Village of the Ghost Bears Read online

  “They don’t like strangers in Cape Goodwin. I’ve had my tires cut when I left my plane on the runway overnight, and I wasn’t bringing in a Trooper to arrest anybody. They see your uniform, they might shoot, all right.”

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

  “In Cape Goodwin, you gotta worry about everything,” McAllister said. “I land; you jump out; I take off. That’s that.”

  “I’m not going to arrest anybody,” Active said. “I just need to talk to them. And they don’t know I’m coming.”

  “Okay,” McAllister said. “But I’m not shutting my engine down. And how you getting out of there? I’m sure not coming back for you.”

  “Cowboy Decker will pick me up in his Super Cub this afternoon.”

  “Well, you better be out at the lagoon waiting for him. If he has to go into the village looking for you, he’s liable to have holes in his floats when he comes back.”

  Active watched as the guide shoveled the remains of the Solare back into the bed of the pickup. Then they climbed in and buckled their seat belts. The Cessna 185 was luxurious compared to Cowboy’s Super Cub. Its skin was metal, not fabric, and it seated four, not two, with room at the back for the groceries and extra gas McAllister had loaded in.

  McAllister handed Active a headset, and he listened as the guide talked to the FAA station across the field. Then they took off into the west wind beneath an unfriendly gray sky that seemed to promise more rain or perhaps snow. Maybe the weird, warm fall was finally breaking.

  McAllister climbed out over Chukchi Bay, then swung right until the nose pointed due north, across the Sulana Hills toward the Katonak Flats. Cape Goodwin was to the northwest, directly up the coast from the far shore of Chukchi Bay. Active studied the shoreline curving into blue-gray haze off their left wing. No sign of coastal fog, so why was the pilot heading north instead of taking the direct route to Cape Goodwin?

  He was about to ask when McAllister came on the intercom in a spray of static. “I gotta go by the Flats and check on my Super Cub.”

  “I heard you went down,” Active said.

  “Mm-mmm.”

  “What happened?”

  From the corner of his eye, Active saw the pilot shrug. “Engine quit. Happens sometimes.”

  Active turned to study McAllister. Most bush pilots never passed up the chance to tell a flying yarn, but maybe McAllister was different. Active thought about the case of Solare the guide had wasted and decided he was definitely different.

  Soon they were circling McAllister’s Super Cub, which was blue and white like his Cessna. The little plane was stranded in a patch of brush, one float showing a long gash down the side. The struts between that float and the fuselage had crumpled too, leaving the plane tilted about thirty degrees, the left wingtip nearly touching the tundra. Over the intercom, Active heard the pilot muttering to himself again.

  “What’s that? I didn’t hear you.”

  McAllister looked at him, as if in surprise, before speaking. “Doesn’t look like anybody’s been fucking with it. You gotta watch ’em.”

  The plane was at least a quarter mile from the nearest water, a long and relatively straight stretch of one of the sloughs that meandered through the pothole lakes on the Katonak Flats.

  “How will you get it out?” Active asked. “Helicopter?”

  McAllister snorted over the intercom. “Right, me and my million dollars. Nah, I’ll wait till freezeup and take it out on skis.”

  Active studied the terrain around the Super Cub. It was rough and covered with brush, fall-dappled in red and gold. “You really think the Flats will get enough snow to smooth all that out?”

  McAllister said, “I’ll cut enough of a trail through the brush that I can winch it out to the slough, then take off from there. All I need is a few days of hard freeze, and it looks like we’re about to get it.”

  McAllister rolled out of his circle and pointed the nose west, straight at a low range of coastal hills, the slopes splashed with autumn reds and yellows, the ridgetops mostly barren gray rock dusted with snow.

  “Too bad about Jim Silver, ah?” McAllister said over the intercom. “He was a pretty good guy, all right. For a naluaqmiu, anyway.”

  “You know him at all?”

