Village of the Ghost Bears by Stan Jones Page A

a moment. “At least there’s Ossie Junior,” Long said. “She’s a legend up there because of what her father did to make sure she’d be born. Little Nanuq, they call her.”
    “Her? Ossie Junior is a she?” Active asked.
    “People are pretty traditional in Cape Goodwin,” Long said, raising his eyebrows. “They still think that when somebody dies, the soul will come back in the next baby that’s born, so they give it the dead person’s name. That’s why you’ll hear the old aanas up there call some kid ‘my little husband’ or ‘my little mother.’ They think the person has come back.”
    Carnaby pinched the bridge of his nose again. “How’d we get on this?”
    “You’re the one that asked,” Active said.
    Carnaby shook his head, then bicycled his hands at Long in a move-it-along motion. “And this relates to Jae Hyo Lee how?”
    “All right, all right,” Long said. “I’m getting to it. Jae came up here eight or ten years ago to work for Kyung Kim.” He paused and looked at Carnaby and Active questioningly.
    The two men nodded. Kyung Kim owned the Arctic Dragon restaurant and every other restaurant in Chukchi, as far as Active knew, plus the town’s only janitorial service. Active thought he’d also heard Kim owned the Arctic Arms eightplex, one of the few apartment buildings not run by the Chukchi Region Housing Authority. Kim was probably the biggest private businessman in town. Most of his employees were allegedly relatives, though not necessarily present in the United States legally. Not long after Active’s arrival in Chukchi, immigration agents had swooped down on the Dragon and carried off most of Kim’s kitchen help.
    “Jae is another one of Kyung’s cousins or nephews or something,” Long continued. “Most of them stay a couple years, then move on. Too cold for them, I guess.”
    He grinned at Carnaby and Active. Neither grinned back. Carnaby rolled his eyes and made the move-it-along motion again.
    “Okay, okay,” Long said. “Jae didn’t leave. He got into the life. Hunting, fishing, trapping. A lot of your Koreans are totally psycho about fishing, but they don’t hunt much and I never heard of one running a trapline before. But Jae did it all. And those Koreans, you know how they don’t mix much, with us or with the whites, how they keep to themselves? Jae wasn’t like that either. Next thing you know, he’s taken up with a local girl and moved out of those trailers that Kyung puts his help in, and they’ve got their own place on the beach down south of the airport, living in somebody’s fish camp. A little cabin there, a couple of wall tents, not bad if you like that life. But that’s where the problem started.”
    There was a loud squeak as Carnaby shifted in his seat. Active scraped his own chair back and stood up to give his sitting muscles some relief.
    “What problem?” Carnaby asked.
    “With Chief Silver,” Long said. “Jae’s girlfriend was the chief’s oldest daughter. Ruthie.”
    “Ah,” Carnaby said.
    Long raised his eyebrows and went on. “The chief was kind of prejudiced against Koreans, because of how they keep to themselves, you know? If there’s any kind of crime involving a Korean, you can never get any of them to say anything, and the chief hated that. Plus, he just didn’t want Ruthie living the village life. His idea was, she’d go to college and end up in Anchorage being a lawyer or something or maybe come back here and work for Chukchi Region or the Gray Wolf mine. But some girls, you know, the first thing they’ll do is the last thing their father wants?”
    “Tell me about it,” Carnaby said, with feeling.
    “Uh-huh,” Long said. “Well, there Ruthie was. Living in a fish camp and the chief going crazy thinking he’ll have a half-Korean grandkid before he knows it. So he goes down there and gets into it with Jae and ends up flat on his back in the snow, because Jae is tough and he has a hell of a temper too. So then the