Shaman Pass

by Stan Jones

  Active rolled onto his right side, curled his legs and waist to push his hands toward the tape at his feet. The fire snake writhed in his shoulder and he had to stop, relax, and close his eyes until the pain subsided a little.

  When his pulse was close to normal again, he took a deep breath and lunged at his feet, like a fat man trying to prove he can still touch his toes. The fire snake took over his entire being, his body was one big dislocated shoulder. A scream tried to boil up from somewhere. Active clamped his jaws down on it and held it to a grunt. But that big happy bubble of warmth blossomed in his brain, and he felt himself sliding off into shock again.

  THIS TIME there was no bullet dream. Active just woke up and opened his eyes, prodded back to consciousness by the pain in his shoulder, completely clearheaded at last. The snowmachine driver sat on the edge of the cot, an old .30-30 carbine across his knees, a pipe between his teeth. He wore insulated pants with suspenders, a plaid wool shirt, unbuttoned, and caribou mukluks. A heavy parka with a green corduroy cover lay on the cot beside him. Active thought he glimpsed a gleam of silver inside the wool shirt, but couldn’t place it.

  “Don’t try to get away,” the driver said. He jacked a shell into the firing chamber of the carbine. “I should shoot you.”

  “I won’t,” Active said. He relaxed, eased his body straight again. The blaze in his shoulder died down a little.

  He studied the driver. Narrow face, somewhat egg-shaped, with leathery, supple-looking mahogany skin, same quality of vigorous but unguessable age as Whyborn Sivula. A slightly beaked nose; silver hair, eyebrows, and mustache; silver bristles on his cheeks and chin. A half-healed cut over his brow.

  And calm, resigned eyes.

  “You’re Robert Kelly,” Active said.

  The driver lifted his eyebrows. “Ee.” The calm eyes were still on Active. “What your name?”

  “Nathan Active. I’m an Alaska State Trooper from Chukchi.”

  “I guess I know who you are,” Kelly said. “I hear you on Kay-Chuck sometimes, talk about catch people. How did you get here?”

  “In the Super Cub. You looked at us when we flew over.”

  Kelly lifted his eyebrows. “But that airplane never land.”

  “I jumped out.”

  “Ah?”

  Active nodded. “Ee.”

  “You never use a parachute?”

  Active shook his head. “I, well, I didn’t have one.”

  Kelly was silent, digesting this. Then, “Pretty bum weather today. I never see a plane up here when it’s this bad.”

  “Cowboy Decker was flying. Do you know him?”

  Kelly squinted no, then his face tightened. He closed his eyes, laid the rifle on the cot and put his hand inside the wool shirt, feeling along his right side. Now Active could see that the silver gleam was a band of duct tape wrapped around Kelly’s middle. He pulled his hand out, studied it, and seemed satisfied with the result. He looked up and caught Active’s eyes on him.

  “No more blood now, so I guess you never hit me too bad.” He raised his right arm and rotated it gingerly at the shoulder, testing the side, wincing a little. “Why you do that anyway?”

  “I thought you were going to run over me with your snowgo.”

  “Well, I think you’re about to shoot me.”

  There was a long silence. Active gathered that Kelly, like himself, couldn’t think of what to say next.

  Finally Active spoke. “Why did you bring me in here? Why not just take off?”

  “I’m shot, so I have to go back to my cabin, see how bad it is, fix myself up first,” Kelly said. “But if I leave you out there, then maybe you’ll wake up, find your gun in the snow, try shoot me again.”

  He stopped and smiled a little. “I’m shot, hurts too much to put you in my sled. I tie you on behind with rope, drag you to my cabin.” The grin got bigger. “But I go real slow.”

  “My shoulder doesn’t feel like you went slow.”

  Kelly shrugged, then grimaced like it had hurt his injured side. “I think your shoulder’s already hurt before I tie you on. You scream when I pull on your arms, scream all the way to my cabin.”

  There was a silence. Active waited.

  Finally Kelly spoke. “Anyway, I guess I wonder, why does a state trooper come all the way up here to my camp, jump out of airplane, try shoot me?”

  Active studied Kelly’s eyes and thought how to do this. Kelly seemed to want to talk. Ordinary people usually did after doing something terrible, like a killing. The stress was too much for them.

  “Do you remember a man named Whyborn Sivula?” Active asked at last. “You brought him here a long time ago.”

  At first the calm eyes were blank. Then they widened in recollection. “Ah. Whyborn Sivula. He tell you, he tell you . . . what he tell you?”

  “Will you tell me about Natchiq?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “You told Whyborn Sivula about him.”

  Kelly took a deep breath and gazed out the cabin’s front window. It looked like milk out there, milk and flying snow. Active realized now how loudly the wind keened around the cabin. It sounded stronger, more violent, than when he had rolled off the ridge and into the willows and fired at Robert Kelly. Perhaps the storm was building again, as Cowboy had said it might. He wondered if the pilot would make it back to Chukchi in what would be a fierce head wind on the return trip.

  Kelly swung his eyes back to Active’s. “Whyborn told you about Natchiq?”

  “A little. I know he was your grandfather. And I know he fought the angatquqs and made prophesies and then he started out for Barrow and he was never seen again.”

  “That goddamn Saganiq see him again, all right!” Kelly slammed his hand down on the bed, then winced from the pain. “He kill him up here!”

  Active just lifted his eyebrows.

  “I guess it won’t hurt to tell you the rest of the story. Then you’ll know how that Saganiq was.” Kelly sighed and inspected his wound again. “By the time Natchiq start for Barrow, his first wife is dead so he—”

  “What happened to her?”

  “My dad never say, just that she die somehow. Her and Natchiq never have any kids of their own but they adopt these two little orphans, a girl name Enyana and a boy name Kiana. By the time Natchiq decide to go north, Kiana is already grown up and married to Point Hope girl and living up there with her family, trying to tell those people about Natchiq and his source of intelligence. This Enyana, she’s really pretty, sew and cook real good, like to laugh, so Natchiq take her for his second wife. Him and Enyana, they leave for the north when springtime is starting, like now. They take maybe three-four dogs, but I don’t know if the dogs are pulling sled, or if they’re carrying packs. Natchiq tell everybody he’ll go to Barrow, then Canada. You know the Eskimo name for Barrow?”

  “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.