Village of the Ghost Bears

by Stan Jones

  He set off at the best sprint he could muster, feeling out of it at first, a little uncertain about where to put his left foot down, a little slow remembering how to lift his right foot and bring it around past the left, almost drunk. But it seemed to get easier as he went, and the shuddering seemed to be letting up.

  By the time he crossed One-Way Creek and started up the ridge toward Cowboy’s Cessna, he figured his body temperature was approaching normal. By the time he reached the plane, he’d probably be sweating.

  Halfway along the crest, Active found himself jogging through fog and realized the descending clouds had now covered the upper end of the ridge. He peered ahead but Cowboy’s Cessna was invisible, swallowed up in the mist.

  “Alan,” he called. “Alan!”

  No answer, but it probably wouldn’t matter. The crest was narrow enough that he surely couldn’t miss the plane, even in the fog.

  But he did, realizing his error only when he stumbled into a rock outcropping. There was nothing like that around McAllister’s tiedown, though he remembered seeing rocks farther up the hill. He stopped and opened his parka, happy to find himself actually hot. He let his breathing calm for a moment, then called Long again, again without result. The fog must be muffling his voice, he decided. But how to find the plane in the murk?

  He turned and pointed himself directly down the ridge, as best he could judge, then set off. He tripped twice as he peered into the void trying to spot the plane. After that, he kept his eyes on the reindeer moss and gravel at his feet, trusting gravity and his sense of direction to lead him down the crest of the ridge rather than over the side.

  The next minute, he stumbled into the tail fin of Cowboy’s Cessna. “Alan,” he said, rubbing the bruise on his forehead.

  There was no answer, no movement inside the plane. He circled the tail and opened a rear door. The plane was empty.

  He stepped back and called Long again, then Pingo.

  Silence, except for the faint sigh of wind sweeping down the ridge. Where—but wait, hadn’t he told Long to bring Pingo down to the lake once McAllister was secure? That was it. They must have missed each other in the fog.

  He dug through the storage area behind the seats and found Cowboy’s survival gear: two pairs of snowshoes, a nylon backpacker tent, the clothes and sleeping bag the pilot had mentioned, a tiny gas lantern, an equally tiny single-burner camp stove with fuel and cooking utensils, the inevitable roll of Visqueen plastic sheeting, a hank of nylon camp cord, a folding saw, and a canvas bag with a seemingly random assortment of Mountain House freeze-dry and military-surplus MREs. He thought it would be too much to carry in one load, until he found a pack frame at the bottom of it all. He lashed everything but the snowshoes onto the frame, closed up the Cessna, and started downhill.

  He was nearly to the foot of the ridge when he came out of the fog. He turned and studied the shoreline near McAllister’s grounded Cessna. McAllister was still stretched out by the fire, now covered with what appeared to be Cowboy’s parka. The little blaze had become a bonfire, and Cowboy was hunched over it with only a wool shirt and a down vest covering his upper body. But that was it. No sign of Alan Long or Pingo Kivalina.

  Active swiveled and surveyed the tundra on the other side of the ridge. The snow was heavier now, and there appeared to be some fog in the air, even here below the clouds. No sign of human presence was detectable in the limited range of his vision.

  He swore and jogged the rest of the way down the ridge, the pack frame flopping against his back and throwing him off balance. He was out of breath by the time he crossed One-Way Creek and sweating when he reached the fire. He dropped the pack frame, and Cowboy knelt and went to work on the lacings.

  “You seen any sign of Alan or Pingo?” Active asked.

  Cowboy looked up in surprise. “What?” he said, peering down the shoreline. “I thought they’d be with you.”

  “Jesus,” Active said. “The plane was empty when I got there. Absolutely no sign of them, no response when I called, nothing.”

  The pilot looked up at the gray wool draping the ridge across the lake. “Where the hell could they be?”

  Active shook his head. “God knows. That Alan. . . .”

  “Maybe Cave was right about Pingo,” Cowboy said, shrugging on a parka from the load Active had brought down the hill. “Maybe he really did set our fire in Chukchi, and now he’s. . . .”

