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  The Bushman’s Lair

  Paul McKendrick

  The

  Bushman’s

  Lair

  On the Trail of the Fugitive of the Shuswap

  Copyright © 2021 Paul McKendrick

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].

  Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

  P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

  www.harbourpublishing.com

  Edited by Peter Norman

  Cover design by Anna Comfort O’Keeffe

  Text design by Onça Publishing

  Maps by Roger Handling, Terra Firma Digital Arts

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Printed on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council

  Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The Bushman’s lair : on the trail of the fugitive of the Shuswap / Paul McKendrick.

  Names: McKendrick, Paul, 1976- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210100753 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210101067 | ISBN 9781550179224 (softcover) | ISBN 9781550179231 (EPUB)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bjornstrom, John. | LCSH: Fugitives from justice—British Columbia—Shuswap Lake Region. | LCSH: Thieves—British Columbia—Biography. | LCSH: Escaped prisoners—British Columbia. | LCGFT: Biographies. | LCGFT: True crime stories.

  Classification: LCC HV6653.B56 M35 2021 | DDC 364.16/22092—dc23

  The Bushman of the Shuswap had a scruffy, bushy beard

  He’d haunt the shores of the great lake, he’d steal your fishing gear

  Might take your wooden paddles and launch your red canoe

  Might wear your hippie sandals and take your gumboots too

  The man they called the Bushman would take your summer clothes

  Put on your cottage underwear and might borrow your favourite robe

  The legend of the Bushman will be told for years to come

  And when he’s finished doin’ his time, he’ll be back to roam his kingdom

  If your bathing suit’s gone missing, if your marshmallows are gone

  If your motorboat’s gone fishin’, then the Bushman’s been around

  If your neighbor’s axe has disappeared, if someone broke the gate

  Then you better accept this simple fact, it’s the Bushman from the lake

  Now he had the cops a hoppin’, he was the invisible man

  Every time they thought they had him, he’d vanish in the quicksand

  He’d taunt those doughnut dunkers by showing up on TV

  He would show the young reporter where he slept up in a tree

  Yeah, the Bushman wanted to live in Hollywood it seems

  And in the end it was the bright lights that brought him down from the trees

  He spoke about conspiracies, some gold mine called Bre-X

  But that’s another story, that story cost me ten grand

  And if one day when you’re down at your cottage by the lake

  If you find your bed’s been slept in, if there’s food left on a plate

  If your waffle iron’s hissing, can’t find your favourite rake

  Then you better accept this simple fact, it’s the Bushman from the lake

  “Bushman of the Shuswap,” written and performed by Charlie Mackenzie

  Contents

  1 Beneath the Surface

  2 Into the Dark

  3 The Call of the Bush

  4 Stargate

  5 Gilded Dreams

  6 Gilded Greed

  7 The Sorcerer

  8 After the Gold Rush

  9 The Hit List

  10 Skookum Tumtum

  11 Hunakwa

  12 Off the Beaten Track

  13 Hunting Season

  14 Who’s Listening?

  15 Deluded Delusions

  16 Into the Light

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  Maps

  Southern British Columbia

  Southeast Asia

  Shuswap Lake

  Southern British Columbia

  Chapter 1

  Beneath the Surface

  Submerging a canoe is not very difficult: it can be tilted to one side to let the water pour in. That leaves it floating barely below the surface, assuming it’s been constructed from materials that are sufficiently buoyant. If one desires to go further and actually sink the canoe, a dozen or so grapefruit-sized rocks should do the trick. The boat will gradually settle to the bottom. It may still be visible, however, so if the ultimate objective is to conceal its presence, it helps to paint it so that it’s indistinguishable from whatever else rests below.

  Retrieving a sunken canoe is more burdensome. First, it must be located, which can be hindered by a steep drop-off below the surface or a camouflaging coat of paint. Then it can be fished out with something like a long pole with a hook at one end or, if a suitable jig is unavailable, dragged to the surface by hand. Once the rocks are removed, there’s the awkward process of hauling it ashore or finding a sturdy platform to rest one end on, then raising the other end above the water and corkscrewing the boat in midair gracefully enough that no water re-enters before it’s returned to an upright and ready position.

  The Bushman had carried out the process many times. Although his five-foot-four, two-hundred-pound frame didn’t grant him a long reach, his stoutness did facilitate heavy lifting. He hadn’t found a way to do the job without getting wet, but the process had become as mindless as driving one’s car out of the garage. So inconvenience was not top of mind as he retrieved his canoe from the lake bottom one frigid day in November 2001. It helped that it was daytime—usually he operated under the cover of darkness. But what really kept him from dwelling upon the task was concern that he might be about to walk—or more precisely, canoe—into a trap.

