Shaman Pass Read online

  This led to a furious discussion in the Eskimo language that I could not follow, but it ended with Iqlavik informing me the remains could be brought out as long as I agreed that the two reluctant ones could place a crucifix inside the canvas wrappings and that neither of them should be required to handle the remains in any way.

  Once this was settled, I asked what they knew about the old shaman’s murder. There was little to go on here, as the two of them who had passed along the rumor had heard it only on a visit to Chukchi, never in Barrow, and had not bothered to collect many details as they had never put much stock in it before now. He was probably killed “early days ago,” before the “nahlogmes,” or whites, came into the country, they thought.

  Active surfed through the journal to its end, but found only one other reference to Uncle Frosty. The entry merely noted that Henderson had taken the remains aboard a government revenue cutter at the mouth of the Colville River and crated them up for shipment to Washington.

  Active began saving Henderson’s journal to his hard drive. Why and how had the same owl-faced amulet found in Uncle Frosty’s mouth by Joseph Henderson’s party almost eight decades ago ended up in Victor Solomon’s mouth? Why and how had the same harpoon Henderson had found in Uncle Frosty’s chest wound up in Victor Solomon’s chest?

  Active dug into the folders he had gotten from Silver and flipped through the pictures of Uncle Frosty. Finally he stopped at a close-up of the mummy’s face. Some of the flesh was gone, but it was possible to see that the mouth was locked open. Perhaps it was from rigor mortis setting in as the body had cooled in Shaman Pass. Or perhaps it was Uncle Frosty’s final scream. Active shook his head. Maybe so, maybe no, but what was the connection to Victor Solomon’s death?

  If any.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ST. MARK’S CATHOLIC CHURCH was a weathered gray two-story building with a rectory and parish offices on the ground floor, a chapel with a small steeple above, and a snow-covered gravel parking lot in front.

  Active parked the Suburban with its tail to the wind to conserve heat in the engine, then walked to the rectory door and knocked. He waited as the west wind whistled past, pushing shredded snow across the parking lot. An Inupiat woman of about thirty came out, her eyes reddened and wet. She looked at him, pulled up the hood of her parka, and brushed past in silence.

  Father Sebastian James followed her out and watched from the doorstep as she mounted a red four-wheeler, yanked the starter rope, and drove off into the wind. “Some problems the Lord solves right away and some take a while,” the priest said, putting out his hand. “Good to see you again, Nathan.”

  James was a thirtyish Inupiaq, narrow faced and serious, with round steel-rimmed glasses that gave him an ascetic look. The only sign of his profession today was the collar. He came from a village upriver, and had gone to Notre Dame, Active had heard.

  They knew each other slightly, but Active, as an agnostic, could never decide what to call the priest. “Father” seemed overformal and insincere, while “Sebastian” might be too familiar and perhaps even insulting with the collar in place. “Mr. James” was unthinkable.

  “Good to see you, too,” Active said.

  James smiled like he had gotten a joke, and led Active through a living room, then a kitchen that smelled of seal oil, and into a small study. It was walled with books and two diplomas proving the Notre Dame story was true. A copier stood in one corner, next to a computer and printer on a wheeled work stand.

  “Victor’s death was a terrible shock,” James said, seating himself behind a heavy desk of scarred blond wood. “And now . . . you said on the phone he was killed by an old-fashioned whaler’s harpoon?”

  Active nodded. “That’s the conclusion I expect when the autopsy’s done.”

  James shook his head. “Any idea when that will be? We can’t conduct our funeral service until the body comes back from Anchorage. He was our deacon, you know.”

  “By the end of the week, I hope.”

  “Can I offer you some coffee? Tea? Pilot bread?” James waved a hand toward the kitchen.

  Active declined, then was silent, thinking how to get into it.

  “Problems with the investigation?”

  Active sighed. “It is a bit of a tangle at the moment. Do you have any idea who would want to kill Victor Solomon, or why? Any gossip from your parishioners?”

