BREAKUP

Kate Shugak 7

Dana Stabenow

( reserved. This book, or parts thereof, be

reproduced in any form without permission, simultaneously in Canada

of Congress Catabging-in-Publication Data

Stabenow. Dana.

Breakup/Dana Stabenow. that . cm.- (A Kate Shugak mystery) BN 0-399-14250-9

Shugak, Kate (Fictitious character)-Fiction. 2. Women detectives-

ka-Fiction. 3. Alaska-Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Stabenow, Dana.

Shugak mystery.

S69.T1249B74 199796-38195 CIP

S4-dc20

I in the United States of America

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 took is printed on acid-free paper. design by Kate Ni

vi my thanks to Tope Equipment for the ride on the D-6

and to Mary Ann for the great line

and to Dad and Hank for the bear stories

vii

viii for my girls

Angelique, Tanya, Marie and Monica

sunshine on a cloudy day

ix

x BREAKUP

xi

1

Kate surveyed the yard in front of her cabin and uttered one word.

"Breakup."

Affection for the season was lacking in the tone of her voice.

Ah yes, breakup, that halcyon season including but not necessarily

limited to March and April, when all of Alaska melts into a

586,412-square-mile pile of slush. The temperature reaches the double

digits and for a miracle stays there, daylight increases by five minutes

and forty-four seconds every twenty-four hours, and after a winter's

worth of five-hour days all you want to do is go outside and stay there

for the rest of your natural life. But it's too late for the snow

machine and too early for the truck, and meltoff is swelling the rivers

until flooding threatens banks, bars and all downstream

communities-muskrat, beaver and man. The meat cache is almost empty and

the salmon aren't up the creek yet. All

2 you can do is sit and watch your yard reappear, along with a winter's

worth of debris until now hidden by an artistic layer of snow, all of

which used to be frozen so it didn't smell.

"The best thing about breakup," Kate said, "is that it's after winter

and before summer."

Mutt wasn't paying attention. There was a flash of tail fur on the other

side of the yard and the 140-pound half-husky, half-wolf was off with a

crunch of brush to chase down the careless hare who had made it. Breakup

for Mutt meant bigger breakfasts. Breakup for Mutt meant outside instead

of inside. Breakup for Mutt meant a possible close encounter with the

gray timber wolf with the roving eye who had beguiled her two springs

before, then left her flat with a litter of pups. All five had been

turned over to Mandy a nanosecond after weaning. One had been on the

second-place team into Nome the month before.

Kate tried not to feel resentful at being abandoned. It was just that it

seemed someone ought to have been present, looking on with sympathy as

she plodded through the million and one tasks produced by the season's

first chinook, which had blown in from the Gulf of Alaska the night

before at sixty-two miles per hour and toppled the woodpile into the

meat cache, so that the miniature cabin on stilts looked knock-kneed.

The chinook had also awakened the female grizzly wintering in a den on a

knoll across the creek. Kate had heard her grousing at five that

morning. She was hungry, no doubt, and a knock-kneed cache was probably

just the ticket to fill her belly until the first salmon hit fresh water.

And speaking of water, before Kate started work on the truck she had to

check on the creek out back. With the coming of the chinook the ice had

broken, and the subsequent roar of runoff was clearly audible from her

doorstep. The previous fall had brought record rain, and the boulders

that shored up her side of the creek had been loosened to the point of

destabilizing the creek bank, but before she could do anything about it

she'd had to go to Anchorage, and by the time she got back the creek had

been frozen over.

3 Before her lumbar vertebrae could start to protest at the mere

prospect of such abuse, she went to take a look, shoving her way through

the underbrush that closed in around the back of the cabin to the top of

the short cliff overlooking the course of the stream.

From the top of the bank at least, the situation did not look that bad.

The tumble of boulders, some of them as tall as she was, broke the

current, supported the bank and excavated and maintained a small

backwater just downstream within the arm of the outcropping, good for

salmon tickling and skinny-dipping.

The thought of skinny-dipping called up a memory from the previous

summer, one that included Jack Morgan, whose behind had suffered from

sunburn that evening. He hadn't complained.

She flapped the collar of her shirt. It had to be forty degrees. A

veritable heat wave. No wonder she was feeling flushed. There was a

length of three-quarter-inch polypro fastened to evenly spaced posts

leading down the side of the bank, and she went down backwards,

breathless not just from the exertion, light of foot and heart.

Up close she was happy to see that the situation looked even less dire.

The two boulders that formed the point of the mini-peninsula had

shifted, but it looked now as if they had merely to settle in even more

firmly than before. No collapsed banks, no rocks sucked into midstream.

She scaled the natural breakwater and to her delight found that the

alteration had caused the backwater to increase in size and depth, just

a little, just enough to increase her crawl from four overhand strokes

to five, and Jack's from two to three.

Or just enough to catch her.

"Get a grip," she said, shifting inside clothes that had fit perfectly

well when she put them on that morning. It was her own fault for reading

Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell late into the previous night. Those

damn Cavalier poets were always headfirst in love with somebody, and

none of them had the least sense of moderation. Charles II had a lot to

answer for.

4 It was Jack's fault, too, for not being here, right here where she

could get her hands on him.

A rueful grin spread across her face. If Jack had the least idea of her

mood he'd be on the next plane.

The water at her feet was so clear it was almost invisible, crisped at

the edges with a layer of frosty ice, and she bent over to scoop up a

handful. It was tart and oh so cold all the way down. Smiling, she

splashed a second handful over her face.

Over the rush of water came a kind of snuffling grunt. Her hand stilled

in the act of scooping up more water, and very, very slowly she looked up.

Fifty feet away, standing in midstream, thick, silvered hide spiked with

water, a female grizzly stared back.

Ten feet downstream of mama came the bawl of a cub.

Five more feet downstream came the answering bawl of its twin. Neither

of them looked more than a day out of the den.

Involuntarily, Kate stood straight up and reached for her shotgun.

It wasn't there.

The grizzly allowed Kate just enough time to remember exactly where it

was-in the gun rack above the door of the cabin-before she dropped down

to all fours in the water and charged.

There was a bark and a scrambling sound from the top of the bank. "NO,

Mutt!" Kate roared, a shaft of pure terror spearing through her. "STAY!"

The bear stopped abruptly in midstream and reared up on her hind legs,

so immediately on the heels of Kate's command to Mutt that a bubble of

hysterical laughter caught at the back of her throat. The bear's lips

peeled back to reveal a gleaming set of very sharp teeth that snapped in

her direction. When they came together it sounded like the bite of an

axe blade sinking into wood.

All thought of laughter gone, Kate backed up a step, casting a quick

glance at the bank behind her. It wasn't as tall or as steep as the bank

down to the outcropping, but it was still taller than she

5 was and lined along its edge with a tangled section of alder and

diamond willow, with no line to aid her ascent. Mutt barked again, and

again Kate yelled, "NO! STAY!" without turning around, because she

purely hated turning her back on a bear. She took another step back and

began to speak in what she hoped was a soothing monotone. "It's okay,

girl, it's all right, you're between me and your cubs, I can't get to

them, it's all right, I mean you no harm, settle down now and I'll get

out of your face, just calm down and-"

There was another roar from the grizzly and she dropped down on all four

feet with a tremendous splash and charged again, water fountaining up on

either side.

