Village of the Ghost Bears

by Stan Jones

  Active’s skepticism overcame his resolve to let Kivalina ramble without interruption. “Two dogs could kill a polar bear? I never heard of that.”

  “Me neither,” Kivalina said. “Why you ask about that?”

  “Well, you said. . . .” Active sighed. “What did Dad-Dad and Susie do when you caught up with the bear?”

  “Dad-Dad, she’s the fast one. She can catch nanuq now he’s tire. So she run up, bite him on the ass. Nanuq, he hate dogs and he’s tire and now he’s mad too, so he stop to fight them dogs. Dad-Dad and Susie, they just run all around him, barking like hell. One of them will run in and bite his ass while he’s trying to get the other one. Pretty soon nanuq forget all about Budzie and me. So we just walk up and shoot him with our rifles.”

  It made a certain amount of sense, but this was Pingo Kivalina talking. Surely it couldn’t be so simple to bring down the fearsome lord of the Arctic, the snake-necked emperor of the ice. “That’s it?”

  Kivalina raised his eyebrows. “Pretty easy, ah? We just take his fur and his gallbladder, leave the meats out there. Maybe when we come back tomorrow, another nanuq is already eating him, so we’ll catch him too.”

  “You took the gallbladders?”

  “Ah-hah, we get lots of money selling them bladders and the fur, all right. Budzie’s our health aide in them days. She’ll use the money to buy stuff for the clinic, or if somebody’s real sick, maybe she’ll get them or their family a ticket to the hospital at Chukchi or Anchorage. At first I never like to do it, but then Budzie say, ‘Us Inupiaq always hunt that nanuq to live since early days ago. Now we just do same thing a different way when we use the money to buy medicine.’”

  Kivalina looked sad and reflected for a long moment before speaking again. “She tell me them bears, they have their own village out on the ice where they go when they die. It’s right by a big polynya with lots of seals and birds to eat, and they’re real happy out there by theirself. A whole village with nothing in it but the ghosts of all them dead bears. You think that’s true, Mr. Nathan?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been out on the ice that much.”

  Kivalina flashed him a look of pity before continuing. “Well, we never find that village, but it’s what Budzie say. Sometimes when I’m up on them cliffs by Cape Goodwin where we always get bird eggs, I look out to the northwest and I can see it, though.”

  “The village where these ghost bears live?”

  “Ah-hah. And I can see Budzie and Dad-Dad out there with all them bears. Must be nice, that village on the ice, ah?” Kivalina looked at Active with an air of expectation, as though inviting him to explore this theory of the afterlife.

  Active gave his eyebrows the slightest twitch, more acknowledgment than agreement, he hoped. “Your sister sounds like quite a woman.”

  The look of expectation vanished. “Too bad that qavvik kill her, ah?”

  “You and Budzie sold the bladders to that Korean guy in Cape Goodwin?”

  Kivalina looked away, as if the subject made him nervous. “Sometimes, I guess, till he go to prison. Now that qavvik kill him, too, ah?”

  Active was tempted to name Tom Gage, in the hopes that Kivalina would explain Gage’s motive for killing Jae Hyo Lee at One-Way Lake. But he gave his head a mental shake.

  Kivalina jerked his head up as the door behind Active slid open. “Arii, who’s that?” Then he relaxed as Alan Long came into the room, steam wafting up from a styrofoam cup in his hand.

  “Thought you might like something to drink, Pingo. Nathan and I need to go outside for a minute.”

  “Gotta piss, ah? Better not to wait so long like me, ah-hee-hee.” Kivalina took the cup and downed a gulp of coffee.

  Active stepped into the hall, eyebrows raised in inquiry. “Back so soon?”

  Long clicked the door shut. “You better hear this for yourself.”

  He led Active into the observation room, where a short, fit-looking black man was watching Kivalina through the mirror. He wore a bristling salt-and-pepper moustache and a North Slope Borough Public Safety Department uniform.

  Long made the introduction. “Sergeant Cave, Trooper Nathan Active.”

  Cave put out his hand. “Johnnell. Pleasure to meet you, Nathan. I hear you think your fire may be connected to our crash at Driftwood last year?”

