Season of Death

by Christopher Lane

  “Hey! You aren’t supposed to be in there!” Mack warned from the ATV.

  “I know,” Ray mumbled back. “Official police business.” If Farrell showed up later, noticed the footprints, and got upset, he could be placated by the knowledge that this little intrusion into his treasure trove was sanctioned by the North Slope Borough.

  Bending to inspect the containers, Ray realized that they weren’t plastic. He tapped one. Ceramic. Pottery? He suddenly felt a new respect for the ground he was standing on. He checked under his boots for artifacts before examining another pot. A section of this one had been cleaned, the mud brushed away to reveal a patch of dull black markings.

  “They’re the same,” Keera observed. She had joined him in the pit.

  Before Ray could ask what she meant, it dawned on him. No wonder the symbols, or letters or whatever they were seemed vaguely familiar. They were just like the ones scrawled on Farrell’s notepad, the one he had left in the box back at the village. Ray was on the verge of accepting this as something bordering on a break when another thought submitted itself. So what? So the markings matched. It proved nothing. It didn’t even suggest anything. Farrell was an archaeologist and had documented the site.

  “Must be important,” Keera said. “Why else would he hide it?”

  “True …” Ray agreed. If the pot was just another artifact, even a significant one in terms of research, why would Farrell entrust the corresponding notes to Reuben? To keep the find from rival scientists? Archaeology, as far as Ray knew, wasn’t that competitive. Maybe in the race for grant money. But for pots …?

  What was it Farrell said in the notes? Something about the site not being Thule?

  “You’re burning daylight,” Mack warned from astride the all-terrain vehicle.

  Ray knew he was right. If they weren’t careful, they’d wind up somewhere on the river when darkness fell. He gave the pots a parting glare, wishing they could speak, before clambering out of the hole on hands and knees.

  Keera sidled up to him en route to the ATV. “That’s why they were after him.”

  “Who’s they?” Ray asked.

  “The evil ones.”

  “Oh! That they!” Depending on one’s mood, Keera could be endearing, comical, or downright irritating. “A whole gang of Nahanis, huh?”

  She scowled at him. “How can you walk in the Light with such doubt?”

  Ray shrugged. “A lot of practice, I guess.”

  “Nahani killed him,” she said, “but the evil ones were after him.”

  He nodded, as if this made sense. “Ah … I see,” he lied. Fruit loops!

  “They wanted him dead because of the pots. But Nahani got him first.” She mounted the trailer, then gasped, “Nahani was … a she. A woman killed him … for fire.”

  “Fire?”

  “She was jealous.” Keera turned to Ray, her face animated. “Dr. Farrell was being chased by evil ones. But this Nahani murdered him … for fire love. Understand?”

  “It’s as clear as mud,” he assured her.

  “Mud?” she asked, squinting. “But mud isn’t clear.”

  Mack cackled at this and started the engine.

  As they began the jolting descent toward the river, Ray shook his head at the nonsense: evil ones … female Nahanis … fire love … Good grief! It was an Athabascan soap opera. Keera was nothing if not imaginative. He watched her extract a plastic bottle of Cutter’s and apply it to her exposed arms, neck, face, ankles …

  “Want some?’’ Her voice was friendly enough, but her expression was sour. Apparently Ray’s ability to be a Lightwalker while harboring doubt was distressing her.

  Dabbing on mosquito repellent, Ray’s mind left Keera’s idiosyncrasies and returned to Farrell. To the pots. To the box that Reuben had stashed. “Artifacts inconsistent with Thule site.” That was what Farrell had written. It was a simple observation. He had somehow managed to rule out the possibility that the pots were created by Thule culture. That was his specialty, so he would have known. And it was worthy of comment. But why had the words implied surprise? Or had they? Maybe Ray had read something that wasn’t there. To him, Farrell’s notes conveyed a sense of confusion, as if the pots should have been Thule, but inexplicably weren’t.