"Oh shit," Kate said, and on the spot invented a technique for climbing

a steep creek bank backwards that might not have been recognized by any

international mountaineering organization but got her up and over the

lip of the bank a split second before the bear, moving too fast now to

stop, crashed headfirst into the wall of dirt with such force that a

large section of it caved in on her.

It didn't improve her disposition any, but Kate wasn't hanging around to

watch. On hands and knees she wriggled through the undergrowth, branches

scraping at her face and tugging at her hair, nails broken, knuckles

split and bleeding, all the while listening to the outraged roaring of

the grizzly behind her. The sound provided unlimited fuel for forward

motion. Kate broke through the other side of the brush and collapsed,

only to be pounced upon by an anxious Mutt, who thrust a nose beneath

Kate's side and flipped her like a landed halibut, sniffing her from

head to toe in between bellowing threats to the grizzly. Between the

growling of the infuriated grizzly, the bawling of the terrified cubs

and Mutt's challenging howls, Kate's eardrums would never be the same.

"It's okay, girl," Kate said, as Mutt nosed her over for the second

time. "It's all right. Calm down, now. Come on, calm down. Mutt, dammit,

knock it off!"

Mutt ceased triage with a hurt look. Unhindered, Kate managed to get to

her feet and stagger to the cabin to retrieve the

6 shotgun. She got back in time to listen as the grizzly proceeded to

tear up an additional six feet of creek bank, which from the sound of it

included the felling of a great deal of timber, before taking her

frightened offspring in charge and marching them off in the opposite

direction. They heard her baying defiance for a good fifteen minutes,

and then it faded only as she put distance between her family and Kate's

homestead.

It took every second of that fifteen minutes for Kate to swallow her

heart, control her respiration and amass sufficient authority over her

muscles to still her knees. Her jeans were soaked through with snowmelt,

her shirt with perspiration. Her blood thudded against her eardrums and

the walls of her veins. With every in drawn breath oxygen fizzed along

her pulmonary arteries. She felt ten feet tall and covered with hair.

She felt as naked and defenseless as a newborn babe. She was terrified,

she was exhilarated, she was most definitely alive.

Returning to the yard, she stood the shotgun butt down next to the cabin

door, ready for action. Inside, she noticed with a sense of detachment

that her hands were filthy from clawing up the creek bank. She looked up

and caught sight of her image in the mirror hanging over the sink. Her

waist-length, straight black hair, which had started out the day

confined in its usual neat French braid, had been yanked into an untidy

bush. The pupils of her almond-shaped eyes took up most of the hazel

iris, and her skin, usually a warm golden brown, had paled to the point

that the roped scar bisecting her throat was almost invisible.

She noticed further, with that same sense of detachment, that everything

within range of her vision seemed to be outlined with a rim of light

that shimmered in the crisp morning air, giving it an air of

unfamiliarity. It was almost as if she were seeing everything for the

first time.

The cabin was a single room twenty-five feet square, with a sleeping

loft beneath a high-peaked roof. To the left of the door was the

kitchen, containing a sink with an old-fashioned, long- handled water

pump, an oil stove for cooking, a woodstove for

7 heat, a table and three old and mismatched but serviceable chairs. A

built-in, L-shaped couch upholstered in deep blue canvas filled up the

corner to the right of the door, and the rest of the wall space was

taken up by bookshelves crammed with books, tape deck and cassette

tapes. A dusty guitar hung on one side of the door, a set of caribou

antlers on the other side with a down jacket and a fur parka hanging

from it. The ladder to the sleeping loft rose up from the center of the

room. On nails driven into the sides of the ladder hung two beaver

traps, a sliming knife with a white plastic handle in a hard plastic

sheath, a couple of rings of keys, a wool muffler and a philodendron she

was in the process of killing.

Kate's heartbeat began to settle and the room once again to look like

home. It seemed so amazingly unchanged from when she had left it, was it

really only twenty minutes before? Strange, when she felt so, so ...

well, she didn't know quite what she felt, except that her knees were

still experiencing technical difficulties and as she moved to the stove

to pour herself a cup of coffee she kept tripping over objects that

weren't there.

The coffee, the last in the pot and strong enough to smelt iron, booted

the kick start with a satisfyingly solid jolt. Kate rinsed out the mug,

scrubbed her hands, clipped her broken nails and changed into dry

clothes, which gave her at least the outward semblance of normality, in

spite of the little electric shocks that kept darting beneath her skin.

Back outside, she narrowed her eyes against the sun. Never had it seemed

more golden in color, never the sky so blue or the trees such a dark,

deep, rich green. The air sizzled with life and death and everything in

between. She gulped it in, greedy for more.

Jack Morgan's face flashed in front of her, and she knew an immediate,

visceral need for his presence, his mouth, his hands, his body. Her skin

radiated a sudden and unexpected heat, and she pulled at the front of

her plaid shirt, popping one of the buttons in her haste, rolling up her

sleeves to bare her skin to the cool, clean air. When she realized what

was happening she gave a snort of laughter. Mutt, on self-appointed

sentry duty, looked around,

8 ears cocked inquiringly. "It's all right, girl," Kate said, still

laughing, albeit somewhat shakily. "Breakup's making your roomie a

little needy, is all."

The ears remained cocked, as if to say, So what else is new? or maybe,

Get in line. Kate laughed again, and then pulled herself together. There

was work to do. Priority one was a truck tune-up. She'd left the supply

run to Ahtna until too late to take the snow machine.

The truck was an '84 Isuzu diesel with 150,000 miles on it that still

got twenty-six miles per gallon on the straight stretch of former

railroad roadbed between Kate's homestead and the village of Niniltna.

She had high hopes of it going another hundred and fifty thousand, until

either she or the truck died of old age. She sorted through the toolbox

for a wrench, pausing when something halfway between a pig squeal and a

jackass bray wafted into the clearing on a stray breeze. It wasn't the

female this time. Probably the grizzly male one mountain over. Probably

the father of the two cubs. She reached down to feel for the 12-gauge

and found it right where she'd left it, leaning against the front bumper.

By ten a.m. she had pulled the battery and put it on the trickle

charger, drained the water out of the fuel filters, checked the oil,

checked the coolant in the radiator, checked the tire pressure all

around and investigated the possibility of porcupines in the fan belt.

Porcupines were pests damn near as bad as bears, born troublemakers;

they would go for anything rubber for the salt in it-the fan belt, the

tires, once Kate had seen a porcupine chewing through the track of a

Nodwell tractor.