  “Killed a Cape Goodwin woman named Budzie Kivalina?”

  Cave nodded. “Viola Louise Kivalina. Only fatality. Only injury, in fact.”

  “And the pilot was a guy named Tom Gage?”

  Behind Cave, Long’s face took on an expectant look.

  Cave shook his head. “Duane Paniuk McAllister.”

  “Dood McAllister,” Long said.

  Active was speechless for a few moments. “Dood McAllister was flying the plane that killed Budzie Kivalina?”

  Cave nodded again.

  “I knew you’d want to hear it for yourself,” Long said.

  “So what—”

  “We got a call from the Rescue Coordination Center in Anchorage a year ago August,” Cave said. “The seventeenth, to be exact. The satellite had picked up an Emergency Locator Transmitter squawking somewhere between here and Chukchi. We launched our rescue helicopter and basically flew down the airway toward Chukchi with our radio tuned to the emergency frequency. About the time we started picking up the signal, Rescue Coordination radioed to say the satellite had pegged it as coming from the Driftwood strip.”

  “You went out on it personally?” Active asked.

  “I like to see the country, and most ELTs are false alarms anyway. Some guy lands hard and it goes off, or he bangs it with a rifle butt while he’s unloading the plane. Usually we have a chat, maybe wet a line for grayling or Arctic char from whatever creek or lake he’s on, and then we’re on our way. But this one wasn’t a false alarm.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We do a flyover, and there’s this Cessna 185 in the Utukok River maybe a quarter mile downstream from the strip, basically crumpled up in a ball, just the tail sticking out of the water. And on the strip, there’s this guy standing over a fire he’s got going from those scrubby little willows that grow up there.

  “The guy turns out to be McAllister. There’s a hell of a wind ripping through the valley, and he’s wet and shivering, so we give him some dry clothes, and he tells us the story. Basically, he and the Kivalina woman fly up in the 185 from his guiding camp on the Upper Katonak to knock down some caribou to feed these hunters he’s got coming in a few days. But McAllister’s wife starts—”

  “They were married?” Active cut a glance at Long, who shrugged.

  “That’s what he called her,” Cave said. “But her name was still Kivalina, so I don’t know if they ever made it official. Maybe she was his common-law wife.”

  “And they were in a 185?”

  “Yeah,” Cave said. “Is that a problem?”

  “McAllister’s still flying one. How many did he have?”

  Cave shrugged. “Beats me. But I think he said the one he rolled up at Driftwood was insured.”

  Active nodded. Cave went on.

  “So all morning, the Kivalina woman is complaining of a bad stomach, and they land at Driftwood to make some tea, maybe catch some grayling out of the Utukok and spend the night. But the stomach keeps getting worse, and she wants him to take her back to Chukchi to see a doctor. By now, they’ve been there a couple hours, and it’s really blowing. The way that strip lies, any wind coming down the valley rolls straight across it, and McAllister is a little antsy about trying a takeoff. But the Kivalina woman’s stomach keeps getting worse, she’s already thrown up everything she ate, and now she’s into the dry heaves, so they climb into the 185 and crank up.”

  Cave tilted his hands to illustrate. “He lifts off with one wing low and lots of rudder to counteract the crosswind. They get a gust at the wrong moment, and, before he can compensate, the low wing catches some brush on the side of the runway and they’re in the river, being rol
led along by the current. He gets out of his harness, starts to yank her loose, then he’s swept out of the plane and washes up several hundred yards downstream and on the opposite bank. By the time he finds a place to cross and gets back to the site, a couple of hours have passed and, anyway, the river’s too fast and deep, not to mention too cold, to go out to the plane. So he blows the water out of his Bic lighter, starts a fire, and sits down to wait for somebody to come by.”

  “He was uninjured, you said.”

  Cave nodded. “We check him over. He’s okay. But we don’t know if the woman is still in the wreck, or washed downstream, or what. So we take off in the helo and search down river four or five miles—nothing. We end up having to come back to Barrow for some divers and equipment to get a cable on the 185 and haul it out. And when we do, she’s in there, all right.”

  “You had her autopsied?”

