Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  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 Chandler. Till then, get lost."

  Lost Patrol

  The Lost Patrol is more stuff of Mountie myth.

  The stuff that goes wrong.

  Among its duties in the Arctic, the Force carried the mail. The mail run from Dawson across the Mackenzie Mountains to Fort McPherson was 475 miles of heartless waste. In December 1910, Inspector Fitzgerald, a former shoe salesman, embarked with constables Kinney, Taylor, and Carter to make the run, taking light provisions for better speed. They traveled up the wrong valley in Wind River country, then floundered about in a wind chill of -100 degrees F. as food ran out.

  The following March, Constable Dempster launched a search. Picking up the trail of empty corned-beef cans, he found an abandoned toboggan, harness, and dog bones. A flag fluttered from a tree on a riverbank, and there Dempster found two bodies. Kinney had starved to death. Taylor had shot himself.

  Skin peeling from frostbite and scurvy, Fitzgerald and Carter had struggled on without food. After Carter died, Fitzgerald crossed his hands on his chest, placed a handkerchief over the constable's face, then prepared for his own end. He wrote his last will with a charred stick, closing it "God Bless AH" and signing his name with "R.N.W.M.P."—Royal North-West Mounted Police—before laying down to die twenty-five miles shy of Fort McPherson.

  The Lost Patrol.

  The heartless north.

  And now Inspector Zinc Chandler had a lost patrol, too.

  Sort of.

  He stood over a desk in the Com Center, straining to make out the break-up on the tape the communications tech played a third time. "Hapless Valley? Can that be it? Play it again, Sam."

  Sam rewound the tape and pushed Play.

  The crisis at Totem Lake was past the point of no return. Weapons having reached the camp, the Mounted was under pressure from right-wing politicians to admit defeat and hand over to the army, which would blast the stronghold back to the Stone Age, or take down the camp themselves to herald the centennial of Almighty Voice. Bean counters were screaming about the cost of waiting it out, money more important to them than police lives. Spiritual leaders had entered the camp to pray with the rebels and counsel them to come out peacefully, which they would or wouldn't, casting the die. The ERT teams at Zulu base were ready to storm the barricades, having ringed the camp with Bison APCs and sharpshooters armed with laser guns positioned up trees. All communications from camp were by cell or radio phones, so the techs in the Com Center used high-end scanners with repeaters on mountaintops to intercept calls far and wide to gather intelligence. And that's how Sam picked up the garbled words from Gunanoot.

  And why he summoned Chandler.

  "Is she de . . ."

  "Katt put up a fight. She will be if you don't . . . another daug . . . dead."

  "Don't hurt her."

  "Come, white man. Fly to ... Lake and
have the pilot drop you . . . He . . . less Valle . . . A river runs . . . on foot. . . won't see me. Any sign of backup, she . . . my land. I hear every sou ..."

  "Enhance it, Sam?"

  "I tried, Inspector. What you don't hear isn't on tape. Bad enough it's from the outer range of the cell site, but there was interference between them and our repeater."

  The Mad Dog entered the room.

  "Dodd didn't make Fort St. James, Zinc. The chief called him back to Gunanoot. Villagers saw him land and pick up DeClercq. Radios are dead and ground radar lost them, but SAR Sat doesn't pick up E.L.T. No crash means in the air and blinding us."

  A military man in plainclothes entered the room.

  "I'm not here," he said.

  "Right," said Chandler. "A plane outside the no-go zone is blinding us. Flying mountain valleys to thwart radar. Impress me with what you have to enforce the air ban."

  "If we were involved—which we're not—we would lock onto all transmissions. Satellite phones and such come in off the bird. The point of transmission can be traced. That's how the Reds got Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev. He made a satellite call from his hideout. The Russians targeted a rocket on the source of the call to cream his ass."

  "Bloodhound?" said Chandler.