During the tune-up she managed to acquire a metal splinter under the

nail of her right forefinger that looked about a quarter of an inch long

and felt as if it ran all the way up to her elbow. She startled Mutt out

of her nap with a loud oath and went into the cabin to perform emergency

surgery. She daubed the resulting gash with antiseptic, and tried to

remember the last time she'd had a tetanus shot. Niniltna had no health

clinic. Each year the public health nurse came through with an

immunization card for

9 every student in Niniltna Public School, kindergarten through twelfth

grade, but once you graduated, you were on your own. If Kate needed a

tetanus shot, she'd have to drive to Ahtna. Convenient, if that was the

right word, since she had to drive to Ahtna for supplies anyway.

The whistle of the kettle interrupted her reverie. A cup of hot cocoa

sounded like heaven on earth. Unfortunately, she'd used up her last can

of milk the week before, and this morning's coffee had been the end of

the Starbucks Christmas blend, which she bought five pounds at a time,

when she had money in December. She rummaged around for something else,

surfacing eventually with an elderly box of Lemon Zinger. There was some

honey left. Hallelujah. She spooned it into the thick white porcelain

mug with a heavy hand. The resulting brew was tangy and sweet and

scalded her insides.

It was noon and she was hungry, but she'd forgotten to get any meat out

of the cache the night before. She added more honey to her tea and put

Jimmy Buffett on the tape deck, forgetting how dangerous Jimmy was to

listen to during breakup. Kate, too, wanted to go beyond the end, find

one particular harbor, be somewhere over China, take another road, any

road, especially today, preferably to a place where there were no bears.

It was an act of self-defense when she replaced Jimmy with Cyndi Lauper.

Girls just wanna have fun. Which of course brought Jack Morgan back to

mind with an immediacy that set her teeth on edge. She changed Cyndi

Lauper for Les Miserables, sat down on the couch and leaned back with a

contented sigh. Mutt, who had overseen the operation with a critical

eye, flopped down with an equally contented sigh.

Fifteen minutes later Kate jerked awake, the now cool tea sloshing over

the side of the heavy white porcelain mug onto her hand and knee. Mutt

was on her feet, nose to the door, a steady, rumbling growl issuing from

deep in her chest.

"Oh shit," Kate said, and got to her feet.

The .30-06 slid comfortably into her hands, and she flicked off

10 the safety and took a step back as she opened the door. "Stay," she

told Mutt, whose growl had grown in volume.

There was a bear in the yard, and to add insult to injury, it wasn't the

sow she'd encountered that morning, it wasn't even the boar from the

next mountain over. This was an entirely new neighbor, a youngster, two,

three years maybe, and small, no more than three hundred pounds and

change. His brown coat was long and thick and shining from six months of

doing nothing but growing it out underground.

He had managed to bump into the cache, with the result that it was now

on the verge of total collapse, so that the frozen meat inside had

shifted enough to force open the door. Half a dozen packages littered

the ground beneath, and a seventh was at present being finished off with

a single gulp, two layers of butcher paper over two layers of Saran wrap

and all. He lifted his lip in their direction and attacked another package.

Kneeing Mutt, who had expressed a sincere wish to rid the homestead of

its uninvited guest and all his kin, back inside, Kate jacked a round

into the .30-06's chamber. "Get out of here!" she yelled. "Go on! Git,

you big pest, before I turn you into a rug!" Mutt raised her voice in

agreement, sounding considerably more threatening.

The bear stood up on his hind legs and waved his claws, snarling. His

mom had taught him that much before she booted him out, and it worked

pretty well on other mammals and most humans. Kate shot a round into the

ground in front of him. The bear let out a shriek of fear and dropped

forward on all four legs, in the process bumping once more into the cache.

"Oh hell," Kate said.

The much-abused knock-kneed leg folded like a pleat in an accordion and

the other three legs couldn't stand the strain and the cache began a

graceful tilt forward, during which the rest of the meat store fell out

and rained down on the grizzly's head-a roast, a package of ptarmigan

breasts, another roast, a package of mooseburger, five pounds of caribou

ribs. The bewildered grizzly

11 gave a bellow of consternation and bolted like lightning into the east.

A bear in high gear is a sight to evoke awe and admiration, and Kate

would undoubtedly have experienced both those emotions but for one

thing. The open door of the garage was in the bear's way. His right

shoulder clipped it in passing and it ripped easily from its hinges,

whirled merrily around on one corner and flopped down with a squishy

splat as the grizzly, barely checking, crashed through a stand of alders

and was gone.

Kate looked from the garage door lying flat on the ground to the cache

crumpled up on the opposite side of the yard and sat down hard on the

doorstep, the rifle clutched in her hands, waiting for her heart rate to

drop below 200.

"Breakup" she said.

12

One bear encounter per life was one too many. Two in the space of eight

hours seemed, at the very least, excessive.

Still, any number of bears in one's life was preferable to what waited

for her on the kitchen table, a task she'd been putting off for three

months, a task she could no longer delay.

That evening she took a deep breath, got out her self-control and

marched over to the kitchen table, where the booklet entitled

"Instructions for Form 1040" waited for her with a superior smirk on its

government-issue face.

An hour later she felt as she always did on this day at this time of the

year, frustrated and angry and convinced she was destined to spend the

rest of her life in a federal prison in Illinois run by Ida Lupino.

"Income," as usual, was proving to be a problem.

13 On page 15 of the booklet the IRS had provided a helpful guide to

just what kind of income must be reported. Earned income was easy; her

brief but intense employment with RPetCo at Prudhoe Bay the previous

year had pulled in $17,500 in fees and expenses. That went on line , no

problem there. There was the mushroom money from last June as well, but

it had been paid in cash and Kate decided what the IRS didn't know

wouldn't hurt them, or her, either.

She tried to remember where the $17,500 was now. A big chunk of it had

gone for Axenia's classes at UAA, although now that Axenia was married

her husband would be taking over his wife's bills. She didn't approve of

Axenia's choice of husband but at least he'd gotten rich at the

government trough and would relieve her of the burden of Axenia's school

fees. Or so Kate sincerely hoped.

Too much of it had gone for that damn dress-up outfit for that party in

Anchorage last winter. The outfit was hanging in Jack's closet in town,

encased in plastic, and if she had anything to say about it, never to be

worn again. She still begrudged every dime.

Of course, once she'd put it on, Jack Morgan's chief object in life

became a determination to get her out of it as quickly as possible, not

necessarily the worst finale to a forced march through Nordstrom's. She

smiled to herself, and then made an effort and pulled her wayward

imagination back to the subject at hand. Most of what was left of the

Slope income had financed Emaa's potlatch. The rest was in the one-pound

Darigold butter can on the table in front of her.

Kate still wasn't sure if her grandmother had had legal title to the

Niniltna house on the river, but whether she did or not Martha Barnes

and her children lived there now, and possession was nine- tenths of the

law. She decided the IRS didn't need to know about that, either.