  “Couple times he busted people that were robbing from my planes when they were parked on the ice in front of town there.” McAllister grunted. “The other cops we used to have wouldn’t bother with that kind of stuff, but he got me back a rifle and a couple of those Woods sleeping bags them kids took. I took him up on the Isignaq, got him a spring bear after that. He was pretty skookum out in the country, all right.”

  “You didn’t charge him for the hunt?”

  McAllister grunted again.

  Active took that for a no, and decided after a moment that it probably hadn’t been unethical for Silver to take the free trip. Not that it mattered now.

  “It’s tough he had to die like that,” McAllister said. “Him and those other people. You got any ideas yet who did it?”

  “It’s Trooper business.”

  McAllister grunted again. “You I.D. them all yet?”

  Active studied the guide and thought it over. On the one hand, it was Trooper business. On the other hand, some of the victims’ names had already been aired on Kay-Chuck, and the village gossip circuit would swiftly broadcast the rest. McAllister undoubtedly knew just about everyone in the village. Not only that, but also their family histories, who they were sleeping or feuding or drinking or hunting with. Everything.

  Active reeled off the list of the victims who had been identified so far. “Know why anybody would want to burn any of them up?”

  McAllister frowned and thought it over. Finally, he shook his head. “Unless somebody was after Chief Silver maybe?”

  Active thought some more and decided McAllister was likely to know as much about Silver and his family as Alan Long did. “You know a guy named Jae Hyo Lee?”

  McAllister grunted. “That Korean that took up with Silver’s daughter. Didn’t he blame Chief Silver for that gallbladder deal in Cape Goodwin?”

  “Uh-huh. You know if he’s back in the country?”

  “I thought he was still in prison.”

  “He’s out,” Active said. “As of about three weeks ago.”

  “You think he came back and started the Rec Center fire?”

  Active said nothing. McAllister turned to stare at him, then directed his gaze back to the horizon.

  A few minutes later, they crested the coastal range and saw a belt of stratus along the shore and, beyond that, the ocean, a limitless expanse of white-streaked steel. At its far edge, the lemon glare known as iceblink signaled pack ice over the horizon, gliding down from the north with the approach of winter.

  The coast here consisted of a chain of long, low barrier islands separated from the mainland by shallow, brackish lagoons. The village of Cape Goodwin lay on one such island, a few miles north of the protruding headland for which it was named. Under the stratus, a quartering surf curled into pearly breakers before splashing onto the gravel beach.

  “There it is,” McAllister said. “It’s famous for—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Active said. “Twins, polar bears, and schizophrenia.”

  Active studied the village as they crossed Goodwin Lagoon. A line of wooden houses straggled along the shore, dominated at one end by a cluster of fuel-storage tanks and at the other by the school, which, as in most villages, towered above everything else. The runway started just beyond the fuel tanks, and the village cemetery lay between it and the lagoon.

  McAllister crossed the beach a quarter-mile from the village and rolled right to line up with the runway.

  “Wait a minute,” Active said suddenly. “Let’s take a look at that boat.”

  McAllister dropped a wing and rolled into a circle around the blue dory with the white outboard beached a few hundred yards down the shore from the village. “Hey,” the pilot said, “tha
t’s Roland Miller’s boat. What’s he doing up here?” He glanced at Active. “Looks like it’s swamping.”

  McAllister was right. The surf was coming over the transom, and the dory was half-full of water and sand. “Wonder why he left it there,” the guide said. “Normally they pull into the lagoon and land on the back side of the island.”

  Active looked up the beach toward the village. A dozen or so boats were beached or riding at anchor in the sheltered waters of the lagoon. A man was loading supplies into one from a small trailer attached to a four-wheeler, and another boat was making its way across the lagoon toward the mouth of the Goodwin River. A few yards in from the lagoon, the frames of several of the whale boats known as umiaqs rested upside-down on driftwood platforms.

  Active refocused on the blue dory. “Let’s make a couple more circles. Maybe it capsized and washed ashore.”

  “I don’t think so,” McAllister said. “See those?”

