Shaman Pass (19 page)

“I don’t think so,” Active said.

“
Ukpeagvik
. Mean ‘place of the snowy owl’ in Eskimo. Funny thing, ah?”

Active lifted his eyebrows. “The snowy owl was Saganiq’s
kikituq
and Natchiq ate it, is what I heard.”

“That’s what the stories say, all right,” Kelly said. “Anyway, Natchiq decide that him and Enyana will go up there to Barrow and they start out. After that, nobody hear anything about them for long time. Spring is over and summer is starting when somebody find Enyana on the trail few miles north of Chukchi. She’s almost dead, nothing to eat for so long. Two of her dogs are lost, she eat the other two, then she eat the tops of her mukluks. They help her get back to Chukchi and she tell how she and Natchiq are up in
taggaqvik
and they stop to camp so Natchiq could get them some sheep.”

“
Taggaqvik
? What’s that?”

Kelly frowned at the interruption. “Mean ‘place of shadows.’ Now we call it Shaman Pass.”

“The old-timers called it Shadow Pass?”

“Shadow Pass, ah-hah. So they’re camped up there and Natchiq take two of the dogs and go out for sheep. Enyana wait and wait in camp, but he never come back. So finally, she go to look, same way he went. She look long time, never find nothing, till finally she see his snowshoes stuck in the snow. Then she have to give up because she’s almost out of food and anyway, look like spring storm is coming down from the north and it’s too dangerous in the pass. So she start back, but she almost die before they find her on the trail outside Chukchi.”

Kelly eased off the bed, limped to the door, and looked out into the storm.

“So Enyana made it back to Chukchi?” Active said.

Kelly turned and picked up the pipe tobacco from the table, then eased himself back onto the cot. “Ah-hah, but she have real hard time.” Kelly paused to load and light the pipe, then went on. “She’s orphan girl, got no family except for her brother Kiana, way up in Point Hope. And now that Natchiq is gone, maybe dead, them people in Chukchi are afraid to help her too much.”

“What were they afraid of?”

“That Saganiq,” Kelly said, frowning at the name. “He’s strutting around like a ptarmigan now, talking about how this proves Natchiq’s magic is weak. Saganiq say he can’t find his
kikituq
, maybe that little snowy owl of his fly up to Shadow Pass and fly into Natchiq’s mouth and eat up his soul. So nobody will help Enyana. They think Saganiq got his power back.”

Kelly fell into a brooding silence.

“Did Enyana go to Point Hope to live with her brother?” Active asked finally.

“No, she’s too weak to travel and when she send word, there’s no answer for long time in them days. They never have telephone or snowgos yet. So that Saganiq take her to be one of his wives.” Kelly grunted in disgust. “She don’t like it, because she think Saganiq or maybe his
kikituq
spirit, the snowy owl, is what kill Natchiq. But she got no way out and Saganiq is very powerful again. So she become his wife even though by now she know she got Natchiq’s baby inside her.”

Active thought this over for a moment. “Enyana was pregnant with your father?”

Kelly lifted his eyebrows. “My father, ah-hah. But he almost never live. That Saganiq, he’s mean to Enyana all the time, always beat her a lot, especially when he find out she’s having Natchiq’s baby. He don’t hardly feed her nothing until finally it’s time for baby to come and she have to go off by herself like the women are starting to do again since Natchiq is gone.”

“She had no one to help her?”

Kelly shook his head. “Not until her brother, Kiana, finally hear about it and come down from Point Hope. He still believe what Natchiq say and he don’t care about the taboo or Saganiq. But Enyana, she’s already in snowhouse, so weak from Saganiq starving her and beating her that she die having that baby, so Kiana, he take it to raise himself. That Kiana, he’s my father’s uncle. That’s my father, Enyana’s baby.”

One hip was getting cold from contact with the cabin floor. Active shifted his weight to the other hip. “What happened to Enyana’s body?”

“Her brother take her up in Shaman Pass, leave her on tundra in the old-time way, so animals and weather will take her back to the earth. But he build
inuksuk
, stone man, on that spot, right where this cabin is now. It’s first
inuksuk
our family build in Shaman Pass, and it’s still out there.”

“Outside this cabin?”

