A Cold-Blooded Business (18 page)

"Yeah," Rebecca chimed in, "the Eskimos built them all over the Slope to help them drive the caribou herds." She probably couldn't, either.

Kate looked from the wellhead back to the stone cairn. "What?" "It's true," Kevin said, grinning. "The caribou would mistake the cairns for men and shy off in the other direction, which happened to be the direction the Eskimos wanted them to go."

Kate couldn't stop the marveling smile that broke over her face.

"You're kidding me."

Chris shook his head, as proud as if he had invented the caribou-herding cairn personally. "Nope. Pretty clever, huh?"

"No lie. I like it. It's almost as neat as the scratcher. Or a story knife

"Storyknife!"

"Have you got a story knife

"Where?"

"What's it look like?"

"How old is it?"

"Where's it from; what's its history?"

Kate patted the air, laughing again. "It wasn't mine, in Unalaska, it's made of ivory, I don't know how old it is, and I think it came originally from the Yukonkuskokwim Delta but I don't know for sure." She told them of Sasha's stofyknife, and of the stories Sasha and her story knife drew together in the sand, and saw that she was regaining some stature in her listeners' eyes, even if it was only by association. They hung on her words, a few taking notes, avid for every scrap of anthropological and/or archaeological information to come their way.

She interrupted herself and said, "You know, there's a lady working at the Base Camp you might want to talk to, maybe even bring over here.

She's an Eskimo, name of Cindy Sovalik. She makes beds for the catering department."

"Really? Where's she from?"

Kate searched her memory. "It's a village east of here-Ichelik, that's it."

"Have you met her?"

Kate grinned. "Almost."

"What's she like?"

"All I know is she's a room steward at the Base Camp. And that she makes kuspuks for cash customers on the side," Kate added.

The prospect of getting their hands on a real live Eskimo was almost more than the self-styled grave robbers could bear. They were all so very young, so very earnest, so single-minded in their pursuit of the historical example. They reminded her of Andy Pence, her roomie and fellow deckhand on board the Avilda. What they lacked in experience they more than made up for in enthusiasm. They made Kate feel her age.

She reached in her pocket. "I brought something to show you, too."

Untying the cord on the little velveteen sack Jack had given her, she shook it over her palm and held out her hand.

"Wow," Chris breathed.

"Go ahead," Kate said. "Pick it up. Look at it. Tell me everything you know about it."

It was a challenge they couldn't resist. "Either Aleutian Aleut or Bering Sea Eskimo," Rebecca said, eyes narrowed on the little carving.

"Bering Sea Eskimo," Kevin said positively.

"St. Lawrence Island," Karen said, narrowing it down.

Chris took charge. "Gambell?" He looked at Kate. "No, not Gambell.

Savoonga. Probably from the Kukulek sites."

In spite of herself Kate was awed. "You guys are good."

The four exchanged slightly sheepish glances. "Actually," Rebecca said apologetically, "we're not that good. There's been a rash of stuff from St. Lawrence through the U lately. The St. Lawrence islanders are digging up every square foot of ground that'll take a shovel, looking for artifacts to sell." "Yeah," Chris said in disgust, "I spent last summer on St. Lawrence.

You ought to see it. People been digging up so many graves, the place looks like it's been carpet bombed."

"The reverence one is likely to have for their ancestors decreases in direct proportion to how hungry their children are at the time," Karen said, her voice tart. "St. Lawrence Island doesn't have exactly what you'd call a booming economy."

"Yeah," Kevin agreed, "and it's the same story in a lot of the villages all over the state. These folks used to make a pretty good living off the land and the sea. Now they've got the Fish and Game breathing down their necks, and the processors screaming discrimination, and they're lucky if they can get their nets wet twice a week. Not that there's anything in the water worth catching anymore, since the long-liners started dragging up the bottom of the ocean out in the Doughnut Hole and selling it off to Japan."

"I know, I know," Chris said impatiently, "I don't mean to judge. But they're destroying their own heritage. What are we, if we're not the product of thousands of years of evolution, and if we don't know how we got where we are--"

"How are we supposed to know where we're going?" the other three said in chorus.

Chris flushed and laughed. "Nice to know you've been paying attention."

"You're right, though," Rebecca said, sobering. "It is nothing more than cultural cannibalism."

