‘Tracki

Descent into Madness: The Diary
of a Kilier by Vernon Frolick,
Hancock House, $34.95

John Moore
BOOK REVIEW

FTER TAKING shots
at the ‘‘true crime”

B . % genre last time, I’m
whipping up a little crow
omeletie, having just read
this account of the life and
bad times of Michael Oros,
aka ‘‘Sheslay Free Mike,”
the elusive trapper who

_ haunted the vast wilderness
triangle of northwestern B.C.

in the early 1980s.

Everyone, local outfitters, the
RCMP, psychiatrists who'd inter-
viewed him and especially the
native people who'd surrendered.
rich traditional trapping grounds
rather than confront him, knew he
was crazier than a smoke-house
rat by then.

The RCMP had tried to nail him
for the murder of trapper Gunter
Lishy in 1981, but they couldn’t

. find a body or a solid legal pretext
to hold him.

The knowledge that they'd turn-
ed atime bomb loose ina
wilderness the size of England
would come back to haunt them
all. .

Oros was killed in a shootout
with an RCMP emergency

response team in the spring of
1985 on the frozen rim of remote
Teslin Lake, but not before he'd
avoided their trap, outfianked half
the team and killed Const. Mike
Buday.

Had the single snapshot that
killed him missed, he was ina
position to hunt down and am-
bush the rest of the team as well.

Police raids on his cabin and
caches in the 1981 investigation
resulted in the seizure of copious
diaries he’s kept since the fate
1960s,

lronically, the loss of the diaries,
which vividly chronicled his emo-

tional and mental deterioration,
pulled yet another brick out of the
crumbling wall between Oros and
total homicidal insanity.

Without the diaries, Oros would
remain as much of an enigma as
Albert Johnson, The Mad Trapper
of Rat River, in the 1930s.

Like Johnson, he seemed to em-
brace his violent fate; to regard his
final confrontation with authority
as an inevitable, almost divinely
ordained Armageddon.

It is the diaries that enable
Frolick to flesh out in rivetting
detail how the unarmed, poetry-
writing vegetarian hippy who liter-
ally walked into Telegraph Creek
ona spiritual quest in 1973, turned
into a bush-crazed outlaw who
gnawed maggoty moose meat and
was rumored to eat human flesh
and run naked with the wolves.

Accompanying the echoes of
Albert Johnson are more sinister
resonances. .

Like Charles Manson, Kansas-
born Oros was an illegitimate
loner who saw in the counter-
culture of the ’60s a new Utopian
society of brothers and sisters in
which he would have a prominent
place.

Like Manson, he came to
believe that his own life had some
undefined but messianic

Jackson laments the
reluctance of major
breweries to use hops

From page 441

erudite Dr. J we sampled bottles
from some of the major beer
types:
® Pilsners: the world’s first golden
clear beer, appropriately repre-
sented by Pilsen Urquell, the
original Pilsner from
Czechoslovakia — an excellent
beer with complex herbal aromas
and a good bitter aftertaste.
© Ales: more fruity tasting than
other beers; represented by
England’s Bass Pale Ale,
Smithwick’s frora Ireland and Dr.
j’s current favorite, McNally’s Ex-
tra Ale from Calgary's Big Rock
Brewery.

Jugs of Earl’s excellent Albino

Rhino, again brewed by Big Rock, .

were also available,

Lagers, stouts, bocks, porters
and lambics we hope will be
covered ina return engagement.

Jackson, a great promoter of the
distinctive beers produced by the
girewing numbers of independent
micro-breweries in England and
North America, was less than im-
pressed with the largely bland
brew produced by the major es-
tablished breweries of Canada,
Europe and the United States.

Their ice beers, dry beers, cold-
filtered brews and other dilute
variations on the original pilsner
theme he dismissed as more mar-
keting hype than brewing innova-
tion,

Special Jacksonian contempt

was reserved for the advertising
campaign of a tnajor brewery’s dry
beer that promised its customers
no aftertaste.

A memorable aftertaste, jackson
pointed out, is one of beer’s great
characteristics. Without it, “how
do you knaw you have drunk a
beer? No aftertaste really means
no taste.”

He also lamenied the reluctance
of big breweries to use hops — the
ingredient in beer that gives it its
distinctive herbal aromas and fla-
vors — in anything more than
token amounts in their brews.
They apparently remain terrified of
offending their customers with real
beer tastes.

Worst beer on jackson’s list?
Corona.

For those interested in joining
the malted safari with the great
Beer Hunter, Jackson has written
the Pocket Beer Book, Michael °
Jackson’s Beer Companion and the
World Guide to Beer as intriguing
road maps.

For the rest of us, time to raise a
glass of ale to the founders of the
Campaign for Real Ale and other
herogs of the quiet beer revolution
initiated in Britain the early 1970s
that has provided beer fans with
more and better brews to savor.

All together now:

Beer, Beer, glorious beer
Up with the sale of it,
Down with a pail of it,
Glorious, Glorious beer!

Moonwalk to that one, Mr.

Jackson.

lan’s

significance.

The cuit-commune he might
have founded never materialized
because he was too introverted to
influence others.

When the Vietnam war ended
and his community of fellow
draft-evaders in Alaska began drif-
ting south to start software com-
panies and get into real estate,
Oros felt bitterly betrayed.

As he blundered off into the B.C.
bush, still seeking Eden and a
commune of Adams and Eves, the

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potpourri of zen, theasophy, haiku
poetry and the blither of Kahlil
Gibran was not enough to sustain
him in inhuman solitude.

The primeval forest he loved got
him; he “went bush,” started
hearing voices, avoiding all human
contact and believing CIA “‘tor-
ture-druggers’’ were spraying bio-
logical warfare drugs on his
wilderness sanctuary.

If you're the right age, you can’t
read this story without
remembering someone you know

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descent into he!

or thinking, “There, but for the
Grace of God (or greed) go 1..."
When you go luoking for Heaven
on earth, all you ever seem to find
are the back doors to Hell.

Vernon Frolick was the crown
prosecutor in Terrace, where Oros
was held for the Lishy murder, in
1982,

This is his first foray into true
crime writing. A good beginning,
even if it is such a desperately sad
story.

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