THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER a breakfast of oatmeal and dried fish with seal oil and grace, Whyborn pulled Alan’s sled out of the tent and hitched it to Active’s Yamaha. Then he went to the heap of gear near the tent and dug out two ordinary household brooms, along with two pairs of aluminum snowshoes, and threw it all into the sled. He motioned Alan into the basket, stepped onto the runners at the back, and turned to Active.
“Alan and me will be out sweeping. Since you can’t sweep with that shoulder, you could drive the snowgo, ah? Take us out to the trail, bring us back to the tent for lunch, pick us up at night, OK?”
Active nodded and straddled the Yamaha, started it, and drove to a spot Whyborn indicated about fifty yards ahead of Robert Kelly’s Arctic Cat in its trench in the snow. The two men climbed out, strapped on the snowshoes, and grabbed the brooms.
Whyborn looked at Alan Long, who was staring at his broom in mystification.
“You never do this before, ah?”
Alan shook his head.
“Well, when somebody leave a footprint in the snow, it get hard like concrete,” Whyborn said. “Even if it blow over, it’s still under there.”
Whyborn began trampling the crust, breaking it up with the edges of his snowshoes. When he had pulverized an area several yards in diameter, he began sweeping away the broken snow to get at the older layer underneath. Alan watched for a minute, then began sweeping, too.
Suddenly Whyborn stopped and bent down. “Look at this,” he said, as Active and Alan hurried up. He pointed at two faint depressions, almost indiscernible in the field of white. “That’s Robert Kelly, all right. That’s his boot heel and that’s his toe.”
Active knelt beside the track.
“Go ahead,” Whyborn said. “Poke it, you’ll see.”
Active gingerly probed the heel print with a mittened thumb. Whyborn was right. It was hard to the touch, as hard as pavement.
“We have to mark it,” Whyborn said as Active stood up. “Maybe you could bring us some of those willows by the tent.”
Active nodded, drove to the tent on the snowmachine, and went to work in the willow grove again.
When he had a couple dozen of the little trees lying on the snow, he ferried them back to the sled in only two one-armed loads. Snapping off the willows wasn’t hard work, but floundering around in the snow was and he was sweating under his winter gear. He climbed onto the Yamaha and paused for a moment to catch his breath and cool off.
He gazed out at Whyborn and Alan at work with their brooms. The sky was bright and cloudy this morning, maybe ten miles an hour of breeze tumbling down from the summit. A cold enough day and bad enough light, white on white. The two men were the only nonwhite objects in sight. It would have been impossible to guess their size and distance if he hadn’t known. They could have been dolls in the snow at his feet or giants across the pass.
It suddenly seemed preposterous. Tiny men with brooms, following a tiny trail of footprints through the blank expanse of Shaman Pass. He was tempted to call it off then and there, head back to Chukchi on the snowmachines, and wait for Robert Kelly to turn up across the line in Canada, or back home in Caribou Creek. Or for his corpse to be spotted on the tundra by some pilot flying through the pass on a summer day.
But Whyborn, with his quiet Inupiat capacity to do any job that needed doing with any tool available to do it, had already found a track. Active shook his head, started the Yamaha, and headed for that first track with his load of trail markers.
FOR THE next four days, Alan and Whyborn swept their way down the north slope of the pass. Active, his left arm still useless in the sling, did camp, cargo, and chauffeur duty on the Ladies’ Model as the trail of willows crept onward. There were no more mysterious lights or sounds in the night, and he decided his imagination had been working overtime the evening they had arrived.
Cowboy Decker showed up just before twilight on the fourth day and was suitably impressed by the line of willows now stretching nearly five miles. He dropped off gas for the snowmachines, oil for the stove, and several boxes of food that Active hoped included more Oreos. The pilot loaded their trash and empty gas cans into the Beaver and rumbled away to the south.
