by Stan Jones
“I can get a trooper rifle.”
“Well, take it,” Silver said.
Active nodded.
TWO HOURS and ten minutes later, he found the spot Silver had told him about, where the main trail left the shoreline, crossed the base of Cape Goodwin, and continued north. He could see maybe ten or twelve of the spruce tripods marking the main route. Past that, they were lost in the snow haze stirred up by the frigid west wind that had kicked in again overnight.
Active stopped the Yamaha, flipped up his goggles, and flexed his throttle thumb as he looked back at Silver’s hickory dogsled. It was towing fine, all the bungee cords still in place, the blue tarp caked with snow thrown back by the snow-machine’s drive track, but still covering the gear the police chief had lent him.
Active turned and studied the route ahead as the wind stiffened his face and brought tears to his eyes. The whalers’ trail was a gray thread in the snow that ran west along the edge of a tall, crumbling bluff until it vanished in the haze. The beach beneath was a jumble of ice slabs driven onshore by the winter storms and now painted with snow by the wind. The result was a fantastic field of blue-and-white sculpture, with occasional patches of black where the ice had scraped up beach gravel as it hit the shore. Snow streamed off the crests like glowing smoke in the slanting light of the low Arctic sun.
He wondered for a moment how he would get down to the ice once he reached the cape, then decided not to worry about it. The whalers would know, and their trail led along the bluff.
He dropped his goggles back into place, flexed his thumb again, squeezed the throttle, and started along the trail. It wasn’t marked by tripods or saplings, like the main trail. Nor was it as broad and deep as the heavily used winter thoroughfare that ran up and down the coast. But it was easy enough to follow across the treeless tundra, even when it veered away from the bluff to avoid the mouth of a gulch or find its way around a high spot.
Finally the trail came to a gulch and didn’t veer. Instead it plunged through a fringe of snow-covered scrub willows to the bottom of the ravine and followed it to the beach. The trail threaded its way through the wrecked ice on the beach, then headed straight out into the rubble of the shorefast ice.
Active steered the Yamaha along the trail as it snaked through a natural notch between two slabs in the first pressure ridge, then across a pan of comparatively flat ice with a puddle of yellow-gray slush in the low spot, then toward a slot hacked in the next pressure ridge. The sled banged and fish-tailed behind him as he went up the slope and over the crest, then bucked and tried to overrun him on the downslope.
A mile farther on he crested a pressure ridge to find the downslope was a near-vertical cliff. He squeezed the brake lever as the Yamaha plunged down the incline, trying to keep the machine straight as the sled pushed at him from behind. The Yamaha jackknifed anyway and was sliding sideways when he leapt off. He landed on his left shoulder in an effort to protect the trooper Winchester slung across his back.
The Yamaha rolled, but the sled stayed upright. He heard a snap as the hitch parted. The Yamaha bounced into the air, hit the ice, and rolled again. The sled scooted down the incline on its own before pinning itself on a jagged chunk of ice at the bottom.
The Yamaha landed on its back at the bottom of the slope, engine screaming, drive tread flailing, the throttle handlebar buried in the snow. Active ran over and dug down into the snow and hit the kill switch. The Yamaha coughed to a stop.
He grabbed a ski with both hands and heaved, then yelped as the banged-up left shoulder objected. He tried again, letting the right shoulder do most of the work, and finally got the machine upright.
The windscreen was broken almost in half, the top piece flopping back over the handlebars, attached only by a couple of inches of Plexiglas at the right edge. He swore and tore it off and flung it into the snow.
He forced himself to calm down and look the machine over. Nothing broken but the windscreen and the hitch, as far as he could see. Maybe the right handlebar was bent a little, but probably not enough to hurt.
He pulled the rifle sling over his head and inspected the .270. No snow in the muzzle, the scope covers still held in place by their rubber bands. He slung it over his back again, registering another protest from his left shoulder.
Shaking his head, he trudged over to the sled. The load was still bungeed into place under its tarp. But one of the hickory slats at the front of the sled was splintered on the pinnacle of ice that had stopped it. He grabbed the sled and heaved it off the pinnacle.
