The last time I saw Scarlet alive, rain from a dismal September sky was pattering the Salish Sea. Despite the weather, dozens of people lined the cliff of San Juan Island鈥檚 Limekiln Point State Park, the best place to watch killer whales from land. It was as if they鈥檇 turned out to pay their respects to a funeral train.

I was on a NOAA Zodiac with a team that included a University of California at Davis wildlife veterinarian听who was hoping to dose the sick three-year-old orca with an antiparasitic听solution. As we approached Scarlet, she was struggling to keep up with her mother and three older siblings, all members of the Pacific Northwest鈥檚 critically endangered Southern Resident killer whales. The vet shot two darts filled with medication, but up close it was obvious that this and the other unprecedented attempts to save Scarlet weren鈥檛 going to be successful.

Scarlet鈥檚 once white eye patches had turned bilious orange, and instead of highlighting the Rubenesque form of a healthy killer whale, they wrapped tightly around the shape of her blubberless skull. She鈥檇 lost so much of her buoyant, insulating fat that it looked like just surfacing for air was an effort.

Less than a week later, after her mother had been seen several times without her, Scarlet was officially declared dead. The little orca likely just slipped away and sank forever into the cold, green water.

Losing Scarlet dropped the Southern Resident鈥檚 population to 74, its lowest level in 35 years. Since she was a female with breeding potential, her death nudges the whales that much closer to extinction.

The Southern Residents are sliding toward听oblivion for three main reasons: fish, fish, fish. Chinook salmon makes听up at least 80 percent of their diet, but many Chinook runs are also endangered. Man-made noise from vessels makes it harder for the orcas to communicate and hunt for what few fish are left. When they do catch a fish, it鈥檚 loaded with industrial and agricultural toxics.

The attention garnered by Scarlet and, last summer, by her podmate, , who carried around her dead calf for 17 days, spurred some government officials to action. Canada curtailed salmon fishing in several known orca feeding grounds, continued a noise-reduction program for ships heading to and from Vancouver, earmarked some funding for salmon recovery, and finally matched the U.S. requirement to stay at least 600 feet听from killer whales.

On the Washington State side of the Salish Sea, governor Jay Inslee formed the and challenged the group to come up with a package of 鈥渂old鈥� proposals to save the orcas.

After a series of meetings and surveys that generated more than 18,000 public comments over six months, the task force and 36-point plan on November 16. As an in-depth primer on the Southern Residents and Chinook salmon and the complex anthropogenic impacts that both have faced for more than 100 years, the report is an excellent read. As a set of actions to save both linked species, it鈥檚 a strong push in the right direction including, as advertised, some bold and contentious ideas, such as听a moratorium on whale watching the Southern Residents.

Governor Inslee, who鈥檚 for president in 2020 on the strength of Washington鈥檚 burgeoning green economy and his attention to climate change and other environmental issues, kept up the task force鈥檚 momentum by turning its听recommendations into more than $1 billion worth of items in the state鈥檚 proposed 2019鈥�21 budget, which will be up for approval with the legislature this spring.

Much of that funding would go to enforce existing regulations protecting habitat and to continue or accelerate restoration projects, all aimed at increasing Chinook salmon, because no Chinook equals no orcas. It also includes money to support the sounds-good-at-the-end-of-the-bar听fixes, such as culling seals and sea lions听and increasing salmon-hatchery production.

Sea lions will die because they鈥檙e smart enough to take advantage of the dam bottlenecks we created that block spawning salmon, serving听them up at all-you-can-eat buffets for the pinnipeds. People forget that, to protect salmon populations, Washington long had bounties on seals and sea lions ($1 and $2.50 a scalp, respectively, back in 1903; $8 a nose in later years, before the bounties finally ended in the 1960s), and all that time the Chinook numbers still crashed due to overfishing and habitat destruction.

The damage and disruption we鈥檝e done to natural systems out West means we do need salmon hatcheries in the short and medium term, even though they threaten wild-run fish via competition and genetic dilution. (It鈥檚 the wild salmon that reproduce more successfully and have the resiliency needed to better face climate change.)

Along with the bounties on predators, we also forget that before we adopted the Northwest鈥檚 orcas as beloved icons, they were killed by fishermen because they, too, competed for salmon. The orcas were also shot by the military just for target practice. And we had no problem letting them be rounded up, driven into nets by explosives, calves separated from mothers, and shipped听off to marine parks to entertain us.听

Our attitudes toward orcas have evolved quickly, but only after we set in motion a clear path to extinction for the Southern Residents, to save themselves from us.

Reading through the task-force proposals and governor鈥檚 budget, what鈥檚 apparent听is that nearly all the beneficial orca and salmon actions will also serve to create a healthier, more productive environment for humans. Cleaning up toxics, preventing oil spills, letting rivers run more naturally, rebuilding fish stocks, and other steps to restore the ecosystem are all no-brainers, even if you don鈥檛 care about killer whales. The Washington State legislature should see it that way when it听votes on the budget.听

This billion dollars is not going to save the orcas, though. That will take decades of continuous effort at the state level as well as federal action on dams and mixed-stock salmon fishing outside Washington State waters. But it鈥檚 definitely movement in the right direction and a sign that the people of Washington are willing to invest, and maybe even inconvenience themselves, to help save a bellwether species that鈥檚 dying in order to show us what we鈥檙e doing to ourselves.

The task force鈥檚 stated recovery goal is to add ten Southern Resident orcas in ten years. Around the same time Scarlet was declared dead, aerial photos showed that one female from each of J, K, and L pods that make up the Southern Residents was pregnant. On January 11, researchers spotted what they estimate to be a three-week-old calf with one of those whales, L77, Matia. Designated L124, the baby looked healthy, and all three pods came together that day in a 鈥渟uperpod,鈥� which is a gathering of the clans accompanied by lots of socializing and playing鈥攕omething we鈥檇 recognize in our culture as a celebration.听

Unfortunately, according to the , two adult orcas, including Tahlequah鈥檚 mother, J17, look thin, and there鈥檚 serious concern whether they鈥檒l make it through the winter.听Despite the federal government shutdown, NOAA just recalled its West Coast marine mammal stranding coordinator on an emergency basis, and wildlife veterinarians are making plans to conduct a health assessment on the two whales as soon as possible.

With two orcas in poor health and the Southern Residents鈥� recent rate of failed pregnancies, the odds are long against the population growing more this year. But then the odds weren鈥檛 good that Tahlequah would carry her dead calf around long enough for the world to take notice of the orcas鈥� plight, or that Scarlet could hang on long enough to ensure that the public and political will was strong enough to act.

The new baby and new actions means there鈥檚 hope for the Southern Residents. Hopefully it鈥檚 not going to take a continual procession of dead whales to keep us pursuing听positive steps to fix the ecosystem both we and the orcas depend on. 听听

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The little orca surfaces under an Apocalyptic red sun that鈥檚 barely visible behind a shroud of smoke from the wildfires burning across the West.

We鈥檙e headed east down the Strait of Juan de Fuca toward Washington鈥檚 San Juan Island, pacing a three-year-old killer whale named Scarlet, also known as J50, as she travels with her mother, brother, and older sister in endless pursuit of salmon.

All four whales are part of J Pod, now known around the world for the recent display of grief by pod member J35, or Tahlequah, who for 17 days and 1,000 miles. It was a protest march against all that we鈥檝e done to kill off these magnificent animals by starving them of their food source, poisoning their water and prey, and filling their habitat with the incessant disturbance of vessel traffic.

I鈥檓 out here as a volunteer along with a team of whale specialists and a wildlife veterinarian under federal permit to assess and document Scarlet鈥檚 health. As she rises for a gulp of the same smoky air we鈥檙e breathing, her short, sharp blow is met with groans aboard our small boat. None of us have ever seen such a skinny whale.

For those of us who live among the orcas, Scarlet meant hope. She was a Christmas present, born at the end of December 2014 in the main fjord of the small island I live on, called, coincidentally, Orcas. The island was named after some Spanish viceroy, not the cetaceans, but you wouldn鈥檛 know it by the ubiquity of postcards, T-shirts, plushies, and whale watchers.

There鈥檚 an informal West Coast cult of the killer whale that鈥檚 devoted to J, K, and L Pods, which together make up the Southern Resident killer whales who spend a good part of their year foraging and socializing in the Washington State and British Columbian inland waters that make up the Salish Sea. In 50 years, this clan of supersize dolphins has gone from being vilified and shot by fishermen to being rounded up for marine parks鈥�48 Southern Residents were caught or killed during the capture operations in the sixties and seventies鈥攖o becoming the most iconic creature of the Pacific Northwest wilds.

Those wilds are myth now. Ecosystem disruption reaches every part of the region. Climate change is exacerbating wildfires, killing seabirds, and melting the Cascades snowpack earlier鈥攎aking the streams less suitable for salmon. Our centuries of assault on the rivers, forests, estuaries, and coastlines have done a number on this remarkable place.

And the looking very bad for killer whales, the apex predator in a dysfunctional environment. After the captures stopped, the Southern Resident population climbed from 70 to a high of 98 in 1995. Then they dropped again, to below 80, and were declared federally endangered by Canada in 2001 and by the United States in 2005. In 2015, they were named one of NOAA鈥檚 , the animals most at risk of extinction and deserving of extra effort and attention.

The Southern Residents numbered just 78, with no live births in more than two years, when Scarlet came along. Born to a beautiful female named Slick, Scarlet was the first of what became known as the baby boom, with eight calves added to J and L Pods over the following 13 months. A compact black-and-white package of pure exuberance, Scarlet represented everything we love about these playful, caring, intelligent, highly social animals, who stick together tighter than most human families.

I鈥檝e been spending time out here on the water for 15 years, and my favorite hour came one August afternoon in 2015 while drifting off Stuart Island as J Pod hunted the tide rips. Scarlet, now eight months old, was determined to spend more time out of the water than in it. She did breach after full-body breach, stood听on her head and waved her tail in the air, slapped her wobbly pectoral fins on the surface, and bumped back and forth between her sister and an aunt, who created a playpen for her with their bodies. 听听听听听

Three years later, half the baby boomers are dead. There are only 75 Southern Residents left, the lowest number in 35 years. And Scarlet is in very bad shape. Peanut head, they call it, when a whale loses so much blubber that you can see the shape of her skull. Healthy orcas do not have necks.

Nearly all the wild orcas seen in the condition Scarlet鈥檚 in have died, and Scarlet is a precious female, potentially producing up to six calves over her lifetime. So NOAA and a U.S. and Canadian collection of federal, state, local, and Native American tribal agencies, along with various public and private institutions and nonprofits, are making an unprecedented attempt to save her. Scarlet鈥檚 gotten lab tests and a shot of antibiotics, and there鈥檚 even been an attempt to feed her live Chinook salmon. Scientists weren鈥檛 able to determine whether Scarlet took the salmon, but she鈥檚 scheduled for more antibiotics and an anti-parasite shot if she makes it back within range of the wildlife vets in time.

Whether she lives or dies, Scarlet鈥檚 poor health and Tahlequa鈥檚 grief are just two agonizing illustrations of a larger picture: that the current state of the Southern Resident killer whales is a disgrace and a huge听embarrassment for the U.S. and Canada, both of which claim these orcas as totems of all that鈥檚 wild and exceptional about them.

We鈥檝e declared the orcas national and regional treasures, bestowed upon them our strongest protections, yet we continue to kill them with building permits, logging, ranching and farming leases, fishing quotas, and dam permits, which all affect the Chinook salmon that these orcas need to survive.

The Canadian government is showing signs of environmental schizophrenia, cutting some Chinook quotas to leave more for the whales while at the same time doing everything it can to build the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion that will cause a sevenfold increase of oil-tanker traffic through the orcas鈥� critical habitat.

Beyond the noise of all those ships, a single big spill could be game over for the orcas, who already carry a massive load of persistent organic pollutants in their tissues, which mothers inadvertently pass on to their babies in their milk, giving each newborn significant doses of toxic PCBs and chemical flame retardants during their most critical development period.

On the U.S. side, decades of greed and cowardice have left politicians no place to piss without hitting a third rail like dam removal, turning agricultural land back into salmon habitat, and curtailing treaty-mandated tribal fishing rights.

Stakeholders like commercial and recreational fishermen, farmers who use the water behind the Snake River dams for irrigation and transportation, whale-watch operators, coastal and watershed developers, and property owners have all dug in, firing blame at one another or at easy targets like sea lions, which have learned to feed on the salmon stuck behind dams. Government programs to cull sea lions are another arrogantly engineered human solution to a problem we created, just like the fish hatcheries we built after destroying native runs.

These circular firing squads leave the orcas in the middle, poisoned and starving.

No help can be expected from Washington, D.C., with the current administration and its congressional allies intent on ripping apart听the EPA that protects the nation's clean air and water and pays for Salish Sea restoration projects, and hobbling the Endangered Species Act, which is supposed to protect and restore the orcas and the Chinook salmon. The fix here is simple: vote in November.