  The priest shrugged. “Lots of talk, lots of dismay, of course, but no real information. Victor lived alone, had no immediate family. No one knew him very well. He could be difficult.”

  “I’ve heard,” Active said. “Even to the point of seeming almost unchristian at times?”

  “The Lord’s igloo is very large,” James said with another smile. “Plenty of dried fish and seal oil even for a grouchy, lonely old hunter.” The priest was silent for a moment. Then, “But this harpoon?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you say on the phone it was Uncle Frosty’s?”

  “Yes, it was taken in the museum burglary, and it’s really almost our only lead. But I can’t see where it points us.”

  “Eh?”

  “It seems to have belonged to an old angatquq who was murdered long ago in Shaman Pass. Ever hear any stories about something like that?”

  The priest shook his head. “Don’t think so. But, of course, the elders who might remember superstitious talk from the old days wouldn’t discuss it with a priest. Even an Eskimo priest.”

  “Apparently his name, Uncle Frosty’s name, was Saganiq.”

  “Sorry, that doesn’t ring any bells eith—” James put a hand over his eyes, then removed it and gazed for several seconds at a spot a foot above Active’s head. “Saganiq? Wait, now, where have I seen—I know I—”

  He snapped his fingers, turned his chair, and looked at the cemetery outside his window. He stood up and said, “Come with me.”

  James led Active back through the kitchen and out a rear door. He paused a moment near the first headstone, then made his way along a central pathway past the rows of grave markers, looking at them as he went. Finally he stopped and pointed at a granite headstone two graves in from the path. “Look at that,” he said.

  The face of the stone was plastered with blown snow. Active pulled a glove from his pocket and slapped it clear. It read:

  MATTHEW SOLOMON

  “SAGANIQ”

  1860(?)–1918

  “Saganiq is buried here? He didn’t die in Shaman Pass?”

  James nodded in satisfaction, hunching his shoulders against the wind. He had come out without a coat. “I knew I’d seen that name somewhere around the church.”

  Active was lost in thought for a moment. “Maybe it’s not the same guy. Saganiq—”

  “Have you noticed the surname?” James was giving him a quizzical look.

  Active looked at the stone again and blurted out: “Jesus, his English name was Solomon?” He realized what he had said. “Excuse me, I . . . I . . .”

  James waved a hand and grinned. “Jesus has heard worse, I’m sure.”

  “But if Saganiq was Matthew Solomon, then he was—”

  James nodded again. “Victor Solomon’s relative, almost certainly. I could look it up in the church records.”

  “Thanks,” Active said. He glanced around at the other graves nearby. They had wooden markers, not stones. Evidently Saganiq had been a wealthy and important man by the time he was buried as Matthew Solomon. Then Active noticed that most of Saganiq’s neighbors in the cemetery had died the same year as the shaman. “What happened in 1918?”

  James had already started for the church. He turned, shivering, and looked at the grave markers from that year. “The Spanish influenza,” he said. “A third of the people in this town died in nine days, I’ve heard. In Brevig Mission, down by Nome, seventy-two of eighty died in five days.”

  “Another western import,” Active said.

  James smiled his “I-get-it” smile, but said nothing. He turned and led the way back
into his study. There, he walked to one of the bookshelves lining the wall, ran his fingers along the spines, and brought to his desk a big green volume labeled “1917–20.”

  He flipped through the pages until he found the one he wanted, then spread the book open on his desk. “Here’s Father Hanlon’s entry on Matthew Solomon’s death . . . let’s see, he left one son, Walter Solomon, um, age eighteen when Matthew died.”

  The priest took off his glasses and tapped them on the open page with a thoughtful look. “Yes, I remember Victor saying his father was named Walter. So Matthew would have been Victor’s grandfather.”

  “And Victor? He never had any kids?”

  James put his glasses back on. “Two, but they died when they were little. His wife, too. They’re all out back there, in the cemetery.”