She looked accusingly at Kate. The other three followed suit, and for a moment Kate felt like she'd been caught robbing a grave. "It isn't mine," she said, her voice rising a little. "It belongs to a friend."

They didn't say anything. "Honest. I didn't dig it up out of my grandmother's grave, in fact, she's still living, so I couldn't have.

It's not for sale." "Wait till somebody makes an offer," Chris said cynical iykate looked down at the little seal. "How much would something like this go for?"

"The Detroit Institute of Arts paid fifty-five thousand dollars for an ivory figure from Point Hope, no questions asked."

Kate was incredulous. "How much?"

"Fifty-five thousand individual United States greenback dollar bills."

.

"Bullshit," she said involuntarily.

"It's true," Chris insisted.

Kevin nodded glum agreement. "Sotheby's auctioned off a stone lamp from Kodiak for fifteen grand a while back." Shaken, Kate said, "It's no wonder there's a black market in the stuff if it's going for prices like that." She thought. "But wait a minute, didn't I read somewhere that they passed a federal act making that illegal?"

"The Archaeological Resources Protection Act," Karen said, nodding.

"Actually, it was passed in 1979, but they beefed up the penalties recently." She looked at Rebecca. "You're our resident legal expert, Becky. What is it now, twenty grand maximum in fines and two years in jail for a first offense?"

"And up to a hundred grand for a second," Rebecca confirmed, nodding.

"But it doesn't apply to buying and selling, only to the pot hunting itself, and only on sites located on public lands." "Shit," Kevin said, disgusted, "most of the state of Alaska is public land. How are you supposed to police 591,000 square miles, most of it wilderness, with eleven park rangers equipped with nothing but a writ?"

"The worst part of it is, the diggers move things," Chris said.

"Move things?"

"Yeah." He pointed at the seal Kate held. "That alone doesn't interest us much. It's a beautiful example of the carver's art, it'd probably sell for a hell of a lot of money in Detroit or New York, but our interest would be in where it was found." He saw Kate's uncomprehending look and elaborated. "Where it was found geographically, of course, like where in Alaska, but especially where in relation to the rest of the dig. This"--he held up the seal--"this was probably an amulet, a charm for a seal hunter, to bring, him good luck on a hunting trip, to honor the animal he was hunting. Maybe he wore it around his neck, maybe it was attached to his visor, maybe it was fixed to his kayak. We'd have a better way of knowing for sure if we could see where it was found."

"Like if it was found near the remains of a kayak, you'd be pretty sure it was a kayak charm," Kate said, "whereas if it was found in a grave around a skeleton's neck, you'd know it was a personal charm. And that would tell you something about who and what the guy in the grave was."

He gave her an approving smile and Kate was proud she'd said a smart thing, but his smile didn't last long. "The way it stands now, it's a charmer of a charm but it doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know. Like this little bear we found. Come on, I'll show you." He led the way back to the trailer and pulled a drop cloth from the corner of one table, revealing three ulu blades, fragments of various wooden bowls and a thread spool shaped from ivory, but no bear. "Where is it?" He looked around, pulling sheets back from the other tables, one after another, revealing an extensive collection of objects made from rock, bone, wood, ivory and skin, but still no bear. "Doggone it, you guys, where's the bear we found week before last? The little ivory one? The polar bear?"

Kevin pointed. "It was on that table, on the corner there, right next to the lamp with the walrus head, yesterday."

Chris straightened, frowning. "Well, it's not there now. Neither is the lamp."

"What?"

The four of them turned the trailer upside down, but they couldn't find either the bear or the lamp. The team was deeply upset at the discovery.

"Those were two of our best pieces," Rebecca said, near tears.

Chris put a comforting arm around her. "Cheer up, Becky. Look, I know I locked the door last night when we left. They were good pieces, the best. Otto probably took them for safekeeping. Try not to worry about it until we talk to him."

"Where is Otto?" Kate asked.

"He stayed behind at the Base Camp this morning," Chris told her. "Said he had to make some phone calls, do some paperwork."

Wake up slow with Toni, Kate thought.

Chris walked her to her truck. She climbed in and rolled down the window. "Chris," she said. "What do you think really happened to them?

To the missing artifacts?"

