Village of the Ghost Bears

by Stan Jones

  At first thought, it seemed bizarre and crazy, pure pathology. But maybe the idea made sense. Maybe it would be therapeutic. Grace’s knack for getting straight to the heart of a thing was a little spooky sometimes. Maybe he’d see what Nelda thought when he got back.

  Grace came downstairs with Nita, handed him a bag, and kissed him good-bye. “Maybe I’ll book us a house-hunting trip to Anchorage for when you get back from Barrow.”

  “I might be back tonight,” he said when he found his voice. “Or tomorrow at the latest.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m probably going to have to make a trip up to the Gray Wolf tomorrow. Can Nita stay with your mom?”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine—just check with her.”

  Nita asked him for a ride, so they walked out to the Suburban together and she chattered about Chuck E. Cheese and the other delights of Anchorage as he drove her back to Chukchi Middle School and marveled at the speed with which Grace Palmer was capable of moving.

  His amazement still hadn’t fully subsided an hour and a half later when he climbed into Cowboy Decker’s Cessna 185 with Alan Long and they lifted off into the clear, windy sky of an Arctic early afternoon. Cowboy pointed the plane northeast, toward the great stone spine of the Brooks Range. They climbed steadily as they passed the Sulana Hills across the bay from Chukchi and then the Katonak Flats. The departed storm had dusted the hilltops and upper ridges white, though the lower elevations still wore the dead, flat brown of late fall. The tundra ponds on the Flats were glazed over now, and pan ice was running in the Katonak River.

  To their left, over the coastal hills marking the western edge of the Flats, Cape Goodwin was just visible as a row of tiny, fragile boxes on the rim of the Chukchi Sea. Farther out, a white line stretched along the horizon where the ice pack rode down from the north on the same wind that rocked the Cessna from time to time.

  Cowboy leveled the plane and clicked on the intercom. “So, why are we going to Barrow?”

  “Trooper business, Cowboy.” Active glanced into the rear seat to make sure Alan Long wouldn’t tell the pilot more than he needed to know. Long was asleep, head resting against one of the Cessna’s Plexiglas windows, mouth slightly open. It made his chipmunk face even more childlike.

  “Who we bringing back?” Cowboy asked. “You have to tell me at least that much, right?”

  Active thought it over and decided Cowboy had a point. “Pingo Kivalina. We hope.”

  “Kivalina, huh? From Cape Goodwin, right?”

  “Uh-huh. You know the guy?”

  Cowboy was silent, adjusting the controls. The Cessna’s nose dropped slightly and the pilot nodded in satisfaction. “Don’t think I know Pingo, but the Kivalinas that I do know . . . well, they’re different. But so is everybody in Cape Goodwin. What did this one do?”

  “Like I said, it’s Trooper business.”

  “He your guy on the Rec Center fire?”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Why else would the Troopers pay for a charter to Barrow? And what else are you guys working on these days?”

  Active said nothing, and Cowboy didn’t ask any more questions. He was silent until they crossed the crest of the Brooks Range and the North Slope unfolded before them. Here in the uplands, the country was already asleep for winter, the terrain a titanium white, the lakes frozen over. Most of the streams were iced in, too, except for the occasional waterfall or stretch of rapids.

  “Hungry country,” Active said.

  Cowboy grunted through the intercom. “I’ll say. Hardly any place to land up here till the ice on the lakes gets thick enough.”

  Active peered down at the terrain. Not trackless, exactly, with all the streams cutting through it, but it might as well have been. The peaks, ridges, and rivers formed an endlessly iterated pattern of arteries and capillaries, meaningless to his untrained eye. “So what would you do if this thing quit on us right now?”

  Cowboy glanced at his instruments, then at the map on his knee. “Right now? We’d probably luck out. There’s an old oil company strip called Driftwood about three or four miles behind us on the Utukok River. We might be able to glide that far. Otherwise, you got your choice: set her down on the tundra and nose over, or take your chances on a lake and cross your fingers about the ice.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Cowboy said. “That’s the Utukok over there.” He pointed under the left wing. “It runs north into the Arctic Ocean, and so do all the rivers west of it—the Kokolik, the Kukpowruk. But that one up ahead there, that’s the Colville. It runs a couple hundred miles east before it turns north and goes down into the Beaufort Sea.”

