Village of the Ghost Bears by Stan Jones Page B

chief starts leaning on Jae for any little thing he can find—speeding tickets on his snow-machine, littering, uncontained trash, I don’t know what all. Made his life miserable, anyway. So you can probably guess what happened?”
    “Jae and Ruthie didn’t split up, I’m thinking,” Carnaby said.
    “Not a chance,” Long said. “Ruthie’s mom being from Cape Goodwin—”
    “Look out,” Carnaby said.
    Long lifted his eyebrows again. “Exactly. Jae and Ruthie took off up there, and they moved in with Ruthie’s grandmother for a while, till they found some kind of place of their own.”
    “They ever marry?” Carnaby asked.
    Long squinted no and shook his head.
    “I’ll bet the chief loved that,” Active said. He had a vague recollection of hearing about a daughter in Cape Goodwin, but these details were new to him. Silver had never mentioned any of it. Too painful, maybe. Every family had its secrets.
    “He was pissed,” Long said. “But what could he do? The women in his family got together and outsmarted him, and he knew it.”
    “I imagine they thought he’d come around eventually,” Carnaby said.
    “Well, he never did,” Long said.
    “Tough one,” Carnaby said. “All right, let’s see. Jae’s in Cape Goodwin, so are a lot of polar bears, and he’s Korean.”
    “Exactly,” Long said. “It takes money to live, even in Cape Goodwin, and Jae didn’t have much. What he did have was an uncle down here in Chukchi—Kyung Kim— who everybody suspected was dealing in gallbladders.”
    The other two men both said a silent prayer of thanks that the polar bear gallbladder trade was a matter for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, not the Alaska State Troopers. Bear gallbladders supposedly sold for upwards of three thousand dollars in Korea, where they were turned into stomach medicine. Alaska was assumed to be supplying much of the market, but poaching and trafficking cases were notoriously hard to make.
    “So pretty soon Jae is buying gallbladders from the guys up in Cape Goodwin, who are always killing nuisance bears around the village anyway, so why not turn a little cash at the same time? Sweet setup all the way around, other than being illegal.”
    Active and Carnaby nodded.
    “Except things kind of got out of hand,” Long said. “You know that big lead off the Cape that the currents keep open pretty much all winter?”
    “The Cape Goodwin polynya,” Carnaby said.
    Active had been to a whaling camp on the Cape Goodwin lead during the Victor Solomon case. But he hadn’t known it stayed open all winter, qualifying as a polynya.
    “Of course, having that much open water in the middle of all that ice is a magnet for anything that swims or flies— seal, beluga, ducks, polar bears—so pretty soon the guys from the village are out there at the lead, killing polar bears for their bladders and selling them to Jae. Word filters out, and eventually the Feds get interested.”
    “So, how’d they get him?” Active asked.
    “That’s where I came in.” Long sounded proud. “I was just out of the MPs then, and I was talking to various law-enforcement agencies about jobs when U.S. Fish and Wildlife asked me about a one-shot undercover deal for them. It turned out to be the Cape Goodwin case. I told them sure, as long as I didn’t have to bust any of the local guys. The Feds got hold of some gallbladders, and I sold them to Jae.”
    “It was that easy? He didn’t recognize you?”
    “Nah, we’re different ages, so we never hung out. I didn’t even know about his deal with Ruthie Silver till after the case broke, and the chief finally told me about it when he heard I had been undercover. Anyway, us Eskimos probably all look alike to Koreans, huh?” Long chuckled.
    Nobody else did, and he continued. “Yeah, it was pretty easy. The Feds flew me and a snowmachine up to Nuliakuk one night in January when it was colder than hell and I rode down the beach to Cape Goodwin. I poured some Wild