Shaman Pass (11 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

JIM SILVER SQUATTED BESIDE his dogsled and explored the shattered slat with a thumb and forefinger. But not for long, not in the cold wind whistling in from the west.

He grunted, straightened, put his glove back on, and looked at Active. “Don’t worry, Nathan. I think my brother-in-law can probably patch it up pretty cheap. Screw on a little section of hickory from underneath, be good as new. Won’t even show hardly. Carnaby will barely notice it on your reimbursement claim.”

“Sorry, man,” Active said.

“Ah, forget it. That kind of stuff happens on the trail. Goes with.”

“Well, thanks,” Active said. “Look, I need to tell you what Whyborn Sivula told me, or didn’t, and then I need to look through the Smithsonian paperwork on Uncle Frosty. I’ve been chasing around so hard on this—”

“You need to sit down and think about it a while?”

Active nodded and they started up the stairs into the Public Safety Building, Active talking as they went. Whyborn Sivula had told him so little that he was able to tell it all to Silver before they reached the police chief’s office on the third floor.

“Saganiq, huh?” Silver tossed his parka on the sofa, dropped into the chair behind his desk, and waved Active into a seat in front. “Maybe I’ve heard the name, maybe not. Doesn’t ring any bells, at any rate. Now that they’re all good Christians, the Inupiat don’t like to talk about their old
angatquqs
.”

The police chief opened a file drawer beside his left knee and pulled out two green hanging folders, each containing a half-dozen or so manila files. He dropped them on the edge of the desk in front of Active.

“You troopers may as well take custody of them,” he said. “Victor Solomon’s murder case obviously takes precedence over my little burglary, and I think solving one solves the other, eh?”

Active nodded and picked up one of the green folders. “A lot of reading here. Guess I better get at it.” He picked up the other folder and stood.

Silver shrugged. “I could give you the 101 course on it. I browsed the files pretty good when I was trying to come up with a list of what was in Uncle Frosty’s crate so I could figure out what was taken in the burglary.”

Active laid the folders back on Silver’s desk and dropped into the chair, then pulled out a notebook and pen. “So?”

“So.” Silver said. “It’s 1920. The federal government is trying to make sure the navy has enough oil if there’s another war. They set up this system of what they called the Naval Petroleum Reserves.”

“Like the one—”

Silver nodded. “Yep, like the one up on the Arctic Slope. They were scattered all around the country. The most famous one was Teapot Dome in Wyoming, which figured in one of your standard big-bucks Washington scandals of the time, but, yes, we got our own. The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, created in 1923. They never found much oil there, but BP and Exxon are still looking.”

“Fascinating,” Active said. “And?”

“And you’re wondering what this has to do with Uncle Frosty?”

Active nodded. “Somewhat.”

“And I have the answer,” Silver said with a smile. “Before you can have a petroleum reserve, you gotta send out surveyors and geologists to take a first guess at where the oil is, right? So in 1920, this party from the U. S. Geological Survey wanders across the Arctic Slope all summer. It’s called the Henderson party after the geologist in charge, guy named Joseph Henderson. The Henderson Bay oil field on the Arctic Slope is named after him.”

Active nodded.

“Pretty soon, it’s mid-August,” Silver continued. “Starting to frost, Henderson is wrapping things up, getting ready to beat it down to the coast and catch the last boat out before freezeup. The party is up in this big saddle that leads right through the crest of the Brooks Range from the Arctic Slope into the Chukchi Basin.”

Silver stood and put his finger on the spot on the map behind his desk. “Place called Shaman Pass.”

Active stiffened in his chair and stared at the chief. “Shaman Pass. What—of course.”

Silver’s eyes widened. “Shit. They must have named it that because of what Henderson found up there. I bet I heard it on Kay-Chuck a hundred times since this Uncle Frosty thing came up, but I never made the connection before.”