That night, Whyborn pulled out the cribbage board and cards and shuffled for the first round of the game. “We could use some more caribou, ah?” he said as he dealt onto a sleeping bag. “Maybe we should go catch some tomorrow.”
Alan’s face lit up in one of his buck-toothed grins as he picked up his cards. “Sure, if we find the main herd we could even get some to take back to town with us.”
Active, who was learning the game now, tossed his two discards into the crib and turned up the start card. He started to object, but realized his heart wasn’t in it. The scrawny little spring caribou Alan and Whyborn had brought in the first day hadn’t provided much meat. With Kibbie’s help, they had eaten the best of it already. Only the tough and stringy cuts were left, and they would be gone in a couple more days. After that, they would be down to the canned meat in their supplies. “How far are they?”
“Not too far now,” Whyborn said. “Around where Angatquq River runs into the Katonak, maybe.”
Well, why not? They’d been at it for four days, twelve to fourteen hours at a stretch in the long spring light. A break wouldn’t hurt. Active shrugged and said, “Sure.”
“You could come, too, ah, Nathan?” Whyborn looked at him expectantly.
Active was tempted. It would be good to see the pass and the Katonak Valley up close, from ground level. Find the kind of intimacy you couldn’t get from the air. But he shook his head. “I don’t think so, with this arm.”
The other two nodded and went back to their game.
Over a very late breakfast the next morning, Whyborn suggested it was time to move the camp farther down the pass.
“We should be closer to where we’re working,” he said. “Too much time running back and forth now. Look like a pretty good side canyon up about a half-mile from where we quit yesterday. Maybe you could go look at it today, Nathan. If it’s good, we could move up there tomorrow before we start work, ah?”
Active nodded, happy to have something to fill the day. “Fine by me,” he said.
Whyborn and Alan left the tent and began loading gas and a minimal camping outfit onto Alan’s sled. When the load was bungeed down, they slung their rifles onto their backs, straddled their machines, and pulled away with Kibbie in her usual perch atop the sled, an expression of bliss on her face.
Active looked down the north slope of the pass as the engine sounds faded. A streak of gray-white was just visible on the horizon. Otherwise the day was perfect, blue and white as the one before. Even better: The south wind had died out and it was dead calm this morning.
As he stooped to enter the tent, he realized his injured shoulder was complaining for some reason. Maybe he had slept on it wrong? Then he remembered: He had forgotten to take the hospital’s anti-inflammatories for the past couple of days. He found the bottle in his gear and took two with some of the morning tea.
By the time he finished cleaning up the breakfast mess, the familiar drowsiness from the anti-inflammatories was kicking in. Well, what the heck. A nap before the trek to the new campsite couldn’t hurt. He started to go into the tent, then paused. The sun was so warm and brilliant.
He dragged Whyborn’s sled out of the tent and stretched out on the hickory slats of the basket. He draped his right arm over his eyes to cut down on the light. Lassitude filled him up like hot oil and his muscles melted and then he was back with Cowboy that day they had seen the ptarmigan shadows flying up the pass.
The thought of a creature so at home in its element as to become invisible was more than he could resist, so this time he floated down from the Beaver and became one of the obsidian shadows himself. He sailed without effort past the Angatquq Gorge and over the summit and started down the north side of the pass, the joy of it blazing up and up inside him until he just had to let it out. But it came out as an ordinary human yell, not a ptarmigan cackle, and he awoke to find himself plain old Nathan Active again, not the least bit invisible, lying in Whyborn Sivula’s sled with a cotton-dry mouth and the afterglow of ptarmiganhood fading inside him.
He sat up and looked around. It was cooler now, thin fingers of cloud reaching overhead from the north, a flutter of breeze, also from the north for the first time, plucking at the guard hairs of his parka ruff.
He checked his watch. Past two already, meaning his nap had stretched to two or three hours, not the couple of minutes it had seemed when he was a ptarmigan shadow. He went into the tent, finished the tea, and dug into the food box for some dried fish and Oreos. That didn’t quite do it, so he ate two pieces of fried caribou left over from breakfast and felt ready to explore for a new campsite.