  He pointed. A faint string of tracks dimpled the silken sand near the water before fading out in the loose gravel higher up the beach. “Probably just quit on him,” McAllister said.

  “Yeah, probably,” Active said.

  McAllister shot him a glance. “The Troopers interested in abandoned boats these days?”

  “Only if somebody gets hurt.”

  McAllister glanced at him again,

  McAllister glanced at him again, then shrugged and pointed the Cessna at the runway once more. Like every bush pilot Active had ever ridden with, McAllister made a low pass to check the airstrip before landing.

  “Shit,” he muttered over the intercom.

  “What?” Active said.

  McAllister pointed down. “Look at that. This is bad.”

  Active stared out at what was left of the Cape Goodwin airport. The system of lagoons and barrier islands was great country for nomadic hunters who subsisted on seals, whales, and seabirds, but it was implacably hostile to any effort to raise a permanent settlement. Unlike the somewhat sheltered recess of Chukchi Bay, the coast here was defenseless against the late summer storms that boiled up from the Bering Sea to the southwest. The one that had hit the village a few weeks earlier had chewed a huge chunk out of the island at the north end of the runway. The surviving section of the strip was appallingly short and appeared to be covered with some kind of steel matting that undulated with the natural contours of the beach and hung, twisted, over the gap left by the storm. Getting down would be like landing on an aircraft carrier, but without the tailhook.

  “We don’t have to do this,” Active said as the Cessna shot past the end of the strip and McAllister rolled into a turn over the lagoon.

  “Shit,” the pilot said. “I don’t have time to take you back to Chukchi. And I ain’t taking you to camp.”

  “What about landing on the beach? I can walk in.”

  “Too soft,” McAllister said. “We’d nose over. That’s why they have the matting. Brace yourself.”

  McAllister made a circle and came up the beach again, low and slow. He chopped the engine over the fuel tanks, banged the plane onto the runway, and rode it like a bronco as it bucked over the heaves in the steel matting. Active found himself jamming his feet against the floorboards in an unconscious effort to help with the brakes as the Cessna rolled and pitched toward the newly carved dropoff into the Chukchi Sea. Active had his seat belt off and his mind on swimming when McAllister finally got them stopped a few yards from the water.

  Both were silent for a time.

  “Shit,” McAllister said finally. He revved the engine and pivoted the plane on its left main gear to point back up the runway.

  “Can you get off again?”

  McAllister chewed his lip, peered through the windshield at the strip, said something under his breath, then spoke up: “Without your weight, yeah. I think.”

  He taxied slowly past the cemetery, marked by a man-high arch formed of two bowhead jawbones, to the start of the runway. “Here ya go,” he said, not killing the engine. “Have a nice visit.”

  Active grabbed his pack, popped the door open, and was about to step into the propwash when he realized he didn’t know which of the rundown houses in the little village was occupied by Ruthie or by her grandmother. Or, for that matter, by Jim Silver’s widow, Jenny, who supposedly had flown home to Cape Goodwin the morning after the Rec Center fire.

  He closed the door again. “Know where I can find Ruthie Silver?”

  McAllister studied him a moment. “Why d’you want her?”

  “Troo—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, Trooper business,” McAllister said. “I think she stays with her grandmother down by the school.” He pointed along the gravel street that rambled through the center of the village, generally paralleling the beach. “That way.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  MCALLISTER’S ENGINE ROARED, AND the plane quivered in place as the pilot held it with the brakes and let the RPMs build. Then he let go, and Active watched the plane bounce down the matting and stagger into the air just before the dropoff into the sea.

  Feeling suddenly grateful that Cowboy Decker would be picking him up in a floatplane from the lagoon, Active turned and started down the street, the knee-length breakup boots that were part of his uniform from spring to freezeup sinking into the beach gravel.

  From ground level, Cape Goodwin looked deserted. No four-wheelers moving, nobody walking. Just the wind off the ocean, a fine rain stinging his face, and a skein of seagulls riding the updrafts along the tideline. No sign of polar bears, but then, none was to be expected until the sea ice closed in for the winter and brought the animals ashore.

