Shaman Pass (22 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER a breakfast of oatmeal and dried fish with seal oil and grace, Whyborn pulled Alan’s sled out of the tent and hitched it to Active’s Yamaha. Then he went to the heap of gear near the tent and dug out two ordinary household brooms, along with two pairs of aluminum snowshoes, and threw it all into the sled. He motioned Alan into the basket, stepped onto the runners at the back, and turned to Active.

“Alan and me will be out sweeping. Since you can’t sweep with that shoulder, you could drive the snowgo, ah? Take us out to the trail, bring us back to the tent for lunch, pick us up at night, OK?”

Active nodded and straddled the Yamaha, started it, and drove to a spot Whyborn indicated about fifty yards ahead of Robert Kelly’s Arctic Cat in its trench in the snow. The two men climbed out, strapped on the snowshoes, and grabbed the brooms.

Whyborn looked at Alan Long, who was staring at his broom in mystification.

“You never do this before, ah?”

Alan shook his head.

“Well, when somebody leave a footprint in the snow, it get hard like concrete,” Whyborn said. “Even if it blow over, it’s still under there.”

Whyborn began trampling the crust, breaking it up with the edges of his snowshoes. When he had pulverized an area several yards in diameter, he began sweeping away the broken snow to get at the older layer underneath. Alan watched for a minute, then began sweeping, too.

Suddenly Whyborn stopped and bent down. “Look at this,” he said, as Active and Alan hurried up. He pointed at two faint depressions, almost indiscernible in the field of white. “That’s Robert Kelly, all right. That’s his boot heel and that’s his toe.”

Active knelt beside the track.

“Go ahead,” Whyborn said. “Poke it, you’ll see.”

Active gingerly probed the heel print with a mittened thumb. Whyborn was right. It was hard to the touch, as hard as pavement.

“We have to mark it,” Whyborn said as Active stood up. “Maybe you could bring us some of those willows by the tent.”

Active nodded, drove to the tent on the snowmachine, and went to work in the willow grove again.

When he had a couple dozen of the little trees lying on the snow, he ferried them back to the sled in only two one-armed loads. Snapping off the willows wasn’t hard work, but floundering around in the snow was and he was sweating under his winter gear. He climbed onto the Yamaha and paused for a moment to catch his breath and cool off.

He gazed out at Whyborn and Alan at work with their brooms. The sky was bright and cloudy this morning, maybe ten miles an hour of breeze tumbling down from the summit. A cold enough day and bad enough light, white on white. The two men were the only nonwhite objects in sight. It would have been impossible to guess their size and distance if he hadn’t known. They could have been dolls in the snow at his feet or giants across the pass.

It suddenly seemed preposterous. Tiny men with brooms, following a tiny trail of footprints through the blank expanse of Shaman Pass. He was tempted to call it off then and there, head back to Chukchi on the snowmachines, and wait for Robert Kelly to turn up across the line in Canada, or back home in Caribou Creek. Or for his corpse to be spotted on the tundra by some pilot flying through the pass on a summer day.

But Whyborn, with his quiet Inupiat capacity to do any job that needed doing with any tool available to do it, had already found a track. Active shook his head, started the Yamaha, and headed for that first track with his load of trail markers.

FOR THE next four days, Alan and Whyborn swept their way down the north slope of the pass. Active, his left arm still useless in the sling, did camp, cargo, and chauffeur duty on the Ladies’ Model as the trail of willows crept onward. There were no more mysterious lights or sounds in the night, and he decided his imagination had been working overtime the evening they had arrived.

Cowboy Decker showed up just before twilight on the fourth day and was suitably impressed by the line of willows now stretching nearly five miles. He dropped off gas for the snowmachines, oil for the stove, and several boxes of food that Active hoped included more Oreos. The pilot loaded their trash and empty gas cans into the Beaver and rumbled away to the south.

That night, Whyborn pulled out the cribbage board and cards and shuffled for the first round of the game. “We could use some more caribou, ah?” he said as he dealt onto a sleeping bag. “Maybe we should go catch some tomorrow.”