  Cowboy dropped the right wing slightly and pointed at a brush-lined furrow threading a snowy valley below them.

  Active grunted in acknowledgment but said nothing, letting Cowboy have his change of subject.

  “You know about the redwoods, right?” Cowboy asked.

  Now Active was slightly interested. “Redwoods?”

  “Yup. There’s a place on the Colville where redwoods are coming right out of the bank and falling into the river.”

  “Fossils, you mean.”

  “No, redwoods. As in wood. They been frozen all this time, and they never fossilized. Or rotted.”

  Active thought this over. It might be true. The Alaskan Arctic had had a much balmier climate in the dinosaur era. Redwoods could have grown here, and they could have been frozen when the climate changed.

  On the other hand, Cowboy Decker’s critical thinking skills weren’t exactly robust. “Did you see this with your own eyes?”

  “Absolutely,” Cowboy said. “Few years ago, I was flying support for a bunch of paleontologists who were in there studying those redwoods. I brought back a chunk and made it into a lamp.”

  Active turned to stare at the pilot. “Did the paleontologists know this?”

  Cowboy shrugged.

  “Is that legal?”

  Cowboy shrugged again.

  Active shook his head and returned his attention to the corrugated landscape. Here the bare, jagged peaks were a savage reminder of the ancient forces that had thrust and tumbled and smashed this particular chunk of the earth’s crust into the Brooks Range millions of years ago.

  As they pushed on, the terrain calmed down and began to look like tundra was supposed to look—flat and lightly bearded with dwarf willow. The snow thinned out, and the land was brown again, except for the blind white eyes of the countless frozen ponds and lakes of the coastal plain.

  By the time Cowboy made his call to the FAA for the landing at Barrow, sunset was blooming behind them. A few minutes later, the lights of the village twinkled in the cold night air as Cowboy swung the Cessna onto final approach and dropped it onto the runway.

  “Five above, eighteen knots of wind,” Cowboy said over the intercom as he turned off the runway. “Welcome to beautiful downtown Barrow.”

  The pilot taxied to a set of gas pumps in front of a hangar with “Icy Cape Aviation” painted on the doors and shut off the engine. “They’ll call you a cab.” He pointed at the office beside the hangar as the propeller shuddered to a halt. “I’ll gas up and tie down and hang around here a while. We going back tonight?”

  “Probably not,” Active said. “This may take some time. There’s paperwork involved.”

  “Suit yourself,” Cowboy said. “I’ll just grab a cot in the hangar here. We let their guys sleep in our hangar if they get a charter to Chukchi.”

  Active thought for a moment, then looked at the salmon sky over the tundra to the southwest. “Should we go back tonight? Will this weather hold?”

  Cowboy nodded. “Clear and cold through the night, according to the weather service. Some stuff moving in tomorrow afternoon, maybe, but we should be in Chukchi by then.”

  “All right, we’ll plan on going back in the morning. It’s already been a long day, and it’s not over yet, so we may as well get some sleep befo
re we start home.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  TWENTY MINUTES LAT E R , A tiny van with an inadequate heater dropped them in the hard-frozen gravel parking lot in front of the Barrow jail, a new-looking two-story building with yellow-brown walls and a blue roof, all made of shiny metal.

  “Look,” Long said. “No stilts.”

  As in Chukchi, most buildings in Barrow perched on the shoulder-high pilings necessary to keep the permafrost from melting and swallowing anything that stood on it. The jail was one of the few structures they’d seen in Barrow that sat right on the ground.

  “I guess they must have found a spot with no permafrost,” Active said. This was rare in the Arctic, but not unheard-of.

  “Either that or they don’t care,” Long said. “They got so much money up here, they can just build a new one if it sinks.” The Prudhoe Bay oil fields lay within the taxing jurisdiction of the North Slope Borough, with the result that the borough’s residents enjoyed a remarkable freedom from material want. Oil money brought houses, airports, hospitals, clinics, cops, bureaucracies, and schools on a scale unimaginable elsewhere in the bush.

