Free Shaman Pass by Stan Jones

them beside the amulet.
    “What about this Johnny Bass?” Active asked when they reached the street. “It’s not a local name, right?”
    “Definitely nonlocal,” Silver said. “An import from Oregon, I think it is. Basically trailer trash, as far as I can tell. Came up with the air force just before they shut down the old radar station, liked the country, and hung around when he got out. Married one of the Kimball girls and moved up onto her allotment.”
    “Ever been in trouble?”
    Silver shrugged. “He’s been investigated a couple times, but never busted.”
    “Investigated? For what?”
    “Theft. Johnny, by reputation, is in the salvage business. Seems he finds a lot of abandoned stuff on the ice, along the trail, along the river. He salvages it and takes it back to camp, either uses it himself or sells it to someone who happens by and needs an ice auger, a couple of jerry jugs, a camp stove, whatever.”
    “And sometimes the stuff’s not altogether abandoned?” Active asked.
    “Supposedly,” Silver said. “Twice he’s been accused of pilfering stuff out of people’s camps, that I know of. We city cops handled a complaint last summer when the Basses were living up at Tent City. Supposedly stole a boom box from one of his neighbors, but nobody saw him do it and we never found the boom box.”
    “You said it happened twice?”
    “I don’t know much about the other one. That one was a trooper case last wint—shit! I think it was Victor Solomon who made the complaint. Claimed Johnny snuck up in the night and stole some sheefish from his camp on the ice. Maybe he went back for another load this year and Victor caught him.”
    “Yeah,” Active said. “And he just happened to be carrying the harpoon he had burgled out of the museum, with which he promptly stabbed Victor, and then left behind the selfsame sheefish that were theoretically the object of the whole exercise.”
    Silver grimaced. “You’re right, it makes no fucking sense whatever.”
    “Not a bit,” Active said. “But we gotta talk to the guy. He ever been violent?”
    Silver slapped himself on the forehead. “Oh, yeah, I forgot. The women’s shelter tried to get us to charge him with knocking his wife around up in Tent City last summer. Then they both sobered up and she wouldn’t sign a complaint. Same old shit. It makes you tired sometimes.”
    Active nodded. “So you up for a run out to his camp?”
    Silver frowned. “I could send Alan Long. I gotta help burn down a house this afternoon.”
    Now it was Active’s turn to frown.
    “An old BIA * house,” Silver explained. “The fire department is burning it so they can practice putting it out, and we gotta do crowd control, keep the kids from turning themselves into frankfurters.”
    “Does Alan know the way to Bass’s camp?”
    “I think so,” Silver said. “He hunts rabbits up there sometimes. It’s about four or five miles past Victor Solomon’s sheefish camp. You can’t miss it.”
    An hour later, Active was bouncing over the sea ice on the Ladies Model, following Alan Long’s Ski-Doo north along the line of spruce saplings set into the snow as trail markers. Active looked for Victor Solomon’s tent when they passed the spot, but saw no sign of it. That reminded him he had told Darvin Reed and Willie Samuels to bring in the dead man’s camp. He made a mental note to get after them if it hadn’t been delivered when he got back to the village.
    A few miles farther on, Long stopped at a fork in the trail. Ahead, the route swung northeast to follow the shore of Chukchi Bay as it curved inland.
    To their left, the Katonak trail wound off through a series of low, brushy islands marking the mouth of the river. Long pointed up the left bank, which started as flat tundra, then rose to culminate in a hundred-foot cliff a mile or so upstream.
    “Johnny’s camp is in the woods this side of that cliff,” Long said. “It’s hard to spot from here but—there, Active,