Alan’s face lit up in one of his buck-toothed grins as he picked up his cards. “Sure, if we find the main herd we could even get some to take back to town with us.”

Active, who was learning the game now, tossed his two discards into the crib and turned up the start card. He started to object, but realized his heart wasn’t in it. The scrawny little spring caribou Alan and Whyborn had brought in the first day hadn’t provided much meat. With Kibbie’s help, they had eaten the best of it already. Only the tough and stringy cuts were left, and they would be gone in a couple more days. After that, they would be down to the canned meat in their supplies. “How far are they?”

“Not too far now,” Whyborn said. “Around where Angatquq River runs into the Katonak, maybe.”

Well, why not? They’d been at it for four days, twelve to fourteen hours at a stretch in the long spring light. A break wouldn’t hurt. Active shrugged and said, “Sure.”

“You could come, too, ah, Nathan?” Whyborn looked at him expectantly.

Active was tempted. It would be good to see the pass and the Katonak Valley up close, from ground level. Find the kind of intimacy you couldn’t get from the air. But he shook his head. “I don’t think so, with this arm.”

The other two nodded and went back to their game.

Over a very late breakfast the next morning, Whyborn suggested it was time to move the camp farther down the pass.

“We should be closer to where we’re working,” he said. “Too much time running back and forth now. Look like a pretty good side canyon up about a half-mile from where we quit yesterday. Maybe you could go look at it today, Nathan. If it’s good, we could move up there tomorrow before we start work, ah?”

Active nodded, happy to have something to fill the day. “Fine by me,” he said.

Whyborn and Alan left the tent and began loading gas and a minimal camping outfit onto Alan’s sled. When the load was bungeed down, they slung their rifles onto their backs, straddled their machines, and pulled away with Kibbie in her usual perch atop the sled, an expression of bliss on her face.

Active looked down the north slope of the pass as the engine sounds faded. A streak of gray-white was just visible on the horizon. Otherwise the day was perfect, blue and white as the one before. Even better: The south wind had died out and it was dead calm this morning.

As he stooped to enter the tent, he realized his injured shoulder was complaining for some reason. Maybe he had slept on it wrong? Then he remembered: He had forgotten to take the hospital’s anti-inflammatories for the past couple of days. He found the bottle in his gear and took two with some of the morning tea.

By the time he finished cleaning up the breakfast mess, the familiar drowsiness from the anti-inflammatories was kicking in. Well, what the heck. A nap before the trek to the new campsite couldn’t hurt. He started to go into the tent, then paused. The sun was so warm and brilliant.

He dragged Whyborn’s sled out of the tent and stretched out on the hickory slats of the basket. He draped his right arm over his eyes to cut down on the light. Lassitude filled him up like hot oil and his muscles melted and then he was back with Cowboy that day they had seen the ptarmigan shadows flying up the pass.

The thought of a creature so at home in its element as to become invisible was more than he could resist, so this time he floated down from the Beaver and became one of the obsidian shadows himself. He sailed without effort past the Angatquq Gorge and over the summit and started down the north side of the pass, the joy of it blazing up and up inside him until he just had to let it out. But it came out as an ordinary human yell, not a ptarmigan cackle, and he awoke to find himself plain old Nathan Active again, not the least bit invisible, lying in Whyborn Sivula’s sled with a cotton-dry mouth and the afterglow of ptarmiganhood fading inside him.

He sat up and looked around. It was cooler now, thin fingers of cloud reaching overhead from the north, a flutter of breeze, also from the north for the first time, plucking at the guard hairs of his parka ruff.

He checked his watch. Past two already, meaning his nap had stretched to two or three hours, not the couple of minutes it had seemed when he was a ptarmigan shadow. He went into the tent, finished the tea, and dug into the food box for some dried fish and Oreos. That didn’t quite do it, so he ate two pieces of fried caribou left over from breakfast and felt ready to explore for a new campsite.