Active walked to the map and stared at the spot above Silver’s index finger. Shaman Pass lay about a hundred and fifty miles north of Chukchi. The north side of it drained into the Colville River, which emptied into the Arctic Ocean a couple of hundred miles east of Barrow. The south side of the pass drained into the Katonak River, which wound through the Brooks Range past Johnny Bass’s camp to empty into Chukchi Bay a few miles from the office where Active stood at that moment. Most of the features in the area bore Inupiaq names he didn’t recognize.

But there was one exception. Active traced his finger along the route of the stream that ran south out of the pass and emptied into the Katonak. “And this is the Angatquq River, I see.”

Silver said, “Shit” again and shook his head.

Active turned back to the map and ran his finger up the Angatquq River to the summit. “And this is where they found Uncle Frosty? Shaman Pass?”

Silver nodded, looking a little grumpy at having his story foreshortened. “Basically, yeah. Henderson is camped out up in the pass and they find this cave in the rocks. And in the cave is Uncle Frosty. The surveyors and geologists get pretty excited thinking maybe they’ve got a mummy from way back, some kind of anthropological treasure. So they take Uncle Frosty down to the coast with them, ship him back to Washington, turn him over to the Smithsonian.”

“And was he from way back?”

Silver shook his head. “Nah, the anthropologists at the Smithsonian weren’t excited at all. They apparently concluded he’d only been there twenty or thirty years. So they preserved him and put him in the basement and there he stayed till Victor Solomon had him brought to Chukchi.”

Active was silent, thinking it over. “You ever been up there, to Shaman Pass?”

“Couple times. Once on a snowmachine trip over to Caribou Creek when my father-in-law was still alive, and once when I landed up there with Cowboy Decker on a Search and Rescue. Actually, it was just a search. We never found the plane, but Cowboy thought he saw some debris up a little side creek, so we landed.” Silver shuddered. “Bad place. Hungry country.”

“Why?”

Silver wagged his head. “It’s the main vent through the Brooks Range in that part of the country, so it’s windy as hell. Blows so hard up there it’s actually been known to kill caribou, according to the old-timers around here. Plus, there’s a hell of a gorge just below the summit that can be a bitch to get past if you’re on a snowmachine. And then there’s the
inuksuks
.”

“
Inuksuks
?”

“Yeah, the little stone men the old-time Eskimos used to build. I guess they were trail markers or something. Every now and again you’ll be up some little valley around Shaman Pass there and you’ll get this creepy feeling something’s watching you. And when you look around, there’s an
inuksuk
sitting up on the hillside above you. Seems stupid to say it, but it’s kinda creepy.”

Active walked back to his chair. “Why’d the Smithsonian think Uncle Frosty was from Chukchi?”

Silver shrugged. “Don’t know. All the file says is, based on Henderson’s journal, that’s what they concluded. So when the Indian Graves Act got passed, the Smithsonian did its inventory, found Uncle Frosty in the basement, and wrote the Chukchi tribal council did they want him.”

“And Henderson’s records? They’re in these files here?” Active tapped the folders on Silver’s desk.

Silver shook his head. “Nah. I guess they’re still at the Smithsonian. Or the U. S. Geological Survey. Or somewhere.”

THE CLOSEST “somewhere” turned out to be the University of Alaska Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks. Active discovered this after two hours of fruitless telephone calls and Internet searches that Sunday afternoon, and twenty minutes of productive telephoning the following morning.

As a helpful librarian named Bruce Marion at the geophysical institute explained, the original records of the Henderson party were in the national archives in Washington, D.C., but the institute in Fairbanks had long ago obtained a complete copy so as to get Henderson’s geological data on the Arctic Slope.

When Active asked Marion to mail him a copy, there was a pause. “As I recall, that file runs about two thousand pages, mostly geological field data,” Marion said. “Are you sure? I could—”

“All I really need is Henderson’s journal,” Active said. “How big is that?”

“Hang on a moment, let me check something,” Marion said.

The librarian laid down the phone and Active listened to the sound of computer keys clacking above the background hiss of the long-distance circuit and thought about that morning’s bullet dream, a repeat of the one two days ago. The assailant with the knife that maybe wasn’t a knife, the useless gun. He started a little and shook his head to clear his mind when Marion came back on.