He hitched Whyborn’s dogsled to the Ladies’ Model and followed the line of willows over the series of gentle, terracelike bluffs that led down the north slope of the pass. As he crested the last terrace, a quarter-mile before the end of the willow trail, his eyes were on the cloud bank to the north, now a solid and unpleasant-looking gray-white mass that loomed halfway up the sky, with an awning of thinner, streaky clouds running ahead.
So he was almost on the snowmachine and the man sweeping the snow before he saw them. The man threw down the broom and sprinted for the snowmachine. Active gunned the Yamaha and bounced down the slope, fighting for control with his one good hand. The driver was yanking at the starter cord now as Active stormed across the flat below the bluff and steered the Yamaha straight at the other machine. With a little luck, he would be able to stop squarely in front of it and block the driver.
He saw that he was coming in too fast and reached across his chest to grab for the brake on the left handlebar, but too late. The Ladies’ Model plowed into the other machine head-on. Active pitched over the windshield and into the other driver, and both ended up in the snow, with Active on top.
Active was digging under his parka for the Smith & Wesson and shouting, “State trooper! You’re under arrest!” as the driver struggled to free himself when a huge shape launched itself with a roar from the sled behind the other machine. Active felt the dog hit his injured shoulder, then he was on his back in the snow with jaws clamped on his throat and yellow eyes glaring into his own.
Thanks to the parka hood, zipped all the way up into a snorkel, the dog’s teeth didn’t draw any blood, but the jaws were like a vise on his windpipe and he couldn’t get air.
Finally he worked the Smith & Wesson free and put it up to the dog’s neck and was thumbing off the safety when someone screamed, “Kobuk, let him go! Don’t shoot, Nathan, I’ll stop him! Kobuk, let him go!”
Calvin Maiyumerak fell onto Kobuk’s back and got an arm under the dog’s neck and began jerking. Gradually, the teeth slipped off Active’s throat and finally he was free, fire snakes writhing in the injured shoulder again.
Maiyumerak led the snarling dog over to the dilapidated sled and made him lie down in the basket, then spoke softly into his ear. Active leveled the Smith & Wesson and watched as the dog calmed, the growls subsiding, the yellow eyes softening but never leaving Active.
Finally Maiyumerak straightened and turned to face Active. He was underdressed as usual, his skinny frame protected only by a snowmachine suit, a headband around his ears, and, yes, Active looked twice to be sure, the high-top sneakers.
Maiyumerak opened his mouth, saw the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson pointed at his chest, and raised his hands. “Don’t shoot, Nathan, I surrender.”
Active shook his head in disgust. “That was your light up in the pass the other night, wasn’t it? I wasn’t just seeing things. What the hell are you doing up here?”
“I was caribou hunting and I—” Maiyumerak trailed off as he saw Active eyeing the broom abandoned in the broken snow a few yards behind the dogsled.
“Bullshit. You’ve been trailing us all week and you—you’re after Uncle Frosty.”
Maiyumerak looked over his shoulder at the broom, then back at Active. “Could I show you something?”
Active said nothing and kept the Smith & Wesson on Maiyumerak’s chest.
“Don’t worry, I won’t try anything,” Maiyumerak said. “Look, my gun’s there.” He pointed at the rear of his dogsled, where the stock of his rifle poked out of its scabbard on a rail.
“Let’s go,” Active said.
Maiyumerak led him to the cleared patch and pointed to a pair of oval depressions in the snow. They looked to Active like the toe prints of a pair of mukluks with ugruk-skin bottoms. There was even a fairly clear serrated line where the bottoms were stitched to the caribou uppers. But there was no sign that he could see of matching heel prints behind the toe prints.
Then Maiyumerak pointed to another pair of ovals in the snow a foot or so ahead of the toe prints. These were different. The bottoms were rounded and smooth, with no mark of a seam.
