheep,”
Rhee cursed. “I slipped inside the wire and crept up to a bunch of
them three times with my knife in my teeth, but the moment I got
close, they trotted away. The moon was too bright to risk standing up
and chasing after them, so I came back.”

At that, Browning, whom
both had thought was asleep, let out a deep guffaw.

“Dumb greenhorn,”
he told Rhee. “The sheep mistook you for another animal because you
came up to them on all fours. If you had walked over to them like a
two-legged master, you could have had your pick of the flock.”

“Damn,” now you
tell me,” Rhee replied lamely.

“You never asked,”
Browning rejoined. “Now here’s another tip. If you ever go
thieving like that again without telling Linder and me, you might not
wake up the next morning. The driver was strike one. This is strike
two. No more.”

Though it was too dark
under the spruces for Linder to see the expression on either man’s
face, he knew that neither was smiling.

* * *

The rivers and
streams were frozen hard and snow still covered the ground in places,
but each day the wind grew milder and a few more trees showed buds on
their branches. From time to time, they heard the beat of wings
overhead and saw ducks and geese headed north to their summer
breeding grounds. Green shoots rose from dead tufts of grass and
danced in the wind, luring rabbits from their burrows. Groundhogs by
the dozen popped out from their mounds to look around, drawing tossed
sticks from the men, who had watched Scotty kill them this way. But
the rodents moved too fast to be hit.

Every time the three
men saw the lights of a village at night or the faraway silhouettes
of buildings, they steered clear and sought to remain hidden among
the trees. After two more days, they cut their daily rations further,
down to one meal per day, eaten at mid-morning, as they were down to
their last kilo of steel-cut oats and little else. Though it was a
prisoner’s reflex to hide a few bread crusts or pieces of meal bar
deep in one’s pockets, Linder shared everything he had, holding
nothing back.

They continued to the
south, moving parallel to the highway across hilly and wooded
terrain, with stiff climbs and scrambles down into steep-sided
east-west valleys. Just past a deserted settlement, the men camped
for the night. Having eaten little for three days, they could think
of nothing but food. Rhee revisited the issue of stealing livestock,
this time proposing to leave one of their fifty-dollar Canadian
banknotes to pay for the meat, but Browning rejected the idea.
Stealing the animal and leaving the money would draw unwanted
attention, since only a fugitive was likely to do either.

The next day, upon
entering a clearing in the forest, they came upon a horse hitched to
a crude sledge. The horse’s bridle was looped around a tree branch,
and across the back of the sledge lay the pelts of what looked like a
fox, a beaver, and several muskrats or badgers, alongside a weathered
double-barreled shotgun and a leather ammo pouch.

Browning seized the gun
at once and then scanned the clearing for signs of its owner, who was
not long in coming. He was a broad-shouldered trapper in his fifties
or sixties, with clear, intelligent eyes and neatly trimmed gray hair
and beard, though his bib overalls and parka were patched and worn.
He entered the clearing from the direction of the nearby stream and
approached the trio calmly, showing no sign of fear or alarm. He went
at once to the horse, ran his hand through its mane and laid his
walking stick across the sledge where his shotgun had been.

“Howdy,” the man
greeted them while sizing up each of the fugitives in turn.

“Good to see you,”
Browning replied evenly. “It’s been a long while since we’ve
seen anyone out here.”

“How can I help you
fellas? Am I right that you’re just passing through?”

Browning hesitated and
Linder could see that he was weighing how to respond.

“You got it right,
mister. We’re headed home and don’t mean to harm anyone. But
we’re short of food and would be grateful if you could spare us a
few bites till we get to the next town.”

“Always ready to help
travelers in need,” the man replied with a simple dignity that
Linder found disarming. He removed his backpack, set it on the
sledge, and reached deep inside, removing a thick-crusted loaf of
brown bread, a half-dozen smoked fish, and a slab of cured meat. Then
he slowly withdrew a long hunting knife from a scabbard hanging from
his belt and cut the loaf and meat into four equal pieces before
handing a fish and a piece of bread and meat to each man.

“You don’t have to
worry about me. I live alone and I’m the only soul for kilometers
around.”

“Thanks,” Browning
said as he accepted his portion of the food. “But this doesn’t
leave much for you to eat later.”

“I’ll be fine with
what’s left,” the stranger replied. Yet Linder could see an
unspoken question in the man’s eyes.

“I’m sorry, my
friend, but we’ll have to take your gun with us,” Browning said,
addressing the man’s apparent point of concern.

For the first time the
stranger appeared annoyed.

“I understand your
situation. But you know it won’t be safe for you to fire it around
here.”

That much was true.
Using it to hunt game would attract notice. But the fugitives
couldn’t just leave it with the trapper and risk his using it to
threaten them or signal others.

“Why don’t you hang
it on a tree along the trail where I can find it after a while?”
the trapper proposed.

Browning looked at
Linder and then at Rhee before agreeing. Then all four men sat on the
snow-covered ground to eat together in silence. When the food was
finished, the trapper rose to leave.

“Good luck to you,”
he said in parting. “I hope you find what you’re after.”