  “Yeah, he got the drop on Alan somehow and took off?”

  “Uh-huh, and, ah, Alan is, ah, lying out there somewhere. . . .”

  “Yeah.” Active looked around at the weather closing in on them. “And right now there’s no way to search for them.”

  “Huh-uh. Not in this.”

  Active chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment, then nodded at McAllister, motionless beside the fire. “How’s he doing?”

  Cowboy grimaced. “No change. I gave him my coat, but he’s not any warmer that I can tell. He’s still breathing, at least.”

  “Well, let’s get him into dry clothes and a sleeping bag and see if we can get him warmed up.”

  Cowboy kicked at the edge of the fire. “I found some rocks and put them in there to heat up. We could stick them in the sleeping bag with him.”

  Active nodded, impressed again by Cowboy’s competence within his own universe.

  They undressed McAllister, got the dry clothes on him, worked a sleeping bag around him, and slid in the rocks from Cowboy’s fire. Active watched as snow dusted the sleeping bag and McAllister’s nose and mouth, the only part of him they had left exposed. “We probably ought to get him into the tent.”

  “Nah,” Cowboy said. “I’ll build him a Visqueen lean-to. We can put the open side toward the fire and he’ll get more heat that way.”

  “I’m thinking I’ll go back up to the plane and get your Emergency Locator Translator.”

  Cowboy raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, I guess we could use some help finding Alan and Pingo.”

  “And you probably ought to keep the .357 handy. In case Pingo is our guy.”

  “Jesus.” Cowboy looked into the trees around their campsite. “I hadn’t thought about that. There’s no telling what he’s liable to do.”

  “Yep.” Active checked the Smith and Wesson on his hip and set off for another trip up the ridge.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  HE WAS FORDING ONE-WAY Creek when the voice came from the trees.

  “Hi, Nathan.”

  Active froze and peered into the cottonwoods. “Alan? Are you all right?”

  “Not really.”

  “What? Are you hurt?” Active looked Long over as he approached. There was no sign of blood, or of an arm held stiffly, or of a limp.

  Or of anyone else.

  “Pingo. Where’s Pingo? He got away, is that it?”

  Long averted his gaze and raised his eyebrows. “I was watching you take off your clothes and bring Dood in from the plane, and when I looked around, he was gone.”

  “Gone? But he was shackled to the seat. Did he rip it loose somehow?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  Active closed his eyes and waited for the urge to throttle Alan Long to subside. “What the hell happened, then?”

  “He had to take a leak. When I put him back in the plane, I guess I forgot about shackling him to the seat again.”

  “You forgot?”

  Long lifted his eyebrows, his chipmunk cheeks drooping in dismay. “I tried to follow him, but it’s too foggy up there. I couldn’t see anything.”

  “So he’s gone.”

  Long raised his eyebrows

  Long raised his eyebrows again. “But he is handcuffed, at least.”

  “Well, he can’t travel very fast,” Active said. “Not on foot, and with his hands shackled. Soon as this weather lifts, we can go up in Cowboy’s—” He noticed the look on Long’s face. “Pingo is still shackled, right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Pretty much?”

  “His
hands are cuffed, but I don’t think they’re shackled to his waist any more.”

  “You don’t think. You forgot that too?”

  Long nodded his head with a miserable expression.

  “Gee, Alan, a guy in handcuffs can move about as well as anybody else and do pretty much whatever he needs to, can’t he? That’s just. . . .” Active stopped as the thought entered his head that maybe Long’s letting Kivalina get away was no accident.

  “At least he can’t move very fast on foot,” he said, studying Long’s face. “Plus it’ll be dark before too long, so he probably won’t get far tonight. If we can get in the air at first light, we should—”

  Long had raised his head and was looking intently up the ridge, into the fog, toward where Cowboy’s Cessna was parked.

  “What?” Active said. Then he heard it himself. Br-r-rr-p. Br-r-r-r-p. Br-r-r-r-p. Like someone pulling the starter cord on a snowmachine. Or a—

  “I bet he’s taking Dood’s four-wheeler,” Long said.

