by Stan Jones
"It's my responsibility, aaka. But I promise to submit her for your approval when I find her." He smiled and touched her shoulder.
She was silent, still studying him.
"What is it?"
"Are you careful, Nathan?"
"About what?"
"About, you know." She reached out into the hall, where her parka hung from a hook. She pulled a box from one of its pockets and handed it to him.
"We give these to the kids at school if it seem like they're fooling around," she said.
"Aaka! I don't need these. And if I did I'd get them myself. You don't get them from your mother!"
"You take them," she said. She dropped the condoms into his gym bag and zipped it up. "You don't want baby before you're ready to take care of it, like me."
A few minutes later, he stopped in front of Pauline Generous's tiny log cabin and turned on the flasher. The yard held a dead Datsun pickup and two snowmachines, also apparently long dead. Three stove-oil drums sat by one wall. A fourth rested on a wooden cradle, with a copper tube running into the house.
A little old bowlegged lady in a red calico parka came out and climbed in beside him.
"About time you get here, nalauqmiiyaaq." She glared at him, her eyes huge behind thick-lensed glasses.
He turned off the flasher. "Be nice," he said.
"Hmmph!" she said. He turned the flasher back on, and started toward the Lions Club bingo hall.
"You know Tillie Miller?" Active asked.
"Everybody know Tillie. I think she's my cousin, maybe."
"You think she's mental?"
"Everybody think she's mental," Pauline said. "I think maybe she just get mean from can't hear so long and drink so much. Lonesome, probably."
"You think I should listen to what she says?"
"You should always listen to what old lady says, nalauqmiiyaaq. How you like Chukchi?"
CHAPTER 4
Thursday Morning, Katy Creek
ACTIVE STOPPED THE TROOPER Suburban in front of Cowboy Decker's house on Second Street. He knocked at the door and waited, grateful for the overnight improvement in the weather.
Morning was breaking sharp and cold under a flint blue sky. It was twelve below, according to KSNO, but the west wind had eased off and consequently it felt warmer than yesterday. Still, twelve below was twelve below. He knocked again. Another wait, and the pilot came to the door barefoot, in Levi's and a T-shirt.
"Hiya, Nate," Decker said in his loud confident bray. "Come on in. What time is it, anyway?"
"A little before eight, like I said on the phone last night," Active said. "You gotta get off Village Standard Time, Cowboy."
Decker pulled back the curtain from a small window over the kitchen sink and peered out. The rising sun bathed his face, picking out silver pinpoints here and there in the morning stubble.
"Damn fine flying weather!" He turned back to Active. "What time's your meeting with the city council anyway?"
"Three o'clock."
"Geez, what's the rush? It's only about an hour and a half to Nuliakuk, even in the Super Cub. You want to take the Cessna, it's under an hour."
"No, no, I need to go by Katy Creek on the way. Remember?"
Decker shrugged again. "It's your nickel."
The pilot made a cup of instant coffee under the hot-water tap, stood over the sink, and ate two slices of pizza from the refrigerator. There was no sign of Decker's wife, who taught fifth grade at Chukchi Elementary. Active guessed she had already left for school.
Decker finished dressing, grabbed his flight case from the floor by the door, and they set out for the airport.
Cowboy's real name was Bill. His uniform was a leather bomber jacket, steel-frame glasses, and a baseball cap. When he wasn't flying or eating, he kept a cigarette clamped between strong yellow teeth. He was about forty-five, Active guessed.
"Too bad about Daniel Clinton's boy killing himself, huh?" he asked as the Suburban bounced along.
"Yeah," Active said. "Too bad."
"I heard it was his turn, though," Decker said. "The Eskimos say there's a curse on the family."
"You believe that, Cowboy?"
"I don't believe in anything but having plenty of airspeed, altitude, and avgas," Decker said. He laughed hoarsely at his own Bush-pilot humor.
They reached the airport. Active stopped the Suburban beside Lienhofer Aviation's red-and-white Super Cub.
Decker took off the bomber jacket, pulled a pair of insulated coveralls from the back of the Super Cub, and worked them on over his Levi's and T-shirt. They were stained with oil and gave off a sharp tang of avgas. He put the bomber jacket back on, over the coveralls.
