Village of the Ghost Bears

by Stan Jones

  “Say again, please? In English?”

  “I feel helplessly happy. Think it’ll last?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said.

  “Even if it doesn’t, I can’t complain. I slept like a zombie.”

  “Me too. I felt oddly drained.”

  She giggled.

  He dumped the eggs onto their plates, tossed two slices of bread into the skillet, and was turning down the gas when she called out.

  “Hey, look at that!” She was pointing across the lake.

  He turned and swept his eyes over the water, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. “What—”

  “Up on the ridge.”

  He scanned the crest and saw them, a string of caribou filing south toward the Isignaq, headed for Jade Portage and the wintering grounds across the river. From this distance, they looked like bugs crawling along the edge of the sky. He was reminded of a phrase he had once heard an old Inupiat hunter use for caribou: earth-lice.

  There was indeed some resemblance, Active saw now. Plus, as the old man had pointed out, the Inupiat of long ago had eaten their own body lice as well as earth-lice. Now that everyone was civilized and bathed regularly, the old man had reflected somewhat gloomily, body lice were no longer on the menu, but at least the earth-lice were still plentiful, and as tasty as ever.

  Active went back to the tent and fetched his binoculars for a closer look. The males were in full fall regalia, with towering antlers and thick coats of gray-black fur except for the white capes shining practically incandescent in the morning sun. The females ran more to brown and gray, with spindly, twig-like antlers.

  “How about some caribou for breakfast?” Grace asked. There was fire in her eyes of a kind he had not seen before. Her Inupiat half coming out, surely.

  “You bet,” he said, hurrying to the tent to uncase the guns. “We’ll have to cross the creek and come up farther along the ridge to get ahead of them.”

  They loaded quickly, slung the rifles over their backs, and sprinted along the lakeshore to the outlet, then worked down One-Way Creek until they found a spot shallow enough to ford.

  He was halfway to the opposite bank, eyes on the ridge, measuring their pace against that of the caribou, figuring the odds of getting up the slope in time, something about the creek trying to get his attention, when she called out behind him.

  “Nathan, look!”

  He turned. She was pointing at a dark object a few yards downstream. He had caught it from the corner his eye before, but in his hurry had passed it off as rocks or a log. Now he saw what she had seen—a pack frame strapped to a figure lying face-down in the stream.

  They splashed through the creek, their Sorels taking on water, and rolled the corpse over. The head flopped forward with the current, as if the neck were without bones, and they both recoiled.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Where’s his face? And look at his hands. The flesh is just . . . gone. What would do that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like—wait, didn’t Cowboy say something about pike in the lake back there?”

  She nodded, and Active moved closer to the head of the corpse, now lying on its side in the shallow water. “Pike supposedly eat everything. Even their own young.”

  Grace looked nervously at the water rippling over her Sorels, then at Active, and edged toward the bank. “Are they in here now?”

  “I don’t think this happened to him here,” Active said, feeling himself shift back into work mode. “He must have been in the lake for a while. That’s when the pike would have gotten at him. Then he drifted into the outlet and got stuck here in these shallows.” He studied what was left of the man’s face. Nothing but grinning bones with a few shreds of flesh attached, but he still had his ears and most of his straight black hair, probably because the hood of his anorak had protected them from the pike. “Anything about him seem familiar?”

  Grace stepped a little closer and studied everything but the missing face. “Not really. But he’s obviously from around here.”

  Active nodded. The anorak had a duct-tape patch below one shoulder, and the man wore a faded Nike sweatshirt underneath, plus insulated Carhartt jeans and Sorels like their own. “Not a stitch of Eddie Bauer or Patagonia on him. But nobody’s been reported missing.”

  “Maybe he’s not overdue yet. I wonder how long he’s been here.”

  Active shook his head. “Not long, probably. He’s dressed for cool weather.”

  “But how did he die?”

  As one, they turned to stare out over One-Way Lake toward the cliff looming at its upper end.