  Maybe it was nothing, he decided as a row of malnourished willows reached up to greet their approach. Maybe he had misread the notes. Except … Hadn’t the letters been scrawled with an extra energy? And the bit about “Not Thule …” He wasn’t certain, but he thought that was in capital letters, underlined. Had there been an exclamation mark?

  He was pondering what might have motivated Farrell to hide his notes, when the ATV lumbered through a thin line of alders and deposited them on the bank of the Kanayut.

  “How’s that for door-to-door service?” Mack remarked.

  “Thanks. We appreciate it,” Ray said, helping Keera out of the trailer. He took the pack from the boat, unzipped a pocket, and showed Mack the orange brick.

  Mack sneered. “Yep. That’s ours.” He paused to curse Rick Sanders soundly.

  Ray replaced the explosive, asking, “Is it dangerous to carry this thing around?”

  “Not without a detonator.” He dismounted from the ATV, waddled behind the bulldozer, and reappeared a few seconds later with a gas can.

  “Oh … Thanks.” Ray had forgotten about fuel.

  When Ray had finished filling the Evinrude, Mack said, “I was serious about the offer. You two find yourselves without a bed tonight, you come on back.” He gestured to the backhoe. “Give the horn on one of these beasts a toot, and I’ll come pick you up.”

  “Thanks,” Ray repeated. He shook the hand offered to him before pushing the raft into the water. When Keera was aboard, he splashed into the river and leapt into the boat.

  “Take care of that little lady!” he called after them.

  Ray nodded, silently hoping that his stint as an unpaid baby-sitter would soon be over. The engine started on the first pull, and he gunned the throttle, pulling away from shore, from Mack, from the Red Wolf Mine. If only he could figure out how to pull away from Keera, he thought. And from Farrell, and from the entire mess.

  It was five minutes before he asked her, “Where are we going?”

  She pointed upriver.

  “Could you be a little more specific?’’

  “Let me have your Bible.” She started unzipping pockets on the backpack.

  “What are you going to do with a BibleT’ he asked, unable to mask his skepticism.

  “Ever heard of scapulamancy?”

  Ray had. It was an ancient Athabascan practice for locating caribou in which a shaman placed the scapula bone of a bull into the fire and interpreted the resulting cracks. He slid the book from the pocket of his parka. “You’re not going to burn my Bible, are you?” Though he placed little value on the contents of the book, it was worth preserving because it was a gift from Margaret.

  “No.” Closing her eyes, Keera held the tiny volume to her breast and began to hum. As the tune swelled, she added words, in Athabascan.

  Checking his watch, Ray swallowed a curse. In a few short hours night would fall. And what was he doing? Heading south into the wilderness with an up-and-coming witch doctor in hopes of locating a dead archaeologist. A dead, headless archaeologist.

  FORTY-THREE

  “I’M NOT GETTING anything.”

  Ray had to laugh at this. Keera had been meditating for almost twenty minutes, alternately humming, rocking on her knees, fondling the Bible as if it were a fetish. “Maybe we should turn around and go back …” He stopped when he saw that her gaze was fixed above and to the right of his head. “What?” he asked, turning. “Wow …”

  Cottonlike tufts of clouds dotted the sky, the sinking sun transforming them into a polychrome watercolor that bathed the jagged limestone ridges in pastel shades.

  “That’s our sign!” She held the miniature book up to the sky, mumbled something. Then, “Shainin Lake. The Voice will show
us where.”

  “Okay …” Ray muttered, wondering how a Voice could do anything other than provide audible assistance. “The Spirit Voice?”

  Another nod. “If we are quiet, we can hear where to go. Quiet and humble.”

  Ray nodded, pretending to understand.

  Navigating up the calm channel that bordered the rapids, Ray noted the location of Lewis’s mishap and of his own. His eyes scanned the woods, half-expecting Headcase to leap out, rifle at the hip. They passed the archaeological site five minutes later. Ray considered stopping. The light would fail soon. Better to be at the dig site than up at the lake. And he needed to speak with Janice anyway. But knowing Keera, she would give him no end of grief if he so much as slowed the Zodiac. Against his better judgment, he opened up the throttle, and they bounced their way upriver.