He hitched Whyborn’s dogsled to the Ladies’ Model and followed the line of willows over the series of gentle, terracelike bluffs that led down the north slope of the pass. As he crested the last terrace, a quarter-mile before the end of the willow trail, his eyes were on the cloud bank to the north, now a solid and unpleasant-looking gray-white mass that loomed halfway up the sky, with an awning of thinner, streaky clouds running ahead.

So he was almost on the snowmachine and the man sweeping the snow before he saw them. The man threw down the broom and sprinted for the snowmachine. Active gunned the Yamaha and bounced down the slope, fighting for control with his one good hand. The driver was yanking at the starter cord now as Active stormed across the flat below the bluff and steered the Yamaha straight at the other machine. With a little luck, he would be able to stop squarely in front of it and block the driver.

He saw that he was coming in too fast and reached across his chest to grab for the brake on the left handlebar, but too late. The Ladies’ Model plowed into the other machine head-on. Active pitched over the windshield and into the other driver, and both ended up in the snow, with Active on top.

Active was digging under his parka for the Smith & Wesson and shouting, “State trooper! You’re under arrest!” as the driver struggled to free himself when a huge shape launched itself with a roar from the sled behind the other machine. Active felt the dog hit his injured shoulder, then he was on his back in the snow with jaws clamped on his throat and yellow eyes glaring into his own.

Thanks to the parka hood, zipped all the way up into a snorkel, the dog’s teeth didn’t draw any blood, but the jaws were like a vise on his windpipe and he couldn’t get air.

Finally he worked the Smith & Wesson free and put it up to the dog’s neck and was thumbing off the safety when someone screamed, “Kobuk, let him go! Don’t shoot, Nathan, I’ll stop him! Kobuk, let him go!”

Calvin Maiyumerak fell onto Kobuk’s back and got an arm under the dog’s neck and began jerking. Gradually, the teeth slipped off Active’s throat and finally he was free, fire snakes writhing in the injured shoulder again.

Maiyumerak led the snarling dog over to the dilapidated sled and made him lie down in the basket, then spoke softly into his ear. Active leveled the Smith & Wesson and watched as the dog calmed, the growls subsiding, the yellow eyes softening but never leaving Active.

Finally Maiyumerak straightened and turned to face Active. He was underdressed as usual, his skinny frame protected only by a snowmachine suit, a headband around his ears, and, yes, Active looked twice to be sure, the high-top sneakers.

Maiyumerak opened his mouth, saw the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson pointed at his chest, and raised his hands. “Don’t shoot, Nathan, I surrender.”

Active shook his head in disgust. “That was your light up in the pass the other night, wasn’t it? I wasn’t just seeing things. What the hell are you doing up here?”

“I was caribou hunting and I—” Maiyumerak trailed off as he saw Active eyeing the broom abandoned in the broken snow a few yards behind the dogsled.

“Bullshit. You’ve been trailing us all week and you—you’re after Uncle Frosty.”

Maiyumerak looked over his shoulder at the broom, then back at Active. “Could I show you something?”

Active said nothing and kept the Smith & Wesson on Maiyumerak’s chest.

“Don’t worry, I won’t try anything,” Maiyumerak said. “Look, my gun’s there.” He pointed at the rear of his dogsled, where the stock of his rifle poked out of its scabbard on a rail.

“Let’s go,” Active said.

Maiyumerak led him to the cleared patch and pointed to a pair of oval depressions in the snow. They looked to Active like the toe prints of a pair of mukluks with
ugruk
-skin bottoms. There was even a fairly clear serrated line where the bottoms were stitched to the caribou uppers. But there was no sign that he could see of matching heel prints behind the toe prints.

Then Maiyumerak pointed to another pair of ovals in the snow a foot or so ahead of the toe prints. These were different. The bottoms were rounded and smooth, with no mark of a seam.

Maiyumerak stepped back and let Active study the tracks. Finally, Active shrugged his incomprehension.