Then he inspected the damaged slat. It was a goner, and Silver would be pissed, but it looked to Active like the sled would still carry its load. Probably the troopers would pay to fix the slat. He hoped.
The problem was how to make the hitchless Yamaha pull the sled. The tongue was a triangle of steel piping, about four feet from apex to base. The base was bolted onto the stanchions at the front of the sled.
At the apex, the tongue hitched to the Yamaha by a bolt through a hinged metal tab. The tab had sheared off the Yamaha and was still shackled to the tongue.
He pulled the sled over to the Yamaha with his right arm and ran through a mental list of the gear he had loaded back in Chukchi, some of it his, some borrowed from Silver. Camp stove, tent, gas, food box, sleeping bag, a thermos of tea, the harpoon handle that Vera Jackson had pulled from Victor Solomon’s chest, now wrapped in two trash bags for its ride to Cape Goodwin. But no rope or wire on the list anywhere. He unbungeed the load, pulled back the blue tarp and checked, and was disappointed to find his memory was perfect.
True, Silver’s tent probably included a few little ties and cords, but Active wasn’t about to cut up the tent after breaking the man’s dogsled. The kind of ties that came with a tent probably wouldn’t be strong enough to pull a loaded sled through the pressure ridges anyway.
Active sighed, opened his parka, unzipped the fly of his snowmachine suit, and felt inside. Yep, he was wearing a belt. He pulled it out, threaded it through the apex of the tongue, then through the frame of the luggage rack at the back of the Yamaha, and buckled it.
He straightened up and studied it. It didn’t look strong enough. He jerked the sled closer and looped the belt through the tongue and luggage rack again, then nodded in satisfaction. The double thickness of leather might work.
He rebungeed the tarp into place, climbed onto the Yamaha, released the kill switch, said a little please to the Great Perhaps, and hit the starter. The machine caught instantly and sounded right. He gave the throttle a gentle squeeze and moved off across the pan, twisting on the seat to check out his makeshift hitch. The sled was moving with the Yamaha. What more could he ask?
Active babied the rig across two more pressure ridges, then shut it off and coasted to a stop on the snow at a fork in the trail. One fork led straight ahead, over the next white pressure ridge. The other veered left and followed a kind of valley between the ridges. He was considering which way to go when a flicker of yellow-gray fifty yards up the valley caught his eye.
His gut lurched and felt hot and he stood up on the running boards and shrugged the rifle off his back and worked the bolt to put a shell into the firing chamber. He raised the Winchester to his eye, saw nothing, lowered it and flipped the scope covers off, raised it again.
At first he still saw nothing. Then an Inupiat woman stepped into view from behind an ice slab and lowered a sopping polar bear hide through a hole in the ice. A rope was tied to the polar bear’s nose; several feet payed out, then the line went tight, vanishing behind the same ice slab that had concealed the woman. She must have been pulling the hide out of the hole when he had first noticed the flicker, he concluded.
He lowered the rifle and shrugged it onto his back before she could spot him pointing it at her. Evidently she hadn’t heard him come up; perhaps it was because he was downwind of her.
He hit the starter button and let the Yamaha glide forward. She finally heard the engine and looked up, gave a little wave
and then watched, hands on her hips, as he drove up and switched off the snowmachine. She was in her midfifties, he guessed, dark silver hair, glasses with round black frames, flowered parka with a big fur ruff, black snowmachine suit, Sorel boots.
They shook hands and introduced themselves. She was Rose Napana. Her husband, Charlie, she reported with some pride, had killed the polar bear two days earlier because it wouldn’t quit hanging around their whaling camp.
The rope, Active now saw, was looped around an ice block a few yards from the hole. An old Polaris snowmachine with a dogsled behind was parked there, too.
Rose saw him eyeing the setup. She kicked the rope, stretched across the snow in front of her. “Them sea lice never finish yet,” she said. “You want some tea?”
“Sea lice?”
Rose frowned and studied him. “You’re that naluaqmiiyaaq trooper, ah?”
Active nodded.