  “What happened?”

  The priest looked depressed. “There was a house fire while Victor was out hunting, or so I’ve been told. This was long before my time, but I gather his wife had a drinking problem whenever Victor wasn’t around to keep her under control. Somehow the kids set the place on fire while she was passed out.”

  “You hear a lot of stories like that around here,” Active said.

  “Uh-huh,” James said. “Too many.”

  “Yet you retain your faith?”

  James said, “Uh-huh” again, and didn’t elaborate. He seemed to have become fascinated by the 1917–20 record book.

  Finally Active broke the silence. “This Father Hanlon who was here when Matthew Solomon died. Did he bring Matthew into the church?”

  James looked up. “In all probability. He founded this mission in 1901, and served here till, um, 1923, I think it was.”

  “Would his records show when Matthew Solomon was converted?”

  “They should, but you’ll have to do a hand search to find it.” The priest smiled his joke smile. “The records are strictly chronological. No subject headings, no cross-tabs, no nothing. This was before Yahoo and Google.”

  “Mind if I give it a shot?”

  “No problem.” James stood up and pointed at the shelf where he had gotten the 1917–20 volume. “Have at it. I’ve got to make a house call. Just let yourself out if you finish before I get back.”

  Active nodded his thanks. James said, “Feel free to copy anything you find,” and left the study.

  Active photocopied the entry about Matthew Solomon’s death from Spanish flu, then searched the pages preceding it for an entry on his conversion.

  No luck, so he replaced the volume on the shelf and studied the neighboring volumes. There were only two earlier volumes in the series. One was dated 1901–1910, the other 1911–1916. Apparently, Hanlon hadn’t had much to record for the first few years of his ministry in Chukchi, then things had gotten busy.

  Active opened the first volume and flipped through it, scanning Hanlon’s neat clerical hand for any reference to Saganiq, Solomon, shaman, or angatquq. As of the close of 1910, Saganiq was still outside Jesus’s big igloo, as far as Active could tell from Hanlon’s records.

  He opened the second volume and found the entry almost immediately. Saganiq had entered the igloo on February 3, 1911:

  The Eskimo Saganiq came to me today and asked to be received into the church. He admitted that he had been a great sinner, an angatquq, had practiced witchcraft and done many other sinful things, though he swore it was not true, as rumored, that he had murdered the false prophet Natchiq. Indeed, after Natchiq’s disappearance in the mountains, had not Saganiq taken in Natchiq’s widow as his third wife until her death in childbirth soon after? At any rate, Saganiq said, he had now given up his old and sinful ways, including polygamy, had embraced the white man’s god, and was ready to follow the teachings of the church with his one and only surviving wife. So I took his confession and brought him into our church, giving him his Christian name, Matthew Solomon. And thus did the Lord save the last of the Chukchi devil-doctors, the only other remaining adherent of this barbaric practice having hung himself last spring.

  Active walked to the copier and laid the entry facedown on the glass. His original theory had just risen from the dead. Except it was more complicated now. Saganiq wasn’t the victim from Shaman Pass. He wasn’t Uncle Frosty. He was in all probability Uncle Frosty’s killer.

  As Active pushed the button to copy the entry, he lectured himself on the perils of tunnel vision in the law enforcement business. The harpoon found in Uncle Frosty wouldn’t have belonged to Uncle Frosty. Of course not. It would have belonged to his killer. Saganiq.

  Why had he not seen it before? Because he had gotten it into his head from the start that the harpoon had belonged to Uncle Frosty. In fact, he remembered Jim Silver saying exactly that over Victor Solomon’s body at the sheefish camp. “It’s Uncle Frosty’s harpoon,” Silver had said.

  And he, Nathan Active, professionally trained Alaska State Trooper, had not once reexamined the assumption.