  “Beats me.” Active scanned the lakeshore for any sign of a camp or boat, then shook his head. “Well, I’ll go through his pockets and pack and see who he was. Let’s get him over to the bank.” At Grace’s look of reluctance, he added, “You can take the feet.”

  Ten minutes later, Active shook his head in mystification and began stuffing the hunter’s belongings back into his pack.

  “No I.D., huh?” Grace said.

  “Nothing. No wallet, no name

  “Nothing. No wallet, no name on his clothes or tent or sleeping bag, nothing. Weird, huh?”

  “Not that weird. A lot of guys from the villages don’t carry I.D. when they’re out in the country. Just one more thing to lose.”

  “Good point,” he said. “What do you make of this?”

  He pulled the soggy remains of a box of two-seventy ammunition out of the pack and held it up for inspection.

  “I guess he was hunting,” she said. “Why else would he be up here?”

  “Exactly. Caribou, probably, or maybe sheep. So where’s his rifle?”

  They looked across the lake again, then at each other. “All right, you take the right bank, I’ll take the left, and we’ll meet at the upper end,” he said. “Give a shout if you find his gun, or anything else man-made, or anything that looks like a recent campsite.”

  Forty-five minutes later, they were standing together on the rubble at the foot of the cliff, as puzzled as ever. Active looked down the lake toward the outlet, then at the mountain behind them, and swore softly to himself as he pulled the binoculars hanging around his neck from the folds of his coat and raised them to his eyes.

  “You think?” Grace said.

  He nodded, sweeping the mountainside with the glasses. There was a relatively gentle slope at the top, where caribou trails cut through the tundra carpet, then bare gray and brown rock, steepening to a near-vertical cliff that ended at the talus fan. “There we go,” he said finally, pointing at a spot uphill and to their right, a few yards above the talus.

  He handed her the glasses and she scanned the slope. “I don’t—oh, yeah, I see it. What—”

  “Water bottle, maybe.”

  “Umm-hmm.” She handed the glasses back to him.

  “You wait here,” he said. “I’ll go up and have a look.”

  “Careful. You don’t want to end up like him.”

  He grunted, handed her his rifle, and started up the slope. The going was rough enough on the talus fan, and it became impossible when he reached the cliff itself. He glassed the object again, now much closer, determined that it really was a water bottle—actually, a plastic Coke bottle—and started back down.

  He was halfway to the lake when he spotted the two-seventy Winchester, wedged muzzle-down in a crevice between two rocks. He pulled it out and studied it. The scope was gone, the barrel was bent slightly, and deep gouges scarred the weathered wooden stock. The sling, if the rifle had ever had one, was also gone.

  He picked his way back to where Grace was waiting and showed her the gun. “He must have been crossing the slope on those caribou trails and lost his footing,” Active said. “Looks like he bounced all the way into the water. That would explain the broken neck.”

  Grace gazed at the slope, then down the lake to where the brush concealed the hunter’s body. “Poor guy. Can you trace the gun and figure out who he is?”
<
br />   “Not likely. There’s a million of these Winchesters around, and most of them were bought before there was any kind of gun registration. We’ll put the word out to the villages and wait for somebody to realize they haven’t heard from this guy in a while.”

  “What now?” she asked as they started back to camp.

  He sighed. “We set off the EPIRB and wait for somebody to show up to see what the problem is.”

  She shivered. “We have to stay on this lake with him?”

  “ ’Fraid so,” he said.

  A DEAD man for a neighbor, they discovered, didn’t affect their appetites. So, after Active found the EPIRB in one of their bags and set it off, they reheated breakfast and began wolfing it down on the lakeshore.

  “How long does that thing take to work?” Grace waved at the bright yellow EPIRB hanging from a spruce tree. It looked like a walkie-talkie.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Never had to set one off before. A satellite picks up the signal, then it tells the Rescue Coordination Center, then they have to decide if the signal is for real and where you are . . . several hours, probably. A day, maybe.”

  “I thought it could tell the satellite exactly where you are.”