Kelly pointed through the rear wall. “Ah-hah, on that hill back there. Then Kiana decide to stay in Chukchi so people don’t forget about Natchiq and his source of intelligence. But it’s real hard because Saganiq and the other
angatquqs
are back in power now and they scare everybody to stop talking about Natchiq, try to make them forget what he did. Anybody who knew him will never forget him, but they don’t talk about him no more, and today hardly anybody even know who he was. His story die out.”

“How did Saganiq end up joining the white man’s church?”

“Not long after my father’s born, white people come into the country,” Kelly said. “Them missionaries show up and start saying some of the same things Natchiq did. At first Saganiq and the other
angatquqs
try to fight the missionaries and keep people in the old ways, but Saganiq finally figure out he can’t win. That’s when he join
naluaqmiut
church, take his name from that King Solomon guy in their Bible, and pretend to be a Christian. And he tell them my grandfather Natchiq’s a false prophet! Hah! He’s lot closer to being a Christian than that Saganiq ever was! But things are still hard for my father, Joshua—”

“His name was Joshua?”

“Ah-hah. When missionaries come in, that’s what they name my father. Joshua Kelly. But things are still hard for him and his uncle Kiana that’s raising him. Everybody’s afraid of Saganiq again and they won’t have hardly nothing to do with my father or with his uncle either.”

Kelly moved to the cabin window and peered out. “So my father and my uncle finally have to leave Chukchi. They move up to Caribou Creek, where Enyana and Kiana first come from,” Kelly said. “It’s better there, but my father still have pretty hard time. A lotta people hear about how his mother and father die, and about Saganiq and everything, and they’re pretty scared of them Chukchi
angatquqs
. My father stay alive by hunting and fishing like he learn from his uncle Kiana, but nobody will have nothing to do with him for long time because of his parents. He’s over forty years old before he marry my mother, then I’m born few years later.”

Kelly fell into another deep, wordless study and Active thought over what he’d heard. So many stories of death and loss and dislocation in the Arctic. Perhaps they explained the cheerful fatalism of the Inupiat, of the ones who didn’t succumb to drink or suicide, anyway. Maybe it was either crack a joke or go crazy.

Kelly picked up his story again. “My father take me up into Shaman Pass lotta times when I’m still little, tell me about Saganiq and Natchiq and Enyana, try look for where Natchiq’s body is hidden. That’s what Kiana thought, that Saganiq killed Natchiq and caged up the body somewhere in this pass, so it couldn’t go back to nature like it should.” Kelly sighed. “My father die when I’m fifteen years old. After that, I can’t think about them old stories anymore, and I never come up here for a long time, till I’m grown up and have kids of my own. Then I start dreaming I’m in Shaman Pass all the time. So then I come up here again, whenever I can, look for Natchiq, put up
inuksuk
anywhere I look.”

Active shifted hips again and waited. Instead of resuming the narrative, Kelly stood and walked to the door in his mukluks, limping a little to favor his right side. He opened the door, knocked his pipe against the frame to empty it, and stood peering into the blizzard.

Active could see past Kelly to his dogsled, hitched behind the black Arctic Cat. It was packed for the trail, with the blue-wrapped bundle they had seen from the air still atop the load. The rig was already caked with a thin layer of snow. Active wondered how long he had been unconscious.

Kelly slammed the door, pocketed the pipe, and limped back to the cot, shaking his head. “Too stormy, I guess,” he said, mostly to himself, as he settled onto the mattress. “Can’t even see down the canyon now.”

“Is that your grandfather on the sled?”

“Don’t matter,” Kelly said.

“Why is he still here? Why didn’t you take him to Canada as soon as you took him from the museum? That’s what your grandfather wanted, isn’t it?”

“Don’t matter.”

Active looked around the cabin and noticed again the radio beside Kelly’s cot. “You heard about it on Kay-Chuck, didn’t you? You’re all by yourself up here in Shaman Pass when you hear on Kay-Chuck how the
naluaqmiut
geologists found Uncle Frosty in the pass a long time ago and took him to Washington and how Victor Solomon was bringing him back to Chukchi.”

“Goddamn that Victor!” Kelly pulled the pipe from his pocket and jabbed the air with it as he spoke. “Always talk about putting Uncle Frosty in that glass case! He’s just like his grandfather, want to make my family little.”

“I can understand how you’d feel. So you decided to come down to Chukchi and get Uncle Frosty out of the museum to see if he really was Natchiq. And then you found Saganiq’s harpoon and amulet in the crate with him and that’s how you knew.”