Decker slipped his flight case under the front seat, then untied the Super Cub. He removed the insulated engine cover, pulled a catalytic preheater from the engine compartment, snuffed it, and stowed both behind the passenger seat. He checked the gas tanks and the oil, and said, "I think it'll probably fly."
Active put his evidence kit in back of the passenger seat, on top of Decker's stuff, then crawled in. The uncomfortable little Bush plane was so narrow that his seat was behind the pilot's, as if they were astraddle the same horse. They put on headsets so they could talk over the roar and rattle of the Super Cub in flight.
Decker cranked up and they taxied out to the runway. The kite-like craft rolled only three hundred feet before lifting off into the cold air.
Decker turned out to the north and climbed to cross the bay toward Katy Creek. The bay's protected waters were frozen, but, off to the west toward Siberia, the ocean was still open, and perfectly calm in the morning air. From the north shore of the bay, the coastline ran northwest until it vanished into blue gauze where sky and sea merged.
Due north, over the tops of the Sulana Hills, Active could see the jade coils of the Katonak River, newly frost-edged, snaking away into the white folds of the Brooks Range.
He wasn't sure when Chukchi bothered him more. Yesterday, it had been close and gray and mean, but at least it had seemed easy then to stick with his plan to stay uninvolved and get out at the first opportunity. Today, the Arctic opened itself before him, blue and limitless and intoxicating, and he felt himself being pulled in. It was the same sensation of weightless vertigo he felt when he contemplated the lips and eyes of Lucy Generous.
At the north shore of the bay, he asked Decker to drop down and head for Aaron Stone's camp on Katy Creek.
"What are we looking for?" Decker asked through the intercom, lowering the plane's nose.
"Aaron Stone," Active said. "He went to his camp for a few days and didn't come back on time. His wife, Clara, asked me to check on him. On my way to Nuliakuk."
The country crawled past below. Countless small lakes, one band of seven caribou, scattered singles and pairs. The stunted spruces that passed for trees around Chukchi cast long spears of blue shadow across the tundra in the slanting light of the Arctic sun.
A cabin here and there, a few snowgo tracks, but no sign of a man on a snowmachine, or on foot. It was still too soon after the thaw for most people to cross the ice from Chukchi. And it was too early in the winter for many workers at the Gray Wolf to have started using their snowgos, as Aaron Stone did, to travel back and forth.
Decker followed the shoreline to the mouth of Katy Creek, then flew upstream to buzz Aaron's cabin. Three frozen caribou carcasses lay beside it, but there was no snowmachine out front, no smoke from the chimney.
Decker circled, lined up on a barren stretch of creek bank near the cabin, and set the Super Cub down. The Bush plane's fat tundra tires easily negotiated the inch or two of new snow on top of the hard-frozen older snow and tundra beneath.
The Super Cub bounced to a stop and they got out. Decker pulled the engine cover from behind the passenger seat and draped it over the nose of the plane to keep it from cooling down in the cold air.
They walked to the cabin, and found the door padlocked. "You got a key?" Decker asked.
"No," Acti
ve said, peering in through a window. "We can just break it."
"Hang on," Decker said. He walked around the cabin, looking up into the trees. "Here we go," he said. "These guys always leave one around somewhere." He reached up into the crotch of a spruce and retrieved a small silver key. Active, feeling slightly shown-up, said nothing.
Aaron's cabin measured twelve feet by sixteen, three sheets of plywood by four, with silver-backed fiberglass insulation be-tween the studs. An oil stove squatted in a back corner, with bunk beds lining the nearest walk. To the left of the door, wooden Blazo crates had been nailed together for shelves, with a Blazo-burning camp stove sitting on top. In the middle of the cabin stood a card table with three folding chairs and a square five-gallon can of Blazo fuel for seats.
On the card table, they found some dried salmon, half a bowl of frozen chili, and a box of pilot bread, along with a half-empty Jack Daniel's bottle and a carton of Lucky Strikes. On one of the folding chairs lay an empty cardboard box that had once held twenty cartridges for a .308 Winchester rifle. A trashbox beside the shelves held, among other things, another Jack Daniel's bottle, this one empty.
