Shaman Pass (20 page)

Kelly lowered the hammer. “Left side, ah?”

Active nodded, and Kelly prodded the shoulder with the carbine’s muzzle. Active winced.

Kelly reversed the rifle in his hands and raised it as high as his wound permitted. The calm eyes were the last thing Active remembered before the carbine’s stock slammed into his left collarbone.

ONCE AGAIN, Active didn’t know how long he was out, but this time he came awake cleanly and suddenly, speared out of sleep by the old pain in his shoulder, worse than ever, and a new one along his collarbone.

He lay on the floor for what seemed a great while, adjusting his position to accommodate his injuries, listening to the wind howl past the cabin as the pain subsided toward a manageable level. There was no other sound, no noise of a snowmachine, and he decided Robert Kelly must have gone.

Judging from the sound of the wind and what he could see of the sky through the windows above him, it would be tomorrow at the earliest before Cowboy could get back in with a plane. Maybe a whole week, as was entirely possible in the Arctic.

How long could he last on the floor? Already he was starting to shiver. Robert Kelly’s oil stove still muttered in the corner, but the heat in cabins tended to stratify: suffocating at head level, but water would freeze in a bowl on the floor. And in a week, the stove would probably run out of oil.

He wriggled his hands. That jacked up the blaze in his shoulder, but did nothing to loosen the tape on his wrists. Somewhere on his belt was a Leatherman, but not within reach of his fingers.

Then suddenly it came to him. Slowly, and with great care, he rolled onto his right side—the good side—and hunched himself sufficiently to bring his face down to his hands. He began to gnaw.

CHAPTER TWENTY

HE SPENT THE NEXT two days nursing the damaged shoulder, listening to the wind and Kay-Chuck, and wishing Robert Kelly had something in the place to read other than the
Alaska Hunting and Trapping Regulations
and a three-year-old copy of the
Anchorage Daily News
.

There was nothing to do but wait out the storm. He probed the burning shoulder, found a frightening number of knobs and bulges where none had been before, and rigged a sling to immobilize the arm. He took tea with some pilot bread and peanut butter he found on the shelves. When he went into the snow to take a leak, he found a cold-storage box nailed to an outside wall, and some dried fish inside it. He added the fish to his menu and found it warmed him from the inside, like a space heater in his stomach. He thought maybe it even made his shoulder feel a little better.

He opened his eyes on the third day and wondered what had awakened him. Then he heard it again: the rumble of an airplane engine, so far off he caught the sound only intermittently. Suddenly he realized it was the only sound. The wind was silent and the box of Sailor Boy Pilot Bread on the table was rendered nearly incandescent by a shaft of yellow sunlight.

He rolled out of bed, favoring the injured shoulder, opened the door, and stepped into an enameled landscape of blue and white and perfect stillness. The sun shone straight into his face, so bright that he had to narrow one eye to a slit and close the other completely to peer down the canyon. No plane in sight yet, but the engine sound seemed to be getting closer.

Suddenly the hair on the back of his neck prickled. He ceased all motion, held his breath, and listened intently. Nothing but the tiny, distant drone of the plane and that feeling of someone nearby.

He swept his eyes around the canyon. They came to rest, almost without his willing it, on an odd-looking pile of snow-plastered rocks on the hill just upstream of the cabin.

He walked over and floundered uphill through the snow, pulling himself along on the willows with his right hand.

The rock pile was maybe three feet high, a stack of flat stones with two longer ones near the top sticking out like arms. And crowning it, a round stone like a head. It looked like it had been there a long time. Where it wasn’t snow covered, the stones were intergrown with grass and weeds, and covered with white lichen.

Active worked himself around behind Kiana Kelly’s original
inuksuk
to look the same direction it did: down the canyon, out over the valley of the Angatquq, a field of white that stretched to the rolling hills across the river.

Still no sign of a plane and now no sound either. Perhaps he had imagined it, or it had been a Bush pilot passing through Shaman Pass on his way to the Arctic Slope.

He started down the hill and was almost back to the cabin when he heard the plane again, close and loud this time. He put his hand above his eyes and squinted down the canyon against the sun. Nothing, except that his eyes were starting to water in the glare. Then a big fat red-and-white metal airplane crossed the mouth of the canyon, convertible wheel-skis dangling beneath like duck feet.

Active recognized it as the Lienhofer Beaver, the craft he had suggested bringing, with backup, before Carnaby had gone cheap-ass and insisted on a look-see in the Super Cub first. He waved wildly with his right arm and saw the wings rock twice before the Beaver passed out of sight beyond the right wall of the canyon.

As the rumble faded and returned, Active strapped on a pair of snowshoes from the cabin wall and started downstream, gradually ascending the ridge that paralleled the creek. The Beaver passed directly overhead and he waved again. The plane made another looping turn downhill and then came straight in, flaps lowered for a landing on the ridgeline.