Ekaterina's possessions had been distributed among family and friends at

the potlatch. So far as Kate knew, Ekaterina had never had a bank

account. For that matter, Kate didn't think her grandmother had ever

applied for a Social Security number. She'd never

14 had to pay for much; no family member or friend ever came to her

house not bearing gifts. Kate had found seven hundred dollars in small

bills and change in the butter can the twin of Kate's sitting on Emaa's

kitchen table, a moose hindquarter hanging out back, a chest freezer

stuffed with salmon in the round, ptarmigan breasts frozen a dozen per

Ziploc bag and enough caribou to keep the entire village in stew for a

week in the upright freezer next to it. The pantry had yielded up ten

cases of salmon, plain and smoked and kippered, case lots of canned

goods and pilot bread, a case of homemade nagoonberry jelly, another of

strawberry jam, a fifty- pound sack of potatoes, a fifty-pound sack of

onions and two fifty- pound sacks of flour. In the closet hung flowered

house dresses, worn Levi's and half a dozen kuspuks, richly embroidered

and trimmed with fur, all gifts from loving and/or grateful family,

friends, tribal members and shareholders. Money and food both had gone

to the potlatch, the kuspuks to female relatives of the right size, and

now Kate was wondering if she'd inherited all of it and if she had, if

she was supposed to pay taxes on it.

She decided the IRS would never know.

Farm income, now. Would that mean the potatoes Mandy grew and sacked and

traded with Kate for salmon to feed Mandy's dogs? Or would that be farm

income for Mandy and barter income for her? But it wasn't income if it

was an even trade, was it? Kate consulted the booklet. Bartering income

was defined as "fair market value of goods or services you received in

return for your services."

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Salmon weren't services.

Potatoes weren't services, either. They were probably goods, though. How

much did potatoes cost nowadays? She had no idea. She never bought

potatoes, she either grew them herself or traded with Mandy for them.

She wondered if there was some way the IRS could find out about that.

She wondered how Mandy had filled out her IRS form, if she had included

Kate's salmon as income from barter.

The vision of the federal prison in Illinois faded, to be replaced by

one of a chain gang in Mississippi, bossed by Strother Martin.

15 She made herself another cup of tea and dosed it liberally with the

last of the honey. She sat back down at the table and drew a pad and

pencil to her and started making out a grocery list, paperwork that was

more her speed, but then Kate had always had a tendency to think with

her stomach. Coffee, flour, butter, salt, seasonings, milk, canned

goods, she was out of everything.

Breakup. If she could just go to sleep at the end of February and wake

up on Memorial Day, the truck running and the cupboards full-and taxes

filed-life would be so much easier.

She dawdled over the list until the sun had gone down and it was time to

light the lamps. She drew out the task as long as she could, checking

the fuel, trimming the wicks, polishing the chimneys until they shone

like crystal. When she was finished, the interior of the cabin was

filled with a warm and welcoming golden glow. She stood admiring it for

a while, and her thoughts wandered to her next-door neighbor. She

wondered if Mandy's parents had arrived on schedule. She wondered if Mr.

and Mrs. Baker had tax problems. Probably not. They probably had a fleet

of tax attorneys on retainer. Them that has, gets.

The distant whine of a jet engine broke the silence. Probably an F-14 on

maneuvers from Elmendorf or Eielson. Even on a remote site in the

Alaskan bush, you couldn't get away from the sonuvabitchin' feds. The

reminder drove her back to the kitchen table, before they parachuted an

IRS auditor down into her front yard.

She had just resumed her seat when Mutt, dozing next to the stove, woke

up with a snort and lunged to her feet.

Startled, Kate said, "What's wrong, girl? What's going on?"

Mutt made a troubled sound halfway between a growl and a whimper. Her

rangy body tense, she stood with her head cocked, ears up, yellow eyes

narrowed, attention fixed on something Kate could neither hear nor see.

Kate didn't like it, not one little bit. Very carefully, she put her

pencil down and rose to her feet. "What's wrong, girl?"

A second half-growl, half-whine was her only answer. It was a sound

unlike anything else Kate had ever heard from Mutt, and a

16 prickle of unease rippled up her spine. She walked to the window.

Through it, the yard looked much as she had left it, a half-circle of

buildings surrounding a clearing with a small, filthy red-and- white

truck with a homemade toolbox in the back, a snow machine, a collapsed

cache and a scattered woodpile, all well illuminated in that maddening

half-light of an Arctic spring evening when the sun was down but not

out. A breeze toyed with the tops of the trees, and far above cumulus

clouds scudded across the sky, attesting to much stronger winds at the

higher elevations.

"What is it, girl?" Kate said softly. "What do you hear? Did that baby

grizz come back for more of what he got this afternoon?" She reached for

the shotgun and eased the door open. This time she would just shoot the

little bastard.

But for now, no bears, no bogeymen, not even any porcupines. Mutt came

to stand next to Kate in the doorway. Against her knee, Kate could feel

her quivering with unease. She knotted her fingers in the stiff gray

ruff and gave it a reassuring tug. "What's wrong,

girl?"

Mutt was looking up. Kate looked from her anxious yellow eyes to the

sky. The hum of the jet engine was still there, although it sounded odd,

a kind of increasing whine. "There's nothing out here, girl," she told

Mutt. "Just your imagination working overtime."

Still, she took a long last look around before pulling the door shut,

and she didn't rack the rifle, standing it instead against the doorjamb.

She was just turning back to the kitchen table when she became aware of

an increasingly loud whistling sound, and then it hit.

It was a thump to end all thumps, a tremendous CRUNCH! of earth and

metal. The ground shook beneath the impact, violently enough to knock

Kate off her feet.

"Earthquake!" she shouted on the way down. She twisted to land on all

fours and headed for the space under the table, knocking a chair out of

the way and snaking out an arm to grab Mutt.

Both windows facing the yard shattered and several somethings

17 whizzed over her head and kaCHUNKed into the opposite wall. Books

fell to the table and from there to the floor, scattering tax papers

everywhere. Mutt, squealing like a frightened puppy, tore free of Kate's

grasp and fled across the floor to dive beneath the couch. Since the

bottom of the couch was only six inches off the floor and Mutt stood

three feet at the shoulder, this was no mean feat.

A split second later there was another CRUNCH! and a piece of the

cabin's roof fell in and onto the couch. Another distressed squeal and

Mutt shot out, streaked across the room and straight up the ladder to

the loft, her paws barely touching the rungs.

The couch fell in.

Well. Not all of it.

Just the section where Kate usually sat to read. The spot where she'd

worn a Kate-shaped groove into the stuffing over the years. The spot

where she'd fallen in sequential love with Wilfred Wetherall and Lazarus

Long and Jamie Fraser.

She looked up.

The roof had fallen in, too.

Well. Not all of it.

Ears ringing, sense of balance iffy, Kate stumbled to her feet and put

out a hand to grasp at nothing. "What the hell was that?" Her voice

sounded distant and tinny. Nobody answered her. She blinked at the

opposite wall, at what had impacted there. It seemed like a long thin

piece of gray metal, several of them.