  “Some do,” he said. “The newer ones.”

  “But they cost more.”

  He nodded.

  “So you kept that one. And here we sit.”

  “Ah-hah.”

  “So cheap.” She shook her head and took a swallow of coffee.

  “We probably should wrap him up,” Active said.

  “You should,” Grace said. “While I clean up here. And we should stop calling him ‘him.’ He needs a name.”

  “A name?”

  “It’s disrespectful if he doesn’t have one. Also, it might jinx him in the afterlife.”

  “I didn’t know we Inupiat believed in the afterlife.”

  “When it suits us.”

  “All right,” he said. “A name. How about Henry?”

  She grimaced and stirred her coffee with a spruce twig. “How about One-Way? In honor of the place of his demise.”

  “No-Way.”

  “Why not? What’s wrong with One-Way?”

  “No, I mean how about ‘No-Way’ for the name?”

  “No-Way? Wha—oh, I see. Once he got into One-Way Lake, there was no way out.”

  “Uh-huh.” He nodded.

  “Excellent. No-Way it is, then. You go bundle old No-Way up for transport, and I’ll take care of the breakfast dishes.”

  She stacked the plates, coffeepot, and skillet, and started for the lakeshore. He didn’t move.

  “What?” she said.

  “It strikes me that the division of labor here is very much along traditional gender lines all of a sudden. Maybe I should do the dishes while you—”

  “No way,” she said with a huge grin.

  “Precisely,” he said with an equally huge grin.

  He dug through the duffel bags again, came up with the roll of Visqueen and a hank of nylon camp cord, and set off along the shore toward No-Way’s resting place.

  He was knotting the last loop of cord around the Visqueen-wrapped remains when he realized the buzz poking at his subconscious wasn’t a late-season mosquito, but an airplane—a Super Cub, from the sound of it.

  He stood, made a visor of his hand, and peered southward, toward the sun. A Super Cub swam out of the glare and into focus. A red-and-white Super Cub on floats, in fact, unmistakably the Lienhofer Aviation Super Cub flown by Cowboy Decker. Active checked his watch, realized he wasn’t wearing it, and started for camp.

  Cowboy came straight in over the trees at the outlet and splashed down, then taxied toward their camp, cut the engine, and grounded the plane in the gravel shallows. He was climbing out as Active hurried up.

  “That was fast,” Active said. “It can’t be more than an hour and a half since I set off the EPIRB. How’d you get here so soon?”

  “EPIRB?” the pilot said as he waded ashore. “I don’t know anything about an EPIRB. You got a problem up here?” He scanned them up and down. “You both look all right.”

  “We’re fine,” Active said. “But we found a dead hunter in the creek.” He pointed at the cliff. “Looks like he fell up there and broke his neck, then drifted down the lake and got caught in the shallows at the outlet.”

  “No shit. Who is it?”

  Active explained about No-Way’s missing I.D. and face.

  Cowboy grunted. “Pike’ll do that, all right. Look, Carnaby sent me to get you. The Rec Center burned down last night and, ah, well, ah—”

  “And what?” Active said, noticing now that the pilot was red-eyed and grimy and smelled of smoke.

  “We’ve got seven or eight people dead and two in the hospital and one that’s not expected to live being medevacked to the burn unit in Anchorage.”

  “Jesus!” Active said. “Anybody I—Who’s dead?”

  Grace didn’t speak, but she pressed a hand over her mouth.

  “They haven’t identified ’em all yet or even counted ’em for sure,” Cowboy said. “But one of ’em was Jim Silver.”

  “Jim?”

  Cowboy nodded.

  Active was silent for a long time, gazing sightlessly at the hillside across the lake. “And was it arson?”

  “They don’t know yet,” Cowboy said. “Call came in around ten-thirty last night. I rolled out with the Volunteer Fire Department, but by the time we got there it was already too hot to go in. All we could do was try to keep it from setting off the Center’s stove-oil tanks or spreading to the other buildings around there—what we call a surround-and-drown. The city cops are on it, and the Troopers, and one of your arson guys is coming out from Fairbanks. And Carnaby wants you back to work on it.”