  Forty-five minutes later, with the lake in sight, Keera said, “We’re getting close.”

  Ray smirked at this. A real psychic insight.

  As they plowed through the current and into the more tranquil waters of Shainin Lake, she pointed to the right. “Over there.”

  Ray obediently steered for the creek where they had found Fred da Head. He was toying with the idea of telling her about the incident when she announced, “This is where his head was. The rest of him is up there.” An index finger directed Ray’s attention up the hillside, toward a tiny patch of blue ice seated in a bowl of limestone.

  “You’ve got to be kidding …” He groaned, already imagining the fun they would have tramping most of the way up the mountain en route to the glacier.

  “See those trees? He’s right up there.” She said this casually, as if Farrell had set up camp and was hunched over a fire, waiting to be rescued.

  Ray beached the raft in almost exactly the same spot where he had landed his kayak a day and a half earlier. Climbing out, he peered up at the mountain and realized that the sun was gone. It had just set and though the glow on the horizon promised another hour of good light: the temperature was already dropping. “Are you positive?”

  “No.” Batting her eyelids, she offered him a winning smile. “But I’m pretty sure.”

  “Come on then,” he sighed, making no effort to mask his irritation. “I want to make it back to the archaeological site before dark.”

  “But what if we find Dr. Farrell?”

  “I don’t care if we find Jimmy Hoffa.”

  “Who?”

  Ray started up the hillside, trudging along the same route Lewis and Billy Bob had followed in their brief search for the rest of Fred da Head. As he did, he wondered what the point was. They hadn’t found anything then. Why would they find anything now?

  “You must believe, Lightwalker,” Keera encouraged.

  Ray stifled a curse.

  A hundred meters up, they topped a rise and were met by a thick, daunting band of alders. Ray’s eyes followed the wall of prickly foliage to the right. It ran horizontally across the mountain, probably all the way to the Kanayut River. To the left, beyond the stream, they formed a similar barrier, this one bending to touch the lake a half mile west.

  “Looks like the end of the line,” Ray observed. He wasn’t so much trying to end the trek, as much as he was stating a fact. “Short of wading up the stream, I think we’re out of luck.”

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” Keera assured him. She nodded at a depression in the alders just a few feet from the water. “Thank goodness for moose.”

  “Yeah,” Ray sighed, following her into the narrow trail. “Thank goodness.”

  The overgrown path of compacted tundra twisted and turned, following the contours of the mountainside and roughly paralleling the stream, before leading them to a slitlike opening in a rocky cliff. Without looking back for permission, Keera began inching her way along a ten-inch-wide ledge, clinging to a carpet of spongy mosses that had attached themselves to the limestone. The water was a dozen feet below them, gurgling hungrily as it gushed through a chute congested with boulders.

  Several careful steps later, the ledge opened to a broad sheet of bald granite. The stream was at ground level again, wide, flowing energetically across a field of barely submerged sandbars. The glacier was still a thousand feet above them, a teardrop of blue in a dull gray bowl.

  “Well?” Ray asked, his head swinging from side to side. He didn’t see any bodies on display. He checked his watch, calculating the return trip to the raft, the time it would take to float to the dig site. The light was beginning to fail. They would have to hurry.

  “Where is he?”

  Keera gazed at the glacier wistfully.

  “No,” Ray promised. “Not even with ropes and good light … Forget it.”

  Keera moved toward the stream. When she reached the water’s edge, she paused, then stepped in like a sleepwalker. She was wet to the knees before Ray caught up to her.

  “What are you doing??”

  Without answering, she turned and started upstream. Ray braced her, supporting her shoulders, gripping her shirt in case she lost her footing. The current was strong enough to carry away a full-grown man. “Keera? What are you doing?!”

  She stopped suddenly. Eyes closed, head bowed, she whispered, “Where?”

  Convinced that she was clinically insane, Ray tried to assist her to the bank. “Come on, Keera.” But she was like a rock, her feet firmly planted in the mud.

  “I need your Bible again,” she told him.