Active was waiting when the Beaver bounced to a stop on the snow and Cowboy shut down the radial engine. The doors popped open and out climbed Alan Long from the Chukchi Police Department, and Dickie Nelson, the trooper Active had wanted to draft for the trip to Shaman Pass in the first place. And Carnaby, towering over the others by half a head.

The trooper captain put out his hand. Active took it and Carnaby looked him up and down and said, “Did you really jump out of Cowboy’s Super Cub?”

Not, “Hello,” or “Glad you made it,” but “Did you really jump out of Cowboy’s Super Cub?”

Active thought it over, but couldn’t see any way to dodge it. “Roger that.”

“That how you hurt your shoulder?”

“Huh-uh.” Active shook his head. “Robert Kelly did it when he ran me down with his snowmachine. Then he whacked it with his rifle butt while I was tied up on the floor.”

“While you were tied up?” Carnaby asked. “Why would he do that?”

“It was in lieu of killing me,” Active said. “I suggested that if I was dead, you guys would come straight after him. But if I was only hurt, you’d have to take me back to Chukchi for repairs. I guess he wanted to make sure I was hurt. Can you spare a pair of sunglasses, maybe? I’m half snow-blind already in this light.”

Carnaby pulled a pair of mirrors out of his parka and handed them to Active, who put them on with an inward sigh of relief. “How’s it doing, the shoulder?” Carnaby asked.

Active gave the right half of a shrug. “Sore. Swollen. Knobs sticking out in funny places. Dislocated, I think. Probably should be looked at pretty soon, all right.”

“We’ve got a first-aid kit and Alan here is a paramedic. That’s why I brought him. That and the fact he knows the pass. He’s hunted up here some.”

Active frowned in concentration, then said no thanks to the offer of an examination by Long. “I don’t think I can get out of this sling and shirt and vest without passing out. And then I’d have to get back into most of it, which would probably mean passing out again, so all in all I’d rather not.”

“Whew,” Carnaby said. “Still pretty shocky, huh?”

“I think so, yeah,” Active said.

“I think there’s some codeine with Tylenol in here,” Long said, swinging a backpack off his shoulder. “Want some?”

Active nodded and swallowed two tablets that Long handed him.

“Did you really jump out of Cowboy’s plane?” asked Dickie Nelson, who had stepped behind the Beaver to take a leak. Dickie had knocked around the troopers’ rural detachments all his career. He was short, wore a mustache, and was famous, and much ridiculed in secret, for a lush head of wavy brown hair that never got any longer, or any grayer. He was a mediocre cop, in Active’s estimation, but a discerning connoisseur of Bush yarns. No doubt he scented a classic here.

Carnaby glared. “Save it, Dickie.”

“Roger that,” Active said.

Carnaby turned the glare on Active. “You feel up to briefing us?”

Active nodded and gave them the short version of all that had happened in the past two days.

“So he didn’t actually confess?” Carnaby asked when Active finished.

“Come on,” Active said. “There’s too much that fits here. Who else could it be?”

“But you didn’t actually see Uncle Frosty on his sled, right?”

“Well, no, not actually.” Active half-shrugged. “Just a blue bundle the right size.”

“And that one-day gap still worries me. Where was he and what was he doing for twenty-four hours? And why would he come back if he already had his grandfather?” Carnaby paused and the look of worry on his face deepened. “Shit! What if the museum burglar and Victor Solomon’s killer aren’t the same guy? Maybe all Kelly did was steal his grandfather.”

“All right, there’s some loose ends,” Active said, uneasy again because Carnaby had once more made the same point as Whyborn Sivula. “I admit it. But he did knock me out and take off. We’ve got flight and assault on an officer, at least.”

Carnaby pondered this, then nodded. “In for a dime, in for a dollar, I guess. Lots of dollars, unfortunately.” He looked at Cowboy in the Beaver and shook his head before continuing. “So you think Kelly’s on his way to Canada?”

“That’s my guess. It’s where Natchiq was headed when Saganiq killed him.”

“Hell of a snowmachine ride.”

“Kelly knows the country,” Active said. “And judging from the load on his sled, he probably had enough gas to get wherever he wanted to go.”

“And he’s married into the Caribou Creek people?”

Active nodded.

“Well, they’ve all got relatives on the Canadian side. So Kelly could probably find somebody to stay with over there.” Carnaby chewed on his lip and looked down the slope, toward the Angatquq River.

“Anyway, I guess we oughta get you back to Chukchi and have that shoulder looked at. Cowboy and Alan and Dickie and I can come back and see about picking up Kelly’s trail.”

“Pretty cold trail,” Active said. “There were two days of wind and snow after he took off.”

Carnaby nodded. “And this sun and warm weather aren’t gonna help. Everything will just kind of glaze over.”