  “Of course, yeah.”

  “Come on, I’ll help you pack up,” Cowboy said. He walked over and began breaking down their camp kitchen.

  Active and Grace went into the tent together and began cramming clothes and books back into nylon stuff bags.

  “Jim Silver,” Grace said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that it? ‘Yeah’?”

  Active shrugged. “He, he. . . .”

  “Go on.”

  “He made sense.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know that he was the best cop I ever met, but he was the one that made the most sense. Of Chukchi, you know. When he explained Chukchi to me, I would think I got it. It was like life was a story for him, and Chukchi was the most fascinating chapter he ever ran across, and being police chief was the best way to appreciate it. You know what he said to me once?”

  “Mmm.”

  “It was when we were out on the ice after old Victor Solomon was harpooned at his sheefish camp and I was whining about the cold, and Jim says, ‘If you weren’t suffering, how would you know you were alive?’ And then he laughed that big belly laugh of his and, you know, all of a sudden it made sense. The ice, the cold, the west wind, Chukchi—even the bad stuff. But this.” He stopped and shook his head. “I need to get out of here. We need to.”

  Her face tightened in the familiar way, but she said nothing.

  “Listen to me. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Nah, I gotta act like a cop now,” he said.

  “Not with me, baby. You can act however you like.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. He wasn’t crying, exactly, but the corners of his eyes were wet. Grace looked away while he wiped them. “Thanks,” he said, and kissed her.

  They crawled out of the tent, hauled out their gear, and collapsed the Arctic Oven as Cowboy ferried loads to the plane. Finally, everything was aboard and Cowboy told them to climb in.

  “What about our friend?” Active pointed toward the outlet.

  “Sorry,” Cowboy said. “No can do.”

  “What if something gets to him? A bear or foxes
or something?”

  “Ordinarily, I’d tie him on a float and we’d be fine,” Cowboy said. “But not on One-Way Lake, not with you two and your gear in the plane. We’d never make it over the trees.”

  “I wrapped him up pretty good,” Active said. “I guess he’ll keep.”

  “Yeah, with the weather this cool,” Cowboy said. “I’ll get back in here as soon as I can.”

  As they took off over the trees, Active peered down at the shiny bundle of Visqueen on the creek bank and wondered again who No-Way had been.

  CHAPTER TWO

  COWBOY FLEW SOUTH ALONG One-Way Creek, the overloaded Super Cub laboring to gain altitude. When they could see over the ridge west of the lake, Active spotted a small band of caribou grazing on a sunny hillside, apparently in no hurry to get to the Isignaq River and cross to the wintering grounds on the south side. He touched Grace’s shoulder and pointed, and she shifted on his lap to watch the little herd until it passed out of sight behind them. It looked like the same band they had seen on the ridge before they found No-Way.

  When they reached the Isignaq, Cowboy swung west, following the big brown river as it meandered toward the coast. The tundra crawled past, the wind-ruffled lakes glinting gunmetal blue under the autumn sky. At the upwind end of each lake, a crescent of calm water, like a shard of mirror, nestled in the lee of the tundra bank. At the opposite end, the wind piled up a moustache of white foam along the shore.

  A family of swans—two adults and a cygnet—patrolled one of the lakes. They were ice-white in the cold, hard light. There was something anxious in the scene, as if the parents, feeling the earth tilt away from the sun, could not impress upon their child strongly enough the urgency of starting south ahead of winter.

  As the Super Cub neared the sea, the sky gathered itself into an overcast, the lakes dulled to feathered slate, and rain streaked the windshield. Cowboy dropped down to an altitude of a few hundred feet and worked his way through the scud until they reached the shore of Isignaq Inlet. Over a couple of miles of gray chop, they could just see the Burton Peninsula, a long fat finger of rolling tundra with the village of Chukchi at its tip.