She shook her head, bemused, and made her way across the floor, knees

wobbling as if she'd just gotten off a boat after six weeks at sea. The

hole in the roof was jagged around the edges. She peered inside the

matching hole in the couch below, to find a piece of oily gray metal,

all knobs and nuts and bolts and flanges, resting squarely, even neatly

inside the Olympia beer box where she stored those cassette tapes she

couldn't find room for on her shelves. There wasn't much left of them

but plastic splinters and snarled brown tape.

"What the hell?" she said, even more blankly than before. She

18 staggered to the door and wrenched it open, only to find herself nose

to rivet with another shard of the metal, quivering with the motion of

the opening door. "What the hell?"

It was a strip of gray metal nearly identical to the ones in the far

wall, driven solidly into the wood of the door. She ducked gingerly

beneath it, put one foot outside and froze.

Her truck was gone.

Well. That wasn't exactly true.

It was there, all right, or what was left of it. About all she could

recognize were the four tires, evidently still attached to the axles,

although all four of them were canted over, and all were ruptured and

flat. The doors had burst open and were lying on the ground at odd

angles. She couldn't even see the toolbox or the bed.

Because lying squarely on top of it was a jet engine.

Impossible.

Kate blinked and looked again.

It was a jet engine, all right. An enormous jet engine, or what was left

of one.

Her mind fought a battle between denial and acceptance. She'd just

managed to grasp the fact of the engine's existence when a second

observation managed to insert itself into the turmoil of her thoughts.

It was a very large jet engine.

It must have come off a very large jet.

Now there was a comforting thought. She raised her head to look warily

up into the darkening sky. If the rest of the plane was coming down she

would see it before she heard it, because her ears were still ringing.

Long moments passed. No plane fell on her.

She let herself relax some, not much, just enough to unlock her knees

and approach the wreckage, almost hopefully, as if closer examination

might make it all go away.

No such luck. The engine wasn't round anymore, it wasn't even

egg-shaped, it was a scrap heap of aluminum and steel or whatever they

made jet engines out of nowadays. She craned her neck up

19 over the lip of the thing and peered inside. Well over half of the

turbine blades seemed to be missing.

The shard of metal in her front door was one of them. So, she discovered

as she stumbled numbly around the semicircle of buildings, were the

shards of metal embedded in the bookshelves on the far wall of the

cabin, in the outhouse door and inside the garage on the wall from which

her tools hung (one of which had neatly severed the power cord to the

hand drill), piercing the side of the snow machine, from which a trickle

of gas ran to mingle with the slush beneath, and the roof of the cabin

and in various tree trunks around the clearing.

Kate emerged from the garage and faltered to a halt, drawing in a shaken

breath. The acrid smell of diesel fuel filled the air, from either the

airplane engine or Ichiban or both. Or, no, of course not, jet engines

ran on jet fuel. The diesel smell must be from the truck. In some

detached portion of her mind, she was thankful there was no fire.

She looked up to see stars twinkling in the sky. The breeze ruffled the

tops of the trees. A torn wisp of cloud slid to one side to reveal the

moon, almost full, silver rays shining down, all the better to

illuminate the complete shambles of Kate's yard. Her ears were still

ringing with the sound of metal crashing into the earth, and she became

aware that, yet again, her knees were trembling.

"Breakup," she said, with loathing.

20

The sun came up at 4:57 a.m. the next morning, or it would have if the

sky hadn't been overcast.

By 4:58 a.m., the homestead was crawling with people.

Kate had progressed from speechless shock to speechless rage.

Mutt was still up in the loft, under the bed.

"Jesus, what a mess." A man of medium height, clad in jeans and a jacket

with National Transportation Safety Board insignia on it stared around

the clearing, at the turbine blades embedded in garage, greenhouse,

cabin, outhouse and trees, at the hole in the cabin roof, at the

flattened truck still obscured by the engine, at the severed and

shattered tools in the garage, at the pierced gas tank on the snow

machine, at the collapsed cache.

"I've seen worse, though." He saw Kate's expression. "No, really.

Happens more often than you might think, a lot more often than

21 the airlines like to admit. Big chunks of frozen sewage, access

panels, doors and hatches, cowling, cones, turbine blades, they've all

fallen off a plane at one time or another. It's kind of like a car

losing a hubcap or a muffler."

Kate said nothing.

"Although," he said with a rueful smile, "generally speaking mufflers

don't have time to accelerate at thirty-two feet per second per second."

He paused expectantly, but something in her eyes must have told him not

to explain that this was the acceleration of gravity, so he contented

himself with adding, "Must have been one hell of a bang."

Kate said nothing. The line of her jaw was very tight.

He pursed his lips in a judicious expression. "You're lucky."

She looked at him.

"Yeah, believe it or not, you are. Outside, there are so many planes in

the air at any given moment that it's next to impossible to track down

the offending aircraft. In Alaska it's easier. Last night, there was

only one 747 in the right place at the right time." He shrugged. "Easy

to identify, and easier for you to demand restitution. By the way, the

plane made it back to Fairbanks safely. Nobody hurt."

"You," Kate said, very carefully, "have obviously mistaken me for

someone who gives a shit."

The speechlessness was beginning to wear off.

The NTSB man raised a quizzical eyebrow. "I'm sure you'll be reimbursed

for damages."

"You bet your ass I will."

He offered his hand. She didn't take it. "I'm John Stewman, National

Transportation Safety Board. I'm the head of the go team." When she

didn't ask, he explained. "That's what we call our response-to-crash

teams, Ms. . . . her," and he smiled, revealing deep dimples and a

slight gap between his two front teeth. His eyes were brown and crinkled

at the corners. Dark hair fell untidily over his forehead, increasing

the resemblance to Tom Sawyer.

Alarmed and annoyed at this sudden awareness, she snapped,

22 "Shugak." It was nothing more than a biological response to a nearly

fatal experience, she told herself sternly. Ask any soldier left

standing after a battle. Ask any pilot who walked away from a crash.

Between the bear encounters and the jet engine, she was feeling a little

rough around the edges, that was all. It would fade.

"Shuyak?" Stewman repeated in a louder voice, and she started and swore

to herself. "Like the island?"

"S-H-U-G-A-K, Shugak, Kate." Besides, Stewman wasn't all that

attractive, he just thought he was. "Make sure you spell the name right

on the check."

The NTSB would not be writing her a check, Earlybird Air Freight would,

maybe, but "S-H-U-G-A-K," he repeated, imperturbable, writing it down on

the top of a form, "Kate. You live here alone?"

"No." She didn't elaborate.

His gaze lingered for a moment on the scar on her throat. "You married?"

"No."

"Children?"

"What are you, the census taker? No."

He sighed. "Ms. Shugak, we need to know who else lives here, so we can-"

She looked behind him and the taut lines of her face eased. "I've got a

roommate."

He pivoted.

Mutt stood in the open door of the cabin, a distrustful expression on

her face. The man extracting the turbine blade from the snow machine

caught sight of her and stood straight up. "John," he said.

The man next to Kate said, "Yes, Brandon."

