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said an hour later as he finished his briefing, closed his notebook, and looked up at Captain Patrick Carnaby, commander of the Chukchi detachment of the Alaska State Troopers. “We obviously have to find Calvin.”
    “Obviously.” Carnaby chewed his lower lip for a moment. “Calvin Maiyumerak, huh?”
    “You know him?”
    “A little. Seen him around town, heard him ranting on the radio about Inupiat sovereignty . . . kind of a hothead, I guess.”
    “There was definitely that bad blood between him and Victor,” Active said. “Nobody likes being called anaq all the time.”
    “Yeah, I guess old Victor could be a real son of a bitch.” Carnaby nodded, seeming lost in thought.
    “And Silver says Calvin kills dogs with his bare hands, so that old Dolly can sew them into ruffs and mittens for the tourists.”
    “Really?” Carnaby said. “Who’d a thunk it? So how you gonna find Calvin?”
    “I guess I don’t see any point in going after him.”
    “Oh?” Carnaby lifted his eyebrows in the white expression of inquiry.
    Active shook his head. “There’s two possibilities. One, he’s out hunting caribou, like Dolly says, even though she professes not to know where. If that’s true, he’ll come back on his own.”
    Carnaby nodded. “And?”
    “And possibility two is, he’s not hunting caribou, he’s running.”
    Carnaby nodded again, and grinned. “And where’s he going to go?”
    Now Active nodded. “Exactly. I think he only has three real choices, all bad. A, he can hide out on the tundra, but eventually he’ll run out of supplies and have to come into a village, or maybe somebody will just run into him out there.”
    Active pointed at a map of Alaska on the wall behind Carnaby’s desk. “B, maybe he can make it on that wreck of a snowmachine to someplace where he can catch a plane, but we’ll be waiting.”
    Another nod from Carnaby.
    “Or, C, he can hide out with a friend or relative in one of the villages, maybe Ebrulik, where his parents live.”
    Carnaby grinned again. “In which case it’ll be all over town in about five minutes.”
    “So we wait,” Active said. “We watch Dolly’s house here. I already put the word out to the airlines, the public safety officers in our villages, and to the troopers and city cops in Nome, Barrow, Kotzebue, Fairbanks, and Galena. And I put a message on Kay-Chuck saying the troopers need to contact Calvin Maiyumerak and anybody encountering him should let us know. He’s bound to turn up.”
    “Sounds right.” Carnaby’s grin was bigger than ever. “Low-impact police work. Low impact on our travel budget, low impact on the manpower situation in this office.”
    Active grinned, too, at how cheap Carnaby was. Still, the Republicans in the legislature were always pounding on state agencies to do less with more, and Carnaby seemed to find ways to put life into the vapid political cliché. “Plus which, Chukchi P.D. is carrying part of the load on this one because of the museum burglary,” Active said, to make Carnaby feel even better.
    “What about the harpoon?” Carnaby said. “Any fingerprints there?”
    “Didn’t check yet. You want to?”
    Carnaby nodded, grinning in enthusiasm. He was known to the officers beneath him—and those above—as the Super Trooper. That wasn’t just because, at six-two, square-jawed and broad-shouldered, he was a walking recruitment poster. It was also because he had some kind of ESP about cases and could normally juggle intradepartment politics with his left hand while juggling local politics with his right.
    Besides which, he was a fingerprint expert. Not just an expert, but an enthusiast also, who wrote papers about cold-weather fingerprinting for law-enforcement journals.
    Active went to his office and brought the harpoon to Carnaby. “I’ll let you know in a couple of hours,” the captain said.
    Active trotted downstairs and stopped at Dispatch to see if he and Lucy Generous were still on for lunch.
    They