"You been in here before?" Active asked.
"Lots of times," Decker said. He lit a cigarette.
"Anything look different?"
"Nah, it's all about the same," Decker said. "I don't ever remember seeing any liquor up here before, but I never really looked." He kicked the trashbox. The Jack Daniel's bottle rattled against a chili can.
Active surveyed the rest of the cabin. A sleeping bag was unrolled on one of the bunks, a pillow at the open end suggesting it had been slept in at least one night. Spare clothes and some camping gear were jumbled on another bunk, and an old shotgun leaned in a corner. There was no rifle.
They went back outside. Snowmachine and sled tracks, dimly visible under the most recent layer of snow, radiated from the camp in various directions. There was no way of knowing which to follow, even if following one from the air had been possible.
"What do you want to do, Nate?" Decker asked around his cigarette.
"Let's look for him," Active said. "He didn't take much gear, so he wasn't planning to go far, maybe just out on his trapline."
The pilot dropped his cigarette in the snow and climbed into the plane. Active stood uncertainly by the wing.
"Get in," Decker said.
Active shook his head. "Hold it a minute." He dug into his evidence kit for plastic bags, went back into the cabin, and slipped one down over the Jack Daniel's bottle on the table without touching it. He worked a ballpoint pen into the mouth of the bottle in the trashbox and dropped it into another plastic bag.
Then, quickly but thoroughly, he searched the cabin, looking in the duffel on the bunks, the shelves in the cooking area, every place in the cabin that might hold—what? He didn't know, but he didn't find it.
He left the cabin, walked to the Super Cub, and stowed the bottles behind his seat. He turned to find Decker watching, a quizzical expression on his face. Active shrugged. "Can't hurt," he said.
Active climbed in and they took off. Decker spiraled the plane outward from Aaron's cabin, each loop a half-mile from the last. Active scanned the tundra to the plane's left, and Decker searched to the right. Thirty minutes passed, then an hour. They saw nothing of a snowmachine or a man on foot or a makeshift camp or any sign of life at the other cabins in the area.
"Nate, if we don't head for Nuliakuk soon we'll have to go back to Chukchi for more gas," Decker said.
"If we don't go to Nuliakuk, how long can we keep searching here?" Active asked.
"Hour and a half, two hours," Decker answered.
"Keep searching," Active said.
But the search lasted only another ten minutes.
"Hey, Cowboy, come around again," Active said as they passed over a stand of spruces on a little knoll at the end of a kidney-shaped lake.
"You see something?"
"Maybe," Active said. "Down in the trees there."
Decker circled, slowed the Super Cub to sixty miles per hour, and floated toward the grove, fifty feet above the tree-tops. Active directed the pilot right and left so that they passed over the thing in the spruces. Pretty clearly, Active saw a dogsled, empty except for a Blazo box lashed to the stanchions at the rear. He could just see the back of the snowgo the sled was hitched to, and the suggestion of a large T-shaped object on the seat of the machine.
"Can we land?" Active asked.
"I'll have a look at the lake," Cowboy told the trooper in the back seat. "Kinda touchy this time of year, especially with the thaw. Ice might still be kinda thin."
The wind had broomed the snow on the lake into long parallel dunes. He lined up on a strip of bare ice between two dunes and flew down it at fifty-five, as slow as you could trust a Super Cub to fly.
The ice looked good. Gray-green, with a few cracks web-bing the surface. Not black and perfect like ice was when it was new and thin and deadly. Not beautiful, as the Eskimos called the ice that would kill you.
He came around again and bounced the Super Cub's wheels off the surface once, twice. He circled and made another pass at fifty-five, studying the ice. It showed no sign his wheels had ever touched it. No cracks, no dark spots from water welling up to signal he'd broken through.
"Let's give 'er a shot," he said through the intercom. He circled, lined up on the bare streak again, and gently set the plane onto it. The ice felt good. Solid, no sign of unusual drag, as there would be if the wheels were breaking through.