"Um, there's a wolf? Over there?" He pointed at Mutt, who regarded his

pointing finger for a moment and then slowly, deliberately and

thoroughly licked her chops.

Stewman looked at Kate for confirmation. "Is it? A wolf?"

23 He didn't look more than wary at the prospect, and Kate, damn his

eyes, liked him for it. She gave a casual shrug and Jack Morgan's

standard answer to that comment. "Nah. Only half."

This time the smile did more than crinkle his eyes. "Only half,

Brandon," he said.

Brandon, a gaunt, pinch-faced albino blond, was not noticeably reassured.

"Mutt," Kate said. Mutt looked over at her but made no move. "Come on,

girl. It's all right."

Mutt had her doubts about that. She took a long, careful look around the

clearing. The half dozen men and women in it slowed their work to a

halt, equally wary expressions on their faces. Brandon's nervousness was

catching. "Come on, girl," Kate repeated. "It's okay now. Come on, come

here." She patted her leg.

Mutt could face down a bull moose in rut, a brown bear waking up cranky

from his winter nap, a mass murderer armed with a shotgun. The engine

off a 747 falling from the sky was beyond her ken, and it was taking her

a while to adapt. Her speculative gaze fell on a woman in a fur jacket

standing next to what had been Kate's truck. The woman took an

involuntary step backward. Satisfied that, jet engine or not, she hadn't

lost her touch, Mutt strolled over to stand next to Kate. She looked up

and cocked an ear, as if to say, What's all the fuss?

Kate caught Stewman's eye. He was grinning, and she almost laughed but

caught it in time. There was no point in giving an inch until the check

cleared the bank.

"John!" somebody yelled. "Come here, will you?"

"In a minute, Tim," he yelled back, and looked from Kate to Mutt and

back again. "This your roomie?" She nodded. "And will she be filing a

claim as well?"

Kate showed her teeth. "I'll be filing one for her."

He grinned again. Kate thought of the fence and the whitewash and

resisted the charm in that smile.

"Introduce us," Stewman said.

24 "Huh?"

"Introduce us, so she doesn't take a bite out of me the next time I make

a move in your direction."

Kate wasn't altogether sure that that was such a good idea, but she

said, "Make a fist, hold your hand out, palm down."

He did so without hesitation. Mutt sniffed at it, sneezed once and

looked up at Kate for approval, her plume of a tail waving back and

forth in a gentle arc. Kate scratched behind her ears.

"That it?" the NTSB investigator asked.

"That's it."

He retrieved his hand and closed the notebook. "Look, Kate, I know this

is tough, but we'll be out of your hair before you know it. We're really

very good at putting the pieces back together."

"How long before you clear all this crap out of here?"

"One day, maybe two."

"How long before I'm reimbursed?"

"You'll have to take that up with the Earlybird representative."

"Which one is he?"

He pointed at a skinny man with a thin, harried face standing on the

other side of the wreckage. "The name's Kevin Bickford. He's Earlybird's

director of operations for the state."

"Thanks," Kate said, and walked around the wreckage to tap Bickford on

the shoulder. He turned and stared at her uncomprehendingly.

"Kate Shugak, Mr. Bickford." He looked blank, and she added pointedly,

"This is my homestead your jet engine just trashed."

He cringed inside his oversize parka, reminding her of nothing so much

as a parky squirrel diving down the nearest hole. He even looked a

little like a parky squirrel, with small, bright eyes set close on

either side of an insignificant little nose that didn't look as if it

could suck in enough oxygen to keep a gnat alive. His teeth, bared in a

failed attempt at an ingratiating smile, were little and white, with the

exception of the front two, which were big and buck. "Mr. Bickford, as

far as I'm concerned, this could not have happened at

25 a worse time. I need my truck. When will I be reimbursed for the

damage done by your engine?"

He couldn't hide his look of surprise, and Kate wondered sourly if he

thought broken gutturals would have been more appropriate to her brown

skin, black braids and Bush lifestyle.

Bickford cleared his throat nervously. Kate raised her brows and waited.

His gaze fell on the scar at her throat and widened.

"Holy-"

"About restitution, Mr. Bickford," Kate said.

He flushed and his eyes slid past her guiltily. "Well, Ms. Shageluk-"

"Shugak," she said, patiently for her. "SHOOgack."

"Of course." His smile was weak. It matched his chin. "Well, Ms.

Shungnak." Close, but no cigar. Kate left it for another day. "I don't

rightly know when you can expect restitution. We have to assess the

damage first, of course. Get an estimate on the replacement value of

your truck, that sort of thing."

"Including delivery here," she said.

"Of course, of course," he said hurriedly.

"And not forgetting the collateral damage done to the tools in the garage."

"No," he said obediently.

"Or the interior of my cabin, and the contents therein, not to mention

the roof."

"Certainly not."

What the hell. "And the meat cache."

He took it without a blink. "Of course."

"Fine," she said. "I'll start a list. One more thing."

Relieved that it was only one more thing, he said almost eagerly, "Yes?"

"I don't want a check."

He blinked. "No check?"

"No. Cash. Nothing bigger than a hundred, please. Fifties if you can

manage it." Cash because the nearest bank was Ahtna,

26 and fifties because it was next to impossible to get change for a

hundred in the Bush during breakup anywhere except maybe the Roadhouse.

Everybody was broke, even Bernie, who let customers drink on tab until

they made their first set of the year.

She saw no need to explain herself to Bickford, who looked a little

dazed by the request, but such was the force of her personality that he

found himself mumbling agreement.

The go team went about its business, locating, identifying and

cataloging the various pieces off the engine around the clearing and

marking their location on a map they had drawn of the site five minutes

after they had arrived. Other than requesting, very politely, that she

touch nothing, they hadn't bothered Kate much. Except for the

photographer, whose flash had to be about ready to wear out. Kate would

be seeing spots for the rest of the week.

She left Mutt to supervise the debris collection process from a post

next to the woodpile and went back to her cabin. The interior looked as

if the second chinook of the year had passed directly through it, books

and canned goods and cassette tapes alternating with glass shards and

wood splinters all over the floor. She couldn't even put on any music to

drown out the sounds of the people outside because one of the turbine

blades had skewered the cassette deck, an electronic shish kebab. Not

that there was anything to play after the piece off the engine squashed

most of her tapes.

A can of stewed tomatoes looked like breakfast, and she dumped it into a

bowl and ate to the accompaniment of a low hum of conversation and an

occasional clang of metal from the yard. She did her best to ignore

both, but as she was scraping the bottom of the bowl, rain began to

patter on the roof, and through the hole onto the couch and the box of

crushed tapes beneath it. She heaved a sigh, went out to the garage,

located the ladder among the wreckage and set it up against the eaves of

the cabin.

The hole was about a foot and a half in diameter. The good news was that

it appeared to have missed all the rafters. Kate went

27 back to the garage, started the generator, plugged in the power saw,

mercifully intact, and cut a piece of plywood to fit the outside and a

piece of Sheetrock to fit the inside and scrounged up enough pink

insulation to stuff in between. Caulking, tar paper and shingles

followed. A quantity of Spackle later and the job was done, except for

painting. Kate had a dreary suspicion that she'd have to paint the

entire inside of the roof to make it match, but that was for tomorrow,

when the Spackle had dried.