At the Washington State level, there鈥檚 an opportunity that has every feeling of a last chance. Governor Jay Inslee has convened an emergency orca task force and promised to take bold action. There are some good folks on the committee, and their draft action plan is due on his desk October 1.

If the task force comes through, there could be legitimate short and long-term actions to save the Southern Residents, the Chinook salmon, and the habitat that they鈥攁nd we鈥攄epend on. If, however, they punt on the tough stuff, as others听have in the past, then the orcas are screwed.

When we left Scarlet after following her that day on the water, she was chugging along at four knots. She hit a wall of current as the tide changed, and her family forged ahead in search of food, which orcas commonly share with their podmates. Scarlet fell a thousand yards behind the others but gamely continued pushing east. We lost sight of her small dorsal fin as the chop came up, her faint blows lost in the smoke from hundreds of fires. 听

Lead photo:听Scarlet, or J50, swimming with her family in early August (Katy Foster/NOAA Fisheries, permit听)

Bob Friel (), an author and documentary filmmaker working on a video series called听, lives in the San Juan Islands. He is a volunteer with the Marine Mammal Stranding Network and Large Whale Disentanglement Network.

The post Orcas in the Mist appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

For generations, the young people of Vanderhoof, British Columbia, have raced through the night down Blackwater Road, their four-wheel drives kicking up gravel as they spin onto a rutted track scraped through the evergreen woods surrounding Hogsback Lake. By day, this small park is a peaceful spot for a听picnic, a paddle, or setting off to hike a stretch of听nearby Telegraph Trail. After dark, Hogsback鈥檚 shoreline offers a great place to throw a party.

On Friday, May 27, 2011, Madison Scott, 20, threaded her hand-me-down 1991 F150 between fir trees and parked in a grassy clearing at the edge of the lake. With long ginger hair, green eyes, a big smile, and a spray of freckles across her pierced nose, Maddy radiated life. A 2009 graduate of Vanderhoof鈥檚 , she stood a听sturdy five foot four and 170 pounds, and had played ice hockey and rugby.

Growing up in Vanderhoof, a small (pop. 4,800) mill town punched square on the sawdust belt of this rugged Canadian province, Maddy was a real northern B.C. girl. She鈥檇 dress up for a dance but was also comfortable atop a horse, dirt bike, or snowmobile. She could handle a socket wrench and had recently begun an apprenticeship as a mechanic in her father鈥檚 shop.听

Maddy鈥檚 softer side showed a passion for photography. She focused her camera on birds, flowers, friends, and especially her younger sister. During one long exposure, an uncharacteristically serious-faced Maddy posed on a bleak snow-covered field. She set off the flash, then walked out of the frame, leaving a haunting image of her body dissolving into the night. In the winter of 2010, one of her cousins commented on the photo on Facebook, saying, 鈥淚 don鈥檛 like ghost stuff.鈥� Maddy responded, 鈥淗aha, you鈥檙e a baby!!鈥�

The day Maddy drove to Hogsback Lake, a windy front had blown itself out by early morning, but it remained unseasonably cool and overcast, never breaking 50 degrees. The forecast called for it to drop into the low forties that night. Still, Maddy planned on camping at the lake with one of her girlfriends after the party. She climbed down from her truck and staked out her two-tone blue听nylon tent. Then, dressed in a black T-shirt and听capri jeans, she joined the fun.

The clearing filled with about 50 people, all from the Vanderhoof area, a mix of 18-to-25-year-olds with a few oldsters mingled in. No one who attended wants to publicly say what went on, partywise. In general, folks say it was what happens whenever young people gather in the woods at night鈥攖he same thing their parents had done when they, too, hung out at Hogsback Lake decades before.听

The party rolled deep into the morning. Maddy鈥檚 girlfriend reportedly went home early after hurting her knee, but Maddy decided to stay and camp alone. The latest anyone admits to seeing her was around 3 a.m.听

All the next day, Saturday, Maddy鈥檚 truck and tent sat in the middle of the park鈥檚 most trampled spot. On Saturday night, there was an even bigger gathering at the same clearing, with as many as 150 people partying all around Maddy鈥檚 campsite. No one, though, says they saw her.

Well-known in the small town, Maddy had dozens of friends and a large extended family that owned part of a local lumber mill and Vanderhoof鈥檚 grocery store, Scott Foods. She was also an experienced camper who鈥檇 been to Hogsback many times. Still, by Sunday morning, when not one of her friends or family had heard from her since the party,听Maddy鈥檚 parents, Eldon and Dawn Scott, drove out to the lake. They found her truck, tent, and purse intact but no Maddy. They immediately called the Vanderhoof detachment of the (RCMP).

When the Mounties arrived, they didn鈥檛 see any sign of a struggle, a flat tire or any other reason Maddy would have ditched her truck, or any bear or cougar tracks. Maddy鈥檚 keys and iPhone were gone. It looked as if she鈥檇 simply walked off or gotten into听another听vehicle. However, with the Scotts prominent in the community, and Maddy known as a responsible, hardworking kid, there was no hemming and hawing about whether this was a legitimate missing-person case.听

鈥淪omething was obviously amiss,鈥� says RCMP sergeant Rob Vermeulen. The local police called in search-and-rescue teams from Vanderhoof, the small neighboring communities of Fort St. James and Burns Lake, and northern B.C.鈥檚 largest city, Prince George (pop. 80,000), an hour east on Highway 16. They also quickly looped in B.C.鈥檚 North District Major Crime Unit.

But Madison Scott had disappeared into the night.

One young woman from a close community gone missing is heartbreaking enough. Go a little wider on the map, though, and Vanderhoof becomes just another of a series of tragic waypoints along a slice of northern B.C. where there are dozens of unsolved cases of women and girls who鈥檝e vanished or been murdered going back four decades. The only link between many of the cases remains proximity to Highway 16, a road now infamously known as the .听

Sixteen鈥檚 less ominous alias is the Yellowhead Highway, a 1,700-mile road from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert named in honor of Pierre Bostonais, a blond M茅tis mountain man who blazed the route west across the Rockies in the early 19th century. B.C.鈥檚 strand of the Yellowhead is a ruggedly beautiful run from the Alberta provincial line to the Pacific coast. The lonely 450-mile stretch from Prince George to the port of Prince Rupert is the portion that has earned the Tears epithet.听

The road has barely left Prince George鈥攔anked Canada鈥檚 most dangerous city two years running for its epidemic of drug and gang violence鈥攚hen the first MOOSE CROSSING sign appears. It鈥檚 a fitting symbol of the duality of this part of B.C., where a fragment of urban affliction butts up against spectacular scenery, where clear-cuts mark the edges of some of North America鈥檚 last wild places, where Alaska-bound $500,000 motor homes stream past struggling villages and small mill towns.听

Put the murders and the missing out of mind and Highway 16 serves as a mainline adventure artery connecting jumping-off points for exploring the B.C. wilderness. A stuffed grizzly waves a glass-eyed welcome from the chamber of commerce in the small town of Houston, while a salmon statue marks excellent steelhead country鈥攖he highway rarely wanders far from good casting its听entire length. Smithereens, the 5,400 residents of alpine-themed Smithers, live beside鈥攁nd bike, ski, and climb鈥攖he startling bulk of 7,648-foot , which towers above the highway. After breaching the Coast Mountains, the road stops at Prince Rupert, where boats carry fishermen to halibut and salmon grounds, whale watchers to humpbacks, and bear听lovers to the .听

Drive Highway 16 long enough and you鈥檒l feel its fickle personality. The two-lane gray-top demands your attention. Past the town of Terrace, it begins to wrap around the mountains, and you learn to hug the edges of sharp, often rain-slicked turns where top-heavy lumber trucks threaten to spill into your lane.听

Towns like Vanderhoof are relatively upscale bumps along the highway, though it, too, has been dragged up and down northern B.C.鈥檚 boom-and-bust cycles. The settlements are strung far apart, and the road slows as it passes through each one. Some of the isolated First Nations villages are little more than smatterings of mobile homes, handmade log cabins, and cinder-block motels. The farther west you drive, the tougher things look.

鈥淲e鈥檙e in the 75 to 85 percent range of unemployment in these villages,鈥� says Mark Starlund, chief counsel of the , a First Nations band long known for their skill at carving cedar totems. 鈥淭here are a lot of unemployed and underemployed. A family might live on $1,000 a month in social assistance. That鈥檚 brutal, Third World poverty.鈥�

A few minutes from any of the towns or settlements and you鈥檙e in vast forest. Convenient for anyone trying to dump a body, skid roads slash through every sizable patch of trees near the highway, especially east of the mountains. It鈥檚 often left to hikers or hunters to stumble upon a victim鈥檚 remains.

Billboards on 16 warning KILLER ON THE LOOSE! are constant reminders of the missing. The disappearances along the highway and two of its desolate tributaries, Highways 97 and 5, date back to 1969, when 26-year-old was found murdered near Williams Lake. There have been clusters of disappearances each decade since, but it鈥檚 difficult to get a handle on the actual number of victims.听

In testimony to B.C.鈥檚 鈥攆ormed in 2010, mainly to investigate why it took law enforcement so long to catch , a serial killer who preyed on Vancouver women from 1995 through 2001鈥擣irst Nations bands and local community groups claimed that as many as 43 women have been killed or gone missing along Highway 16. In 2005, the RCMP created a special unit called (E is the RCMP designation for all things British Columbian, and Pana is an听Inuit god who caretakes souls in a frozen underworld before reincarnation) to examine some of the disappearances and to determine whether another serial killer was at work. Its investigators eventually sorted through hundreds of unsolved murders, missing women, and sexual assaults in B.C. over the past four听decades and found that 18 cases shared enough similarities to be possibly linked.

The number of cases E-Pana took on was limited by certain criteria. Investigators considered adding a case only if the victim was female, had been involved in a high-risk听activity, such as hitchhiking or the sex trade, and had disappeared or been found murdered within a mile of Highway 16, 97, or 5. Nine of E-Pana鈥檚 victims are aboriginal, and nine are Caucasian. They range in age from 12 to 33; 12 of them are under the age of 20.听

Then, in 2009, used similar criteria but widened the search beyond a one-mile limit to come up with 31 cases of missing women in the general area, all of them similar enough to be potentially linked.

Thumbing a ride is one of the major risk factors for women who end up on the Highway 16 lists. Caution-yellow billboards insist GIRLS DON'T HITCHHIKE ON THE HIGHWAY OF TEARS. But they do. 鈥淲hat scares me,鈥� says Starlund, 鈥渋s that you can drive this highway today and still see young girls hitchhiking even when they know what鈥檚听going on. But it鈥檚 not like they can ask, 鈥楳om, can I borrow your car?鈥� because Mom鈥檚 so poor she doesn鈥檛 have a car.鈥� Two women from Mark Starlund鈥檚 Gitanyow band are on听E-Pana鈥檚 list of 18.

The idea of getting regular public transportation running between the communities comes up every time there鈥檚 a study group or public meeting. 鈥淲e started the Kitwancool bus on welfare day so people can get to Terrace to cash their checks,鈥� says Starlund. 鈥淪ome other villages do that same kind of thing, but that鈥檚 just a couple of times a month.鈥� The rest of the time, there might be no other option than hitching if these girls want to get someplace.

There are other Tears cases where the girls were doing nothing riskier than riding their bikes, walking, or hanging out with friends near the highway that runs through their small town鈥攍ike 12-year-old , who was plucked off her bike near Nicola Lake in 1978. Her remains were discovered 17 years later on a logging road.

No new cases have been added to听E-Pana鈥檚 list since 2006, but that doesn鈥檛 mean that the region鈥檚 murders and disappearances have ended. Between听October 2009 and September 2010, three Prince George women went missing. Two were found murdered. One has yet to be recovered, though RCMP officials鈥攚ho created another special unit, called听E-Prelude, to investigate these cases鈥攕ay they have evidence that she was killed.

And then, most recently, there鈥檚听Maddy Scott, who was at a party with friends.听Because she disappeared some 10 miles from the highway and wasn鈥檛 involved in anything considered high-risk, Maddy isn鈥檛 on听E-Pana鈥檚 Highway of Tears list. 鈥淭here is nothing to indicate at this time that Maddy鈥檚 disappearance is connected to the ongoing听E-Pana investigations,鈥� says RCMP constable Lesley Smith, the spokeswoman for North District Major Crime.

But for the people living in the small communities along 16, all the chilling tales start to run together.

When North District Major Crime, the RCMP unit that handles the most serious cases in that part of the province, took charge of Maddy Scott鈥檚 file, a dozen investigators poured into Vanderhoof and began working the case from a crime angle鈥攄oing forensics and interviewing potential witnesses鈥攁t the same time the search was still ramping up.