“Sea lice are these little bugs, live in the water.” Rose said it patiently and slowly like she was talking to a kindergartner. “They eat the meat and fat off the skin. Nice meal for them and I never have to scrape it. Good deal, ah?” She grinned. “But they’re not done yet. One more day, maybe. Now you want some tea?”
He declined and asked if she knew the way to Whyborn Sivula’s camp.
She lifted her eyebrows. “I’m going that way, you could malik on your snowgo.”
He was deciding that “malik” must mean “follow” when Rose took a closer look at the Yamaha, then turned an admiring gaze on him. “Yoi, so pretty. I always want a purple snowgo myself. And electric start! Too bad you break your windshield.”
From the ice she lifted a slab of snow that appeared to have been cut for the purpose and slid it into place over the polar-bear hole, to prevent blow-in and retard freezing, he supposed. Then she straddled her old Polaris, pulled the starter rope, and headed back up the trail toward the fork.
He steered his Yamaha in a wide, easy half circle to spare the leather hitch and followed her as she worked her way through the pressure ridges and out to the edge of the ice. There she stopped, and made a throat-cutting motion for him to do the same. He did, and flipped up his goggles.
The lead was a half-mile wide, Active estimated, a belt of indigo flecked with small white floes. The west wind was piling up small waves against the edge twenty feet from the front skis of his Yamaha. Wisps of sea smoke hurried across the water toward them.
Across the lead, he could see the ragged front of the pack ice, looking by some trick of perspective like a distant mountain range an ocean away.
“Whyborn is second camp that way,” Rose said, pointing up the lead to the right. “You can’t miss it. See you.”
She pulled her starter rope and headed left down the lead.
Active followed the ice edge for a half-mile, then the trail pulled away from the water and skirted behind a rubble of pressure ridges where the ice edge swelled out to a kind of point. As he passed by, he saw several snowmachines parked behind the ridges, and a foot trail leading toward the water. The first camp, he surmised.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FOUR-TENTHS OF A MILE farther on, Active found another gaggle of snowmachines behind the white slabs of a pressure ridge, another foot trail leading through the ridges toward the ice edge.
Active parked the Ladies’ Model and debated what to take with him from the sled. Anything left behind might get pilfered, but he couldn’t carry it all. He settled on the rifle, which he left strapped across his back, and the double-trash-bagged handle from Uncle Frosty’s harpoon, which he pulled from under the blue tarp. He took off a mitten, reached into the inside pocket of his parka, and touched the baggie that contained Uncle Frosty’s owl-faced amulet.
Then he picked his way through the pressure ridges to Whyborn Sivula’s whaling camp.
A white wall tent like a tiny cabin squatted ten yards from the water, canvas rattling in the wind. A stovepipe poked out the top, sending up a thin tendril of gray smoke that left a sweet, oily smell in the air as it streaked away to the east. Slabs of white muktuk were stacked beside the tent. Active knew whalers hunted the little white beluga whales that often preceded the prized bowheads up the leads in the spring. The meat was good to eat, supposedly, and the muktuk made good fuel for the camp stove.
An umiaq, also white, crouched on snow blocks at the water line, a steel-barbed harpoon and a whaling gun like a giant’s rifle pointing seaward from the bow. Inside were coils of rope and a huge white float.
The whalers had raised a windbreak of ice slabs near the umiaq. A half-dozen men lazed in the shadows behind it, drinking coffee, chatting idly, two of them playing cribbage with a pegboard made from a walrus tusk. Their card table was a blue-and-white plastic Igloo cooler.
Another man, with binoculars hanging from his neck, stood on the crest of the nearest big pressure ridge, looking out across the lead. Here it was choked with floes and slush, no longer the open expanse of indigo Active had seen when he and Rose first found the water. Perhaps as a result, the west wind, though still rising, created no waves here.
The lookout spotted Active and called out something in Inupiaq. Active thought he caught the word naluaqmiiyaaq.
In a moment, an Inupiaq in navy blue snowmachine pants and a brown down vest, but no parka or gloves, emerged from the tent and walked forward as Active covered the last few yards to the camp. The man blinked for a moment in the white light, then pulled mirror glasses from the vest and put them on.