O joy, Of rapture, it was time for lunch. A can of retried beans heated

up and seasoned with garlic powder and oregano was better than cold

stewed tomatoes. She cleaned up the kitchen, tossing the ventilated

canned goods and restoring the rest to the shelves above and below the

counter, adding as she did so to the grocery list, which was beginning

to resemble the provisional logistics for D-Day.

After that it was time to start a list of everything Earlybird was going

to replace whether they wanted to or not. She started with the tape deck

and Ae box of tapes beneath the couch. The list was over fifty titles

before she was done.

She moved on to the books, where the news was even worse. The copy of

The Wind in the Willows with the wonderful Michael Hague illustrations

had been pierced through the center, stabbed to the heart, a fatal

wound. Next to it, Louise Erdrich's Tracks had the cover peeled back

like an onion. "Goddammit," she said, and started another list.

Halfway down it came the sound of raised voices from the yard. They got

louder. She marched over to the door and yanked it open, ready to kick ass.

The go team were clustered in a group in the center of the clearing,

around two of their own, a man and a woman. Stewman, his back to the

cabin, heard the door open and turned.

She glared at him. "What's with all the noise?"

He glanced back at the group. "We've, ah, we've run into a little, uh,

well, I guess you could call it a snag." He tried to smile but it didn't

take.

28 The woman, a slender redhead with freckles, looked as if she was

going to throw up. The man next to her, the albino blond, looked

terrified. Kate took a step forward. "What's going on?"

Stewman glanced back around the circle, and back at Kate. "We, uh, well,

we found a body."

Kate stared at him. "I beg your pardon?'

He shoved back his cap to scratch his head, and resettled it firmly.

"There's usually a pattern to the way debris scatters in an incident

like this one. I sent Selina and Brandon"- he indicated the terrified

man and the nauseous woman -"out to canvass." He paused. "They found a

body instead."

"They found a what?"

"A dead body," John Stewman said for the third time. He had regained his

composure and he was patient and apologetic but firm. "The body of a

dead man." He glanced back at Selina and Brandon. "I gather it's not in

the best of shape."

Kate stared at him. He wasn't joking. She sat down heavily upon the

doorstep. Mutt, concerned, deserted her post near the woodpile and

trotted forward to nose at her cheek. Kate put an arm around her neck

and rested her forehead against the thick gray fur. "You're not kidding,

are you," she said into Mutt's ruff.

"No."

"Why me?" Kate said.

"If not you, who?" Stewman said brightly. "If not now, when?" She raised

her head to look at him. Just look. He sobered. "Sorry."

"Where?" she said, mostly just to be saying something. Ex-DA's

investigator on automatic.

Stewman pulled off his cap again and smoothed back his shaggy mane of

hair, a nervous habit. "About three miles that way." He pointed roughly

southwest, away from the Yukon Territory and toward Valdez.

The Earlybird man said apprehensively, "How did he die? Did you see any

parts off the engine nearby?"

Stewman raised an eyebrow and said sardonically, "Don't worry, Bickford,

this guy's been there longer than last night."

29 Brandon shuddered his agreement. Selina made a stifled sound and

clapped her hand over her mouth. She staggered off a few steps and lost

her lunch on the ground right next to the snow machine.

"Did you send for the trooper?" Kate said.

Stewman held up a two-way radio. "We called it in on Channel 9. Talked

to somebody in Niniltna, a ham operator-"

"Bobby Clark."

He nodded. "That's the guy. He said he'd call the trooper in Tok."

"Good," Kate said without enthusiasm. Just what she needed, on today of

all days, a smartass trooper with the mating instincts of a tomcat and

the come-on repertoire of Casanova. A thought occurred. "You said three

miles? That way?" She pointed.

"More or less. Selina and Brandon said it was pretty rough going. My

guess is it's closer rather than farther away."

What with one thing and another, it had been a very long twenty-four

hours, even for breakup. Not one but two close encounters of the ursine

kind, a jet engine falling out of the sky to smash flat her primary

means of summer transportation, a hole in the roof and, oh yes, let us

not forget, income tax.

And now, on top of everything else, a body. "You know what?" Kate said

brightly. "If you found the body three miles that way, it isn't on my

homestead, so it's not my problem." She got to her feet and dusted her

hands. "It's not my problem," she repeated firmly, willing herself to

believe it. "You can leave, and you can take your pieces of engine and

your bodies and your go team with you." She looked at Bickford. "Now."

Stewman had the audacity to laugh out loud. "Is this what they call the

bum's rush?"

"Off," she said to Bickford, pointing in the general direction of Seattle.

Bickford had donned a too-big gimme cap whose brim came down to the end

of his nose. It had a patch with a red-and-white jet on a robin's egg

blue background and a border reading "Around

30 the Clock, Around the World." The name Earlybird Air Freight was

inscribed on the bill. He snatched the cap off to wring it between his

hands. "I'm sorry, Ms. Shungnak," he said, searching desperately for

understanding, forgiveness and even a trace of fellow feeling in Kate's

stony expression, "but I'm afraid it'll be a while before we get the

equipment in here to do that." He nodded at Kate's squashed truck and

the engine on top of it. "Sucker weighs more than four tons."

Four tons? Eight thousand pounds? A shiver ran down Kate's spine as she

realized again just how close the world had come to losing her. For some

reason it made her even angrier and she rallied, her chin coming up and

taking aim. "I don't give a shit about any problems you might have,

Bickford. You're in the air freight business. Find a Here or a

helicopter and fly it out, or mush it out on a dogsled, or haul it out

on a horse-drawn cart." Her voice rose. "I don't give a good goddam how

you do it. I want you people off my land. You got that?" She rose to her

feet. "You're trespassing. I want you off my land." She fumbled behind

her for the door handle.

"Ms. Shungnak, please, be reasonable. We can't-"

"Git!" she said. "Don't even fly over here anymore!" As she turned to go

back inside the cabin, Mutt spoiled her grand exit with an anxious

whine. "What!" Kate said furiously. "What now!"

Mutt had her ears cocked, and she was looking east. At least this time

it couldn't be a jet engine falling off; jet engines didn't fall

horizontally. It was something, though, because, now that Kate had

stopped yelling they could all hear an approaching sound like a herd of

elephants crashing through the underbrush. A sec- I and later and the

herd of elephants smashed through into the I clearing and resolved

itself into a bull moose, young, his antlers mere beginning spikes.

This barely had time to register, as he was moving like he was up

against Secretariat in the Kentucky Derby, a flat-out, no-holds barred,

down-the-straightaway gallop. He pounded through the clearing and people

leapt out of the way and into trees, with the!

31 sole exception of the Earlybird man, who appeared to possess no

self-protective instincts whatsoever. The moose ran right over the top

of him and charged out the other side of the clearing, crashing through

the underbrush with a fine disregard for the scenery.