Maiyumerak stepped back and let Active study the tracks. Finally, Active shrugged his incomprehension.
Maiyumerak put the toes of his high-tops in the rear depressions and knelt. His knees fit squarely in the front depressions. He looked up at Active. “Either he stop to pray or he’s real tired, look like.”
“I doubt Robert Kelly would be praying.” Active looked at the empty snowfields around them, imagining Kelly on his knees in the blizzard, ordering himself to keep moving while that voice at the back of his brain told him it wasn’t worth the trouble.
Maiyumerak stood. “I could show you something else up there.” He pointed ahead, at the mouth of a side canyon. Active nodded and they crunched forward, occasionally breaking through the crust. Maiyumerak followed his own snowmachine tracks into the canyon and up the bed of a little creek for a few yards. Finally he stopped and pointed through a fringe of willows. “See, somebody have a camp here.”
Active couldn’t see it at first, but eventually he picked out the silhouettes of several piles of gear under the snow, with blue tarp showing through here and there.
They pushed through the willows. Maiyumerak pulled back the tarps to uncover a snowmachine, several cans of aviation gas, a white wall tent with two-by-fours for the frame, three nylon backpacker tents, a barrel stove, and five waterproof duffel bags labeled A. RIVERS—CHUKCHI.
“Who’s A. Rivers?” Active asked.
“Arnie Rivers,” Maiyumerak said. “Naluaqmiut guide. Fly his hunters up here in the fall time for caribou and sheep, come back in the spring for bear sometimes. I guess he use this for his camp.”
All was silent, except for the sound of Kobuk barking joyously somewhere out front. Probably after a lemming, judging from the tone.
The snow in Arnie Rivers’s camp was pocked with tracks from Maiyumerak’s high-tops. “Did you take anything?”
“I never touch nothing,” Maiyumerak said.
From the looks of the gear under the blue tarps, Maiyumerak was telling the truth. But it still seemed unlikely to Active. “Why not?”
“I never have time.”
“Why not?”
Maiyumerak squinted in reluctance and fished cigarettes and matches out of an inside pocket.
“But you had time to go out there with a broom and interfere with a trooper investigation?”
“I never interfere with nothing.” Maiyumerak lit the cigarette, took a drag, and exhaled. The smoke drifted away on the breeze from the north. “I just want to get Uncle Frosty before they take him back to that museum.”
“Uncle Frosty’s evidence in a homicide. And he belongs to the tribal council.”
Maiyumerak grimaced. “Not if they try put him in a case for tourists to look at.”
“That’s their business,” Active said. “Why did you wait till now? You’ve been watching us all week, right?”
Maiyumerak nodded. “After I hear on Kay-Chuck how Robert Kelly take his grandfather and get away from you up here, then you guys find his sled and snowgo, I start to think he’s probably dead, all right. Maybe I could come up here and find them, maybe at least hide Uncle Frosty before you fellas come back, except how am I going to find them? All Kay-Chuck say is, it happen in Shaman Pass. Didn’t say if it was south side or north side, or even if it was up one of these canyons. Then I see Whyborn and Alan Long take off on their snowgos, all loaded up for a long ride, and I think maybe they’re coming up here. So I follow them and then I watch you fellas every day to see what you will find.”
“You’ve been camping by yourself up in these hills all this time?”
“I got Kobuk for company, all right.”
Active shook his head. “So you’ve been coming down and doing your own search at night?”
Maiyumerak squinted. “I never sweep myself until today. That’s when I see Alan and Whyborn take off to the south, look like they’re going hunting. And you’re asleep on the sled. I come down through this little canyon here and that’s when I find this camp. Seem to me like Robert Kelly was trying to reach this place but he never make it.” Maiyumerak pointed at the nearest trail marker in the line stretching back up the pass. “Robert Kelly and Uncle Frosty must be between here and that last willow, ah?”
