Village of the Ghost Bears Read Online Free PDF Page B

the four-wheelers. “Maybe a couple of these belong to Jack and Enos.”
    Carnaby shook his head. “Nope, they were on Jack’s Honda, and they drove it to the emergency room. That’s how we got the alarm. The ER called 9–1–1.”
    “How about Cammie? Did one of these belong to her?”
    “No telling till we talk to her family,” Carnaby said.
    Active studied the ATVs. “So how do we find out who owns these? They don’t have plates.”
    The captain grimaced. “Nobody registers an ATV around here. We’ll just have to wait for people, family members, to realize somebody never got home last night and come check. We put out the word on Kay-Chuck.”
    Active glanced at the ATVs in the circle. “There’s only three machines now. The other two have already been claimed?”
    Long nodded, flipped open his notebook and showed Active a page with six names on it. Cammie Frankson, Jim Silver, and the two survivors in the hospital were at the top. Below them were Augie Sundown and Rachel Akootchuk, who, Long reported, had been identified when their four-wheelers were claimed.
    “Augie Sundown?” Active said. “Ouch.”
    Long nodded again. “That family.”
    “First Edgar and now Augie,” Active murmured.
    Augie Sundown was—had been, Active corrected himself—the hottest thing ever to come out of high-school basketball in bush Alaska, where the game was a religion, played under street lights or moonlight or the northern lights on iron-hard frozen snow with gloves for protection when it couldn’t be played inside.
    Augie, known as “Mr. Outside” for his ability to score from beyond the three-point line, had played four incendiary seasons for the Chukchi Malamutes, then gone off to the University of Alaska Fairbanks to play for the Nanooks. There he was a starting point guard by the end of his first season, despite the fact that he stood just under five feet, eight inches. He had come home for the summer to teach at a basketball camp sponsored by the city and apparently had ended up at the Rec Center at exactly the wrong moment.
    “Edgar?” Barnes said. “Who’s Edgar?”
    “Augie’s father,” Active said.
    Edgar Sundown had vanished with his brother-in-law Cecil Harris during a seal hunt on the spring sea ice the previous year. The official search had gone on for thirteen days, nonstop, before the Troopers called it off, though volunteers had continued to patrol the ice in skiffs and bush planes till the last floe had melted and the Chukchi Sea rolled unencumbered from Point Hope in the north to the Bering Strait in the south.
    “Wow,” Barnes said after hearing the story from Long and Active. “Living in Fairbanks, I sure as hell knew who Augie Sundown was, but I never heard about his father and the uncle. You never found anything?”
    “Not a trace.” Active said. “They had two snow machines with dogsleds, a kayak—but we never so much as picked up a jerry jug off the beach.”
    “Two older guys, out in the country all their lives, the right gear—everybody kept thinking they could handle anything; they must be camped on the ice somewhere out there, waiting for the weather to lift or somebody to come by, but. . . .” Long fell silent and shook his head.
    “Anyway, this was right before Augie graduated,” Active said.
    “With honors,” Long added.
    “It’s like he had Role Model coded into his DNA,” Active said.
    “First kid from Chukchi ever to get a full-ride sports scholarship anywhere,” Long said. “And then Edgar disappears.”
    “Everybody wondered if Augie would crash,” Active said. “Just hang around town, shoot hoops in the city league—”
    “Get drunk,” Long interjected.
    “He didn’t, obviously,” Barnes said.
    “Not Augie,” Long said.
    “He’s gonna leave a hell of a hole in the Nanooks lineup.” Barnes didn’t seem to notice the outraged stares produced by this remark as he took Long’s notebook with the list of victims.
    “You guys know anybody