Bloodhounds strained to latch onto听Maddy鈥檚 scent. Aircraft mounted with infrared cameras probed the bush. Boats towed underwater cameras and side-scan sonar arrays through Hogsback Lake; divers searched its silty听bottom. Even the 鈥攍ocal detachments of the Army鈥攋oined in the effort. Within a day, 150 volunteers had shown up to help.听

On May 31, 2011, four days after Maddy鈥檚 disappearance, the RCMP suspended the search. The volunteers, however, kept looking. On June 21, Maddy鈥檚 parents offered a $15,000 reward, which they eventually raised to $25,000. (It has since been raised again, to $50,000.) In a September 1 statement, the Scotts asked those with any information to come forward and thanked the tight-knit community. 鈥淲e have always loved living here,鈥� they said, 鈥渁nd it is often in a time of crisis that you truly see the network of support that exists in an area that we are proud to call home.鈥� But the days and weeks dragged on, with no results. At press time, 11 months after she went missing, there was still no sign of Maddy.

The RCMP鈥檚 E-Pana hasn鈥檛 made much progress on its cases, either. The special unit has grown to a team of 50 people with an听annual budget of $6 million, and investigators have come up with thousands of persons of interest. E-Pana began doing background checks and profiles on more than 2,000 possible suspects. Then it cast an even wider net, over an additional 5,000 persons of interest. The project received 1,006 tips in 2010 alone and has made 16,000-plus听inquiries since its creation in 2005.

Though the unit鈥檚 spokeswoman, RCMP corporal Annie Linteau, says they are pleased with the progress to date, there have been no听arrests, and no files have been closed. 鈥淗omicides and missing persons investigations are听complex,鈥� Linteau explained in an听e-mail. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 think we will be able to say whether there is a serial killer at play听until we have been successful in solving or charging in all 18 of the files or the majority. At this point, evidence gathered in these cases has yet to lead us to believe that a single person is responsible, although we are very much alive to the possibility.鈥澨�

Linteau said that each investigation had undergone numerous reviews to determine whether evidence could be forensically retested using new technology. 鈥淚n many of these cases, the women were not reported missing for a long time, so there were few if any clues other than the body. In others, there is still no body. And many of the murders happened before the current advances in DNA testing. We鈥檝e been able to obtain DNA from old samples of clothing and tissue.鈥�

Occasionally, there have been artist renderings and vehicle descriptions of last-seen-withs. There have been murder confessions that later proved false. There鈥檚 a man,听Leland 鈥淐hug鈥� Switzer鈥攏ow in jail for killing his brother鈥攚ho the RCMP feels is somehow connected to 25-year-old 鈥檚 disappearance in 2002. Hoar, who鈥檇 spent a season planting trees for Prince George鈥揵ased , was waiting at a gas station on Highway 16, looking for a ride west to Smithers, where she was going to visit her sister. She hasn鈥檛 been seen since. Switzer鈥檚 property has been searched, but he鈥檚 never been charged.听

Truck drivers carrying cargo to and from the port of Prince Rupert have long been mentioned as possible suspects in the highway murders, but none have ever been听arrested. Then in April 2011 came a harrowing story from a 20-year-old woman who stopped near Highway 97 and Kamloops to help a unibrowed, bushy-bearded man who鈥檇 flagged her down. He tried to force her into his 1992 Dakota pickup, but fortunately she punted his nuts up into his throat and escaped. She gave a good description of the hairy guy and his truck, but like all the other leads, it has yet to prompt any arrests.听

The RCMP did have a recent break in a murder case unrelated to E-Pana. On Saturday night, November 27, 2010, a young Mountie saw a black GMC Sierra pickup come skidding out of one of the Vanderhoof area鈥檚 innumerable old logging tracks. The constable lit up the truck and pulled it over. A wildlife cop was called to investigate and trudged up the logging road. His flashlight illuminated the body of 15-year-old Vanderhoof resident Loren Leslie, a tenth-grader at Nechako Valley Secondary School.

鈥淪he told her mother she was going out to get coffee with a girlfriend,鈥� says Loren鈥檚听father, Doug Leslie. 鈥淟ater that day, she听texted a friend to say she was going for a ride with this Cody guy, and that鈥檚 the last anyone heard from her.鈥�

The truck鈥檚 driver, 21-year-old Cody Legebokoff, was raised just up the road from Vanderhoof in Fort St. James, and his and Loren Leslie鈥檚 grandparents had grown up together in the nearby town of Fort Fraser. Loren and Cody were allegedly also Facebook friends.

Then, on October 17, 2011, nearly one year after Legebokoff was , the RCMP鈥檚 E-Prelude unit investigating the 2009鈥�10 disappearances of the three Prince George women charged him with those killings. If the charges are proved, Legebokoff was both , cruising the dark alleys of Prince George in his black pickup looking for random victims, and the snowboarding small-town boy next door who asked a young family friend to go for a ride and then killed her.听

Legebokoff, who goes on trial this year for the four first-degree murders, was already in custody when Maddy Scott disappeared. And the RCMP says it has no evidence linking him to any of the crimes on E-Pana鈥檚 list. That leaves the residents of northern B.C. facing three unnerving possibilities: there is still a serial killer out there, maybe more than one; the other murders were committed by different men who likely still live among them; or they are losing their daughters to a combination of both. It鈥檚 hard to figure which alternative is more frightening.

The听RCMP investigations have no shortage of critics. 鈥淭hey鈥檝e got all this money and these resources and spent two years inputting all this information into their super-computer,鈥� says , an RCMP constable turned private investigator. 鈥淲hen it didn鈥檛 spit out the name of a killer, they said, 鈥楿h-oh, what do we do now?鈥欌�夆�澨�

I met Michalko one morning at an east side听Vancouver coffeehouse. At six-two, 240 pounds, with arms that take up more than his share of the table, Michalko, 64, still looks like he could handle himself in the Manitoba mining-town bar brawls where he cut his teeth as a Mountie. Michalko left the force听after he was transferred to Vancouver, where they expect their cops to be more refined. 鈥淚f somebody in Manitoba told you to fuck off,鈥� he says, 鈥測ou flattened him, and there was no flap. Here, it was a lot different.鈥�

Along with missing the two-fisted form of frontier justice, Michalko says he grew weary of what he calls the RCMP鈥檚 鈥渄ysfunctional bureaucracy.鈥� He鈥檚 spent the past 14 years working as a PI. In late 2005, while he was sitting in his home near Vancouver, a news story came on about , another young woman gone missing from Highway 16.听

鈥淚鈥檓 bitching to my wife that even I could solve this case, that the RCMP haven鈥檛 done bugger all! And she said, 鈥榃ell, instead of just talking, why don鈥檛 you try to do something about it!鈥欌�夆�澨�

Michalko鈥檚 wife shares a home office with her husband, and he soon had a wall covered with pin maps, case notes, and head shots of dead women. 鈥淪he recently asked me to take those photos down,鈥� he says.

Without access to the RCMP鈥檚 state-of-the-art software or its warehouse full of files on the highway murders, Michalko still thought he had an edge. 鈥淚 know from experience that the natives do not like the RCMP,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hey just don鈥檛 trust them or the government. That bad blood goes all the way back to the residential schools and to when Canada outlawed the potlatch, which was the听natives鈥� way of ensuring that every family in the band had enough to live on. Now in those communities there鈥檚 a lot of misery.鈥�

Claims of institutional racism within the RCMP toward members of the First Nations are often brought up in discussions of the highway murders. According to the , in 2010 the country鈥檚 average clearance rate for homicides was 84 percent, while for indigenous women it was 53 percent. It falls below even that dismal average in B.C., where only 51 percent of the murders of native women are ever cleared. (The RCMP鈥檚 Annie Linteau says that each case, regardless of the victim鈥檚 ethnicity, is thoroughly investigated.)

Michalko thought the key to solving the cases was old-fashioned, door-knocking听police work in local villages. And for such a big, pasty white guy, Michalko has听always had a good relationship with Canada鈥檚听aboriginals. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e good people,鈥� he says. 鈥淎 lot of them have drug and alcohol problems, and they drive me crazy sometimes, but I really like them. I think I must have been one of them in a past life.鈥澨�

Limited to working nights, weekends, and whatever spare hours he had, Michalko jump-started his Highway of Tears investigation by putting ads in small-town newspapers along the Yellowhead. 鈥淚 just said, 鈥業f you know anything about the missing or murdered girls, call me.鈥︹�� And the phone started ringing.鈥�

Michalko says that his first big break came in March 2008, when he found someone who claimed to be a witness to the murder of 16-year-old on the outskirts of Smithers. He immediately brought that person to the RCMP. 鈥淧roblem was,鈥� he says, 鈥渢heir theory was that this girl had been done by a serial killer. My witness blew that idea out of the water, and they didn鈥檛 like that. I talked to the witness a couple of weeks later, and while the RCMP did talk to the guy he identified as the killer, to my knowledge no one followed up again. So I wrote the RCMP and told them that if they had no objection, I was going to continue investigating. They wrote back telling me that not only was I not going to work on that case, but I wasn鈥檛 working on any other case or they鈥檇 charge me with obstruction of justice.鈥�

Michalko鈥檚 involvement caught the attention of the local press. 鈥淭he RCMP鈥檚 attitude toward me was the best thing that could have happened,鈥� Michalko says. 鈥淣ow the First Nations people up there were certain I wasn鈥檛 one of the RCMP boys.鈥� (The RCMP eventually backed off and said it welcomes input from citizens and follows up on all leads. Meanwhile, Linteau says she can鈥檛 comment on the Wilson investigation because it鈥檚 ongoing.)听

Most recently, Michalko has been working with Claudia Williams to find out what happened to her younger sister, , one of the E-Pana 18, who disappeared on听August 25, 1989. The sisters, members of the听Gitanyow band, had gone to a Prince Rupert hot spot called Bogey鈥檚 Cabaret to celebrate the end of the summer salmon season, which they鈥檇 spent working together at a nearby cannery. After last call, Alberta asked her sister to accompany her and some friends to a party. Claudia looked away to talk to someone for a few minutes. When she turned back, the whole group, including her sister, was gone. That was the last time she saw听Alberta. A month later, hikers found her body off Highway 16.

Claudia says that Alberta knew everyone she was last seen with. Still, almost 23 years later the murder remains unsolved. 鈥淓very one of those people are covering up, and that鈥檚 going to break down,鈥� says Claudia, now 52, who was 30 at the time, four years older than her sister. She has been keeping the investigation alive, badgering the RCMP, soliciting information through social networks and old-fashioned fliers, and hiring Michalko, who鈥檚 charging her a fee of one听Canadian loonie.

All along, Michalko has theorized that most of the highway murders were not committed by a serial killer but had happened听under horrifically mundane circumstances: the bad uncle, the boyfriend from hell, the date rape or domestic-abuse case that went from bad to worse. Still, all the hours and all the tips have yet to lead to an arrest. 鈥淚 can鈥檛 tell you how many times I鈥檝e said, 鈥極K, this is it, I give up,鈥欌�夆�� says Michalko, who estimates he鈥檚 worked 40 hours a month on the Highway of Tears cases since taking them on six years ago. 鈥淲ithin a day or two of that, though, my phone rings and, Hey, this is good information! I鈥檓 still convinced I鈥檓 going to solve one of these, but I thought it would be easier.鈥�

On the drive back from Prince Rupert to Prince George, I stop again in Vanderhoof. Down Blackwater Road on a night with no party, Hogsback Lake lies so still I can hear the kisses as fish rise to the surface to feed.听

The Scott family has spent many nights camping out at the lake, returning again and again to the woods where Maddy was last seen. Volunteers continue to expand the search area; they鈥檝e now covered hundreds of miles. Calls come in from psychics around the world.

The idea that someone from this little town that people say has always been such a wonderful place to live might be keeping a dark secret haunts locals. How can somebody just disappear like that from a group of people she knew? Somebody knows. Why aren鈥檛 they saying something?

鈥淔or investigators,鈥� says the RCMP鈥檚 Rob Vermeulen, 鈥渋t鈥檚 frustrating any time you know there鈥檚 information out there that could help but hasn鈥檛 gotten to you yet. We continue to appeal to people who, for whatever reason, haven鈥檛 passed on that information to please get that to us.鈥�

In another of the area鈥檚 terrible turns, Vanderhoof local Fribjon Bjornson went missing early this year. A father of two young children, 28-year-old 鈥淔rib鈥� had recently hired on at a logging camp in Fort St. James. According to his mother, Eileen, Frib was friends with Maddy Scott and had been very troubled over her disappearance. A couple of weeks after he vanished in mid-January, police received a tip that led them to partial human remains in a neighborhood on the nearby Nak鈥檃zdli reservation. They by his dental records. The rest of his body has not been found.

No charges have been laid in Bjornson鈥檚 murder, and the RCMP and Eileen say there is no connection between his case and听Maddy鈥檚. But in this small rural community that has seen three of its young people murdered or gone missing, and another from a nearby town charged as a serial killer鈥攁ll within 14 months鈥攖he lack of answers only feeds the sense of dread.

