Shaman Pass (24 page)

Active pulled off his sunglasses and studied his reflection in Maiyumerak’s mirrors.

Maiyumerak pulled them off and looked Active in the eye. “Please, Nathan?”

Active looked back at Arnie Rivers’s hunting camp and the canyon behind it, then walked over to the trench.

“You don’t need him for your case, now,” Maiyumerak persisted. “And you’re Inupiat. You don’t want him in that museum for
naluaqmiut
tourists to look at. He belong out here.”

Active looked at the pair in the snow. “It’s not . . .”

Kobuk started barking again, his muzzle pointed south up the pass. They looked that way and at first saw nothing, heard nothing. Then Active picked up the distant hum of a snowmachine engine and saw a black speck moving down the slope.

Maiyumerak watched tensely until the rider was close enough to recognize. Then his shoulders sagged. “Too late now, anyway. That Alan Long would never do it.”

Alan pulled in a few minutes later and shut off his Ski-Doo, staring in surprise at Maiyumerak. He walked over to the pit without a word, his eyes taking in Robert Kelly and the bundle beside him.

“Is that Uncle Frosty?” he asked, looking at Active.

Active nodded.

“Good.” Alan stepped into the pit and pulled back the tarp for a look, then gave a satisfied nod. “Jim Silver never thought I’d get him back. Now we can close our burglary with the museum’s property back where it belongs.”

Active and Maiyumerak shot each other a quick glance, rolling their eyes. Active pulled the piece of grocery bag from his parka. “We can close the murder of Victor Solomon, too. Kelly left behind a note saying he did it.”

“Really?” Long said. He took the note and read it over. “This is excellent. Damned fine police work, Active.”

Active exchanged another eye roll with Maiyumerak.

Long turned to Maiyumerak. “What are you doing here, Calvin? Did you help Trooper Active find these guys?”

“Actually, it was Kobuk who found them,” Active said.

“Smart dog,” Alan said. He stepped out of the pit and, with Calvin, loaded grandfather and grandson onto the sled behind Active’s Yamaha.

Active drove the Yamaha to camp with Alan and Calvin riding ahead on their own machines. When Active reached the tent, he saw four field-dressed caribou stacked in the snow, the purple-brown flesh already glazed with frost.

The three other men were huddled in front of the tent, Calvin pointing at the cloud mass to the north and talking seriously to Alan and Whyborn.

“Calvin and Whyborn think we ought to get out of here,” Alan said as Active walked up.

Calvin nodded and waved at the north again, in the direction of the clouds and breeze. “Storm coming. I heard it’s real bad up here when it come from north side. We should go.”

Active frowned. “Go where?”

“Not so bad on south side,” Whyborn said.

Active shrugged. “Yeah, OK.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THEY PACKED A FULL set of camping gear into the sleds. Also, gas for the snowmachines and fuel oil for the stove. Plus the four caribou, plus Kobuk and Kibbie, who bounded onto their owners’ sleds, wormed out hollows in the baggage, curled up with their tails over their noses, and closed their eyes. Finally everything was stowed except the corpses of Natchiq and Robert Kelly, now resting on the mat of willows where the tent had stood.

“Looks like we have to leave ’em,” Maiyumerak suggested. “Cowboy could pick ’em up when he get everything else.”

Active shot him a glance. “Not a chance, Calvin. Something might happen to them before Cowboy gets here.”

“Like what? Nobody even know they’re here.”

“Somebody might come by.”

“What you going to carry them in? You got no sled.”

“We’ll borrow one.” Active turned and pointed at Robert Kelly’s abandoned sled, still squatting in its trench with the Arctic Cat in the middle of the pass.

Maiyumerak squinted his unhappiness, but said nothing.

Active retrieved the sled with his Yamaha and they loaded the two corpses on, securing them not with bungee cords but with actual rope at Active’s insistence.

Even with the four sleds, they left a fair pile of gear behind, with a note to Cowboy explaining their plan to wait the storm out in the best campsite they could find on the south side of the pass.

BY THE time they were ready to go, the wind was up to twenty miles an hour, Active guessed, with long streamers of snow slithering over the surface in a sugary mist.

Whyborn, as the senior hunter in the group, took the lead. He looked at Active as they prepared to start their engines. “You ever travel with a bunch of snowmachines in a storm before, Nathan?”

Active shook his head, the wind whipping the guard hairs on his parka ruff into his eyes.