  "The military would dog in three ways:

  "Acoustically, we'd insert a ring of ground-based sonars—like sonar buoys for submarines—around Totem Lake. A microphone picks up the sound of an engine and tells you where it is. Works well in the north, where planes are few and far between.

  "Visually, we'd scramble an F-18 with airborne radar. You watch Desert Storm? We use that. Tracks every plane in radar range on a screen. Because it looks down from above, flying low to use mountains as a blind is a joke.

  "Visually, an F-18 would also have forward-looking infrared. It picks up every source of heat around, and what's hotter in this deep freeze than the engine of a plane?"

  A dispatcher entered from a side room.

  "It's going down, Inspector. They need you at Zulu base."

  Outside, the rotors of a Force JetRanger began to whirl.

  As Chandler grabbed his parka and ran to catch the chopper, he called back to the invisible man.

  "Whatever it takes, find that plane and where it sets down in the mountains."

  The sense of isolation reached out and seized him by the throat. When the drone of Dodd's bush plane died away, he knew he'd cut his umbilical cord to the modern world, and except for the radio phone in one pocket and .38 in the other, he could be the first human to cross the land bridge from Asia ten thousand—who knew how many?—years ago.

  He wondered how it got the name Headless Valley. Silent and white, white and silent, the land about him slept under a soft blanket of snow and a hard sheet of ice, rumbling occasionally as it turned over in deep slumber. Across these waves of drifted snow he trudged, trudged, trudged, the muffled shuffle of his snowshoes a lullaby, puffs of powder kicked up to dress him from toe to head in white, the north a ghost town in which he was the only ghost, as he tramped into the valley V squeezed between peaks.

  . . . shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffte ...

  When he stopped to listen, the snow absorbed every sound.

  Ice walls and vertical rock reached high into the sky, crowding him to induce the feeling he was locked in an icebox. The flat light of winter was fading fast, for these were the darkest of the dark days, and before long the pale glow wore itself out. In deep drifts snow is never white, but rather every shade this side of blue. Tramping his way up the valley on the frozen river, he moved along a stark, eerie, shadowless chasm, mile upon mile of banked drifts and ice-encrusted trees before him, soundless as death and deafness except for the faint squeak of shoes on trackless freeze. The bony branches of the maples raised their limbs from the snow like skeletons out of a graveyard. Designed for winter, the Sitka spruce resembled alpine huts, the slopes of their branches sliding off snow before the weight could break them. Smears of spruce spread up the sides of the valley.

  . . .shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffle . . .

  He crossed a line of caribou tracks heading up the mountain. In still weather frigid air settles into the valleys, so wildlife moves up to where it is slightly warmer. Soft, diffused gray gave way to a long period of twilight. The Mountie felt cold infiltrate the edges of his parka. It nipped at his bare ears, so he untied the overhead flaps of his beaver-skin hat, pulling them down the sides of his cheeks to retie the string under his chin.

  Arctic wind began to whistle down the valley V.

  Whhhhooooooooo . . .

  With no shadows and deepening twilight, it became hard to determine what was ahead of his shoes. Did it slope up, down, into a hollow, or was the drift flat? A beaver lodge bulging from the ice sent him sprawling to mitts and knees.

  He moved to the bank of the river, but that was no help, for willow bushes beneath the snow collapsed when he stepped on them. It seemed as if the land itself was booby-trapped.

  The meaning of wind chill was driven home. Every few minutes he had to wipe the back of his mitt across his eyes to keep frosted lashes from freezing together when he blinked.

  . . shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffle . . . shhhhufffle . . .

  The snuff from twilight to darkness stirred primal fear. Into the utter black above rose a winter moon.

  As night tightened around him, the landscape fused.

  Molten moonbeams glistened the way. As he continued shhhhuffling up the silver valley, sparkling ice crystals fell from the trees. Backed by celestial pin pricks, the mountains were dark teeth, and he looked up from the belly of the beast. If he strained, he could hear water flowing and freezing under his feet.