Today, some neighbors are looking sideways at each other. Some families find themselves treated as outcasts because their sons were at the party with Maddy and have come听under suspicion. Wild rumors circulate about听human trafficking, dungeonlike bunkers on rural properties near Hogsback Lake, and the involvement of local drug dealers. Vanderhoof mayor says this has听always been a place that pulls together through hard times, but even he describes the pain as 鈥済ut-wrenching.鈥� It鈥檚 twisting the little town into knots.

As I drove out of Vanderhoof after 10 on a rainy night, the small pool of light cast by the Scott Foods shopping center quickly faded as I headed east on Highway 16. At the edge of town, my headlights picked out a face in the blackness along the side of the road. I was so surprised that it took me a moment to realize it belonged to a woman in dark clothes, hitchhiking. I was already too far past her to stop and back up, so as soon as I could, I made a U-turn. I wanted to pick her up, ask what the hell was worth the risk, and then make sure she got there safely. By the time I made it back to the spot where she鈥檇 been standing鈥攚ithin sight of a big billboard asking for help finding Maddy Scott鈥攕he was climbing into a black pickup.

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Colt knew that the tower crew at the Monroe County airport in Bloomington, Indiana, started work at 6:30 a.m. Dawn began brightening the eastern sky at 5:53, so there was plenty of light outside as he raised the hangar鈥檚 big bifold doors. He rolled the Cessna out, then closed and locked the doors behind him. With any luck, no one would notice that the plane was missing for hours鈥攎aybe days, if he caught a break like he had when he crashed his third stolen plane and no one paid any attention to its emergency beacon.

Colt cranked the engine and taxied to the runway. At exactly 6:01, a security camera captured Cessna Corvalis N660BA taking off into the clear purple sky. It was July 4, Independence Day.

Since his April 2008 in Seattle, 19-year-old Colton Harris-Moore had outfoxed and outrun the authorities time and again for 26 months. In Washington鈥檚 San Juan Islands, near where he grew up, he鈥檇 become famous for stealing planes, a crime all the more audacious because Colt had never had a formal flight lesson. On May 16, 2010, he pirated a $400,000 sport yacht and left the San Juans, then hopscotched across the country in a series of stolen trucks and boats. With the FBI,听bounty hunters, and numerous local authorities trying to track him down, at the end of June Colt made camp in a small copse inside the fence at Monroe County Airport, waiting patiently for just the right airplane to land. At noon on July 3 his ship came in. Colt watched as the Cessna landed and had its oil changed and fuel tanks filled. Conveniently, the听mechanic left the keys inside the plane.

Colt now had a fine plane and a plan that made sense, at least to him. Instead of a short hop, this time he planned to leapfrog far ahead of his pursuers. Not that he had any reason to be concerned that they were catching up to him. After all, he had just spent an听entire week at an airport within a half-mile of where he鈥檇 dumped the last stolen car. This flight would be the big one鈥攂igger headlines, bigger splash. He had a plane that could carry him out of the country to where he thought the good life lived.

On paper, the Corvalis could just make it to Cuba. In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt signed an extradition treaty with Cuba that covered fugitives wanted for larceny, which would include Colt鈥檚 crimes. Complicated relations between the two countries since La Revoluci贸n, however, had made the treaty unworkable, and Cuba had become a possibility for certain fugitives. Flying there direct from the United States without a flight plan can be dangerous, though, and not just because of the risk of miscalculating fuel and dropping into the Straits of Florida.

Instead, Colt veered east and flew out over the Gulf Stream with a different destination in mind. Fittingly for a story that so far had included UFO sites, ancient Indian burial grounds, and Bigfoot hunters, a little over four hours after he鈥檇 taken off from Indiana the Barefoot Bandit entered the Bermuda Triangle.

Around 11:15 a.m., several Bahamians noticed the Cessna circling north of Sandy Point, a small village on a beach-fringed spur at the south end of Great Abaco. Private planes often buzz the area鈥攅ither to take aerial photos of the scenery or to scout for a stretch of coast on which to carve out a development鈥攕o no one paid much attention to it.

serves this sparsely populated end of the island, but Colt didn鈥檛 dare use the runway. It was daylight, plus he figured there鈥檇 be customs and immigration officers there to greet planes. He鈥檇 have to execute another off-field landing. (Of the four previous planes he鈥檇 stolen, two endured hard off-field landings, so he鈥檇 had some practice.) Colt settled on a section of sugary bog, the margin of a wetland covered in marsh grasses and mangrove sprouts.

With at least one Bahamian looking on in disbelief, the Corvalis came in lower and lower鈥攁pparently under control but far from any sensible landing spot鈥攁nd crashed into the swamp. Calls went out to the Royal Bahamas Police Force (RBPF) and the Royal Bahamas Defence Force (RBDF), the country鈥檚 sole military branch.

Normal landing speed on the Corvalis is 70 miles per hour, and once it touches down on a runway it requires about 1,200 feet to roll to a stop. As soon as Colt鈥檚 main gear hit the muck, though, it was as if he鈥檇 landed on peanut butter. The nose of the plane slammed down onto the front wheel, which burrowed into the soft sand, collapsed, and was torn from the fuselage. An instant later, the nose itself hit, the propeller whipping into the ground and the blades bending backward like banana peels.

Instead of using 1,200, the plane went from flying to full stop in an eye-bugging 150 feet.

When Colt gathered himself and lifted the Corvalis鈥檚 gull-wing door, he was 1,050 miles from where he鈥檇 taken off. He could officially check off another item from the collage shopping list he鈥檇 made in detention, artwork that included听Rolex watches and Cadillac emblems. He鈥檇 made it to the Caribbean.

The landing was rough enough to set off the plane鈥檚 distress beacon, which began signaling that N660BA had gone down hard at 11:44 a.m. The U.S. Coast Guard in Miami picked up the signal and immediately went into search-and-rescue mode.听

The Coast Guard tracked down the plane鈥檚 owner and then alerted the Bahamians that it had been stolen. RBDF soldiers set out for the site by boat but, because it was low tide, couldn鈥檛 get close. Once again a combination of luck and choosing the right spot had given Colt enough time to get away before the cops arrived. As it was, Colt almost stumbled into an RBDF trooper later that day who got close enough to report seeing a white male 鈥渨ith lacerations鈥� who ran off when he was spotted.

Whether he got cut up in the crash or while picking through the mangroves, Colt was in good enough shape to make his way the eight or so miles to Sandy Point, a fishing village of about 400 people. The owner of a little gas station and convenience store says that sometime after dark, Colt stopped by to fuel up with food. He broke in and left with a Gatorade and two bags of potato chips, then stole a brown Chevy Tahoe and aimed it north up the highway for the 48-mile drive to , the island鈥檚 single-stoplight main town.

The Bahamians told the Coast Guard that they were planning a mission to the crash site for early the next morning and requested air support. At 6:11 a.m. on July 5, a USCG Guardian jet detoured on its way to deliver spare parts to Guant谩namo Bay, Cuba, and arrived on the scene. The pilots had no trouble spotting the downed plane and reported, 鈥淒oes not seem to be in distress.鈥� They stayed at the site for three minutes and didn鈥檛 see anyone in the area.

Later that morning, after a four-hour slog, Bahamian police officers got to the plane. As expected, they found no one. Cushions had been taken out of the Cessna and laid on the ground in the shade of the wing. There was also a bucket beside the plane with used towelettes inside.

I was on a boat trip听over the Fourth near my home on Orcas Island, in the San Juans, and didn鈥檛 hear the news about Colt until late the next day. It was already almost tomorrow Bahamas time, but I picked up the phone. Who can you call at midnight in the Bahamas? Fortunately, the Out Islands have been like a second home to me for the past 30 years, and among many friends and acquaintances I had a buddy who owns a bar鈥擩ohnny Roberts.

The party was in full swing at Nipper鈥檚 on Great Guana Cay, just across the Sea of Abaco from Marsh Harbour. Johnny had heard the first coconut telegraph beats about Colt鈥攖hat Nassau had sent a team of听detectives to Great Abaco that day鈥攂ut told me no one was sure where the kid was. He said to call his cousin Tim Roberts over at Marsh Harbour鈥檚 in the morning and he鈥檇 have the latest word.

The FBI had already for Colt鈥檚 capture. Apparently by taking his road show international, Colt had irked and embarrassed them enough to finally admit publicly that they were after him and to offer a bounty.

The universal reaction to the news that Colt had gone to the Bahamas was 鈥淒umb move.鈥� I wasn鈥檛 so sure. Everyone said he鈥檇 be spotted immediately鈥攁nd not just because he stood six foot five. They thought a white kid in the Bahamas would stick out like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee. Not so. After the Spanish had wiped out the Lucayans who originally inhabited the islands, the Abacos were settled by British Loyalists who鈥檇 fled the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War. Even today, when countrywide 85 percent of the Bahamas is black, half the residents of the Abacos are white.

There鈥檚 also a population of expats in the Abacos, and the 2,000 or so vacation homes there are mostly American owned. Parts of Great Abaco seem more like a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. Plus it was regatta week.

If he planned on getting by as he had in the Northwest islands鈥攂y playing Goldilocks in unattended homes鈥攈e had hundreds to choose from. As for the rest of Colt鈥檚 MO, there are three airports on Great Abaco. Marsh Harbour and Treasure Cay always have small planes tied down out on the field. A Cessna with a full tank of gas could make it from Abaco to the Yucat谩n, Cuba, the Turks and Caicos, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, or as far south down the Caribbean chain as the Virgin Islands. For boat selection, there are hundreds of all sizes and styles in the Abacos, both in marinas and moored at private docks.

Arrayed against him at the moment was only a small contingent of RBPF officers in Marsh Harbour. Even though the Bahamian police announced that they were sure they would very quickly round up the young miscreant, it felt to me as though Colt had done his homework. Either that or he was just very lucky in that he鈥檇 picked another welcoming, unsuspecting community.

Over the next two days, Colt was up to his usual antics on Abaco. He broke into a dive shop, a restaurant, the local FedEx building, a bike shop, and the Abaco Cancer Society thrift shop. Colt stole clothes, food, some cash, and a first-aid kit.

First thing Wednesday morning, July 7, my phone rang. It was Tim Roberts, who鈥檇 been keeping me apprised of any Colt news. But this time something was wrong. 鈥淏ob,鈥� he said in a hoarse whisper, then paused. I immediately thought he was听going to tell me that Colt was dead. After a long moment, Tim said, 鈥淚 can鈥檛 talk louder because there鈥檚 a TV crew in here sniffing around for information.鈥�

He said he鈥檇 just heard that a boat had disappeared from the marina. I asked him what kind. 鈥淔orty-five Sea Ray,鈥� he whispered. New and tricked out, a 45-foot Sea Ray Sundancer is a $750,000 sex bomb of a power boat.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 him,鈥� I said. 鈥淎ny idea where it went?鈥� I could hear Tim shuffling the phone around before he said one word into cupped hands: 鈥淧reacher鈥檚.鈥� A friend of the boat鈥檚 owner had spotted the Sea Ray grounded on a reef off Preacher鈥檚 Cave, at the north end of , the next island south. I thanked him for the tip and hung up.

It was a very ballsy trip. Colt had to start a boat and sneak out of a crowded听marina that was supposed to be under surveillance. Then he had to navigate the shallows around Marsh Harbour鈥檚 Eastern Shores before running about 20 miles south听through the Sea of Abaco. At Little Harbour, he was forced to leave the protection of the fringing islands and flushed out into the deep blue. Ironically, as Colt steered the Sea Ray into the open Atlantic, he motored directly past the luxury resort where the dreaded paparazzi鈥攊n the form of American TV crews鈥攚ere staying.

I spoke with friends who were sailing to Eleuthera that day, and they reported that sea conditions were very rough. Colt had a lot of boat under him, capable of doing more than 30 knots, but he still had to pound his way across 56 miles of open ocean that was more than 13,000 feet deep, with big swells rolling in on his port beam the entire trip. It must have been one hell of a ride.

The Bahamian authorities听and the rest of the media believed Colt was still on Great Abaco, and indeed there were several more sightings of the Barefoot Bandit reported on the island. Police and defense-force soldiers poured into Marsh Harbour and patrolled the streets with shotguns and automatic weapons. But I decided to go with what my gut was telling me. Thirty sleepless hours after leaving Orcas Island, I landed at North Eleuthera Airport on Saturday evening, July 10鈥攖he Bahamian听independence day.