“Well, we could put you second in line.”

Active nodded, and Whyborn continued.

“I’ll take the lead, then you, then Alan, then Calvin.”

Active nodded again.

“So you should keep me in sight all the time, no matter what. If I speed up, you speed up. If I stop, you stop.”

Another nod from Active.

“And you gotta look around every couple minutes, make sure you can see the other fellas behind you. You don’t see them, you stop right there and wait. If they don’t come up, you wait till I come back to you, then we will go back down the trail and find them, OK?”

Active nodded once more, with considerably more confidence than he felt, and they started off.

The temperature dropped as the north wind pushed air up the pass. The miniature thermometer on the Yamaha’s key chain had read five above when Active pulled into camp with Natchiq and Robert Kelly; now it read five below.

Their only break was that the wind was behind them, not in their faces. For the first hour or so, they about matched speed with it, roaring along in an eerie bell of calm-seeming air, snowflakes whirling through it as the storm built up.

After that, the wind was faster than they were, hurling ever denser clouds of snow past them, the flakes dancing in the beams of their headlights. As the air thickened with snow, it became harder and harder to see the other machines, even with their lights on, and eventually they were no more than five yards apart. Whyborn cut their speed to ten miles an hour as he groped his way through the snow.

A little after six, Whyborn’s taillight suddenly stopped bouncing and Active had to veer to the right to avoid hitting the leader’s sled as the Ladies’ Model coasted to a halt. They left their machines running, lights on, while they waited in the woolly twilight for Alan and Calvin. When they pulled up, everyone shut down and gathered beside Whyborn’s machine. Active arrived in time to hear Whyborn say, “I think maybe we’re off the trail.”

Active peered around in the blizzard. The air was like milk now and with the machines stopped he could feel the full force of the wind. Forty miles an hour, maybe fifty. Temperature minus twelve by the key-chain thermometer. Chill factor? Better not to estimate. But how could Whyborn tell if they were on the trail or not? No feature of the landscape was visible.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Calvin said. “Seem like we veer off to the right back there, start cutting across them snowdrifts at a different angle, all right.”

There was a wordless moment that stretched on and on, no sound anywhere except the wind blowing past their parka hoods, the streamers of snow hissing over the crust.

“I guess I could take the lead,” Calvin said.

Active almost protested, but stifled it in time. Whyborn lifted his eyebrows, and that was that. Maiyumerak, as usual, had been riding with just his snowmachine suit, a pair of leather work gloves, and a headband for protection, though he had replaced his high-tops with a pair of ancient Sorels. Now he went back to his sled and dug a parka and fur mittens from one of his boxes. He saw them watching, and his face split in his gap-toothed grin as he pulled on the extra gear. “Little bit colder today, all right.”

He took the lead and they started off again. Maiyumerak veered left from the direction they had been taking before Whyborn stopped. Then, a few minutes later, he veered right.

Active couldn’t tell for sure that anything was different, but now it did seem they were bouncing over the sastrugas at the same angle as before. At any rate, their speed picked up again.

They crested the pass a little after seven in gathering dusk. Active realized it was the crest only because Maiyumerak stopped the convoy and told them so, and said they would reach the gorge in another couple of miles.

Active checked his thermometer. Minus twenty now, the wind at least fifty and apparently still building. The cold was burning through his parka and Refrigiwear overalls, trying to get at his bones.

“When we get there, I’ll stop again till you guys come up,” Maiyumerak shouted over the wind. “Then I could drive through the bad part and walk back and take Nathan’s machine through. Then Alan and Whyborn could come through, OK?”

They started down the south slope of the pass. It did seem that the weather eased slightly, as Whyborn had predicted. Less snow in the air, not quite as cold, visibility up to maybe a half-mile now, permitting occasional glimpses of the sea of cloud raging overhead. If he could see the clouds, Active realized, that meant little if any new snow was falling. The snow boiling around them must be an Arctic ground blizzard, picked up by the wind still building at their backs. It had to be pushing sixty miles an hour, he thought.

Below the summit, the pass narrowed toward the gorge, the sides pinching in and steepening until the trail was just a narrow bench along the brow of a hill. They rounded the hill and the gorge opened below them, vertical sides covered with snow and ice as far down as they could see in the murk.