Active studied the scene, and Maiyumerak’s logic. “If he had Uncle Frosty with him. Maybe he hid him somewhere back up the trail. Or maybe he missed this place in the storm and walked right past it.”
Maiyumerak was silent, looking along the line of willows. “Could be. But he know this country like his wife’s miluks, from what I hear, and he have to go this way to get to and from Caribou Creek. I think he know about this camp.”
Maiyumerak turned and pointed at the canyon wall. Like the gear, the inuksuk was hard to make out in the snow at first, but Active finally saw it. The little man stood on a ledge about twenty feet above the camp. His bottom half was buried in a drift, but he was mostly free of snow from the waist up. The dark frosted stones of the torso, arms, and head stood out clearly once Active’s eyes focused on them.
Now it was Active’s turn to shrug. “Maybe Robert Kelly put in the inuksuk before Arnie Rivers started camping here.” He turned and looked out at the trail of willows leading down from the pass. Kobuk had stopped barking now, but was still digging furiously in the snow maybe a hundred yards out from the canyon mouth.
Active shook his head at the dog’s boundless, if pointless, energy and turned his attention back to the problem of Calvin Maiyumerak. “I should arrest you for interfering with our investigation. But you’re not worth the paperwork. Take off now, and I’ll forget it.”
Maiyumerak lifted his eyebrows, but didn’t look convinced.
Active pulled the handcuffs off his belt and tapped Maiyumerak’s wrist. “ ‘Take off now’ means, ‘If I see you again before this investigation is complete, you’ll go home wearing these.’ ”
Maiyumerak jerked back. “Arii! They’ll freeze my arms.”
Active lifted his eyebrows and smiled. “Uh-huh. Now get— what the hell is that?”
Even as he said it, Active realized the unearthly howl was coming from Kobuk.
Calvin flicked away his cigarette. “Shit!” he said, and floundered through the snow toward Kobuk, who let out another howl.
Active burst through the willows. Kobuk was on his haunches beside his dig in the snow, his muzzle pointed at the sky. Calvin reached the spot first, looked into the crater, and knelt beside the dog. Active moved up beside him, looked down, and saw a shoulder, clad in a green corduroy parka, in the trench the dog had clawed out in the snow.
“Look like Kobuk find him for us, ah?” Maiyumerak said.
They began clearing away the snow around Robert Kelly. They worked in from the right arm, uncovering his torso, legs, and a frost-glazed face of dark marble, expressionless, the cut still visible over the brow. His arms were folded across his chest, mittened hands clasped as if in prayer.
As they cleared the left shoulder, they could see a blue shadow through the adjacent snow. They kept clearing until they had uncovered something man-shaped and man-sized wrapped in a blue tarp beside Robert Kelly. They stepped back and were silent for a time as the breeze from the north sifted snow onto the plastic.
“That’s Uncle Frosty, ah?” Maiyumerak said finally.
“Has to be,” Active said.
“Can we look?”
“Got a knife?”
Maiyumerak reached inside his snowmachine suit and came out with a big clasp knife. He opened it and passed it to Active.
Active knelt beside the blue bundle, cut away the ropes, and folded back the tarp. Uncle Frosty—Natchiq—was wrapped in caribou fur. Fresh caribou fur from the look and smell of it. Kelly must have removed whatever the Smithsonian had used for wrapping and replaced it with something his grandfather would be more used to.
Only the mummy’s head was visible. Most of the hair was gone, and the skin was wizened and leathery from its long sleep in the cold, dry cave in Shaman Pass and in the Smithsonian basement. The eyes were open and empty, the lips drawn back in that ghastly grin Active remembered from the photograph. But something seemed familiar.
“They kind of look alike, ah?” Maiyumerak said.
Active looked back and forth between the two men and grunted assent. It was true. Natchiq had the same narrow, egg-shaped face as his grandson.
Active replaced Natchiq’s blue tarp, then noticed a gleam from between Kelly’s praying hands. Maiyumerak spotted it, too. “Look like he’s holding something.”