  Cave paused, a look of unease ghosting across his face. “Several broken bones, including a skull fracture that killed her.”

  “Any water—”

  “No,” Cave said sourly. “No water in the lungs—”

  “But if she was underwater—”

  “The pathologist said the head injury probably killed her instantly. She could have gotten it in the plane before they hit the river.”

  “And the stomachache? Any sign of—”

  “Internal organs unremarkable,” Cave said.

  Active sighed. “So you—”

  “Yeah, we called it an accident. The evidence didn’t support any other conclusion.”

  “I suppose not.”

  This was the point where the conversation should have been over. Cave should have been offering his hand again, probably with a business card in it, and starting for the door, but he wasn’t. And Alan Long’s face had that expectant look again.

  “And?” Active said.

  Cave shot him a sour look. “And a couple weeks later, Pingo there”—Cave pointed through the glass at Kivalina—“comes into my office with a guy named Tom Gage. They’ve got this duffel bag. They pull out a dog’s head, and they plunk it down on my desk.” head, and they plunk “A dog’s head.”

  Behind Cave, Alan Long lifted his eyebrows.

  “With an eye shot out,” Active said.

  “Exactly,” Cave said. “Officer Long tells me you’ve seen it too.”

  Active nodded.

  “Anyway, they say it proves Dood McAllister killed Budzie Kivalina at Driftwood. They look like a couple of drunks that just staggered out of the Board of Trade bar in Nome, they smell like it, too, and I’ve got no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.” Cave paused, the look of unease touching his face again, but staying this time. “Then they dig into the duffel bag again—out comes a hunk of Visqueen for a tent, a couple sleeping bags, a camp stove, and some Mountain House freeze-dry.”

  Active sucked a breath through his teeth. “Camping gear?”

  Cave nodded.

  “You didn’t find any camping gear in McAllister’s plane?”

  “McAllister said they didn’t have much with ’em, and what they had must have washed out in the crash.”

  “But you didn’t see any when you flew down the river searching for Budzie’s body?”

  Cave shook his head, looking testier than ever.

  “And that didn’t seem odd, for a bush pilot not to have—”

  “We were looking for a woman, dead or alive, Trooper Active, not a bunch of damned Visqueen and sleeping bags. It was a fucking rescue mission. I mean, McAllister’s got a hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth of Cessna folded up out there in the Utukok like origami, and he’s about yea far from hypothermia himself.” Cave held up a thumb and forefinger in a pinching motion to illustrate the dimensions of “yea.”

  Active nodded. “Sorry, I’ve, ah, we’re—”

  “Forget it,” Cave said.

  “So what did Pingo and Tom have to say?”

  “Yeah,” Cave said wearily. “Pingo and Tom, Jesus. I sit them down and get them some coffee and they tell me their story. Pingo, he’s obviously crazy, as you know. And this Gage, he isn’t much better by this point. It turns out he’s been drunk pretty much continuously since the Kivalina woman died.”

  “What about the—how did they—”

  Cave waved a hand. “Their story is, Gage comes to Chukchi, takes to the life, and starts going up to Cape Goodwin, where he and the Kivalina woman fall in love. But she’s hooked up with McAllister, so she knows she’s got to have it out with him. Gage offers to go with her, but Budzie figures it would be safer to do it alone. So off they go to hunting camp, her and McAllister, and she’s going to break it to him up there. He’s always more relaxed out in the country, she says.”

  Active nodded.

  “Next thing anybody knows, Budzie turns up dead in McAllister’s plane at Driftwood. Gage hits the bottle, and Pingo is over on the Canadian border fighting wildfires with the Bureau of Land Management. You’ve heard of the Goodwin Hotshots?”

  Active shook his head, hoping the detour would be short.

  “It’s this crack firefighting team they’ve got there. It’s how the village guys make money in the summer, and Pingo’s one of the Hotshots. Don’t ask me how he got in, crazy as he is. Anyway, he comes home from firefighting, and Gage tells him his sister was killed in a plane crash up at Driftwood with Dood McAllister and that McAllister got out without a scratch. Then they both get drunk and pass out, and, while Pingo’s unconscious, Budzie comes to him in a dream and says there wasn’t any crash and he’s gotta go find this dog of hers.”