  “Come on,” Active shouted, and sprinted up the slope. But, even over the sound of his own feet scuffing over the tundra, he could hear the four-wheeler catch and settle down to a steady r-r-p, r-r-p, r-r-p, then rev up and gradually fade into the distance.

  He stopped in the fog. Long bumped into him from behind.

  “Damned fine job, Alan,” Active said, unable to check himself now. “Pingo could be a hundred miles away by the time this stuff clears.”

  “I don’t know if a four-wheeler can hold that much gas.”

  “You happen to notice what was in that trailer McAllister was towing?”

  “I can’t remember. Oh, yeah, a bunch of gas jugs, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Arii.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Active debated whether to continue on to Cowboy’s Cessna or get back to the fire and see to the perhaps-dying, perhaps-reviving, McAllister. Long was safe and Pingo apparently bent on clearing out of the country, so the situation probably no longer qualified as an emergency. Unless—

  “Come on. We gotta get up there.”

  Long looked into the fog shrouding the ridge. “What for? Pingo’s gone, like you said.”

  “In case he did something to the plane. I’m not sure anybody knows we’re here. If we can’t fly out, it may be a while before anybody figures it out.” Active set off up the slope at a fast trot, leaving Long to follow. Or not.

  “YOU SURE my plane’s okay?” Cowboy asked a half-hour later. “Maybe I oughta go have a look myself.”

  “If you like,” Active said. “But I think Pingo just snuck up, started McAllister’s four-wheeler, and took off. There’s no sign the plane was touched. In fact, the keys were still in the ignition. I locked up and brought them back with me.”

  He pulled the keys from his pocket and dropped them into Cowboy’s hand with a mildly accusing look.

  “I always leave ’em in the switch,” Cowboy said, sounding defensive. “You take ’em with you and they fall out of your pocket on the tundra, then where are you?”

  “Good point,” Active said. “Except this time.”

  Cowboy grunted and swung his gaze to Alan Long. “And how exactly did Pingo get loose, Alan?”

  Long hedged and stumbled his way through the story.

  When it was over, Cowboy shook his head. “I never knew anything like that to happen with Chief Silver.”

  Long said nothing. He turned and walked to the lakeshore.

  Active studied McAllister’s figure in the Visqueen lean-to. The sides and rear were closed off, so the only opening was the front. It faced the fire, which Cowboy had extended with more fuel from the nearby spruces until it paralleled the makeshift shelter for most of its length. It looked to be about as warm an arrangement as could be devised with the resources at hand.

  McAllister was still covered except for the nose and mouth poking out of Cowboy’s sleeping bag. The bag was vibrating visibly.

  “McAllister’s shivering now?” Active said. “That’s good, right?”

  “I think so,” Cowboy said. “Assuming we want to keep him alive.”

  “Yes, Cowboy. We do.”

  The pilot turned and pointed at a coffeepot nestled in the coals at one end of the fire. “Got some hot water here. Ready for an MRE?” He turned and looked toward the lake. “Alan? Want some chow?”

  Cowboy dumped several of the brown pouches into the coffeepot and poked at them with a spruce branch to make sure they were immersed. “Couple minutes,” he said. He handed out what passed for treats in MRE-land, and Active munched on something called Fortified Snack Bread as the entrees heated.

  “What ab-bout me-he-hee?” McAllister said from under the lean-to, his teeth chattering.

  Active checked the impulse to jump in surprise. “You’re hungry? We’ve got—”

  “I’m cuh-hold. I need something huh-hot.”

  Cowboy pawed through the food bag and came up with envelopes of powdered hot chocolate and clam chowder. “These’ll be the fastest,” he said, eyeing Active.

  Active nodded.

  Cowboy emptied the envelopes into cups, added water, and stirred the chocolate. He glanced at McAllister. “Who’s going to do this?”

  “I could,” Long said from behind them. Neither had noticed him come up from the lake.

  “Take off your gun first,” Active said.

  Long unbuckled his gunbelt and dropped it into the tent Cowboy had set up. Active unsnapped the flap of his holster and held the Smith and Wesson at his side.

