Primal Scream (35 page)

creeek . . . creeek . . . creeek . . .

As Katt snapped shots of some of the 525 crests displayed by Gitxsan Houses, she yearned for a potlatch invitation so she could hear their stories. There were land creatures like the wolf, bear, beaver, and marten . . . sky creatures like the owl, raven, and thunderbird ... sea creatures like the killer whale, dogfish, and salmon . . . and mutant monsters like Half-way-out, Split-person, Three-beings-across, Sharp-nose, and People-of-the-smoke-hole . . .

. . . creeek . . . creeek . . . creeek . . .

Finished with the Wolf totems, Katt arrived at the longhouse. It had four corner posts carved into grizzly bears standing erect. The ridge beam of the lodge was carved like a salmon. The Frog poles beyond were carved in high and low relief. Native colors—red, yellow, black, and blue-green—once had decorated features like eyes, eyebrows, lips, and nostrils. Time had long since washed them away, but the paintbrush in Katt's mind dabbed them back. Not all the crests

.
.
. creeek . . . creeek . . .

were inherited. Some were

. . . creeek . . . creeek . . .

won by conquest. The great warrior Nekt was of the Frog-Raven clan, and Katt wondered
 

.
. . creeek . . creeek .
. .

if he had won some of these crests?

Camera to her eye, Katt caught sight of something circling her head.

A hand clamped her mouth before she could scream.

The psycho got Katt.

DeClercq came out of the band office to find Katt gone. So engrossed had he been talking with the Git-xsan chief that he'd lost track of time, and that Katt stood outside waiting for him. Obviously, she got bored with cooling her heels, and had wandered down to the village by the river to photograph totem crests. So he wandered down, too.

"Katt!"

No answer.

Hairs twitched on his neck.

"Katt!"

No answer.

Butterflies tickled his stomach.

"Katt!"

No answer.

Sweat trickled from his armpits.

With mounting unease he walked the length of the village from the lodge of the lowest Wolf almost to the lodge of the lowest Frog, where he found Katt's camera abandoned on the ground, and a spray of blood reddening the snow beside. He almost threw up. His hand was shaking as he withdrew the cell phone from his pocket, a "dedicated line" assigned to him by the Force, the number RCMP issue. For Christmas he had given Katt a cell phone of her own, which might seem to some an extravagance for a teen, but which he saw as a necessity in a world going insane.

Press one button to speed-dial 911, and call in the cavalry as you run for your life.

Blood and no call from Katt meant something horrid was going down. He turned on his phone and punched in her number and waited ten rings.

An answer.

No voice.

Just labored breathing.

"Katt?

"Katt!

"Ka—"

"Katt can't come to the phone." What sounded like a native voice. A soft monotone. "She may never come to the phone again."

"Don't hurt her!"

"Like you hurt me?"

"Not me."

"You. All redcoats are the same. Your pal returned me to the reverend's cock."

"It's me you want. Not her."

"Come, and she goes free. You and me. Man to man. In the land as it was before filth came. I'll give you what we were denied. A fighting chance."

"Is she dead?"

"Katt put up a fight. She will be if you don't do what I say. Try to trick and you find another daughter dead."

"Don't hurt her."

"Come, white man. Fly to Spirit Lake and have the pilot drop you at the mouth of Headless Valley. A river runs down the valley to fill the lake. Follow the river up on foot. Snowshoes. No gun. No radio. I'll see you. You won't see me. Any sign of backup, she dies. This is my land. I hear every sound."

The line went dead.

He called back.

No answer.

. . . creeek . . . creeek . . .

Above him totems creaked in the Arctic wind, and the shadows of ancient monsters danced about the bloody snow.

Jane
, he thought.

My God!

Not again!

Had he raised Katt from birth, he would have said no No, you can't come to Gunanoot. It was only because she wasn't his daughter that he had capitulated, for he knew she was free to leave any time she desired, and so he'd ignored his better judgment to keep her happy with him.

He recalled what they had said at the airport when she returned from France by way of Boston to visit her
real
parent.

"How's your mom?"

"Sends her best. You're to look after me. And curb my excesses."

"You? Excesses?"

"That's what I said. But you know how out of touch mothers are."

DeClercq switched the cell phone for his portable VHF radio. Because the plane was chartered by the Force for Totem Lake, not only did Dodd's Beaver maintain VHF contact with air traffic control, but it was equipped with a VHF portable linked to the Mounties' transmitter for police calls.

"Dodd?"

"Ten-four."

The engine noise was so loud DeClercq could barely hear him.

"Return to Gunanoot."

The transmission broke up. VHF requires a direct line of sight.

"Ten-nine." Repeat.

"Return to Gunanoot."

"But I gotta get the chief at Fort St. James."

"I'm countermanding that. I'm commandeering your plane. I'm chief superintendent. Now get your ass back here."

"Yes, sir!" said Dodd.

The forward doors of a Beaver are narrow and slant backward and up in their frames. A smooth hip swing and sharp knee bend are required to slip fluidly inside the cockpit. DeClercq bumped into everything as he climbed into the plane.

"Where to?" asked the pilot.

"The Nahanni."

"You're joking? That's Northwest Territories. We'd need extra fuel."

"Is there another Headless Valley?"

"Up by Spirit Lake."

"Near here?"

"Gunanoot Mountains. Where the Skeena springs. The north border of ancestral Gitxsan hunting grounds. West of Spatsizi Plateau."

"Let's go," said DeClercq.