"I don't know." He kicked at a lump of snow. "I'd hate to think--I just don't know." She asked a question she knew he didn't want to answer.

"Has anything else gone missing lately?" He met her eyes, his own troubled, but she was right, he didn't reply. "You think they might have been stolen?"

He shrugged, saving himself the need to say it out loud.

"You trust your people?"

"Of course," he said, "of course I trust them," but his indignation sounded forced and he contradicted himself with his next breath. "They auctioned off a wooden Tlingit bowl at Christie's last week for five thousand dollars. Our staff archaeologists barely make minimum wage.

How can we compete with that?"

"Appeal to people's finer feelings," Kate suggested, only half facetiously.

"People don't have any finer feelings when it comes to cold hard cash,"

Chris said morosely.

Kate's inconvenient memory kicked in with Ekaterina's enraged expression, and the words that went with it, Shame on you, Katya. "No," she agreed, "I guess we don't."

A mile or so from the dugout she stopped the truck and looked back. At that distance the mound of the roof blended into the horizon, indistinguishable but for the scurrying figures around it. At that distance the mound might be a landed whale, and the figures the crew that had landed it, yesterday or a thousand years ago.

Behind the mound the stone calm was barely discernible. The wellhead stood out in clear relief, and ten miles beyond it the gas flares at the Central Compression Plant burned without ceasing.

She was corralled by Harris Perry at the door of the Base Camp and, along with the other three B Shift roustabouts, detailed to help clean up a crude spill on Z Pad. A wellhead valve had malfunctioned and Z Pad was right on the Kuparuk River, so the cleanup was a matter of some urgency. Black gook stretched out in a pool twenty feet across and the smell of sulfur made Kate's eyes water. The in-house environmentalist was there with a response list attached to a clipboard, and succeeded so well in getting in everyone's way that one of Kate's fellow roustabouts, a burly, taciturn man in his fifties, shouldered her into an open lead in the otherwise frozen river. The environmentalist emerged bawling, sloshed to her Suburban, slammed inside and kicked gravel fifty yards peeling out. The other two roustabouts promised the burly man a night out on the town their next week in. Kate was careful to add her congratulations to those of her coworkers. The Kuparuk River looked cold and Kate had always had an innate aversion to getting her feet wet.

"Greenies," the burly man said with loathing. "For a thousand years it was a frozen wasteland. Now all of a sudden it's the goddam delicate tundra."

The rest of the afternoon was spent laying out absorbent pads, with Kate doing most of the work under the disinterested gaze of three self-appointed supervisors, who all made a lot of money that afternoon sitting in a truck chewing toothpicks.

She recounted the afternoon's activities to Dale and Toni over dinner, not forgetting what had happened the last time she had brought a grievance to this table. Dale said instantly, "Prudhoe Bay, Where Conservation and Corporation Meet."

"Oil Field or Wildlife Refuge?" Toni retaliated. "Only Your Stockbroker Knows for Sure." She sipped her coffee reflectively and added, "I don't know why we don't just quit the Slope and go into advertising. We're wasted here."

"Speaking of wasted," Dale said, "how was that Seattle SWAT team you toured last month? I forgot to ask."

"Actually, not a bad bunch of guys. For hired killers."

After dinner Toni carried Kate off to a pinochle game with Warren Rice and Sue Jordan. Kate lost twenty bucks, partly because she never failed in her belief that her partner had everything she needed to make a run, mostly because she'd always been more interested in the players than in the cards.

Halfway through the third game Otto Leckerd materialized and Hartzler abandoned shooting the moon for going there. "Otto," Kate called after the lovers.

He turned to look at her, hand brushing but not quite holding Toni's.

"What?"

"You find those missing artifacts out at the dig?"

"What missing artifacts?"

"You know, the ivory bear, the stone lamp? Chris and the others told me about losing them. Have you found them yet?"

She watched with interest as the color left his face, leaving it a pasty white, and kept watching as the color flooded back in, turning him a tomato-red. Her gaze shifted to Toni, who was looking at her with a considering expression, brows slightly puckered. As soon as Toni noticed Kate looking, her forehead resumed its usual porcelain-smooth perfection. She hooked her arm through Otto's and pressed it to her side. "What's all this? Have your little spirits been walking off with artifacts?"