  He shook his head and tried to focus on the case instead of his own stupidity. Why had Saganiq killed Natchiq, if that really was Uncle Frosty’s name? And why had Saganiq left behind something so valuable as a harpoon, representing as it did countless hours of hand labor in a primitive society. And why would an angatquq like Saganiq leave behind his amulet?

  But most of all, why would someone go to the trouble of stealing Uncle Frosty—Natchiq—from the museum, along with Saganiq’s amulet and harpoon, and then spearing Victor Solomon with it?

  Active had just reached the end of the 1911–16 volume without finding any other references to Matthew Solomon or Natchiq when Sebastian James returned from his house call. “Come up with anything?” the priest asked.

  Active showed him Father Hanlon’s account of Saganiq joining the church. “You ever hear of this Natchiq?”

  The priest studied the photocopy and shook his head.

  “He would presumably be Uncle Frosty, assuming we take Saganiq’s denial of killing him for what it’s probably worth,” Active said.

  James nodded. “Presumably.”

  “If this Saganiq really was an angatquq and a killer, how did he end up in the church?”

  James chuckled. “I think Father Hanlon’s entry speaks for itself. Saganiq’s conversion signaled the end of the devil-doctors.”

  “You really think that? The angatquqs were in league with the devil? Weren’t they just the traditional version of a priest? Wouldn’t you have been one yourself, in those days?”

  James looked into himself as though he had never considered the question. “I hope not,” he said at length. “By the time the naluaqmiuts showed up, the angatquqs were as corrupt as a priesthood can be. Some tried to do good, the female ones in particular, but too many of the male angatquqs used their power over our people for the usual perks: wealth, women, privilege. So when the white man brought in Christianity along with his rifles and his medicines, we Inupiat were ready for the Word. The power of the angatquqs, like much of the rest of our culture, crumbled away like hoarfrost.” James paused in thought for a moment. “Except the angatquqs, I think, deserved it.”

  “So Saganiq was just joining the winning team?”

  James nodded. “A conversion of convenience, I’m sure. I’m just surprised it took him so long. By 1911, the battle was long over. He must have been a stubborn man.”

  Active started to speak, but James raised a hand.

  “Actually, perhaps I’m being a little unfair to the angatquqs and to the Inupiat who watched the white man arrive. Do you know much about the history of this area just before contact, Nathan?”

  Active shook his head. “Very little, I guess. The Yankee whalers showed up in the late eighteen hundreds?”

  James nodded. “And they came at a bad time for the Inupiat. According to the anthropologists, there was an amazing famine in the Chukchi basin around that time, starvation on a biblical scale. For two years in a row, everything vanished—no caribou, no whales, no fish, no birds, no berries. Or almost none. When it was over, the
population of this area was ten percent of what it had been before.”

  “Ninety percent mortality? That’s, that’s . . .”

  “Died, or moved away in search of food,” James said. “The survivors who described it for anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s told of starvation, cannibalism.”

  “I had no idea,” Active said. “I knew life was hard back then, but I guess I assumed the land always provided enough to get by.”

  “Not always,” James said. “So when the naluaqmiuts showed up, the Inupiat were a chastened people. Nothing they or their angatquqs could do had been able to bring back the fish or game, and then the white man steams over the horizon with plenty to eat, new technology, and a new religion. Or maybe the new religion was part of the technology.” James smiled, a thin, wry smile. “Whatever it was the naluaqmiut had, it seemed to work, so we bought the whole package.”

  “Including the liquor that killed Victor Solomon’s family.”

  “That, too,” James said. “That, too.” The priest studied him for a moment, then, “And you?”

  “Me?”

  “How are things with you? I look at your face and . . .” James shrugged.

  “I’m fine. Police work carries its share of stress, of course.” Active shrugged back, trying to make it look nonchalant.

  James smiled. “It’s all right. The Lord doesn’t mind if you take comfort from Nelda Qivits. It’s where you end up he cares about, not the path you take.”

  Active stared, speechless. How many others knew about his visits to the little cabin near the hospital?