Dodd hit the starter to send the propeller into a blurring arc. "H-T-M-P-F-S-C-G," he said to himself, to check hood, trim, manifold, primer . . . for a pre-takeoff ritual. Reaching right to the three-slotted power lever console just below the split between the front windows, the pilot pushed PROPELLER forward to "full fine" pitch for maximum rpm, and MIXTURE forward to "full rich" for lots of oomph, before he straight-armed THROTTLE to 36l/2 inches of manifold pressure to get them up
fast
to takeoff speed.

"Hang on," he shouted over the whine. "You're in for a bumpy ride."

DeClercq white-knuckled his seat.

Flaps down, the plane began to ski along the road. The washboard of frost heaves clacked DeClercq's teeth as the Wasp Junior engine shrieked with a banshee wail. Picking up speed, picking up speed, Dodd rocked the W-shaped handgrip atop the control column in front of him to elevate the tail, the bend in the road ahead rushing head-on. Then he pulled back on the stick slanting from
the center of the floor to lift
them off the ground and up over the oncoming trees.

The rear steerable
ski brushed the treetops during
climb-out as the bush plane took them into a clear blue sky.

"Piece of cake," the pilot said, retracting flaps at five hundred feet.

As DeClercq loosened his grip on the seat, he saw a reminder of what the Beaver is all about down where the instrument panel met the cockpit floor. There poked an oil filler spout with a yellow cap, so a pilot hi the Arctic could pour warmed-over oil drained the night before to sleep with back into the engine from inside the cockpit hi face of a bone-cracking wind on another sub-zero morning.

Brrrrrr
.

Before whites made it a reserve, the village of Gunanoot had been a base for operations, occupied during the freeze-to-thaw months for potlatch feasts. March saw the Houses travel north up the Grease Trail—now Highway 37—to the Nass River for the run of eulachon, known as candlefish from their greasy oil. There Nekt's mother was captured by Haida raiders, and Nekt later made his myth through wars along the Grease Trail, worn a yard deep by millennia of trekking feet. The greater part of the year, the Houses were in their northern territories, fishing, hunting, and trapping to smoke and dry the next winter's supply of food, packed back to Gunanoot before freeze-up.

Those northern territories were under the Beaver's wings.

"Listen hard," said DeClercq. "This is urgent. I'm senior officer, and you're flying a secret mission. No one knows but you and me. Life is in the balance. This is life or death. If someone dies, and you're the leak, I'll see you charged. Understand?"

The pilot nodded. 'How can we be tracked?"

"Radar," said Dodd, tapping the Mode C transponder by DeClercq. "This sends out a coded signal in reply to a radar pulse, giving our location and altitude. From it they can figure out our direction of flight and air speed."

"You beat it by flying the valleys?"

"Yeah. No line of sight."

"Then do it," said DeClercq.

"Emergency locater transmitter is no problem. It's armed, but won't activate unless we crash. G-force sets it off. Can't have it on because of SAR Sat. Search and rescue satellite orbits every ninety minutes. If E.L.T. was on, the plane would seem crashed to the eye in the sky."

"Can you turn it on?"

"Yes."

"Then make sure it's off."

Dodd did.

"VHF is caught by a direction finder that homes in on the signal. But D.F. only works if you broadcast, so it can vector in."

"Kill the radios."

Dodd did.

"Okay," said the pilot. "That blinds them. As long as the military isn't involved."

"By the time it is, I'll be set down and you'll be long gone."

Wilderness . . .

Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate who penned "The Female of the Species," called Canada "Our Lady of the Snows." As far as the eye could see beyond the cockpit windows, mountain ranges sliced across the north. Coast Mountains. Hazelton Mountains. Skeena Mountains. Omineca Mountains. Guna-noot Mountains. And more. Row on row of rugged peaks spiked to the horizons, their pinnacles and obelisks soaring thousands of feet above the plane, too big, too hard, and too hostile to be anything but threatening, while the bush pilot zigged and zagged the Beaver through their valley Vs. Lakes were plate-glass sheets of snow and ice scattered like a deck of fumbled cards. Glaciers licked down chasms shadowed blue, from the mouths of which ice fields smothered plateaus. Until recently this terrain had held the world record for snow: eighty-nine feet hi 1971/72. This was C-O-L-D country. Winter went on forever.

A mile or so back from Spirit Lake, Dodd began his in-range check.

"B-U-M-G." Brakes, undercarriage, mixture, gas. No brakes with skis. "C-U-P."

He pulled the throttle back in three increments to slow the plane from cruise to flap-extension speed. The Beaver buzzed through a V of rock, white slipping under it on the far side.

"Spirit Lake," said Dodd.

Land in feet of fresh snow and you will bury the plane. Snow didn't come any fresher than this, so Dodd had no option but touch and go. He flew the crosswind leg across the landing site to check for obstacles; a turn left for the downwind leg parallel to the "runway" with wind at his tail; a turn left for the base leg to the end of the strip; and a turn left for the final leg to complete the square. To keep from pounding the plane into the powder, he flared the nose up from approach to landing attitude, then touched down the heels of both main skis to compact the snow, maintaining ah- speed to take off.

Three circuits compressed the snow enough for them to land.

Touchdown.

Chop the power.

The Beaver skied to a halt.

"Headless Valley," Dodd said, pointing north.

DeClercq scribbled a note for him. "Here's written proof of countermand."

"Want my rifle?"

"No."

"Snowmobile? It's stored in back behind the sling seat."

"Just a pair of snowshoes."

"Sure you know what you're doing?"

"Positive," DeClercq said.

"At noon tomorrow keep your distance but fly close enough for radio phone. If I don't call
for pickup, tell Inspector Chan
dler. Till then, get lost."