Eleuthera is a gangly 110-mile-long island shaped like a marlin鈥檚 skeleton picked clean by sharks. It made the most sense that Colt would stay up in the north, near the bay that separates 鈥淟utra鈥� from its satellite cays, including nearby , two miles away.听After checking out bee-and-bat-filled Preacher鈥檚 Cave and finding no sign of Colt, I had a few Kaliks at a rum shop called Coakley鈥檚 International Sporting Lounge, on Three Island Dock. There鈥檇 been a recent burglary here; Gatorade, water, honey buns, and Snickers bars were missing. Colt. I figured he would come back there to forage again, but the dock was so busy with people heading over to the big Homecoming party at the Bluff, a small village on the other side of the island, that I assumed he鈥檇 stay away that night. Bad assumption. A friend and I left Coakley鈥檚 and joined everyone at the Bluff for heaping plates of lobster and cracked conch, stiff rum drinks, and live music.听

An employee from Romora Bay Resort and Marina on Harbour Island, 19-year-old Mauris Jonassaint, arrived at Three Island Dock a couple of hours after I鈥檇 left. Mauris stood at the end of the pier talking to a friend while they waited their turn for a taxi to the Bluff. Suddenly, they heard a boat engine coming toward them. The water was pitch black except for the reflection of lights from Harbour Island. Mauris says they figured it was a boat coming to pick someone up, but he could tell it was moving way too fast through the shallows.

A small white hull appeared out of the darkness, headed right for the dock. Everyone started听waving it off, shouting, 鈥淲hoa! Slow down!鈥� When the driver got close enough to see that there was a crowd of people there, he immediately spun the boat around and started back for open water. Mauris and the others watched, dumbfounded, as a tall white guy in a light T-shirt and camouflage shorts ran the boat aground on a submerged rock within sight of the pier.

Colt had busted into a vacation home at Whale Point, a finger of North Eleuthera. He broke in looking for one thing: a key to the shiny new 13-foot Boston Whaler Super Sport sitting on a trailer outside. He found it in the garage, then muscled the half-ton boat and motor into the water and started its 40-horsepower Mercury outboard. The unsinkable $10,000 Whaler, designed for use as a yacht dinghy and all-purpose sport boat, wasn鈥檛 big enough to get Colt farther down the Bahamas chain, but it was plenty of boat for buzzing听between the islands at the top of Eleuthera.

Colt rocked the Whaler free and then did something that set the course for his foreseeable future: he decided to turn around and come back to the dock. He stopped the boat about 20 feet away from the pier and shut off its engine. Mauris says he was laughing.

Colt looked up at Mauris and said, 鈥淒id you hear about the plane I crashed?鈥�

鈥淭hat was you do that?鈥澨�

鈥淵eah,鈥� admitted Colt.听

鈥淲hat鈥檚 your name?鈥� asked Mauris.听

鈥淐olton Harris.鈥澨�

Mauris says Colt was very friendly and relaxed, and as they started talking he sat back and put his bare feet up on the gunwale. Mauris asked why he鈥檇 come to the Bahamas. Colt said he didn鈥檛 have enough fuel to go to Cuba.

Colt answered every question Mauris and his friend asked. He told them he was from Camano Island and still planned on getting to Cuba. 鈥淚 asked him how he鈥檚 getting there and he said, 鈥楶lane.鈥� My buddy was playing with him and said he wanted to go. But Bandit said, 鈥楴o, I fly alone.鈥欌�夆��

While they were chatting, the current carried the little Whaler toward the dock. Mauris and his friend knew about the $10,000 FBI reward and watched as the boat came closer and closer. When Colt was just about within jumping range, though, he calmly reached over and started the engine, moving the boat back out of reach, then stopping again.

Mauris says the conversation went on for more than half an hour when Colt听started to get agitated. 鈥淚 ask him if he miss his mom, and he鈥檚 like, 鈥榊eah,鈥� so I said, 鈥楾hen why don鈥檛 you go back home?鈥欌�夆��

鈥淭oo many cops,鈥� said Colt, who then asked, 鈥淪o where are your cops?鈥澨�

鈥淲e don鈥檛 have that much cops,鈥� answered Mauris.听

鈥淲ell, call them,鈥� said Colt. 鈥淚鈥檓 bored.鈥� I want to get chased.鈥澨�

Naturally, Mauris thought Colt must be joking. 鈥淏ut then he started to get mad, saying, 鈥楥all the cops, call the cops! I want to get chased! For real, call them! Call them!鈥欌�夆��

Mauris tried to calm Colt down. 鈥淚鈥檓 like, 鈥楾here ain鈥檛 no cops, man.鈥欌�夆��

And there weren鈥檛. No one had called them, even though everyone on the dock had figured out that it was the famous Barefoot Bandit bobbing in front of them.

After Colt got mad, Mauris signaled to his buddy, who pulled out a cell phone. He didn鈥檛 dial the RBPF, though; he called friends who had a boat, whispering to them to hurry up and get there, that they had the Bandit 鈥渞ight here at the dock.鈥�

Colt spotted the guy making the call. 鈥淲hy is that guy on the phone?鈥�

Mauris told him not to worry about it. Colt gave a big smile and said, 鈥淚鈥檓 gone!鈥�

He started up the outboard and began to pull away, turning back to yell to听Mauris, 鈥淩ead about me on the Internet!鈥�

The whaler blasted away听toward Harbour Island. Across the bay, at the island鈥檚 Romora Bay Resort, Colt pulled up to the dock and ran onto the grounds heading east, leaving the boat鈥檚 engine running. At 11:43 P.M. Kenny Strachan, the resort鈥檚 security guard, approached Colt but backed off when Colt brandished a pistol as he ran away. Strachan called the Harbour Island police and then ran down the dock and took the key out of the Whaler.听

A few minutes later, Eleuthera鈥檚 chief inspector, Roston Moss, woke to banging on his door. All the landlines were down, and there was only intermittent cell service because a boat anchor had snagged an underwater cable two days before. Given word that the infamous Barefoot Bandit was armed and trapped in a patch of woods near Romora Bay, Moss knew he鈥檇 need more manpower to have any chance of corralling the outlaw who鈥檇 escaped so many police operations over the past two years. Moss pulled on a pair of denim shorts, threw his bulletproof vest over a muscle tee, grabbed his 9mm, and ran out of the house in his slippers.

Moss used a hotel鈥檚 Vonage connection to make calls that were relayed via听radio to officers who were spread across Eleuthera, still out policing the late-night听independence day festivities. By 1 a.m. he had 16 men. He broke them into two teams. With no night-vision equipment and no dogs, his strategy was听simply to contain Colt in the area until sunrise, when he鈥檇 be easy to spot in the low scrub. Moss led Team One, which included unarmed members of the local crime watch. Their job was to seal off the island so Colt couldn鈥檛 escape. Team Two鈥攁ll cops packing Uzi submachine guns, shotguns, and their 9mm sidearms鈥攚as ordered to continue patrolling the edges of the tree line to keep Colt bottled up.

Dawn would break in five hours.

Moss and his team drove to the island鈥檚 other听marinas, telling them to 鈥渞emain on red alert鈥� so Colt couldn鈥檛 grab another boat.听

鈥淚t seemed like half the island was up and around by now,鈥� says Moss. Many came up to the chief inspector asking to be deputized. He told them to just keep their eyes open but not to put themselves in danger, since this was an armed fugitive.

Time dragged on, with no sightings and no action for more than two and a half hours. Everyone was tired and bleary-eyed. Talk among the cops dropped to听occasional whispers, then to nothing. Kenny听Strachan, now with his shotgun strapped across his back, walked out onto the dock and sat down.

At 2:45 a.m., Chief Inspector Moss got a report of a possible escape boat on Pink Sand Beach. He and his team drove across the island to check it out. As soon as they left, Colt made his move.

Kenny and another guy were on the dock near the marina office, discussing whether Colt might be able to sneak back and take one of Romora鈥檚 boats.

鈥淛ust then a white guy come up and say he heard a boat startin鈥欌��,鈥� says Kenny. 鈥淲e listen and suddenly hear boat engines bog down and go whooooo, like when you go full throttle. We start yellin鈥�, 鈥楧at鈥檚 him! Dat鈥檚 him!鈥欌�夆��

Colt had managed to creep from the woods east of Romora Bay and through the cordon of Team Two cops. He crossed the resort grounds and then made it out onto the dock. At the farthest corner of the听marina lay the Lady BJ. The owners of this 76-foot aluminum yacht鈥攁 Miami real estate investor and his听family鈥攚ere fast asleep belowdecks with the generator thrumming and air conditioners blowing. They never heard Colt climb down off the dock onto the 32-foot Intrepid they鈥檇 towed over from Key Largo as their sport boat. The keys were on board, and Colt fired up the pair of 275-horsepower Mercury outboards.

With a full tank of gas in what the Bahamians call a go-fast boat, he had the range to get to Nassau or Cat Island or Rum Cay or Long Island, or to lose himself amid the hundreds of Exuma cays, all before daylight. If he could just get out of the bay.

Colt opened her up and headed south toward the deep cut between Harbour Island and Whale Point that led to open water.

The cops of team two, led by RBPF鈥檚 Sergeant Hart, ran down to the dock with guns ready, but Colt鈥檚 boat had already disappeared into the darkness. The only chance to catch him was to find a boat of their own. Hart asked the owners of a 92-foot yacht called Picasso if the RBPF could borrow their sport boat, Dr. J, a 27-foot Boston Whaler Outrage powered by twin 250鈥檚. With one or two people aboard, Dr. J could top 50 mph, just like Colt鈥檚 Intrepid. However, along with Sergeant Hart and three more RBPF officers, who were laden with body armor and weapons, the boat鈥檚 owner, another visiting boater, and the boat鈥檚 captain, Ron Billiot, also got aboard.听Billiot cranked the engines, tossed off the lines, and headed out into the dark bay. They were already about four minutes behind Colt, and all the extra weight meant there鈥檇 be no way the Whaler could catch the Intrepid in a chase. All they could hope for was a lucky break.

A few minutes after the Dr. J took off, Moss arrived at the dock and commandeered another civilian boat. This one wouldn鈥檛 start, so they tried another. It started, and with Moss, five cops, and the captain on board, it roared off into the pitch-black night.

It was the first time the chief inspector had been out on a boat after dark in this area. Fortunately, he wasn鈥檛 driving, because the deceptively calm bay hides a nasty surprise for anyone in too much of a rush to check the charts.

Colt, never afraid of going full speed at night, blasted south along Harbour听Island. He only had to make it to the end of the island, just 1.1 miles from Romora, and he鈥檇 be able to pick out the smudge on the horizon that marked the inlet leading to open water and continued freedom. He鈥檇 broken through to unlock whole new levels of the game.

Then, suddenly, everything went to shit. Three-quarters of a mile south of the marina, the Intrepid abruptly slowed, as if the seawater had turned to Jell-O. The engines growled and the propellers churned. Colt had hit a sandbar.

Two things conspired to finally end the Barefoot Bandit鈥檚 long run. First was the sandy shoal that stretches more than halfway across the bay between Harbour听Island and North Eleuthera. To get to the Whale Point cut, boaters have to first steer toward the Eleuthera shoreline to skirt the bar. It鈥檚 marked on charts and obvious on satellite photos. It鈥檚 also easy to spot during the day, when the shallows glow a brilliant aquamarine compared with the deeper blue of the surrounding waters. At night, though, it鈥檚 invisible.

The other thing that got him was also invisible that night. One of Colt鈥檚 first fascinations, and one of his very first words鈥攖he moon鈥攂etrayed him. Hitting its darkest phase that morning, the new moon brought dramatic tides. It had sucked water off the sandbar听until it sat dead low tide at 2:22 a.m., less than an hour before Colt showed up. A few hours and another 18 inches of incoming tide later and he would have skimmed right across.

Aboard the Dr. J, Ron Billiot knew all about the sandbar. He slowed as he neared the shallows, and they switched on the spotlights. A light-colored hull popped out of the darkness. Idling closer, the men could see Colt at the controls of the听Intrepid鈥檚 center console, one hand on the throttles, one on the wheel. The police began shouting at him: 鈥淪top!鈥� 鈥淚t鈥檚 over!鈥� 鈥淵ou鈥檙e caught!鈥� 鈥淧ut your hands up!鈥�

Colt鈥檚 hand came up; it was holding a pistol, and he fired a shot. The officers, each with an Uzi or a shotgun aimed at Colt, saw the muzzle flash but didn鈥檛 return fire. They yelled at him to drop his weapon.

Colt screamed back, telling them to get the lights off him. 鈥淒on鈥檛 come any closer!鈥� he yelled. 鈥淚鈥檓 not going back to jail! Don鈥檛 come any closer or I鈥檒l kill myself!鈥� He raised the gun to his temple.

The cops weren鈥檛 going away, though.听After a few tense moments, Colt pulled the gun away from his head. He turned back to the boat鈥檚 controls, pushing the throttles forward. The Intrepid dug down in the stern, the props chewing into the bottom, but slowly it began to make headway. Colt had bogged down at the shallowest part of the bar, and now his boat鈥檚 powerful engines were plowing through the sand, taking him toward deeper water.