Kelly was silent, looking lost in thought. Something was trying to swim up out of Active’s subconscious. Then he remembered the records of the Henderson party.

“Those
naluaqmiuts
who found your grandfather?”

“Ah?”

“Did you know they found Saganiq’s amulet in his mouth?”

“That piece of
anaq
Saganiq! Now I see what he mean when he talk about how his
kikituq
fly into Natchiq’s mouth and eat up his soul.” Kelly paused and smiled a little. “Maybe Saganiq can’t forget how my grandfather eat up that owl, make him little.” Kelly chuckled at the thought.

Active shivered again at Natchiq’s genius for psychological theater. To the old-time Inupiat, the
natchiq,
the humble little seal, had provided food and fur, and oil for the stone lamps. Life itself. Natchiq had gone up against Saganiq with no magic, only words, and had climaxed the drama by eating an owl, the messenger of death and the
kikituq
of the great shaman.

Kelly looked down at Active on the floor. “You’re trooper, you know
naluaqmiut
law about stealing, ah?”

Active lifted his eyebrows.

“After my grandfather is taken from museum, I hear Victor Solomon on Kay-Chuck again. He say he know who did it and he will find Uncle Frosty and put him back in that museum and police will put the thief in jail.”

Kelly paused and his face blackened again. “He think I’m a thief! How you can steal your own grandfather? You’re state trooper. You know
naluaqmiut
laws. How you can do that?” Kelly looked at Active and stared, waiting for an answer.

“He wasn’t talking about you,” Active said. “He told our police chief in Chukchi to arrest Calvin Maiyumerak for robbing the museum.”

Kelly looked puzzled for a few seconds, then nodded. “I heard of him. He’s the one try stop Victor Solomon from putting my grandfather on display?”

Active lifted his eyebrows. “And anyway, even a
naluaqmiut
court would probably have given Natchiq to you instead of Victor’s museum if you could prove he was your grandfather.”

Kelly was silent for a long time. “You mean I—” He stopped and shook his head. “I never think about that.”

“None of this had to happen. You didn’t need to steal your grandfather. And you didn’t need to kill Victor Solomon. You did kill him, didn’t you?”

Kelly was silent, his jaws locked.

“But why wait a day to kill him? That’s the part I can’t figure out. Why not just take off and keep going till you were in Canada?”

Kelly pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head.

“Instead, you wasted that extra day, and that meant you got trapped up here by the storm and couldn’t get away before I showed up. But why did you wait?”

Kelly’s voice was light, reflective, when he spoke again. “Killing Victor Solomon—you think that’s worse than putting my grandfather in a museum?”

“That’s what the law says.”

“
Naluaqmiut
law.”

Active shrugged, white-man style. “Why did you wait a day?” he repeated.

Kelly shook his head, then rose and limped to the door. Snow whirled in when he opened it. The flakes fluttered to the floor and landed on Active’s face. It looked as murky and white as ever out there, the wind still shrieking down the canyon and past the cabin. Active tried to guess what time it was. He and Cowboy had reached Shaman Pass by 8 or 9 A.M., he supposed, but how long had he been unconscious? He didn’t know, but his inner clock told him it was around noon now.

Kelly shook his head, closed the door, and muttered, “
Arii
, no good.”

He turned and sat again, but this time at the table in the center of the cabin. He looked down at Active, trussed up on the floor. “Your pilot, he’ll come back when the weather gets good, ah?”

Active lifted his eyebrows. “With more troopers.”

Kelly felt his side, looked at his fingers, and sighed. “Then I better go, I guess.”

“You can’t go in this weather,” Active said. “And you’re hurt.”

“Can’t stay either.” Kelly stood and lifted the carbine off the cot. He put the muzzle to Active’s forehead and looked down with his calm, resigned eyes. “And I can’t let you tell about me.”

Active tried to speak, but his tongue was paralyzed and swollen, blocking his wind.

Kelly pulled back the hammer on the carbine.

“You don’t want to kill a trooper,” Active finally managed to croak.

Kelly shrugged one shoulder. “I never want to kill Victor Solomon, either.”

“Look,” Active said desperately, “if you kill me they’ll come after you the minute they get here.”

Kelly tilted his head slightly, his eyes on Active’s.

“But if you leave me alive, they won’t be able to follow you. They’ll have to take me back to the hospital because of my shoulder.”