  * * *

  The following summer, near that same spot, a group of houseboaters pulled their rented floating homes, Yachts of Fun and Peat’s Pride, up to a remote beach on British Columbia’s Shuswap Lake. The boats were staked to the ground to make sure they stayed put for the night. The beach was equipped with fire pits, but the houseboaters hadn’t brought firewood. Collecting deadwood was prohibited—this beach was within a newly formed provincial park—and a sign on the beach indicated the fine was somewhere in the vast range of $86 to $1,000,000 (the upper end presumably reserved for those pillaging more than a few sticks for a fire).

  The law-abiding boaters appointed a three-man crew to harvest fuel farther south down the lake, past the protected area, and they set out in a smaller boat that had been towed behind one of the motherships. They hoped to find large pieces of deadwood floating in the water; this would serve the dual benefits of burning longer into the night and removing the boating hazard. But the lake’s waterline had receded in the summer heat, exposing more of the craggy shoreline and leaving less deadwood in the water, so they had to go ashore instead.

  Above them rose steep and seemingly impenetrable slopes clad in spruce, fir, cedar and hemlock—an unlikely location for signs of human activity. So they were surprised to see that the receding water had exposed a black hose that snaked under rocks and led up into the bush. They decided to follow it and discovered a faint trail that meandered from above the rocky shoreline and up a couple of switchbacks. They came to what looked like a small wooden shed built into the steep, mossy hillside. It was framed with two-by-eights that didn’t yet display the silvery patina of years of oxidation and sun exposure. Fringes of vapor barrier could be seen at junctures in the framing. When the foragers opened the door and poked their heads inside, they were greeted by the beginning of a passageway that disappeared into darkness.

  Conveniently there was a light switch just beyond the entranceway, and it illuminated more of the dank corridor. The walls, which looked hastily assembled and suspect in their ability to resist a cave-in, were lined with wood framing intermeshed with wiring and cords. The floor was mostly bare earth, strewn with buckets, pipes and boards. Near the entrance was a smaller portal with a door open just enough to admit the black hose from the lake. The outside of the door was camouflaged with branches held in place by spray insulation. Binoculars hung nearby, presumably used to scan activity on the water.

  Farther along, the walls were adorned with snowshoes, fishing nets and other paraphernalia hanging from hooks, and beyond that the passageway broadened to about fifteen feet wide to accommodate a kitchen. Plywood shelves were lined with jars of ground coffee, vegetable oil, sugar, salt and popcorn seeds. There were pots and pans and cleaning supplies, including a fresh box of SOS pads. An empty Kraft Dinner box lay beside a well-used two-burner camp stove. Shelves adjacent to the kitchen held a bank of at least ten car batteries interconnected by rusty cables and grounded to a post. A small clothes washer was plugged into the battery bank. Farther along, the passageway was partly obstructed by hundred-pound propane tanks that would weigh about 170 pounds when full.

  At the end of the passageway, about thirty feet into the rock, the cave pivoted to the right and expanded into a roughly thirteen-by-thirt
een-foot chamber. The space was framed in and protected from moisture by layers of vapour barrier with insulation sandwiched between. An elevated plywood frame supported a regular bed mattress upon which lay an assortment of blankets and clothing. Storage units fashioned from plywood surrounded the bed. Wiring that fed into the bedroom was connected to various lights, a computer and a radio. Reading material was scattered about, including a newspaper opened to an article on Osama bin Laden. In the corner stood a small bird cage, though nothing stared back at them from it.

  The boaters asked themselves whose abode it could be. An especially private hermit? Someone with an unorthodox idea of a fishing lodge? Or perhaps someone more menacing who could return at any moment? They didn’t linger to find out. They returned to their group to tell them of their discovery and informed the manager of the houseboat rental company, who had shown up to fix a faulty battery in one of the boats.

  The manager needed few details to identify the occupant: “It’s the home of the Shuswap Bushman!”

  While travelling the large body of water nocturnally by canoe and helping himself to provisions from cabins in the area, the Bushman had built the nine-hundred-square-foot cave and furnished it with supplies from those same cabins. After the houseboat manager was shown the cave, he radioed the police. They appeared shortly thereafter, questioned the houseboaters, appropriated film from their cameras and began removing the stolen possessions from the cave to be floated down the lake on a barge. The houseboaters, meanwhile, finished their holiday and set off on the five-hour journey to return their floating homes to their moorage. Along the way they were intercepted and boarded by a TV news reporter and cameraman eager to learn more about the Bushman’s hideout.

  The Bushman had already garnered a following as the result of earlier media coverage of his escapades. But many viewed the coverage as glamourizing. “I hate it when people call him the Bushman,” said one police staffer. “He’s just a two-bit crook.” The police sergeant tasked with bringing him in echoed that comment: “Let’s not romanticize this guy. He’s a thief. Sure, he’s a bizarre thief. But he’s a thief.” Some cabin owners recoiled at any suggestion that he was anything more than a “bush rat” or “garbage bear.” And a local newspaper questioned the idea that he was some kind of Robin Hood and instead referred to him as “just a loser who’s lost in the woods.”