On the Dr. J, Billiot told Hart that if the Intrepid got just a little farther it鈥檇 be off the sandbar, and they鈥檇 never be able to catch it. The Barefoot Bandit would get away again.

Back at Romora Bay, Kenny Strachan stood on the dock staring out at the black water when he heard what sounded to him like a war: 鈥�Bloom bloom bloom bloom bloom! On and on and on. I thought, Oh my God, they killed him!鈥�

The first shotgun blast hit the port-side outboard engine and peppered the engine well. Other officers fired their Uzis, the 9mm bullets spraying the starboard engine. At least two rounds went toward the听center console, where Colt was standing. One passed through the stainless-steel piping at the middle of his seat, tore through the cushion, and cracked the windshield. A second punched into the steel pipe and ricocheted inside until it was spent. Another round went well high and ripped into an aluminum outrigger ten feet above the waterline.

The police officers finally ceased fire after pumping at least 20 rounds into the Intrepid, killing both of its engines. Acrid smoke filled the still night air. For a moment, the only sound was the soft rumble of the Dr. J鈥�s outboards.

鈥淪top shooting! I can鈥檛 hear! I can鈥檛 hear!鈥� Colt rose from the deck of the Intrepid, screaming and waving his arms.

The post Game Over appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Around 10 A.M, everything went to shit. Sixty-mile-an-hour wind gusts grabbed the little Cessna 182, shook it, twisted it, threw it down toward the jagged peaks of the Cascade Range, then slammed it back up again.

Pilots of small planes obsess about the weather. Ill winds, icing, poor visibility all can bring a flight to a terminal, smoldering conclusion. However, when you're a 17-year-old kid with exactly zero hours of flight training other than what you've gleaned online and from DVDs, and you're sitting in the pilot seat of a stolen airplane trying to make a quick getaway from a whole lotta law that's on your tail for busting out of a prison home and going on your second cop-teasing crime spree, well, you've got other things on your mind besides the weather.

It's believed the kid had cased the small airport on Orcas Island, in the San Juans off the coast of Washington, for at least a week, hiding in the trees behind a flimsy deer fence to watch takeoffs and landings, waiting patiently until a late-model Cessna 182 Skylane fuel-injected dependability, easy to fly, rugged as hell touched down and rolled into the hangar farm. Sometime after sundown, he'd pried his way inside the hangar, where he had all night to check out the plane, read the GPS and autopilot manuals, and dig around to find the ignition key the owner had tucked away in a fishing-tackle box. At sunrise, he'd raised the hangar's wide metal door, attached the tow bar, leaned his six-foot-five, 200-pound frame against the one-ton plane, and slowly rolled it out.

Between YouTube and flight sims, any computer literate can find more than enough info to pilot a plane in theory. Microsoft Flight Simulator reproduces the dash of the 182 exactly, and once the thief climbed into the pilot's seat, his fingers found all the gauges and controls quickly, adjusting fuel mixture and rudder trim. The newer fuel-injected engines turn over easily, and with so many private planes on Orcas, none of the neighbors took special notice of the early-morning growls of the Skylane's 235-horsepower Lycoming. He revved up and taxied south toward the still-sleeping town of Eastsound, then spun the plane until its nose aimed straight down runway 34 which ends abruptly in the cold, slate-gray waters of Puget Sound. He went full-throttle and popped the toe brakes. Instantly the plane lurched forward. The virgin pilot kept his cool, applying enough pressure on the right rudder pedal to counteract the propeller torque and keep the Cessna on the skinny, half-mile strip long enough to hit 60 miles per hour, lift off, and mainline an epic hit of euphoria.

From what the pilot's mom, Pam Kohler, tells me, this was not only her son's first solo takeoff but the very first time he'd ever been in a plane. Here's a kid who'd been told over and over, by teachers, by the police, by so-called friends, and by nearly every adult he'd ever had contact with, that he would never do anything. Suddenly he's flying high, soloing in a bright white plane with whooshing red stripes.

He banked toward the sun, which was rising above snowcapped Mount Baker, and turned south, flying alongside Orcas's Mount Constitution, at 2,402 feet the highest point in the San Juan Islands. Within ten minutes, Camano Island, his home, came into view. There's a landing strip on Camano, but that wasn't an option his face already adorned Wanted posters all over that island. So he continued south-southeast, leaving Puget Sound for the mainland and managing to avoid the heavy commercial air traffic around Sea-Tac. South of Seattle, he banked east, putting the frosty white bulk of Mount Rainier in his right-side window, and headed across the Cascades.

The mountains create a lot of weather, and on a good day, this means lively turbulence. On November 12, 2008, it meant wind gusts exploding against the little Cessna like aerial depth charges, causing one massive buzzkill.

“The ride would've been extremely uncomfortable,” says Eric Gourley, chief pilot for San Juan Airlines and a flight instructor with somewhere north of 13,000 hours in the air. Gourley spent time as an Alaskan bush pilot, so “uncomfortable” to him means the equivalent of spinning inside a commercial clothes dryer. He's a fellow resident of mine on Orcas Island and taught the owner of the stolen plane popular Seattle radio personality Bob Rivers how to fly. Now he just shakes his head, considering a kid with no training flying over the Cascades that morning, saying it's “almost unbelievable” he made it.

The police believe it, though. Once past the violent updrafts, the kid flew on until 11 A.M, when he attempted to land in a scrub field on the Yakama Indian Reservation about 300 miles from where he took off. The Cessna came in hot and hit hard, bouncing back into the air before impacting again and nosediving into a gulley, the propeller blades tearing up the earth. The pilot trashed the plane, but he walked or ran away, the minimum test of a successful landing. When police got to the scene, they found the cockpit splattered in puke. Other than bits of his breakfast, though, the pilot left no trace and disappeared into the woods.

Before he was suspected of stealing the plane, the kid had been just Colton Harris-Moore, high-school dropout, juvenile delinquent, and petty thief who sometimes left bare footprints at crime scenes. After he climbed out of the Cessna and disappeared in the wilds of Washington State home of Sasquatch, D.B. Cooper, Twin Peaks, and Twilight he became Colt, latest in a long line of gutsy outlaws to capture the world's imagination.

WHEN YOU LOOK at the facts, it's easy to understand why he's garnered so much attention: His name is Colt, carrying the gunslinging resonance of the Wild West. He's escaped a jail (albeit a baby jail) and evaded several sheriffs, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and even the FBI for 20 months. He's underdogging it alone in the Northwest wilderness, yet he's followed by bloggers and Facebookers worldwide, the modern equivalent of yesteryear's sensationalized dime-novel hero. During his many close calls, the cops claim Colt has “vaporized,” “vanished,” and “ran like lightning.” When the posse does close in, he allegedly rustles luxury cars, boats, and even planes. And something no one's mentioned is that one of his hideouts on Orcas Island, Madrona Point, is an honest-to-God, can't-make-this-stuff-up ancient Indian burial ground. Hell yeah, this looks like the birth of an outlaw legend.

“Colton was first suspected of theft in 2001, when he was ten years old,” says Detective Ed Wallace, of the Island County sheriff's department, which has been chasing Colt almost constantly ever since. Born March 22, 1991, the young outlaw tended toward the childish in his criminal tooth-cutting petty thefts and malicious mischief. Classmates remember him and a couple of cronies getting busted for breaking into their school, Stanwood Middle, located in mainland Snohomish County just across the bridge from Camano Island, where Colt lived with his mom in a single-wide. By December 2003 Colt had accumulated eight incident reports at school for theft and vandalism, among other infractions, resulting in multiple suspensions. According to Snohomish County court records, when confronted by the principal, Colt said he “could not stop stealing and didn't know why.” In sixth grade, the kids at school began calling him Klepto Colt.

Christa Postma, one of his former classmates, says that while Colt was always getting into trouble, he was “a nice kid” and “seemed really smart, though he didn't know how to put that into his schoolwork.” The two of them would hang outside the Stanwood Library after school, and that's where, she says, Colt met up with a future accomplice, a guy two years older, with the rebel-ready handle Harley Davidson Ironwing. “When Colt wasn't around Harley, he'd be totally chill,” she says. “When Harley showed up, Colt would suddenly be all, I'm so big and bad.” Ironwing, who's serving time in Washington Corrections Center, recently talked to an Everett Herald reporter for a story subtitled “Harley Davidson Ironwing says he trained Colton Harris-Moore how to survive by stealing.”

By the age of 15, Colt had been to juvie more times than most kids his age had been to McDonald's. When not in detention, he often lived under a sentence of community service. In 2006, as soon as he finished one stretch at the Denny Youth Center, in Everett, police were already poised to arrest him for crimes they'd investigated while he was away. That July, one day before he was due in court, Colt disappeared into the hinterlands of Camano Island.

Roughly 70 percent of Camano remains wooded primarily thick stands of cedar and maple with a soft sea of waist-high ferns filling the understory. From the road, you can't see past the first line of trees, and even when you hike in, the exuberant growth means you'd literally have to stumble onto anyone who kept a low-profile camp. No matter how lush, though, living off the land is harder than it sounds and always dirtier, smellier, and hungrier. Going into the wild killed Christopher McCandless in Alaska. Eric Rudolph the anti-abortion Olympic Park bomber was finally nabbed when he slithered out of the Appalachian boonies to go dumpster diving for food. Tramping through Camano's many parks and preserves that butt against residents' backyards, Colt came up with an idea that remains his identifying M.O.: When your ecosystem is a vacation destination, the vacationers lie at the bottom of the food chain. Instead of camping full-time, he began breaking into Camano's 1,000-plus holiday homes many of them empty much of the time to shower, forage for food, and sleep.

Ever the opportunist, Colt found that, along with cans of tuna, people leave all kinds of property in their weekend homes. He helped himself to laptops, cash, jewelry, camcorders, cell phones, a telescope, a GPS unit, iPods, radio-controlled toys like boats and a helicopter, and a Trek mountain bike. There's not much evidence that he pawned the loot, just collected it. Sometimes the homeowners left behind credit cards. Another Colt innovation: Simply punch in those numbers online and you get custom burglary, with overnight delivery of such on-the-lam necessities as bear mace, aviation magazines, a police scanner, and “evidence eraser” software. This was a risky escalation, though, because Colt now had to return to the scene of the crime to collect his packages once they'd been delivered.

On February 9, 2007, seven months after he'd gone on the run, Island County cops finally corralled Colt when he screwed up and turned on a light in a supposedly vacant home. He surrendered after a short standoff and pled guilty to three of 23 counts of burglary and possession of stolen property. After a year in the max-security Green Hill School, Colt was transferred to the minimum-security Griffin Home, near Seattle, to serve out the rest of his three-year sentence. But around 9 P.M. on April 29, 2008, he decided he'd had enough of confinement and reportedly climbed out a window.

Today, Colt remains at large and getting larger, a suspect in more than 100 crimes, mostly felonies. It's been 20 months since he busted out and began playing Grand Theft Auto: The Reality Version, and he's wanted in five Washington counties Island, Snohomish, San Juan, Whatcom, and Kitsap as well as in Idaho. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police joined the chase when he bolted north of the border this past September, allegedly stealing cars and breaking into homes to scrounge for food. And because they believe he flew across state lines in October in another stolen Cessna, Colt's got the FBI on his tail.

This time, the authorities were chasing a suspect alleged to be the lanky teen near the crash-landing site of a $500,000 Cessna 182 turbo that had been heisted in Idaho, flown back across the Cascades, and somehow set down in one cracked, wracked, and jacked-up piece on a hillside clearing in Granite Falls, Washington. Police marshaled two counties' worth of SWAT in armored personnel carriers, canine units, a sheriff's helicopter, and a Department of Homeland Security Blackhawk. Their search of every outhouse, henhouse, doghouse, and meth house Granite Falls has a rep turned up nothing. Once again, the suspect melted into the Washington woods.

After this latest escape, the media set up all three rings, bringing in the Today show, CNN, CBS, Fox, CBC, and all the Seattle network affiliates and radio talkers to fetishize the fact that Colt had committed some crimes while barefoot, and to sling lazy shorthand references like Catch Me If You Can. The story had already gone viral online, and when it was picked up by print and TV worldwide, the Colton Harris-Moore Fan Club on Facebook was friended from as far away as Ireland, Italy, and Australia. A ballad about Colt showed up on YouTube, and T-shirt sales FLY, COLTON, FLY! and MOMMA TRIED soared.

The law, in particular the sheriff's office of Colt's own Island County, was not, to put it mildly, amused. When he was asked on CBC TV about Colt's Robin Hood hero status, Sheriff Mark Brown's round-and-ruddy face turned a new hue.

“He's certainly not my hero,” he said, adding ominously, “I hope that you and I and everybody else, when he does make that fatal mistake, are not responsible for something other than an arrest being made without an incident.”