“Thought so,” the librarian said. “Do you have Internet access out there in—where is it?”

“Chukchi,” Active said. “You mean Henderson’s records are online? I couldn’t find them with any of the search engines.”

“Not all of his records. Just his journal and a bibliography of the rest.”

“But why—”

“It’s in a section of our holdings that’s public but not publicized, if that makes any sense.”

“Not really,” Active said.

“We don’t think our computers could handle the load if we opened all of our archives up to the search engines and we started getting hits from all over the world,” Marion said. “You’re a state employee, do I have to tell you about the budget situation?”

Active grunted in acknowledgment.

“So we can’t afford to upgrade our computers, either. As a result, the Henderson material is in what we call our Gray Archives—not indexed, but accessible if you know the Internet code. I’ll give it to you, just don’t put it on the Google search engine, OK?”

Active grunted again and copied down the string of letters, numbers, dots, slashes, and tildes, then read it back to Marion.

Marion said he had it right, so Active said thanks and goodbye and turned to the computer beside his desk.

He started Internet Explorer, typed in the address Marion had furnished, and watched the little globe spin in the corner of the screen. He sent up a prayer to the cybergods that Bruce Marion’s elderly Internet servers wouldn’t be too busy on a Monday morning to open the Henderson archives.

They weren’t. In less than a minute, Active had a menu onscreen that offered two items: “Journal of Joseph Henderson, USGS, May–August 1920,” and “Bibliography, Henderson Party, 1920.”

Active clicked on the journal and soon had a menu breaking the journal down by week, from May 18, 1920, through August 28. He clicked on the first week in August and began reading.

Each of Henderson’s entries was a succinct record of what they had found during the day, where they had camped, the weather, where they planned to go the next day. The geologist was all business except when it came to the four Eskimos he had hired in Barrow.

Their main job was to guide the expedition to the long-known natural oil seeps that had given rise to the idea of an Arctic Slope reserve in the first place. They also helped with camp chores and transportation, and brought in fresh meat whenever the party encountered the caribou herds that summered on the Arctic coastal plain. Henderson identified only one of the Barrow Inupiat by name—Iqlavik, who seemed to be the senior hand among the four.

The party had discovered Uncle Frosty on the morning of Monday, August 16, according to Henderson’s entry that night. One of his geologists had come across a little cave while chipping rock samples from an outcropping near their camp in Shaman Pass. The geologist had crawled in to see if the walls of the cave looked any different from the rock on the face of the outcropping, only to put his hand on a fur-wrapped bundle that turned out to be Uncle Frosty. After that, Henderson wrote:

We removed the remains from the cave and made a cursory examination. The furs crumbled away to reveal the body of an ancient Eskimo male, apparently preserved by the dry, cold climate of this region, who had been killed by a harpoon thrust to the chest, perhaps for ritualistic reasons, as we found an amulet of an owl’s face between his teeth.

I directed that he and his effects be wrapped in canvas so that we could transport him to civilization for analysis by competent anthropologists.

This discovery, and my decision to retrieve the remains, unsettled two of our Eskimos, who said the mummy would bring us bad luck, as they supposed him to be an old shaman from the Chukchi Basin long rumored to have been killed here, which event gave this spot its name, Shaman Pass.

But Iqlavik, the great skeptic, came to my rescue as usual. He scoffed at this, saying he had never heard of such a rumor and, anyway, it was obvious this old shaman, if that’s what he was, couldn’t cause bad luck to anyone or he would have prevented his own murder by afflicting his would-be assassin with some very bad luck indeed. Moreover, Iqlavik said reprovingly, now that they and all other Barrow Eskimos had accepted Jesus as their savior and given up devil worship, no old shaman, dead or alive, could cause trouble in any case, and, even if he could, why not let the white men take him away with them, as it would certainly be harder for him to cause trouble for anyone in Barrow if he were thousands of miles away in Washington, where all the white men lived.