  Chapter 2

  Into the Dark

  “Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.”

  Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

  Shuswap Lake has four arms of unequal length that give it the shape of a lopsided H. The southwestern arms that form the bottom half of the H are home to towns, farms and industry amid a landscape ranging from rolling grasslands sprinkled with ponderosa pine to fertile farmland incised by meandering waterways and flanked by evergreen hills. In contrast, the top half of the H is more inaccessible and untamed. Towering alpine peaks capture moisture from the Pacific, sustaining the unique inland rainforest ecosystem below and building up large snowpacks in the winter that replenish the lake, which in some parts is over five hundred feet deep.

  Having four arms makes the lake attractive for tourism. Not only does the elongated shape provide more explorable shoreline—the reported length of which ranges from over 1,400 kilometres to a more credible 405 kilometres, depending on the source—but it also provides four different destinations. This is particularly attractive to houseboaters who want to feel they are captains of their own ships and not just on the same journey as the other roughly two hundred houseboats that could be plying the waters at the same time. Of course, they need not leave the comforts of their lavish floating homes, which are up to three storeys high and ninety-four feet long and sometimes outfitted with essentials like air conditioning, hot tubs, large-screen TVs, hardwood floors and granite countertops.

  Houseboaters seeking solitude generally head north into Anstey Arm, nestled among abrupt, forested hillsides that sweep upward on the east side to the peaks of the Monashee Mountains. Anstey’s upper end cannot be reached by road, and its lower end, at the middle of the H, can be reached only via a rough, washboardy logging road that takes an hour to travel from the nearest town, Sicamous, and only accesses the private lakefront properties that occupy some of the shoreline. Except for a few beaching spots that can host houseboats for the night, most of the remaining shoreline is rocky and uninhabited except for wildlife and, for a brief period, the Bushman.

  * * *

  I had the good fortune to spend some time on the Shuswap as a teenager and into my early twenties, when my family had a cabin on Salmon Arm, the southeast arm of the lake. Our slice of lake life provided plenty to occupy us, so there was little justification to spend a full day in a boat touring all the way up Anstey Arm. That changed, however, when I learned that the Bushman’s cave had been discovered there. The prospect of seeing it was reason enough to explore the arm, and so on a sun-soaked summer day in 2002, I set out with some similarly curious friends for a visit.

  Roughly halfway up the arm, past all the cabins, we saw a cluster of boats moored along a particularly forbidding section of shoreline. There was no obvious attraction there, so we wondered if perhaps we had stumbled upon some other cave seekers. We moored our boat against the serrated shoreline and found the switchback trail leading up the slope. It was tricky to navigate in flip flops, but it wasn’t long before the doorway to the cave appeared abruptly in front of us.

  Beyond the wood-framed entrance was an impactful glimpse into the Bushman’s life. Even though the police had cleared out many of the contents, it felt like we were encroaching upon someone’s home. It had a sensible arrangement, with enough space in the kitchen to comfortably prepare and enjoy a meal, and the bedroom chamber felt like it was located deep enough in the earth to safely ride out Armageddon. The custom-built framing and furniture suggested the Bushman had kept busy and was prepared to stay awhile. The reading material lying about suggested he enjoyed some leisure time—notwithstanding that the newspaper on the bed, folded over to reveal the picture of Osama bin Laden, felt slightly ominous in that setting. Putting that and the mildewy aroma aside, it was possible to see some attraction in the den as a short-term hideaway. It was also possible to see how living there day to day might lead to anti-social tendencies or exacerbate any pre-existing ones.

  Over the years since I set foot in his lair, I have continued to marvel at the effort required to construct it, and questions have percolated about its bearded occupant’s motivation. He didn’t seem to fit the profile of a refuge-seeking hermit who had drifted onto a wayward path or a freeloading, curmudgeonly misanthrope who had always been askew. There seemed to be more to him.

  Curiosity kept pulling me in, and I began digging deeper and deeper. At some point, that curiosity morphed into a determination to answer the question of what had driven him to the cave. If nobody else was going to tell the full story, perhaps it would have to be me.

  Margaret Atwood is partly responsible. While pondering the Bushman’s story, I stumbled upon her 1972 book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, which identified survival as the central symbol in Canadian literature. Her take on “survival” is broader than just fending off menacing elements in the bush: “In earlier writers these obstacles are external—the land, the climate, and so forth. In later writers the obstacles tend to become both harder to identify and more internal; they are no longer obstacles to physical survival but obstacles to what we may call spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human being. Sometimes fear of these obstacles becomes itself the obstacle, and a character is paralyzed by terror (either of what he thinks is threatening him from the outside, or of elements in his own nature that threaten him from within).”