A rabbit’s foot. A talisman. An answer, I hoped.
If Homza came through on his promise, I’d be transferred off base — suspended from the investigation.
You’ll be alone, General Homza had warned me.
Well, I was already alone. I was more alone than I’d known possible.
Watching Hess drive off, I spoke softly, out loud, to thin air, to whoever had killed her. Who, I now believed, had wiped out Clay Qaqulik and the Harmon family, and then eight others in town.
“Come and get me,” I said.
SIXTEEN
The first quarantine death occurred three days later. It was not from rabies.
Whynot Francis, hunter, father of three, whaling captain, stood twelve feet beneath the earth in his ice cellar, behind his one-story Barrow home, that morning, enraged at the soldiers who had sealed off the town; at the growing fear, at the lines of panic-stricken people flooding the hospital, coming in with any symptom at all; normal coughs, normal aches, normal fevers, imaginary pains. Everyone waiting, holding their breath, waiting for something terrible to occur.
They will not keep me here, he thought.
Whynot was a stocky, balding, pigeon-toed man, plain faced, with a bowlegged walk. He had a masters degree in geology from the University of California, and worked for the Iñupiat-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, advising the board on which tribal land could be leased to outsiders, which should be retained.
Whynot took an annual spring trip each year to Philadelphia, where his college-age daughter was an English major at Penn. His wife was an anthropologist, who studied the psychology of nonnative scientists who came to the Arctic.
That morning Whynot considered the hacked-off chunks of raw seal, musk ox, and caribou around him — and a diminishing supply of bowhead. It not only fed his family and in-laws, much of it went to the old folks’ home, the Presbyterian church, and to Uncle Glenn and Aunt Flo, after Glenn broke his leg in July.
There was not enough food. Whynot’s anger crested.
“We’re going out. To hell with the soldiers,” he called up to the four faces peering down at him through the wooden trapdoor opening. Above that was thick fog.
The cellar was fifteen by ten feet. Its permafrost walls gleamed with ice. Permafrost went down eight hundred feet in Barrow. Many homes had these cellars. Whynot’s meat lay in piles, not neatly cut as in a butcher shop, but in hacked-off chunks, ribs rimed with frozen blood, white bones protruding, ice crystals coating it, nature’s freezer burn.
Whynot climbed up the aluminum ladder. Up top waited his two favorite cousins, Lewis and Aqpayuk, his brother-in-law, Edward, and his best boyhood pal, Walter Aiken, who had played tight end for the Barrow Whalers state champ high school football team when Whynot was quarterback.
Whynot told the others, “I served my country in Iraq. I fought for the United States. These soldiers have no right to keep us here.”
Three of them nodded agreement but Edward looked nervous. He was a shy, heavyset, kind man whose bad eyesight required the use of thick-lensed glasses. He tended to sweat when nervous, and he was sweating now. He was a reliable and highly efficient crew member.
Edward said, doubtfully, “That general said the Coast Guard will stop boats from going out.”
“We’ll go the long way around. The ships won’t see us in the fog.”
Whynot kissed his wife, Violet, good-bye and made sure his eighteen-foot-long powerboat was secured in its hauler to his Durango. He loaded the whaling dart gun, harpoon, and whale bombs. The crew piled in and they bumped through semi-deserted streets toward the beach. Normally small boats were launched from a protected point, a small cove north of the old Navy base. But the road was blocked, so Whynot figured he’d just back the rig up in town, onto the black beach.
Almost all the soldiers were out at the barricades. So no soldiers spotted the truck hauling the boat.
Bowheads were enormous compared to the small aluminum outboard boats. Normally this time of year, scouting crews would go out, range around as far as thirty miles away, and report back to Barrow by radio. When the migration began, all the other crews would go out, too.
But all radio reception was jammed just now. Whynot knew that if he got lucky today, if he spotted whales, his crew would be alone.
The whales were much, much bigger than the little boats. Normally several boats would haul a floating carcass home. Whynot’s elders had told him to go for the young ones, as they are plumper. Bowheads could live for over two hundred years. Some had been harvested with harpoons in their hides dating from President Andrew Jackson’s day.
“Cold,” Whynot told Edward and Aqpayuk, in the cab with him, as he backed onto the beach. “I haven’t felt cold like this, this time of year, ever.”
“The sea will freeze soon,” said Aqpayuk, a backhoe driver.
“The whales must be coming,” said Edward.
“If this cold settles in for a few more days, soon we can ride our snowmobiles away, around the soldiers.”
Edward said, as they backed the boat into the water, “The general said the quarantine might end soon.” Meaning, Let’s wait and not go out today.
“No! The ocean will be solid by then. No hunt!”
Whynot’s friend Walter guffawed from the cramped backseat of the extended cab. He was a good spotter, an alcoholic who sometimes disappeared for weeks on Nome’s Front Street, its row of bars. He’d fly off. Later, someone would get a phone call. Someone else would go fetch Walter, and bring the sick man home.
“Once the whales pass, they are gone,” he said.
Edward kept at it, as they bounced off in a thick fog. “The general said the Coast Guard has a chopper, snipers.”
But any reference to threats hardened resolve. Lewis, a teacher at the high school, growled, “The Whaling Commission. The duck in.”
These were references to other times that outsiders had imposed their will on Barrow. The International Whaling Commission, which regulated global whale hunting, had ordered it all to stop in the 1970s, when scientists said the species was on the edge of extinction.
“Only six hundred left, they said,” Lewis said. “We said there were more. The commission said we were wrong. Turned out there were thousands of bowheads. The ban was lifted. If we would have gone along, hunting would have stopped.”
Walter agreed. “And the duck in. Those federals said we couldn’t hunt ducks. Too many ducks shot down south, by sport hunters. We didn’t listen. We eat those ducks. We killed what we needed and, together, took the ducks to their offices and dared them to arrest us. We were too many. Civil disobedience worked. It will work now.”
“What’s that?” interrupted Aqpayuk, quietest man in the crew, shielding his eyes, gazing west. They’d left the fog area. They were in the clear. He gazed in the direction of the Coast Guard ship, which was not in view.
“Where?”
“That speck.”
“It’s a drone!” announced Edward.