  Well, the kids would already be in class; most of the men were probably upriver hunting, like the Village Public Safety Officer; and it was early enough in the day that everyone else, operating on village time, was probably still in bed.

  He made his way to the school and saw several houses that could be Ruthie’s grandmother’s place, but none that seemed likelier than another. From the corner of his eye, he sensed a flicker of motion at a window as he passed a cabin that looked to have been built of driftwood logs. He turned to catch a glimpse of a heavy-jawed oval face, but it vanished before he could raise a hand to wave or turn toward the door to knock.

  He was about to go into the school and ask for directions when he heard the stutter of a four-wheeler near the shore of the lagoon. He watched as the driver rode it up the slope to the street and parked beside a house. The man pocketed the key and started back the way he had come, avoiding eye contact all the while.

  He could hardly have missed an Alaska State Trooper in uniform on the village’s only street. “Excuse me,” Active shouted.

  The man accelerated his pace toward the lagoon, Active now recognizing him from his clothing as the man who had been loading his boat as they circled to land. Active trotted down the slope to where the man was untying the boat, another of the homemade plywood dories favored in the coastal villages. This one wasn’t painted, just covered with a clear varnish that glistened in the rain.

  “Excuse me,” he said again. “I’m Trooper Nathan Active.”

  The man cut him a sideways glance and tossed the rope into the boat without a word.

  “Can you tell me where Ruthie Silver lives?”

  The man was short and mahogany-faced with close-cropped white hair and dark glasses. He wore a raincoat, hip waders, and a baseball cap with “Native Pride” stitched on the crown. He gripped the prow of the boat and heaved, grunting loudly. It didn’t budge. Evidently the tide, such as it was at this latitude, had ebbed since he had beached the boat.

  Active seized a gunwale and heaved too. The dory scraped backward and then was afloat. Active grabbed the prow to keep it from drifting away. The man climbed in.

  “Ruthie Silver?” Active asked again, without much hope.

  “Got a whalebone in front, all right,” the man said, pointing toward the school.

  Active thought he remembered a bowhead vertebra beside
the door of one of the houses near the school.

  “Thanks,” Active said. He decided to press his luck. “There’s a blue dory swamped on the beach down there.” He pointed south. “You know whose it is?”

  The man was at the back of the boat now, squeezing a rubber bulb in the fuel line to prime the engine. “Not me,” he said and yanked the starter cord. The outboard sputtered to life, and he backed the dory away from the beach, then threw the engine into forward and started across the lagoon to the mainland.

  Active trudged through the gravel to the cluster of houses near the school and found the one with a whale vertebra out front. It looked like a huge, three-bladed outboard propeller carved from porous, cream-colored pumice.

  He stepped through the kunnichuk to the inner door, knocked, waited, and knocked again, trying to imagine living on village time. Up till two or three in the morning, sleeping till noon. There were days when it sounded pretty nice. In the Arctic, it was dark all winter and light all summer. The diurnal cycle was pretty much an abstraction, another naluaqmiut invention of marginal utility.

  Finally the door opened to reveal a gray-haired Inupiat woman wearing a tired, kindly face and the lightweight, flower-patterned, all-purpose parka known as an atikluk. She took in his uniform in silence.

  A tiny white dog burst yapping into the room from somewhere in the back of the house and headed for Active’s ankles. The woman bent and scooped him up. “You, Jackie, you shut up now!” She cradled the animal to her chest until he calmed down. At last, he was only a silent bundle of white fur with two glaring, black BB eyes.

  “Arii, this little can’t-grow,” the woman said. “He think he’s great big husky, all right.”

  “I’m Trooper Nathan Active,” he said. “I’m looking for Ruthie Silver.”

  “I’m Blanche Ahvakana,” she said. “That Ruthie, she’s still asleep I think. You don’t need to bother her. She’s too sad, all right.”

  “It’s about her father.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she studied his. “You find out who burn him up yet?”

  “Maybe Ruthie could help us.”