  “Keera …” Ray complained. His legs were numb from the icy water, and what little patience he had begun the scavenger hunt with was now exhausted.

  “We’re close. But I need your Bible. Trust me.”

  Exasperated, he dug the book out of his parka. She held it in both hands, like a divining rod, aiming it at the water.

  “Are you ready to go back to the raft?” Ray asked.

  “He’s right here. In this stream.”

  Ray gave the water a cursory glance. “I don’t see him.” Shaking his head at the foolishness of it all, he started for shore. “I’m going back.”

  “You can’t leave me here,” she pleaded, sounding like a ten-year-old again.

  “Watch me.” He had just made it onto the bank when he heard her scream. Turning, he expected to find her being swept downstream. Instead, she was standing on an elevated sandbar, her head bowed awkwardly, her eyes open wide in terror.

  “What is it?”

  Sobbing, she managed to gasp, “It’s … him …”

  FORTY-FOUR

  RAY REACTED BY high-stepping into the river. “Where?!”

  Keera, still petrified, pointed at her feet, as if she had just sighted a spider.

  With dusk swiftly approaching, the stream was taking on an opaque quality, reflecting the sky and mountains. It was impossible to see anything below the surface.

  “Where?” Ray investigated with his feet, tapping along the sandbar, probing an eddy. His boots found smooth rocks, gravel, a mucky bottom … something hard, long … More rocks? Sticks? He glanced at Keera for confirmation. She nodded once.

  He jostled what felt like a tangle of tree limbs. One of the branches poked up from the water. It was attached to a hand.

  Ray stumbled backward, swearing. He landed on his seat three yards away. Wet to the armpits, he glared at the place where the appendage had breached the surface.

  “It’s … him,” Keera managed in a pitiful whisper.

  Returning to the spot where the body had waved up at him, Ray knelt and reached into the water, exploring the bottom: pea grit, polished stones, slime. It took another step forward before he made contact with the sticks. They were bare in sections, spongy in others. Fabric hung from them in ragged bands.

  After two minutes of blind examination, his fingers fumbled upon the hand. Keera moaned as he lifted it out of the water. Ray fought off the urge to gag.

  The hand was recognizable as human only because of the length and number of the digits dangling from the wrist. Part skeleton, part mangled flesh, it looked
like something that had functioned as a chew toy for a grizzly before being discarded in the water. The exposed bone was yellow-gray, already covered in a thin layer of silt. The skin that remained was bluish, swollen several times its original thickness.

  Ray was about to release his grip when he noticed it: a slender gold band on the third finger. The ring finger. It took him a moment to determine which hand he was in possession of. The left. A wedding band? As he worked it off, sliding shreds of ligament away like muddy residue, he felt like a grave robber. But this was evidence, a means of identifying the body. Dropping the hand, he put the ring into a jacket pocket.

  “I told you it was him,” Keera said, the shock of discovery wearing off.

  Ray ignored her words. Reaching into the water, he gripped the rib cage and tried to bring up the entire body. It didn’t budge. It was lodged in the sand, as if it had been part of the landscape for years. He traced a leg. The section below the knee was gone. The other was missing from the thigh down. He bent and found the other arm. It was intact, except for stubs where three of the fingers should have been. He returned to the shoulders. They were soft, a combination of wet clothing and muscle. The neck was flimsy and, he realized in horror, reached up into nothingness. The body was headless.

  After nearly losing his dinner, he stood and rubbed his eyes.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It … uh … It doesn’t have a … a head,” he stammered.

  “I told you it was Dr. Farrell.”

  “Just because there’s no head doesn’t mean it’s Dr. Farrell,” Ray pointed out. “Whoever it was, they had a wedding ring on. Other than that …”

  “It’s Dr. Farrell. I’m sure of it.”

  Ray tried to think the facts through. This was difficult given that his stomach seemed intent upon sending back the chicken stew. Gagging, he decided that Fred da Head had probably belonged to this body. After all, how many disembodied heads and headless bodies were there in the Bush? As to whether or not it was Farrell, Ray knew a simple way to find out: show the ring to Janice.