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that O'Donnell and his copilot might be freezing to death that very moment.
    He felt responsible. He'd asked the pilot to make the pick-up. There hadn't been time to send a plane out from Fairbanks. O'Donnell had been on a cargo run to Deadhorse up at Prudhoe Bay. Stanton had dubbed O'Donnell's old twin-engine DC-3 "Santa's Sleigh." Every year it carried Christmas presents back and forth between the men working the oil fields at the top of the pipeline and their families in the cities to the south.
    Deadhorse. The frozen edge of the world. Nothing but Inuits and oil riggers. What a place to spend Christmas, Adashek thought.
    He had flown up there himself four months earlier. Another homicide report had come in, this one on the brutal murder of an Inupiat family in the White Hills. A fisherman, three teenage girls, an eight-year-old boy. All of them decapitated, slit open and gutted, stretched out on the ice like bearskins. Two weeks earlier, 120 miles east on Knifeblade Ridge, two unidentified Caucasian bodies had been found naked in the snow, partially eaten. Their heads were never found.
    The fact that no oil company employees had been killed didn't make the owners of the companies any less worried. They put pressure on Billy Higgs, the local sheriff in Deadhorse. But Higgs had his hands full with drunken riggers and wife beaters; he'd need an army to track down some maniac killer striking at random across the frozen 500-mile expanse of the North Slope.
    When the oil companies decided to advertise for bounty hunters, Higgs turned a blind eye. They put an ad in the local paper and were deluged with offers. Trackers, bear-hunters, trappers, ex-military, ex-convicts, ex-killers. In the end, three different men were sent out over a ten-week period.
    Two of them were never heard from again. The third went on trial for manslaughter — he'd killed the wrong man.
    Adashek had had enough; he knew what had to be done. He flew to Deadhorse with a case of rifles and thirty rounds of tranquilizer darts. He found a guide and went searching for the Yakuutek. If anyone could track down the elusive killer, he knew it would be those primitive hunters. They were wilder than the rest, one of the last arctic tribes discovered by the white man. Remote and untamed, they lived always on the move, following the migration of the caribou herds across a thousand miles of frozen tundra. They were the only ones who still lived in huts built of ice. They rode dogsleds; shunned snowmobiles, Evinrudes, gas stoves, alcohol. They believed "white man food" would turn their brown skin white. They ate raw caribou meat, dipped in seal oil; and sucked the roe from whitefish, caught through the ice on fishhooks cut from the teeth of wolves.
    Hunting was in their blood.
    Adashek knew they wouldn't hunt the man for money. Money meant nothing to them. But he had something else they wanted.
    Three years earlier, on the Anuktuvik Pass, Adashek had arrested a Yakuutek hunter with a sixteen-year-old girl tied to his sled. The girl was the man's daughter. Months earlier, she had run away from the tribe, and her father had gone searching for her. When he finally found her, it was in a strip club in Fairbanks. The hunter grabbed her by the hair and dragged her off the stage. On his way out, with the girl in tow, he ran a seal harpoon through the club owner's neck.
    The hunter had served three years. Adashek made a deal with the parole board: exchange the killer of one man for a man who'd killed a dozen. They knew a bargain when they saw it.
    So did the Yakuuteks, who also liked a good hunt.
    How many days had they chased him, the Chief wondered. He wished now he'd given them bullets instead of darts. But there was no way to know if the right man had been caught until he could be identified by Dr. Katukan.
    From behind the terminal, an Alaska Airlines 727 rose with a deafening roar, climbing steeply into the western sky. The sun was heading down. It would be dark in a few