LYING JUST 30 MILES north of Camano and offering some 3,000 ready-to-pluck vacation homes, the San Juan Islands and in particular Orcas, the largest and most heavily wooded of the archipelago became Colt's second-happiest hunting ground. Floating out here in Puget Sound, on America's far western frontier, Orcas collects more than its share of the anti-authority-minded. When about 100 of us gathered around a huge bonfire just before Halloween to drink beer and chow on barbecued venison (called “hillside salmon” when it's out of season), talk naturally turned to Colt. Everyone knew his victims or at least frequented their restaurants and shops. One guy had been hit twice, his store burgled and then his boat allegedly stolen and run aground during another getaway. Between slurred extremes of “I'm glad he's sticking it to the cops” and “Hope he sticks his head in my house, 'cause he'll die of lead poisoning,” there was a universal appreciation of Colt's balls and brains.

听

With only some 4,000 full-timers on Orcas, we're all at most one degree away from each other. Residents include ex-CEOs of chemical companies and defense contractors, millionaire Microsofties who optioned out in their thirties, Hollywood glitterati, an Apollo astronaut, and even The Far Side's Gary Larson. And then there's the rest of us: retirees, a working middle class of small-business people, organic farmers, contractors, and cabinetmakers, and an eclectic mix of wood-carvers, potters, painters, musicians, and writers. Many struggle to cling to an island where the cost of living reflects its isolation. The cool Salish Sea, filled with killer whales, giant octopus, and Steller sea lions, acts as a moat, keeping the world at bay, but every single thing must be imported except fresh air, the spectacular outdoor lifestyle, and whatever you can find at the farmers' market. It's worth it, though: It's that wonderful. This is the kind of place where, B.C. before Colt ignition keys lived in the car's cupholder and very few of us locked our homes.

This past summer's crime wave appeared limited to Eastsound, Orcas's zero-traffic-light and one-cow town. (The cow's name is April and she lives at the top of Enchanted Forest Road.) Madrona Point, the Lummi Indian burial ground where Colt secretly camped, is a thickly wooded peninsula dangling below town, conveniently located just steps away from all the shopping. Eastsound was easy pickings for Colt, and since it lies half an island away from the rural cabin where my wife, Sandi, and I live, Colt was the furthest thing from my mind on this August 22, when I woke to a noise at 3 A.M

All manner of deer, raccoons, mink, otters, owls, and other critters rustle around here at night, but none had ever moved lumber. The sound of wood clacking also roused our dog, a Leonberger named Murphy, and he padded heavily into the bedroom, snuffed at the window screen, and raised his hackles. The first rain we'd had in more than a month plinked off the metal roof, and the thought of pulling on shoes and a rain shell, finding a flashlight, and stumbling around under the cabin which perches at the edge of a rocky cliff seemed way too exhausting, especially since this was probably just a deer bombed on fermented huckleberries. The following night, again around 3 A.M, I woke to the eerie sensation of someone staring at me in the pitch blackness of the bedroom. Murphy was on alert at the window again, hackles raised. I sat up and listened but couldn't hear anything except the rain.

The next day, I learned that during those two nights someone had broken into a B&B, a restaurant, a marina, and a dock store all within a mile or so of our place. When I realized that the dense woods surrounding our cabin connected directly to all of those spots, my hackles went up, too. That's also when Sandi started talking about putting up curtains while we turned the cabin upside down looking for our one house key.

Usually, life on our little island remains so blissfully devoid of what a city dweller would call “action” that our hormone-charged teens call it “Orcatraz.” Before Colt, we read the sheriff's log for its Lake Wobegon like entertainment. My favorite entry from this past summer: On August 3, “an 83-year-old Eastsound woman reported…one pair of fur-lined moccasins…and three almost-new pair of beige women's underwear were stolen from an unlocked old fruit-packing barn.”

The last time an Orcas crime was even considered newsworthy for the mainland papers was 22 months ago, when a numbnut who'd drifted ashore for a while decided to punish the “rich, white people” of the island for the death of Luna the killer whale (who'd swum into a tugboat's propeller 185 miles north of Orcas, up in Canada). He jumped a fence at a power station and, fully protected by Playtex kitchen gloves, tried to cut a high-voltage line with a pole saw. When a lineman got to the scene, the vigilante's pants were still smoking. No matter how delusional, though, at least that guy had a message, something Colt has yet to feel the need to offer.

“Jesse James and other outlaws weren't celebrated just because they were criminals,” says professor Graham Seal, author of The Outlaw Legend: A Cultural Tradition in Britain, America and Australia. “They were seen to embody a spirit of defiance and protest, allowing the dispossessed to strike a vicarious blow against their oppressors.” Seal says that Colt “sure sounds like an outlaw legend in the making,” especially considering his elusiveness, style, and growing number of supporters. So who's living vicariously through Colt? So far, he's a blank screen, ready for projection. Rebelling against the government, the cops, your parents? Colt's got you covered.

The only hint of a motive I can dig up is a note Colt wrote to his mom after the Camano Island deputies found one of his campsites, filled with stolen merchandise. His dog, Melanie, was at the camp, and the police took her. “The cops wanna play, hu!?” Colt wrote. “It's war! Tell them that.”

DAVIS SLOUGH RUNS wet at high tide, making Colt's home turf, Camano, officially an island, even though it's a drive-to. Over the past 20 years, most of the island's rustic fishing and crabbing camps have fallen to luxe waterfront homes, but the talk still tends toward what's biting and how Dungeness crab season is shaping up.

Heading toward the lower end of the island, where Colt grew up, I pass the dinky prefab that serves as a base for Camano's small group of sheriff's deputies and their black-and-gold patrol cars. Soon the homes spread out and it's mostly wooded acreage, private property as well as parks, with plenty of room to hide. I leave the pavement at Haven Place, marked by a long line of mailboxes and several FOR SALE signs.

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After reading a couple hundred pages of Island County court documents concerning Colt's childhood, I got the impression that, at times, this place had been anything but a haven for him. Reports name a dozen Child Protective Services referrals dating from the time he was one. They also reference “numerous” reports that “Colton's mother has been heavily affected by alcohol abuse throughout his formative years” and state that his father was gone by the time Colt was four, though back for at least one family barbecue, which ended with Colt calling 911 and the father being chased through the woods and arrested on outstanding warrants. The court documents state that Colt's stepfather was a heroin addict. A third potential male role model was described by Colt's mom as “not playing with a full deck.” A court psychologist's evaluation says that young Colt was diagnosed with ADHD, depression, and intermittent explosive disorder and placed on four medications. Quotes from Colt at age 12 include “I am tired of this stuff” and “I need help.”

I turn down a dark driveway, slowly roll past several no-nonsense NO TRESPASSING signs, and park beside three other pickups in varying states of decay. Across a small clearing slumps a dingy white single-wide trailer with extra bits and pieces cobbled on, including a small wooden deck. I climb the loose cinder blocks, piled three high, that stand in for steps. Looking out from atop the rain-slicked deck, it's a beautiful, peaceful piece of property, completely screened by lush green drapes of cedar. The junk cars, the busted lawn furniture, the aluminum shed frozen in mid-collapse nothing is really so far out of the ordinary for the rural areas around here. It's just a little more so. At the far side of the clearing, amid the soaring cathedral of cedars 100 feet tall, stands some kind of statue. It's about four feet high, without much shape, but could be a Virgin Mary.

“That's an armadillo that used to stand outside a liquor store,” says Pam Kohler, Colt's mom. “The chickens got to it, though, and pecked off some of the Styrofoam.” The statue, she says, like the trailer, was on the property when she bought it 24 years ago. She leads me inside, where I'm greeted by 20 pounds of wagging tail named Melanie.

“Colt wanted a beagle, so we went to the shelter and they brought this one out,” says Pam. “I think she's some kind of hunting dog. This summer she got one of the biggest snakes I've ever seen, and just last month she's barking at something in the yard, so I walk over and it's a SWAT guy hiding in the trees in his full G.I. Joe outfit.”

The first time I talked to Pam on the phone, we were interrupted when six police officers showed up at her door. All the jurisdictions have been there and, lately, officers from an auto-theft task force who, she says, have told her they think Colt has stolen between 40 and 60 cars. “Those guys brought me a plate of chocolate-chip cookies,” she says. “It's all weird.”

I get the sense, though, that the weirdness started before Colt's current troubles. Pam, at 58, appears literally hunched over from the weight of a life that hasn't been what she expected. We sit down at a small table in the kitchen. She's not smoking, but the air is so saturated Pall Malls, by the butts in the ashtray that it claws my eyes. She talks of a marriage to an Air Force man (she was Pam Harris then), a life in Southern California, another in St. Louis, and then moving back to her home state, Washington, cashing in her retirement fund to buy these five acres on Camano, where, after five years of trying and 20 years after the birth of her first son, along came Colt. Pam says she had a federal job back then, in the accounting department of the National Park Service down in Seattle. “Commuting three hours a day when I had a newborn baby, that was awful.” The Air Force husband was gone, and Colt's biological father was in and out of the trailer and their lives. Pam remarried when Colt was four, giving him a stepfather named Bill, a Vietnam vet whom, she says, he was very close to. “They did everything together,” she says. Then one day, when Colt was ten and Bill had gone off to help move some relatives to Florida, the phone rang.

“Someone from Island County sheriff called and asked if I was Bill's wife. I said yes, and they just said, 'Well, he's dead.'” No funeral, no closure other than the jug of ashes in the closet and Bill, she says, never wanted to be cremated. Pam doesn't know how he died. “They wanted me to pay for a coroner's report, and that just don't jive with me not cool.”

“After Bill died, I freaked,” says Pam. “I cried all the time, and I drank a lot and went into a deep depression. I'm sure it affected Colt, too.” Her job ended, and the only money coming in was from Social Security widow's benefits. She took some criminal-justice and psychology classes at Skagit Valley College. “I wanted to be a lawyer,” she laughs, then sighs. “But then crap just started happening, trucks breaking down, nobody to help me.” She stopped going, and money got tighter. “We starved,” she says. Court documents from around that time report, “Colton wants mom to stop drinking and smoking, get a job, and have food in the house.”

Melanie climbs onto the couch in the living room, where a nice TV stands next to the woodstove. A hallway so narrow that my arms brush both walls leads back to a bathroom and the bedrooms beyond, including Colt's, the one that a deputy's affidavit says sported a padlock hasp one time when they showed up looking for him, so Pam took a hatchet to it. In the kitchen, I sit below a piece of plywood screwed into the wall where there used to be a window. Three years ago, Pam says, a neighbor who accused Colt of stealing his car stereo terrorized them every night for a month by throwing potatoes, a can of corn, and circular-saw blades at them, breaking windows in both the trailer and her truck.

NEIGHBORLY RELATIONS DO seem complicated along this stretch of road. One of the times the local police came closest to catching Colt was when they spotted a black Mercedes owned by Carol Star who lives next door to Pam driving erratically. When they gave chase, the Mercedes turned into the parking lot of the nearby Elger Bay Caf茅 and out jumped Colt while the car was still moving. He disappeared into the woods as the car rolled between a propane tank and a wall with inches to spare, coming to rest against a dumpster just a couple of yards from a 20-foot cliff. Star says Colt had already robbed her house several times, and it was from a stolen camera found in her car that Island County Detective Ed Wallace recovered the now infamous picture that Colt had shot of himself and then deleted. It shows Colt relaxing amid the ferns, wearing a Mercedes polo and a Mona Lisa smile. It's the same picture that now graces WANTED posters throughout the state.

“That's a terrible photo of him,” says Pam, though she likes another WANTED pic taken by a security camera at the Island Market, on Orcas. “We didn't take many photos when he was growing up,” she says, handing me a dusty frame holding a 1997 group shot of a Stanwood/Camano Junior Athletic Association soccer team along with a portrait of Colt in his uniform. In the pictures, he's a cute towhead with a big, bright smile. When I spoke with the parents of another kid on that team, though, they said that Colt had come to only the first couple of practices and the photo session and that he never actually got to play. It's a shame, because from the accounts of a half-dozen deputies who've chased but never caught fleet-footed Colt in the woods of Camano and Orcas, he's a natural athlete.

“He was a fat, happy baby,” Pam remembers. “I used to call him Tubby.” She pauses for a moment, then recalls other nice memories from Colt's childhood: camping in the Cascades (“Maybe I shouldn't have taught him all that survival stuff”), summer days on the water, she and Colt dancing to Sinatra's “Summer Wind” out on the deck. Pam remembers once taking Colt to a local beach but having to leave him there alone because she had a headache. “When I went back to pick him up, he'd set up a whole Robinson Crusoe camp, propping his towels up on sticks for a shelter.” Colt had also dived up 40 Dungeness crab in deep water without a mask or any other equipment. “He had them all lined up on the beach,” she says. “I told him to pick the five biggest to take home for dinner, and he let the rest go.”