Active fumbled with his one good hand at Kelly’s frozen hands, then gave it up in frustration. “See if you can get it out.”
Maiyumerak knelt and forced Kelly’s hands apart, then pulled out an object wrapped in silver duct tape. “Look like he want us to find it. You want me to cut off the tape?”
Active nodded and Maiyumerak pulled out his knife again and sawed at the wrappings until the object inside was free. Wordless, he passed the Prince Albert can to Active.
Active thumbed up the lid and peered inside. A folded paper was all he could see. He started to pull the mitten and underglove from his right hand to fish it out but thought better of it as the breeze lashed his parka ruff into the corner of his eye.
“Come with me.” He stood and trudged back to the snowmachines, Maiyumerak hurrying along beside him and asking, “What he put in there?”
When they reached the Yamaha, Active knelt and laid the tobacco can on the black Naugahyde of the seat. He looked at Maiyumerak. “I think it’s a note. I want you to take it out and spread it on this seat and hold it down while I read it. And don’t let the wind take it.”
Maiyumerak squinted assent, bared his right hand, and gingerly pulled out the paper. It was a piece of brown grocery bag, Active saw, covered on both sides with penciled block printing. Maiyumerak spread it on the snowmachine seat and held it down as they both read it. “To whoever find me,” it began.
My name is Robert Kelly and this man with me is my grandfather Natchiq the Eskimo Prophet who was kill early days ago by a bad angatquq name Saganiq. My snowmachine break down because it’s shot by that Trooper Active so if you find us it mean we never make it out like I’m afraid will happen, that’s why I write this note. I don’t care what happen to me but please don’t take my grandfather back to Chukchi. They will put him in their museum for naluaqmiut tourists to look at that don’t know anything about him or what really happen early days ago.
After I take my grandfather from that museum in Chukchi, I go back to my camp in Shaman Pass, get ready to take him over to Canada where he was going when Saganiq kill him. That’s when I hear Victor Solomon on Kay-Chuck, talk about how he knows who do it and they will put him in jail and my grandfather will still go in glass case for naluaqmiut tourists to look at. I never know he thinks Calvin Maiyumerak did it, so I think he’s talk about me. That’s when I decide to leave my grandfather at my camp and go talk to Victor, see if he will make a deal. I ride down to Chukchi again and ask some old lady on the street, where is Victor? She tell me he’s at his sheefish camp so I ride out there and he come out of his tent when I drive up. He look pretty surprised when I show him his grandfather’s harpoon and owl amulet and tell him who I am. Then he say, what I want?
I tell him it’s time for our families to give up old fight, now it’s modern times. I say, he can have Saganiq’s things, put them on display in museum, I’ll take my grandfather to Canada like he always want, then he will drop the case and it will be over. No more problems for our families.
Victor take that harpoon and the amulet, all right, but then he say he’ll tell police about me anyway. He’ll find my grandfather and put him on display in the museum and the police will put me in jail. My grandfather and me, we’ll both be in cages, that’s what Victor say.
That’s when I think I’ll just try to get away, go back to get my grandfather and hide him somewhere in Canada before police can catch me, hope Victor never find him. But Victor, he try stop me when I start to leave, hit my eye with his grandfather’s harpoon.
So I grab that harpoon away and all of a sudden something tell me to stab him with it. I do it and Victor fall down in sheefish hole and seem like he’s dead already when he hit the ice. I never mean to kill him but when he’s dead, I’m not sorry. That’s why I leave the harpoon and amulet behind, that way maybe if a few old people can still remember the stories about my grandfather and Saganiq, they will know what happen when they hear about how Victor is kill. I even put Saganiq’s amulet in Victor’s mouth, let him eat his grandfather’s kikituq.
I know I’m bad man now, even if I never mean to do what happen. All my life, I try live new way. Go to school, get job, vote, pay naluaqmiut taxes. But when I’m out there on the ice with Victor, old-time Eskimo way seem right to me.