The three fugitives
walked on for an hour or more without speaking. Linder felt a nagging
unease at having taken something of great value from the trapper.

“Well, at least we
left him his horse,” Linder noted. The comment drew an uneasy laugh
from the other two men but failed to make Linder feel better.

Five kilometers further
on, Browning slung the rifle from a low tree branch overhanging the
trail after wrapping the breech and muzzle with plastic film.

Later that evening they
used a thick pole to break through the ice on a frozen pond and
caught some fish using Scotty’s techniques. While roasting the fish
over a fire, Linder and Browning interpreted this success as fate’s
endorsement of their decision to leave the trapper unharmed. This
time even Rhee agreed.

As he gazed across the
fire at Browning’s weather-beaten face, Linder was troubled by how
much the Montanan seemed to have aged since they met on the forestry
detail only a few months before. His tall, lean, broad-shouldered
frame appeared stooped, his face haggard and his right hand had
acquired a tremor.

“Not far from Montana
now, Will,” Linder remarked as Browning handed him a piece of
skewered fish to roast over the fire.

“Yep. The border
won’t be more than a day or two away once we hit the rail lines,”
the older man replied.

“You must realize the
DSS will be waiting for you if you show up at your ranch, don’t
you?” Linder probed.

Browning nodded as he
held his own skewer above the embers.

“Yeah, but I’m not
so sure I’d want to go back to the ranch, anyhow. It’s an odd
thing, but somewhere along the way I think I’ve lost my love of the
land. What the camps have taught me more than anything is to hate
physical labor. All I care about now is my wife and kids. I think
that, if I make it home, I’ll never want to be more than a step
away from my wife again. Wherever she goes, I’ll be right on her
heels.” Browning looked up and Linder could see tears welling in
his large brown eyes.

“Do you have a safe
place away from the ranch where your wife could come to meet you?”
Linder asked. “Why not stay in Alberta and have her come across to
the Canadian side?”

“I’ve been thinking
of something like that,” the rancher replied. “I have some
friends in Calgary who helped me out when I was running cross-border
ops during the insurgency. I might look them up.”

“Good idea,” Linder
responded. “Are you planning to enter the city or might you be able
to phone someone from the outskirts and arrange for him to pick you
up?”

“I’d prefer to call
if I can find any of their numbers. By the way, you’re welcome to
join me if you don’t have other plans.”

“Thanks,” Linder
answered, “but I’m headed further south and would rather stay as
far away from cities as I can. I think my biggest challenge will be
keeping under the radar while I bypass Edmonton and Calgary.”

At this, Linder tore
into his skewered fish and let out a murmur of satisfaction.

“If I were you,”
Browning suggested, “I’d try hitching a ride on a freight train
this side of Edmonton. That way, you’d limit your exposure in urban
areas and cover a lot more ground. There’s always a risk of getting
clubbed by a guard, but you’ve already developed a hard head in the
camps. Hell, I’ve ridden the rails plenty of times; I could show
you how to get around.”

“I’d like that,”
Linder answered. “It’s a heck of a long way to Salt Lake on
foot.”

“So you’re still
heading to Utah?” Browning asked with a doubtful expression. “How
do you plan to stay out of harm’s way in a place like that? Utah is
a restricted zone, for God’s sake.”

“That’s exactly
what makes it possible,” Linder answered with a gleam in his eye.
“You see, restricted zones are more about keeping people in than
keeping them out. If you’re registered to live in a place like Utah
or Idaho, the government doesn’t want you picking up stakes to seek
your fortune in Chicago or New York. They want you to stay put so you
don’t mess up the Five-Year Plan.”

“But the restricted
zones are where the insurgency was hottest,” Browning pointed out.
“They’ve got camps and military bases scattered all over the
place. How will you get through all the checkpoints? What will you do
for I.D.?”

Linder laughed.

“You haven’t seen
the government security apparatus from the inside, as I have. The
national I.D. database is a joke. First off, their computers don’t
work half the time and the new biometric I.D.’s are so expensive
and easily hacked or corrupted that, outside the major cities, the
government has gone back to issuing old-fashioned paper I.D.’s. Out
in the small towns and rural areas, nothing at all is digital and
there’s a thriving black market in forged documents. It’s the
Wild West all over again. Outside the Fort Apache stockade, the
Indians rule.”

“So you really think
you can survive by going underground?” Rhee asked, suddenly taking
an interest in the conversation.

“Not exactly
underground. More like underclass,” Linder replied with a hearty
laugh. “I’ll dress like a homeless drifter, work as a migrant
farm worker or day laborer, and score the best phony papers my
Canadian dollars can buy. I’ll be free to go wherever I want and,
as long as I don’t shoot anybody or walk around screaming
anti-government slogans, nobody in authority will give me so much as
a second look.”

* * *

Two days later, a
day’s walk from Dawson Creek, Alberta, amid increasing signs of
human habitation, the men ran short of food once again. This time, a
nagging fear that local town-dwellers might betray them to the police
in hopes of collecting a reward strengthened their determination to
stay far away from settlements. Each man vowed that he would rather
starve than face recapture.