Maiyumerak’s taillight stopped bouncing. Active cut the Yamaha’s engine and coasted to a stop beside him. Maiyumerak dismounted and walked over to Active, putting the snorkel of his hood against Active’s to be heard over the wind. “That’s the hard part up ahead,” Maiyumerak shouted, pointing to a stretch where the bench narrowed even further. “I’ll take my snowgo over, then come back and get yours and you can walk over. See them bushes sticking out of the snow there? You can grab them if you need something to hold on to.”

Active peered into the murk and nodded. It didn’t look as bad as he’d hoped. The bench did narrow a little more, but not so much that a snowmachine couldn’t navigate it in reasonable safety, perhaps even a snowmachine with a one-armed driver. Another Arctic legend magnified in the retelling, no doubt.

Maiyumerak walked back to his Ski-Doo and Active watched as he raced toward the hard part. As the bench narrowed, Maiyumerak hit a small snowdrift that crossed the trail and his sled swung slightly downhill behind the Ski-Doo. Active’s spirits lifted slightly at this. Maiyumerak gunned his engine and finished the crossing with the sled in a diagonal slide, snow spraying from under the cleated drive track, until he reached safer terrain where the bench widened again.

Active could just see him through the blowing snow as he parked the Ski-Doo and started back toward them on foot, grabbing the dwarf willows in the snow to make it over the worst part of the trail.

Soon he was back, and straddling the Ladies’ Model. “I’ll take it over, then come back and walk across with you, Nathan.”

Active looked down into the gorge, then glanced back at Alan and Whyborn, waiting a few yards back on their snowmachines, then decided. He turned to Maiyumerak and winked.

Maiyumerak pointed questioningly into the frozen depths of the gorge.

Active nodded.

Maiyumerak still wasn’t certain. “Your snowgo, too?”

Active lifted his eyebrows and grinned.

Maiyumerak grinned back, started the Yamaha, and gunned it along the trail. He was halfway across when the sled hit the drift and swung downhill, as before. But this time the weight of the sled and its cargo seemed to be too much for the snowmachine. It churned to a halt, snow spewing from the drive track, and Maiyumerak flung himself off and grabbed a clump of dwarf willows. The Ladies’ Model and the sled accelerated backward down the steepening curve of the hill, bounced into the gorge, broke into pieces, and vanished with Robert Kelly and his grandfather.

Maiyumerak picked his way back to where Active was standing, still staring into the gorge. Maiyumerak raised his hands and shrugged helplessly. “Sorry, Nathan, I just couldn’t hold it.”

Whyborn and Alan came charging up through the snow. Alan looked at Maiyumerak with a mixture of astonishment and outrage. “You ruined my burglary case,” he said. “We’ll never get Uncle Frosty out of there now and breakup will wash everything away.”

“Them Yamahas never did have the traction of a Ski-Doo,” Whyborn offered.

Maiyumerak said, “It sure was a pretty color of purple, though.”

Active shrugged. “It died in the line of duty. The troopers will reimburse me.” Then he asked Maiyumerak, “Think I could catch a ride up there on your sled with Kobuk?”

FIVE DAYS later, Active unlocked the bachelor cabin and stepped inside. It was warm, so the heat hadn’t gone off while he waited out the storm in the camp Maiyumerak had found in a canyon on the south side of Shaman Pass. And the cabin smelled normal, meaning either that he hadn’t left anything too gross in the garbage, or that Lucy had taken care of it while he was gone.

He slipped off his boots at the door, like everyone did in Chukchi, eased out of his parka and dropped it on the sofa. Then he dialed 9-1-1.

As he’d hoped, Lucy was at the dispatcher’s station and took the call. “What do you want?” she said in her grumpiest voice. Cowboy had radioed in on the way back that everyone had safely weathered the blow in the pass, and Carnaby would have passed the news to Lucy that Active was on his way home. And her Dispatch console would have told her who was calling.

“There’s an emergency at the bachelor cabin,” he said. “I need some
muktuk
right away.”

“Well, stop tying up this line and call Nelda Qivits.”

“She told me only yours would do.”

“My what?”

“
Muktuk
.”

There was a pause. Then, with the slightest undertone of surprise and delight, “
Arii
, that Nelda! She said that?”

“Yep. She said I should try out my harpoon on your
muktuk
.”

Lucy gave a little cry that was half giggle and half yelp. “Is this an obscene call? This line is recorded, you know.”

“Maybe you should come over and arrest me.”

“All right, I will!”