But my grandfather was a good man, never kill anyone or do any other bad thing all his life, try help them Eskimos at that time get ready for naluaqmiuts to come with their new ways. So that is why I ask you, if you find us, please never take my grandfather back to Chukchi.
And please call my daughters Louise Oomittuk in Point Hope and GeriAnne Carson in Barrow, tell them I’m found and that I loved them, and that I was not a bad man, except this one time.
Active folded the note, tucked it inside his parka, and dropped his sunglasses back over his eyes. “Well, I guess we know what he was doing that extra day,” he muttered to himself.
“What?” Maiyumerak said.
“Doesn’t matter.” Active shook his head. “Let’s get them back to camp. Cowboy can haul them out to Chukchi in the Beaver.”
Maiyumerak didn’t move. “Both of them?”
Active nodded, steeling himself against it.
“We could leave Uncle Frosty here like Robert Kelly say, ah? You got your man.” He pointed at the trench where Robert Kelly lay beside his grandfather a few yards away.
Active shook his head. “Uncle Frosty is museum property and he’s evidence in Alan’s burglary case and my homicide. He has to go back.”
“Alan don’t have to know. I could take off with Uncle Frosty and hide him somewhere, and you could say we only found Robert.”
Active pulled off his sunglasses and studied his reflection in Maiyumerak’s mirrors.
Maiyumerak pulled them off and looked Active in the eye. “Please, Nathan?”
Active looked back at Arnie Rivers’s hunting camp and the canyon behind it, then walked over to the trench.
“You don’t need him for your case, now,” Maiyumerak persisted. “And you’re Inupiat. You don’t want him in that museum for naluaqmiut tourists to look at. He belong out here.”
Active looked at the pair in the snow. “It’s not . . .”
Kobuk started barking again, his muzzle pointed south up the pass. They looked that way and at first saw nothing, heard nothing. Then Active picked up the distant hum of a snowmachine engine and saw a black speck moving down the slope.
Maiyumerak watched tensely until the rider was close enough to recognize. Then his shoulders sagged. “Too late now, anyway. That Alan Long would never do it.”
Alan pulled in a few minutes later and shut off his Ski-Doo, staring in surprise at Maiyumerak. He walked over to the pit without a word, his eyes taking in Robert Kelly and the bundle beside him.
“Is that Uncle Frosty?” he asked, looking at Active.
Active nodded.
“Good.” Alan stepped into the pit and pulled back the tarp for a look, then gave a satisfied nod. “Jim Silver never thought I’d get him back. Now we can close our burglary with the museum’s property back where it belongs.”
Active and Maiyumerak shot each other a quick glance, rolling their eyes. Active pulled the piece of grocery bag from his parka. “We can close the murder of Victor Solomon, too. Kelly left behind a note saying he did it.”
“Really?” Long said. He took the note and read it over. “This is excellent. Damned fine police work, Active.”
Active exchanged another eye roll with Maiyumerak.
Long turned to Maiyumerak. “What are you doing here, Calvin? Did you help Trooper Active find these guys?”
“Actually, it was Kobuk who found them,” Active said.
“Smart dog,” Alan said. He stepped out of the pit and, with Calvin, loaded grandfather and grandson onto the sled behind Active’s Yamaha.
Active drove the Yamaha to camp with Alan and Calvin riding ahead on their own machines. When Active reached the tent, he saw four field-dressed caribou stacked in the snow, the purple-brown flesh already glazed with frost.
The three other men were huddled in front of the tent, Calvin pointing at the cloud mass to the north and talking seriously to Alan and Whyborn.
“Calvin and Whyborn think we ought to get out of here,” Alan said as Active walked up.
Calvin nodded and waved at the north again, in the direction of the clouds and breeze. “Storm coming. I heard it’s real bad up here when it come from north side. We should go.”
Active frowned. “Go where?”
“Not so bad on south side,” Whyborn said.
Active shrugged. “Yeah, OK.”