Still, it didn't hurt to be careful. He kept some throttle on and taxied rapidly along the bare streak until he reached the end of the lake, where he drove the main wheels up onto shore. "No substitute for solid ground," he told the trooper. He pulled a knob on the control panel and the engine coughed to a stop.
The lake and woods were silent and deserted, except for a raven that flapped in to watch from the top of a dead spruce. "Tularuk," it called.
Active got his evidence kit from behind the passenger seat, Decker threw the cover over the plane's nose to keep the engine warm, and they walked to the clump of trees on the snowmachine trail, the snow crunching deafeningly under their boots. Decker took one look, paled, and turned away.
"That him?" Active asked the pilot's neck and shoulders.
"Yeah, it's Aaron," Decker said.
Aaron Stone lay on his back on the seat of the snowgo, arms flung out as if starting a swan dive into the lake of blue sky above. He wore a parka with a fur ruff on the hood, a baseball cap, and a green Refrigiwear snowmachine suit. His leather-and-rubber Sorel boots still rested on the running boards of the Yamaha. His eyes were covered by mirror sunglasses; his waxen face looked surprised under a light covering of snow. There was a small hole in his throat and a lot of blood on the snowmachine seat under his neck. There was so much blood it had dribbled off and puddled on the running boards around his Sorels.
A .308-caliber semiautomatic Winchester hunting rifle with a telescopic sight lay beside the trail just ahead of Aaron's Yamaha. Across the machine's skis lay a bare spruce branch, with a fork at the tip. It appeared that Aaron had stopped in the spruce copse, propped the stock of the rifle on the Yamaha's windshield, put the muzzle to his throat, and pushed the trigger with the spruce branch. He had then fallen backward on the seat, while rifle and spruce branch were thrown forward by the recoil.
Active studied the trail before and behind the Yamaha, and the snow beside it.
"Two suicides in one week," Decker said from behind him. "That's kinda weird, even for Chukchi. Must be something in the water, huh?"
Active turned and saw that the pilot had recovered his normal color and some of his normal bravado.
"Here's something else that's weird," Active said. "Look at the trail here. Stay back, stay back, just look from where you are. You see those old snowmachine tracks under the new snow? Now look around Aaron's snowgo. You see any boot tracks under the snow?"
"No," Decker said. "So?"
>
"Wouldn't a man want to stand beside his snowgo a few minutes and think it over before he killed himself? Maybe take a leak, have a last smoke? And see that spruce branch on the Yamaha's skis there? He probably used it to push the trigger, right?"
Decker nodded.
"Well, look at this tree." Active pointed at the only spruce within reach of the Yamaha's seat. "See, no sign a branch was broken off. So where did he get it?"
"He could have pulled it off another tree back down the trail," Cowboy said. "Maybe that's where he took his last leak and had his last smoke."
"Of course he could," Active said. "But why wouldn't he just shoot himself there? Why would he bring it here?"
"You think somebody killed him and made it look like he did it himself?"
Active shrugged.
Decker pulled out a cigarette and lit up. "That kind of stuff never happens around here, Nate. Somebody gets drunk, gets mad, blasts his woman or his best friend, then turns himself in. Nobody in Chukchi ever plans anything more complicated than a hunting trip."
Active was silent as they surveyed the scene again. "Yeah, you're probably right, Cowboy. It's probably just another suicide. Can you put him in the Super Cub?"
"Not with you, and probably not at all the way he's frozen with his arms spread out," Decker said. "We need the Cessna."
"Well, go get it," Active said. "Call Evelyn from the airport and tell her to set up an autopsy. And get her to call Mayor Crane and let him know I won't make his city council meeting."
"You're not coming?" Decker said. "You're going to stay here by yourself with the . . . with Aaron? What if something happens? What if the 206 is out on a trip and I don't get back tonight?"
"I'll walk to a cabin, or drive Aaron's Yamaha." Active pulled a Nikon from his evidence kit. "I've got a couple hours of work here and I want to get it done before dark. If I leave now, somebody else may come down the trail here and disturb the scene. Or our friend there might decide to have a snack." He pointed at the raven in the dead spruce.
The bird launched itself from the top of the tree and circled them. "Tularuk," it chuckled twice. Then it winged away. Decker shuddered.