  “Dad-Dad?”

  “That’s it,” Cave said.

  “Apparently that dog never left her side,” Active said.

  “I gather,” Cave agreed. “Anyway, Pingo wakes up out of his dream, gets Gage on his feet, starts pouring coffee into him, and says they’ve got to go to Driftwood and find Dad-Dad, and off they go in Gage’s Super Cub. Next thing you know, they’re in my office.”

  Cave shook his head at the recollection. “God, you should have smelled them. And that damned dog’s head.”

  “How did they find it?”

  “They land at Driftwood, and Pingo starts to thinking he can smell Dad-Dad and he wanders off through the brush and, sure enough, he turns up the dog’s carcass.”

  “The whole thing? Not just the head?”

  Cave shook his head. “Dad-Dad was big, one of those Mackenzie River huskies, supposedly. Maybe a hundred and ten, a hundred and fifteen pounds, according to Pingo. Too big for the Super Cub with the two of them and a couple cans of avgas and their gear in it, anyway, so they cut off the head to bring in and show me how the eye was shot out.”

  “McAllister didn’t mention the dog when you rescued him that day?”

  Cave shook his head.

  “And what about the camping gear? How’d they find that after you—”

  Cave sighed. “I told you. We were looking for a plane-crash victim, not camping gear.”

  Active was silent, his eyebrows raised in the Western expression of inquiry.

  “Instead of searching downstream, they go up, and they find the stuff stashed in the brush.”

  There was silence all around the room for a long time.

  Finally, Cave sighed again. “So I ask Pingo and Tom, what do they think happened? How did the plane end up in the river and Budzie dead without McAllister getting himself killed too, or at least banged up? Gage laughs and says it would be easy if Budzie was already dead or unconscious. Just strap her into the passenger seat, crank up the engine, and set the throttle to a fast taxiing speed, then get out and grab the tail and steer the plane over the bank. It hits the water, the current takes it and rolls it up, and McAllister’s home free. Then McAllister dunks himself in the river and waits to see if anybody hears the Emergency Locator Transmitter in the Cessna, probably figuring if nobody shows up he’ll dig out the camping gear from where he hid it, douse it in the river for realism, then set up his Visqueen
tent and hang tight till someone comes along.”

  “And what about the dog?” Active asked. “How—”

  “Uh-huh,” Cave said. “They figure McAllister is in the process of beating Budzie to death because she’s dumping him for Tom Gage and Dad-Dad comes to her defense. So McAllister shoots Dad-Dad, but he only wings the dog, and it crawls off and dies out in the brush where Kivalina finds the carcass a couple weeks later.”

  Active looked through the glass at Pingo Kivalina, who had put his head down on his arms and was evidently asleep at the table. “Dood McAllister, huh?”

  “You thinking he set your fire?”

  “Pingo says somebody burned down the Rec Center to get him and Gage.”

  “Except Pingo got away,” Cave said.

  “Yep,” Active said.

  “Well, other than Pingo, what have you got that points to McAllister?”

  Active felt depressed as he sketched the arson investigation for Cave.

  “So the wire from the locker-room door is about the most concrete thing you’ve got?” Cave said after hearing him out. “And Pingo’s roommate Tom Gage being a pilot and an aviation mechanic?”

  Active nodded. “But McAllister’s a pilot too, so maybe he’s got one of those safety-wire twisters, and maybe it’ll match the marks on the wire. If we can find it.”

  Cave grimaced in sympathy. “But so far Pingo is all you’ve got that says it was McAllister?”

  “He’s too scared to name him. He just calls him the qavvik.”

  Cave gave Active an odd look. “You don’t know? That’s what the people in Cape Goodwin call McAllister, according to Pingo and Tom. The wolverine. It fits too. You ever meet him?”

  “He gave me a plane ride a few days ago,” Active said.

  “Plane ride, huh?” Cave stared at him, grinning a little. “And you didn’t suspect a thing? Imagine that.”

  “We were just getting started,” Active protested. “And we had no—Yeah, all right, point taken.”