  It was certainly unimaginable in the Chukchi region, where the only taxable property of any consequence was the Gray Wolf mine, and even that was minuscule compared to the golden goose at Prudhoe. Still, the Aurora Borough had been formed to take advantage of the opportunity to tax the Gray Wolf, and things were improving with the flow of jobs and revenue from the huge copper mine in the Brooks Range north of Chukchi. Now Chukchi and the other villages in the region were about to be absorbed into the borough. One day soon, the Chukchi police force would be dissolved, and Alan Long and the other city cops would find themselves employed by the borough’s public safety department. Jim Silver had been tapped to organize the new agency as his last project before retirement.

  Active paid the Filipino cabby, and they picked up their bags and walked into a lobby decorated with Eskimo masks made from dried caribou hide. Active recognized the masks as coming from Caribou Creek, an Eskimo village high in the Brooks Range, anomalously distant from salt water, seals, walrus, whales, and the other customary marine mainstays of Inupiat life. The village was known primarily for the caribou hunting in the nearby tundra valleys and high lakes of the Brooks Range. That, and caribou masks.

  Active dropped his bags, checked his cell phone for service, found three bars, and dialed the Troopers in Chukchi. Evelyn O’Brien answered and put him through to Carnaby, who told him that Charlie Hughes, the District Attorney, had gotten an arrest warrant for Pingo Kivalina. They could fly him back to Chukchi, unless he managed to talk himself out of suspicion in the interview.

  Two jailers showed them into an interview room like every other one Active had ever seen: a table of blond wood, four chairs with shiny metal frames and black vinyl seats, one door, a trashcan, and a one-way mirror.

  One of the jailers was a middle-aged Inupiat woman with a name tag identifying her as Mabel. The other was a younger white man named Ray, chubby and weak-chinned with a moustache that failed to lend authority or character to his round face.

  Mabel told them to wait in the interrogation room while they fetched Pingo Kivalina, but Active asked to be put in the observation room to watch Pingo a few minutes before confronting him.

  Mabel nodded, led them next door, and reminded them to keep the lights off. Then the two jailers left to get Kivalina.

  Active and Long looked at each other in the dim light of the observation room.

  Long grimaced. “This could be it, huh?”

  “Could be,” Active said, fighting down the urge to pace or drop to the floor for a few pushups.

  Finally the jailers returned with an Inupiaq in short-sleeved orange jail coveralls. Mabel put him in a chair facing the one-way mirror, and the two cops finally got a look at Pingo Kivalina.

  He had stringy black hair down to the middle of his back and an oval face with a long, heavy jaw under a wide mouth that appeared to grin reflexively when left to its own devices. His skin was black along the cheekbones, the mark of a hunter who had been repeatedly frostbitten while snowmachining in the cold. His left arm looked sunburned around the elbow, which glistened with some kind of ointment.

  Kivalina surveyed the room after the jailers left, then got up and walked over to the trashcan and looked in. He came to the mirror, peered into it, and waved. Active couldn’t tell if Kivalina was waving at himself or at the people he assumed were behind the mirror.

  The jailers let themselves into the observation room.

  “Think he’s your guy?” asked the one named Ray.

  Active shrugged and looked at Pingo Kivalina again, wondering why the face seemed vaguely familiar. Had he been in one of the pictures at Tom Gage’s place?

  “What do you think?” Active asked the jailers.

  “There’s no telling,” Ray said. “He’s totally gooned out as far as I can see. Keeps channeling his dead sister and telling her about this wolverine that’s trying to kill him. My guess is, he’ll confess to Nine-Eleven if you push him hard enough.”

  Active had watched Mabel as Ray spoke. She had a pleasant face, somewhat lean and angular; bright sharp eyes; and gray-streaked black hair worn in a braid at the back of her neck. Just now, she also wore the Eskimo mask.

