A gatekeeper is not necessary to complete a call with the connection you describe. My guess, according to your error, is that your dial peer statements are incorrect, or faulty. If you'd like to post the end stations, and your dial peer configs, it may be more helpful in troubleshooting your problem.
Alternately, you may want to look into call manager intercluster trunks if you are trying to "network" call managers across a WAN to facilitate 4 digit dialing between ccm nodes.