  Long crossed to the lean-to and slipped the sleeping bag off McAllister’s head, then got an arm under his shoulders, and raised the hot chocolate to his lips.

  “I could d-do i-hit myse-helf,” McAllister grumbled, trying to shrug the sleeping bag off his shoulders. “Unloose my ha-ands.”

  “Your hands stay where they are!” Active stepped forward a couple of paces and showed McAllister the gun, though he didn’t raise it.

  McAllister relaxed, and Long fed him the hot chocolate. Then Cowboy fixed the clam chowder and Long fed that to McAllister too.

  “Thanks,” he said. It sounded as if his teeth had stopped chattering. He glanced around the camp. “Did you say that kinnaq is here? I thought he burned up in that fire back in Chukchi.”

  “He got out,” Active said, watching as McAllister digested the news.

  “Where is he now?”

  Cowboy cleared his throat.

  “He got away,” Long said. “He took off on your four-wheeler.”

  “Wonder where he went,” McAllister said with what sounded like a snicker.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Active said.

  Cowboy pulled the MREs out of the coffeepot and passed them around, with plastic spoons. They ripped open the pouches and dug in. Active found himself with one labeled Cajun Rice/Beef Sausage and another that identified itself as Western Beans. They tasted about the same—pretty much like he imagined boiled sawdust would taste. How did the military fight wars on the stuff?

  Cowboy collected the empty pouches and dropped them into the fire. Then he passed out official MRE napkins. “Just wipe off your spoons and put ’em in your pocket for later.”

  He looked across the lake at the falling snow and into the fog covering the ridge where his 185 was tied down. “I gotta go have a look,” he said. “You never know.”

  “You never do.” Active shrugged. “I doubt Pingo’s anywhere within ten miles by now, but—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got the .357.” Cowboy grabbed one of the MRE snacks from the food bag—some sort of chocolate bar—and, munching, headed down the shore to the crossing of One-Way Creek.

  “I guess I could wash these,” Long said. He picked up the cups he had used to feed McAllister and walked to the lakeshore. Active heard him splashing water and was glad he had suppressed the impulse to say “Think you can handle it?”

  McAllister shifted in the sleeping bag, trying to find a comfortable position for his legs
. It was evidently difficult with his ankles tethered by the FlexCuffs and his hands shackled at his back. Eventually, he rolled onto his side, drew his knees up nearly to his chin, and studied Active. “You could take these things off my hands. They’re cutting off my blood.”

  “They’re supposed to be tight. Just keep them under the bag. Alan can check them when he’s done with the dishes.”

  McAllister only grunted, his leathery face masklike, the dark eyes warier than ever.

  AFTER LONG returned from the lakeshore and stowed the two cups with Cowboy’s gear by the fire, Active pulled him a few feet into the spruces. “I’m going to see what I can get out of McAllister,” he said. “I need you there too, for a backup witness to anything he says.”

  “Can I ask questions?” Long said.

  Active eyed him. “You think of something you want to ask, let me know and we’ll step away and discuss it first, okay?”

  Long looked unhappy but raised his eyebrows yes. They walked back into the firelight and Active prodded McAllister with the toe of a Sorel.

  “You know why we’re here,” he said.

  McAllister grunted.

  Active recited the Miranda warning.

  “Where am I going to get a lawyer?” McAllister said.

  It wasn’t actually a request, Active decided. “We know you killed Jae Hyo Lee up here.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Then how did he end up here in One-Way Lake with his neck broken?”

  McAllister’s shoulders jerked under the sleeping bag. “Maybe he fell in the lake while he was coming in to rob my camp.”

  “How would he know where it was?”

  McAllister shrugged again. “Maybe the kinnaq told him.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  McAllister shrugged again, but said nothing.

  Active waited a while, but McAllister maintained his silence as the snowflakes fluttered down, leaving the taste of metal on Active’s tongue when he breathed in. He wiped his eyebrows and saw that snow had collected on McAllister’s eyebrows as well. Because he couldn’t wipe, it was melting and trickling into his eyes.