Colt's problems with the police, Pam says, started on his eighth birthday, when she bought him an expensive bike. “He goes out to ride it, and next thing an Island County cop car pulls into the driveway with Colt inside. The deputy gets out and opens the trunk. He says, 'Is this Colt's bike?' I got pissed! Just because we live in this kinda dumpy old trailer they figure, 'How could Colt get a nice bike like that? Well, he musta stole it.' I know Colt was scared, and it had a big effect on him.” Since then, Pam says, everything that happens on the island is blamed on Colt. “He hasn't been alive long enough to do all the crimes they say he's done.” Of the burglaries he is responsible for, Pam doesn't think he's stealing because he wants things. “Anything he needed, I always found a way to get for him,” she says. “He had a computer, a PlayStation, then the new PlayStation, a whole bunch of James Bond movies I got on eBay he loves those. He also had two flight-simulator games…”

Pam brings out an art project Colt did while in detention. It's a psychologist's wet dream of a collage, packed with luxury brand names and images of Rolexes, cruise ships, smartphones, gold bars, credit cards, and, most prominently, a private jet. One snipped quote reads: MAKE MONEY NOT MISTAKES.

Pam says she was never able to control Colt. “He always did just what he wanted,” she says. “Like now with him running from the cops; he's doing it because he likes to see if he can. He thinks it's easy…and he's sure making them look like fools.” Pam says Colt calls her from the road and they get along fine now, talking for hours about everything and laughing a lot. “When he was younger, though, we fought about everything…you name it.” And after Bill died, she says, everything got worse. I ask her about the medications they put Colt on to manage his behavior. “A psychiatrist had him on something,” she says, “then wanted to keep raising the dose and trying different things. One day, Colt came over to me in the yard and sat down and he would hardly ever sit down and he just hung his head. God, he was so depressed. So I said he's not going to be used as a guinea pig, and I took him off the drugs and stopped taking him to that doctor.”

Colt grew up with the roar of low-flying jets as a daily event Camano Island lies curled just east of its big sister, Whidbey Island, home to a large naval air station and Pam says he always loved planes. She bought him sheets of balsa wood to make models, and he thumbed through his plane-identification book so much that it fell apart. “From the time he was a little kid,” she says, “he could look up at any plane in the sky and tell you what make it was, what engine it had, when it was built, and whether it was a good, safe one.”

Colt listed “pilot” as his occupation on his MySpace page, and Pam says she and his aunt promised him flying lessons if he graduated high school. She shrugs. “Evidently he didn't need flight school.”

I page through a new book Jane's Aircraft Recognition Guide that Colt sent Pam last Christmas. (“He's smart enough not to send things direct; he first sends them east and has them forwarded to me.”) She's very interested in which ones he flew. “I'm not saying it's right,” she says, “but if he flew those planes, I'm very, very proud of him.” She does hope, though, that Colt will take her advice and get himself a parachute before he steals another one.

THE RISK TO COLT GROWS greater each passing day, with each alleged new crime and each additional jurisdiction pulled into the hunt. He can't walk into a Quickie Mart anywhere within 500 miles without being recognized. But still they haven't caught him.

The FBI fields an entire cyber-crime task force using advanced CIPAV spyware to find all kinds of ether-based bad guys and obviously the Bureau has plenty of experience tapping phones and tracking cells. But the FBI remains close-lipped about the ongoing investigation.

At the county level, there's a lot of frustration mixed with embarrassment. The cops try to minimize it, but you can tell they're getting more pissed the longer this drags on. According to his spokesman, Island County Sheriff Mark Brown is “way over” talking about this case. These small departments are in a tough position, hammered by residents on one side for not pulling out all the stops to catch Colt, and on the other for wasting too much of their dwindling budgets chasing what is, at the end of the day, simply a property thief, not a rapist or murderer. The FBI is busy hunting terrorist sleeper cells, and the police in Washington State have had six of their own murdered in the past three months. In the overall law-enforcement scheme, Colt is as several cops have told me just “a giant pain in the ass.”

When the Island County sheriff's deputies failed to quickly recapture Colt, some locals considered taking matters into their own hands. Joshua Flickner, whose family owns the Elger Bay Grocery, remembers Colt from the time he was a kid, and describes the “evil” in his eyes. Flickner says the crime that sent Colt into the woods for the first time happened at his store. “We had him on the security camera emptying our ATM using a stolen credit card four or five days in a row. That woman was his first identity-theft victim, and she was just in here. I've talked to dozens of his victims. You don't see the victims. All he's doing is hurting people financially, psychologically, he's hurting people, yet here we are putting him on a pedestal, glorifying him, idolizing him. He's got a Facebook site…I want to vomit, OK?”

Flickner went to Sheriff Brown about forming a posse to comb the Camano woods, but the offer was declined.

Up here in San Juan County, Sheriff Bill Cumming is also surprised Colt hasn't been caught. “Burglary, burglary, commercial burglary, burglary, commercial burglary, commercial burglary…” Cumming runs down a long, long list of felonies almost all of them on Orcas that he believes Colt may have committed. “We've processed all of these crime scenes, and some we're sure was him; others may go nowhere because the suspect wore gloves…others, maybe he'll tell us about them someday.”

With a criminology degree from UC Berkeley, an easy laugh, and a visage that's part Gene Hackman and part Jimmy Buffett, the 61-year-old Cumming hits the right tone as sheriff of the laid-back San Juans; he's held the job for 24 years. He doesn't believe Colt committed every unsolved crime on his books, but he also doesn't think his department knows yet the extent of his activities.

For most of Colt's time on the lam, Cumming reminds me, the feds and others haven't been involved; it's just been too few underfunded deputies tasked with shaking a few million bushes. He offers a “no comment” when I ask him about a rumor I heard around the bonfire that one of his deputies had been sitting in an Orcas home when Colt came to pick up a package he'd ordered online. The story goes that by the time the cop got out of his chair, Colt had leapt off the porch without touching the stairs and vanished into the trees. Like the Island County sheriff's department, Cumming's guys have had Colt in their grasp there just weren't enough hands there at the time to hold on. On September 13, 2009, Orcas deputies got close enough during a foot pursuit to positively identify Colt, but he danced away. “We could hear him laughing,” one deputy involved in the chase told me. Colt ran through a churchyard and into the woods, circling around to Brandt's Landing, where he stole a boat and rode off into the sunrise, escaping to Point Roberts, on the mainland.

What happens once they do catch him? “There are no easy answers,” says Cumming. “We arrest people we're not social workers and from an enforcement point of view, the longer we can lock him away, at least we know he's not committing more crimes during that time. However, any thoughtful person who looks at long-term protection issues knows that this person will come back to the community and who do you want to come back?”

A local woman who spent years as a crisis worker counseling at-risk youth, and who asked to remain anonymous, says she believes “Colt didn't intend for all this to happen. It's gotten away from him now.” She met Colt when he was about 14 and had been sentenced to serve a week of community service at the park where she works. She says Colt showed up without food or anything to drink but had to work full days outdoors. “I fed him, gave him water, and he was just so very grateful.” Colt worked hard sawing and hauling wood, pulling weeds, and cutting brush, she says, and was very smart, showing a “ridiculous amount” of knowledge about the local plants.

Colt, she says, wasn't anything like the extreme cases she's seen. “He really struck me as a good-hearted kid who'd always been looked at with negative expectations and didn't have a lot of motivation to feel good about his life. Yet when given an opportunity, I mean he just worked his butt off. How is it possible,” she wonders, “that all these groups of people and systems in place miss children like this, over and over again?”

Two weeks after Colt finished his community service, he rode his bike the ten miles back to the park. “He was kinda shy, handed me three small bags and just said, 'Here.' I'd told him we had a very small budget for new plants, and he'd gone out and hand-harvested seeds from local flowers that he thought would grow well in the park. I said, 'Oh my God, thank you so much!' And he's like 'Yeah, all right. Well, I guess I'll go, bye.' He started to walk away but then turned around and said, 'Thank you for being so nice to me.' I was literally teary-eyed.”

Colt, unfortunately, has escalated beyond youth programs he turned 18 last March. “One of the problems of our justice system is that he'll be tried as an adult for any new crimes, so he'll end up in jail,” says Eric Trupin, a child psychologist and director of the University of Washington's Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy. “That's unfortunate for this kid, but, again, he is a risk to the community. He's gonna hurt somebody if he keeps this up.”

NOVEMBER IS THE SHITTIEST month on Puget Sound. Halloween leaves behind malevolent winds and drooling skies. The shockingly short days have to compete with the four months of sunny, 72-degree days and 9 P.M. summer sunsets that went before. Down on Camano, another wave of burglaries sweeps across the island like a cold front. One woman's home is hit twice within a week. She knows Colt's back because, she claims, over the years he's robbed her eight times, always for cash and food. She says this time he took some pizzas.

On my last trip down to Camano, a black-windowed SUV pulls up as I sit in front of the Elger Bay Caf茅. The four deputies inside are loaded for bear, and I'm told they're a search team. When I stop by Pam's trailer, a friend of hers shows me his plans for booby-trapping the property with modified shotgun-shell “toe-poppers” in order to keep the cops and the media and the weirdness away. Pam's very interested in the price of bulletproof vests. “I'm going to get Colt one,” she tells me. “I don't care if he wants it or not. I'm getting him one and he's going to wear it. Sometimes a mother has to put her foot down.”

With multiple warrants for his arrest plus cash rewards offered by the Orcas and Camano chambers of commerce, Colt can't trust anyone, can't risk turning on a light in a house that's supposed to be empty, and hopefully won't risk breaking into an occupied home. The islanders are edgy. While this remains the safest and friendliest place I've ever lived, nearly everyone I know, from the most liberal tree hugger to the most conservative clear-cutter, is armed some disturbingly so and has been since long before Colt showed up.When homes started getting hit again on Camano, Pam's neighbors say, police helicopters were up searching at night. The colder it gets outside, the easier it is for the thermal-imaging gear to pinpoint a small campfire or a warm face poking out of a sleeping bag. The fact that the infrared hasn't spotted him means that Colt's back to house-hopping, he's slipped loose of the dragnet yet again, or just to help along the legend he's a vampire.

In another strange twist, Ed Wallace says that Island County is now seeing copycats. “Burglars are hitting homes, stealing cash, and then grabbing a pot pie before they leave. That way, everything gets blamed on Colt.”

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Speculation on how this will all end remains a popular local pastime, second only to coming up with ways to catch Colt using various combinations of tranquilizer darts and tiger traps. If he doesn't surrender peacefully or wind up forming the red bull's-eye in a burnt circle of ground where a stolen Cessna augers in, a lot of people think Colt will end up gunned down by the police. A shot fired during the Granite Falls chase and an assault rifle stolen from a deputy's car with Colt a suspect in both events could lead to quick draws. That's not what the cops are saying, though. In fact, they're not saying much about the case anymore. “I'm very cognizant of the fact I don't want to be part of the problem with this young man by giving him notoriety, creating myths behind him that endanger the community and do not bode well for him in the long run,” says Bill Cumming, who along with Trupin believes that Colt narcissistically digs the infamy and that it may cause him to escalate to tragic levels.

Colt's Facebook fan club now has more than 15,000 members. A big Swedish contingent came aboard recently, along with a number of marriage and wanna-do-you proposals and plenty of helpful suggestions for the “Barefoot Burglar,” such as “You should steal the space shuttle.”

Pam calls me one Sunday morning to say that Colt phoned her the previous night. “He's safe and in good spirits,” she says. “And he's nowhere near Camano Island. He's on the mainland, staying with friends at a house protected by all kinds of high-tech security and cameras.” Colt, she says, does computer work for them and gets paid $600 a week. “I told him to send me some money,” she laughs.

Pam says Colt told her before that he may lie low for a while, maybe a year, to let things die down before coming in from the cold and turning himself in. She doesn't think, however, that he'll get a fair trial. Pam believes the best place for him would be out of the country, someplace without an extradition treaty. She said Colt's goal was always to fly wealthy people around in jets until he got rich enough himself to buy a yacht and live on a tropical island. “That's still what his plans are,” she says. “He wants to come get me, and we'll go live the good life.”

Back home on Orcas, walking down the path toward my little cabin, I hear a noise in the woods. It's dusk and raining. Maybe it's just a bird rapping its bill against a tree, but something's a little off. Since all the break-ins, every simple sound seems to echo a little louder. I move into the trees and pick my way carefully down the steep slope to a spot under a big fir where bald eagles like to perch and eat. The skulls, spines, and fine bones of fish and seabirds litter the forest floor. There's no one around and no sign anyone has been. All I hear now is tree frogs, the only living things besides the resurgent moss that are happy about the ceaseless rain. I look up at the cabin. My wife has switched on the lights, and through the big window I can see her moving around the bedroom. As I stand here in the woods, in the dirty blue light and cold drizzle, the sight of the cabin's honeyed glow epitomizes the idea of warm and cozy, of safety, of home.

I climb back up the hill, duck under a wet cedar branch, and walk inside, where I'm greeted by my big dog and a toasty fire. I feel sorry for Colt. And then I lock my door.

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