Whyborn Sivula was slight and looked to be in his early sixties, his face a dark, polished brown with strong Mongol lines. He still had all his teeth, as far as Active could see, and the gray hair still had a little black in it.
But it was hard to be sure. He walked easily, like a man still with good knees and hips. So he could be in his early fifties.
Still, Inupiat men who spent much time out in the country weathered early to that deep and relatively wrinkle-free mahogany, Active had learned, and then seemed to stop aging for a while. So Whyborn Sivula could be in his early seventies.
Active pulled off his right mitten and put out his hand. “Mr. Sivula? I’m Nathan Active with the Alaska State Troopers.”
Sivula shook hands, his eyes on the trash-bag-wrapped object at Active’s side. “Everybody know who you are.”
Active held up the harpoon. “Do you know why I’m here?”
Sivula said nothing.
“I talked to Calvin Maiyumerak.”
Still nothing from the old whaler.
“Can I show you this?” Active raised the harpoon again.
“We could go inside, I guess.”
Sivula led Active into the tent. Inside were two flat cargo sleds, covered now with caribou hides and sleeping bags to serve as benches and beds. Opposite the doorway, at the end of the alley between the cargo sleds, a homemade barrel stove muttered to itself. The sweet, greasy stench of burning muktuk was very strong. Something was bubbling in a pot on top of the stove. It smelled like beef stew. Or fish soup. Or both.
Sivula sat on one of the sleds and motioned for Active to use the other, and offered beluga stew from the stove. Active downed a bowlful, partly because it was local protocol, and partly because he was hungry and cold from the ride up the coast.
Then he turned his back to Sivula and laid the harpoon shaft, still wrapped in its trash bags, on the bright green sleeping bag that covered the other sled. Then he pulled the baggie from inside his parka and laid it beside the harpoon. He put the owl’s face down, then slid out of the way and faced Sivula, whose eyes were riveted to the objects on the sleeping bag.
“Did you hear that Victor Solomon was killed?”
Sivula said nothing, eyes still on the green sleeping bag.
“He was killed with this harpoon.” Active pointed at the exhibits on the sleeping bag. “And the killer left this amulet on the body.”
Sivula still didn’t speak, though Active thought he flinched slightly.
Active knew he
was pushing it. Older Eskimos considered questions rude, particularly from a stranger. But today, there wasn’t time for the proper formalities, and Sivula seemed hypnotized by the amulet and the shaft.
“These things were taken when Uncle Frosty was stolen from the museum,” Active said.
Sivula definitely flinched now. “I don’t know about that,” he said.
Now Active was silent, holding eye contact until Sivula broke it. Active cleared his throat, looked at his feet. Still nothing. “I heard you went to Calvin Maiyumerak’s house and asked him about the burglary.” He looked not at Sivula, but forty-five degrees right of the mahogany face, at a rear corner of the tent.
Finally Sivula spoke. “He never tell me anything. Say he don’t know anything about the burglary.”
“Why did you want to know about the burglary?”
“I don’t know.” Active saw the mask sliding over Sivula’s face, the one that meant a white person, or perhaps any authority figure, was asking too many questions.
“What do you know about the burglary?”
Sivula squinted and said nothing.
Active unwrapped the harpoon shaft, being careful not to touch it except on the ends, and also careful to expose the owl-face property mark for only a fraction of a second. Then he rolled the mark out of sight and looked at Sivula.
The whaler’s body was rigid, his hands gripping his knees as if to keep from reaching across and grabbing the harpoon.
“These things here that were taken in the burglary and found on Victor Solomon’s body, they have marks on them,” Active said. He pulled the amulet out of its baggie and placed it on the sleeping bag, the owl’s face still down. “My friend Jim Silver—you know Jim Silver, the naluaqmiut police chief?”
Sivula nodded, still rigid, his eyes never leaving the objects on the bed.
“Jim Silver said that, in the early days, the Inupiat put these marks on their equipment in case it got lost,” Active said. “But he didn’t know whose marks were on these things from the museum. Maybe an Inupiaq would know, someone who knows about the early days.”