  “Thanks, Ray,” Active said. “I guess we can take it from here.”

  Mabel headed for the door with Ray, but Active touched her arm.

  “Maybe you could stay.”

  “Ah?”

  “Do you speak Inupiaq?”

  She lifted her eyebrows.

  “How’s Pingo’s English?”

  “You sure you don’t need me?” Ray interrupted.

  “No, I just think we may need a translator with Pingo.”

  Ray nodded with a relieved look and pushed out the door.

  Mabel was smiling. “He always watch Howard Stern on cable this time of day,” she said after the door had closed. “He like it when that Howard get those silly girls to take off their tops.”

  Active marveled for a moment at the New York shock jock’s reach. But anywhere was everywhere these days, as long as there was electricity for a satellite dish.

  “Will we need a translator with Pingo?”

  Mabel turned and studied the man in the mirrored room. “I don’t think so. His English is pretty good, all right.”

  “It feels strange to call you Mabel,” Active said, “but I didn’t get your last name before.”

  “It’s Oktollik,” she said. “Mrs. Mabel Oktollik.”

  “Oktollik? Isn’t that a Cape Goodwin name?” Long asked. “Are you from there?”

  “My husband’s family was,” she said. “But they move to Fairbanks when he’s little boy, so I only been there a few times, when we visit his relatives.”

  Active nodded at the one-way mirror. “You ever know that guy when you were in Cape Goodwin?”

  “Pingo? I think I must have seen him at the village, all right, but I don’t remember if we ever talk or anything. I don’t think so. Did he set that fire in Chukchi?”

  “We don’t know yet. You think he did?”

  She glanced at Pingo, who was now slumped in his chair at the end of the table, arms crossed, chin on his chest. He looked to be asleep. “It’s hard to tell what somebody can do,” she said. “Somebody that’s nice can do bad things, or someone bad can be nice sometimes.”

  “Is he crazy, like Ray says?”

  “He sound crazy, all right, talking about that wolverine kill his sister and now it’s after him. But at the same time, I dunno. Seem like he believe what he’s saying, but crazy people are like that, ah?”

  “That’s right,” Long said. “It’s the difference between a crazy person and a liar. The crazy person believes it.”

  For a moment, Active thought Mabel was about to turn the Eskimo mask on Long, but she just lifted her eyebrows.

  “A wolverine, huh?” Active asked.

  “Ah-hah. Qavvik, he call
it.”

  Active lifted his eyebrows. “And the sister? What’s her name?”

  “Budzie, I think. He’s kind of hard to understand sometimes. He was pretty drunk when we got him, but he’s sober now. Hung over too.”

  Active looked at Kivalina, then back at Mabel Oktollik. “Well, if his English is okay, you don’t have to stay, unless you want to.”

  She shook her head. “No, I should get back to work. When you’re done, call us to take you out.” She pointed at a phone on a table by the door. Its one lighted button was the room’s only illumination, other than what came through the mirror from the interrogation room. “Extension two-three-two.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Oktollik. We will.”

  She left, and Active turned to Long. “Any thoughts?”

  “Apparently he’s not too crazy to remember his sister’s name. Otherwise. . . .” Long threw up his hands.

  Active peered through the glass. “I want to talk to him alone.”

  “What? I—”

  “I need you to stay here and observe, watch his body language, listen for voice changes, that kind of thing, all right?”

  Long gave a grudging nod, and Active walked into the interrogation room.

  “Pingo Kivalina,” he said as he closed the door. “I’m Trooper Nathan Active.”

  A shoulder twitched. Kivalina’s eyes opened.

  He blinked and peered about in evident confusion for a few seconds, then spotted Active by the door. His face went blank, and he screamed “Arii!” as he jumped up and knocked over the chair. Active braced himself, hoping that Long was on his way from the observation room to help.

  But Kivalina didn’t come at Active. He spun and slammed blindly into the mirror, leaving a smear of mucus and blood on the glass as he slid to the floor. The crotch of his coveralls darkened and the smell of warm urine filled the room. He twisted to look at Active and screamed again. “Arii! He come with you?”