  A howl that shattered the stillness brought him to a halt.

  It was startling in the frozen hush.

  The image that formed in his mind had flaming eyes and flashing fangs.

  More howls joined in, starting on a high note but dropping in tone.

  The mournful calls echoed down the valley.

  This was the tune of year when wolves hunted in a pack.

  The wavering call sent shivers up his spine.

  Oww. Oww. Owwhoo-oo-oo ...

  Loot

  Katt was wrenched back to consciousness by a sharp boom near her head as one of the logs in the cabin wall froze. Was it concussion or a drug that made her brain ache so? She vaguely remembered passing out in front of a totem pole crest of Weeping Woman clutching a grouse caught too late to save her brother from starving, with the One-Horned Goat Who Feasted Men glaring down at her from above.

  Then lights out.

  Lights back on, what she saw was her frigid prison cell, for Katt was gagged and hogtied in a cabin in the woods, lying on her side on a mattress of caribou hides on a hard floor, covered with the smelly furs of three grizzly bears.

  The light was a guttering candle.

  Her eyes darted about.

  The sole door into the cabin was hand-hewn from a huge hollow tree trunk. A thick layer of frost covered the wood. The door opened into a dark and bestial hall lined with the remains of trapped animals: moose hides, and fox pelts, and bear and beaver skins. Feathers from eagles and other raptors stuck from its ceiling, around the hindquarter of a stag butchered, dressed, and hung to age.

  The tallow of the candle was animal fat.

  Lined like troops on parade, the walls of the room were vertical logs two feet thick and chinked with moss and mud against drafts. Leghold traps with steel teeth yawned on wall hooks. Carpeting the rough planks of the floor were more skins, wolf, lynx, wolverine, coyote, and mountain goat. The windows were glass jars cemented together with mortar, blinded outside by snowdrifts up past the frames, and inside by an opaque layer of rime. Through beams above she could see a roof of hand-split shakes, and slung back and forth over the rafters were strips of flesh from the carcass suspended in the hall, strung to dry into jerky.

  The gamey stench gagged her.

>   Slaughterhouse.

  An oil drum on a bed of stones served as a hearth, stone cold now. Against the wall a sled was piled with firewood. The single chair was a hollow log upholstered from elk hides. The kitchen was a shelf cluttered with cans: condensed milk with knife holes punched into its top, a tin-can sugar bowl, and a can filled with knife, fork, and spoon. A soot-black coffeepot was set on the oil drum. A mug nearby filled with its brew had been used again and again.

  The floor heaved open.

  A trapdoor.

  Hung with rattling deer hooves like Nekt's ta-awd-zep fort.

  Breath billowed up from the opening.

  A shadow danced on the wall.

  And Katt nearly died of heart arrest when the head of a wolf emerged.

  A wolf with a hissing propane lamp.

  The wolf head was worn as a hat by Winterman Snow. He was of the Wolf clan in Gunanoot. The naxnox hiding his face was White Man's Mask, a split down the middle for halait transformation. The mask was closed to offer a white man's face, eyes shut in skin as pale as winter snow, tongue sticking out in disrespect between twisted lips. The legs of the wolf skin hung down Snow's chest, over the headhunting blanket worn by Rector Noel in the photo behind Reverend Noel's desk.

  The Winterman gripped a totem pole in his other

  Six skulls harvested from white men stacked one on another up a steel rod.

  The skulls were painted with weird designs.

  Catholic crosses fashioned from erect phalluses in Gitxsan colors.

  Totem crests.

  Owned by Snow.

  And only he could tell the stories behind how they had been obtained.

  From the cellar under the cabin he pulled a wealth of loot. Naxnox hoarded by the rector and never sold to collectors. Loot the reverend inherited from him. Masks and whistles and rattles and drums and gambling sticks. Soul catchers and doctors' wigs . . . and all those wonders of halait.

  Halait here.