Twenty minutes later, the thunder was closer. The wind was picking up as well, and I was about to get my rain gear handy when I heard Sampson bellowing, “Alex! Alex! Come here! Fast!”
My first thought was Bear! And he doesn’t have the rifle!
I grabbed the shotgun, raced to the river, and came out on the bank in time to see John running along the sandbar, his fly rod nearly bent in two.
“Alex!” he shouted. “I’ve got one! It’s a monster!”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Bring a phone to take a picture in case I can land it!”
By the time I’d waded the back channel and run down the sandbar to him, Sampson was kneeling in the shallows by a cutthroat trout that was at least a foot long.
“It’s huge!” I said.
“Told you.” He grinned. “Now I’m going to scoop it up with my hands and you take the picture.”
I set down the shotgun and dug out my phone. He lifted the fish with both hands and pushed it toward me as I snapped several pictures. Then he gently lowered the fish into the water with one hand, grabbed the fly with a pair of thin pliers, and twisted the hook free. He held the fish by its tail, moved it back and forth in the current several times, and let it go.
The fish lazed there a moment and then disappeared into the swifter water with a flick of its tail.
Sampson looked at me like he couldn’t believe it. “I caught a big trout on a fly, Alex. How is that possible?”
“I think someone might have been helping you a little, John.”
He smiled wistfully. “It is a beautiful place for her.”
“It is,” I said.
It was nearly four thirty. The thunder was getting even closer. I could see dark clouds cresting the mountain opposite us as we started back up the sandbar.
The sun vanished behind clouds. The wind gusted, threw grit in our eyes.
As we neared the back channel that separated us from the riverbank and our camp, we heard a faint buzzing noise far to the north.
Sampson said, “What’s that?”
“No idea,” I said, raising my binoculars from the chest harness and seeing nothing at first.
But as the buzz changed to a steady chop and thump, there was a flash in the air that I caught through the trees, the sun reflecting off a windshield that quickly became a helicopter flying low over the water as it arced around the bend three hundred yards north of us and flew south fast.
“What the hell? Helicopters aren’t allowed in the wilderness,” Sampson said.
“They can’t land in the wilderness,” I said just as a man leaned out the right rear door of the chopper with an AR rifle.
“Gun!” we both shouted and leaped into the back channel, going for the riverbank, cover, and our weapons.
The gunman opened up. Bursts of bullets from an automatic weapon skipped across the water and tore into the sandbar and the channel water right behind us.
Chapter
83
Matthew Butler hadn’t flown a helicopter in more than three years and never a Bell Jet Ranger. He had hoped to pilot the chopper to Swan River Valley the evening before and then head upriver first thing in the morning.
But it had taken him longer than expected to become familiar with the Jet Ranger’s sensitive controls. He’d finally flown the helicopter south at midday and landed in a clear-cut in the backcountry west of Condon, Montana, where he, Big DD, and Vincente set about removing the rear doors.
It was after three p.m. when they’d finally lifted off in search of Cross and Sampson. Big DD sat in the copilot’s seat. Vincente was harnessed in the back, tethered to a hook set center high on the rear wall. He wore ski goggles and carried an AR rifle modified for full automatic.
Figuring Cross and Sampson were somewhere in the upper river, Butler had flown in a more or less direct line to high above Big Salmon Lake. There, he’d dropped altitude, picked up the South Fork of the Flathead, and followed it upriver.
They’d crossed Murphy Flat, where the Flathead was joined by the White River and broke up into several braided channels. They saw a young couple in kayaks pulling small rafts of gear but neither Cross nor Sampson. Nor did they see them in the broad canyon upriver, where Butler was able to fly two hundred feet over the water. They saw no one in the first four miles.
By that point they’d been in the air almost an hour and forty-five minutes and their fuel gauge showed a little more than half a tank before reserve.
“We’ll give it fifteen more minutes,” Butler said as gusty winds began to buffet them.