“Let’s go look now.”

Carnaby chewed his lip again and squinted at Active. “With that shoulder and all?”

“The codeine is starting to kick in, I think. Another couple hours won’t make much difference,” Active said. “But you guys will have to do the shooting, if there is any.”

Carnaby grinned approvingly. “I thought you might see it that way.”

They climbed into the Beaver, Nathan riding shotgun beside Cowboy because he was the only one who had seen Robert Kelly, or his snowmachine.

Cowboy looked questioningly at Carnaby.

“Nathan says he can handle a little run up the pass to see if we can pick up Robert Kelly’s trail,” Carnaby said.

“All right,” Cowboy said. He hit the starter and the old radial fired up, snorting and belching out blue smoke until it settled down to a throaty rumble. Cowboy pulled a headset from between the front seats and Active slipped it on.

Cowboy shoved in a little throttle, the radial growled, and the Beaver lumbered through a clumsy half-circle to face down the ridgeline. Cowboy fed in the rest of the throttle and in a few seconds hauled back on the wheel and horsed the plane into the air. He leveled off a couple hundred feet above the tundra and followed Robert Kelly’s creek downstream toward the Angatquq River.

“Any ideas?” Cowboy asked through the headset.

Active studied the terrain beneath the plane. The wind had done its work. The long undulating snow ridges called sastrugas snaked over the tundra, leaving no sign a snowmachine and dogsled had ever passed by. “I don’t see anything,” he said. “Anybody else? Alan? Dickie? Boss?”

There was a chorus of negatives over the intercom. “How about we just fly up the pass a ways then?” Carnaby said. “That’s probably the way he’d go, eh?”

“It’s the only land route through the mountains anywheres around here, far as I know,” Cowboy said. “We’ve got gas for maybe another forty-five minutes, max.”

The pilot took the Beaver up to eight hundred feet, which, he explained, was the ideal scanning altitude. He continued downslope until they were over the Angatquq River, then rolled into a left turn and pointed them straight up the pass.

The plane hung in the air like a trout in a clear pool, the white landscape rolling away on either side, the blue dome arching overhead. As they flew up the Angatquq, the patches of scrub spruce and willow penetrating the sastrugas thinned out and the route into the pass became a broad valley of pure, rolling white.

But near the crest, the mountains crowded in from either side and soon Active saw a jagged, ice-walled canyon under the right wing.

“Angatquq Gorge,” Cowboy said over the intercom. “That’s where the river starts. Supposedly, there’s a spring down in there that flows all year, even in the dead of winter. The snowmachine trail runs along the rim there.”

Active peered through the frost on the window and saw what could have been a faint scratch along the lip of the gorge. The gorge petered out a mile or two below the summit, where the mountains opened out again into a broad, flat saddle of alpine tundra.

A few minutes after they started down the north slope of the pass, Alan Long spoke from the seat behind the pilot. “Isn’t that a snowgo down there?”

Cowboy dropped a wing and they all stared down at the tundra. Active caught a glimpse of something that looked like a windshield and handlebars sticking out of the snow before they swept past it.

Cowboy brought the plane around in a graceful, descending turn and they passed over again, this time only a couple of hundred feet high. Now the picture was clearer. Definitely a windshield and handlebars, the rest of the machine and its dogsled discernible only as an oddly convoluted drift behind the windshield.

“Can you get us down there?” Carnaby asked.

Cowboy rolled the Beaver into another turn and lowered the wing flaps. In less than three minutes the plane was bouncing over the sastrugas to a stop by the buried snowmachine.

They piled out and used snowshoes to dig out Kelly’s black Arctic Cat and dogsled, Active grateful to get a pass because of his shoulder. The other four—even Cowboy—grunted and heaved and it became clear in a few minutes that no frozen driver was under the snow. They found a rough shelter Kelly had made by turning the dogsled on its side and draping the skin of his wall tent over it. Inside was evidence he had occupied it for at least a few hours: an unrolled sleeping bag on a mat of caribou hides, a camp stove still set up for use, two paper sacks of groceries, one with the top half of the bag ripped away. Outside, three red jerry jugs of gas, a half-dozen plastic bottles of snowmachine oil, a small toolbox, a gas lantern, and the frame for the tent. Almost as one, they swiveled to survey the incandescent slopes around them.

“I guess it quit on him,” Dickie said.

“Where’s Uncle Frosty?” Cowboy asked.

“Kelly must have taken him along. A man carrying that kind of load, how far . . . in that blizzard. . . .” Active stopped and shook his head.

“Could he get through?” Carnaby asked.

“Cowboy, Alan, you guys have been up in this country before,” Active said. “What do you think? Any shelter close enough that he could have made it?”

Cowboy spoke first. “I never saw any camps up here but Robert Kelly’s.” The pilot shook his head. “But I never saw that one before now.”