Kate put one foot out to see if Bickford was all right-she didn't want

him damaged before she had the cash in hand-and in the next instant drew

it back smartly. The race was not limited to a single contestant. No

indeed, hard on the heels of the bull moose was a grizzly bear, the same

cache-robbing youngster Kate had run off the day before. She opened her

mouth to shout a warning but there was no need, g-men diving for cover

for the second time in as many minutes. She reached for the rifle over

the door, but there was no need for that, either, as she had just enough

time to see the harried expression on his face before the bear ran

straight across the clearing and on through the brush, taking the trail

the moose had broken for him.

Three bear encounters in two days was almost enemy action, and Kate was

inclined to be indignant. So was Mutt, who took off in pursuit, barking

excitedly.

"Mutt!" Kate yelled.

Mutt skidded to a halt, and was giving Kate a reproachful look as the

bear's backside disappeared, when the sound of gas engines going flat

out approached, again from the east.

"What the fuck's going on?" somebody yelled.

"Dive, dive!" somebody else yelled, and they did, everyone who had just

picked themselves out of the mud and the slush dove for cover yet again,

with the exception, of course, of the Earlybird man, who gazed about him

with a bewildered air. The stranger in a strange land.

Two four-wheelers, driven by two big men in black-and-red- checked

mackinaws and deerstalker caps, burst into the clearing. Mutt, balked

from bear chasing, took off after the four-wheelers instead, barking

with enthusiasm and adding to the general uproar.

One of the four-wheeler drivers had a rifle in his right hand

32 with the sling wrapped around his forearm and a bottle in his left.

"Whoopee!" he shouted.

"Powder River, let 'her buck!" yelled his friend.

They roared in a circle around the Earlybird man, frozen in the center

of the clearing, only to finish up, after Whoopee clipped a section of

the jet engine and swerved, with a grand front-end finale, hard enough

to catapult both drivers from their seats. They met head to head with a

Crack! that could be heard all across the clearing. One of the

four-wheelers managed to climb over its sister ship, turn hard right

rudder and run straight into Kate's garage, impacting, in order, Kate's

old-fashioned but until then still-working wringer washing machine, the

trickle charger and the far wall with enough force to send all the

remaining tools on the wall crashing to the floor. The washer, dancing

frantically around on one caster, lost the battle for balance to gravity

and tipped over, landing on its barrel side. For not having achieved

thirty-two feet per second per second, it made a splendid crash.

Kevin Bickford stood where he was, white face streaked with mud and

oversize parka stained with slush, looking as if he couldn't believe he

was still alive and in one piece. Kate didn't blame him, but she had

other things on her mind, like murder.

She started forward and a third four-wheeler leapt out of the brush,

this one driven by Dan O'Brian. Skidding to a stop in the center of the

clearing, he killed the engine and was one step ahead of Kate to the

four-wheeler drivers, who were sitting up and beginning to take

hilarious notice of their surroundings. Whoopee had lost his bottle, so

Powder River hoisted himself up and fished a silver flask from a hip

pocket. Whoopee greeted this with a loud cheer and a wet, noisy kiss on

Powder River's cheek.

They had just enough time for a gulp apiece before Dan fastened a hand

in each collar and jerked them to their feet, causing them to spray

whiskey all over the Earlybird man, for whom Kate, against her will, was

beginning to feel a little sorry.

"GOTCHA," Dan roared, "you drunk-driving, wildlife-poaching,

great-white-hunter-wannabe sonsaBITCHES!"

33 He slung Whoopee down ungently at the base of a tree and fastened his

wrists together with a plastic restraint. Powder River received the same

treatment. They recovered enough to protest.

"SHADDUP!" Dan roared again.

They shaddup.

Dan, quivering with outrage, smoothed a trembling hand over the red hair

standing straight up all over his head and turned a wrathful gaze on

Kate to say one infuriated word.

"Breakup."

34

At that moment the sound of another engine was heard, and with a single

bound Mutt gained the center of the clearing, where she stood barking up

at the sky, tail wagging furiously. Kate didn't look. She, too, knew the

sound of that engine.

Sure enough, over the tops of the trees came a Bell Jet Ranger, a small

helicopter with the insignia of the Alaska Department of Public Safety

emblazoned on the doors. It set down a little to one side of the center

of the clearing, rotors only just missing the top of the wrecked engine

and the eaves of Kate's garage, cabin, greenhouse and outhouse. It would

have taken a chunk out of the cache's roof had the cache still been

standing, but it wasn't, and if Kate had been in a fair mood, she would

have admired the artistry of the landing.

She wasn't. She didn't.

35 Seconds later the trooper emerged in all his blue-and-gold glory. He

conferred first with Dan, then with Stewman, then with Brandon and

Selina, while Kate watched from her front doorstep, scowling and keeping

her distance. Wasn't her land. Wasn't her body. Weren't her hunters. She

didn't want anything to do with any of it, and she was prepared to tell

Jim Chopin so, at length, but she never got the chance, because he

loaded Selina into the chopper and took off.

Well. It was obvious that her help was neither wanted nor needed. Fine.

She stamped inside and made a fresh pot of hot water, just in time to

pour out for Dan O'Brian, who had calmed down enough to stare into his

mug and say incredulously, "Since when do you drink tea?"

"Since I ran out of coffee and a jet engine fell on the only

transportation I've got to get me to the store for supplies."

He caught the ferocity behind the misleadingly mild words, and said

hastily, "Hey, I live for tea. Serve it up. Got any sugar?" It was

immediately obvious that that was the wrong thing to say too, so he fell

back on something he knew for certain she would agree with. "I hate this

time of year."

"I heard that," Kate said, with feeling.

He nodded at the wreckage in the yard. "Looks like Chicken Little was

right."

"Looks like."

"Jim says they found a body."

"That's the rumor," Kate said, studying the swirling liquid in her mug

with absorption.

He grinned. "Amazing how you don't have to go looking for work, Shugak,

how it comes looking for you."

"I wasn't looking," she stated. "I'm not looking. It's breakup, for

crissake, I've got nineteen different things to do without taking on

trying to figure out why some doofus wound up dead wandering around the

back of beyond."

His grin faded. "I thought he got brained by a piece off that engine."

36 "I don't know," Kate said stubbornly, stifling the memory of Stewman

saying, This guy's been there longer than last night. "I don't know

anything about it. I don't want to know anything about it. All I know is

the engine missed me."

He got up to look out the window, measuring the distance between the

engine and her front door. "Barely."

She was tired of the subject, or so she told herself, and nodded through

the cabin's open door at the two men sitting at the base of the tree.

They had stopped shouting obscenities with the arrival of the trooper.

Now they were silent and glum. "What's with Rocky and Rambo?"

"Couple of Arco engineers from Anchorage." Dan turned to raise an

eyebrow in her direction. "On a hunting trip," he added blandly.

"In a manner of speaking," Kate agreed dryly. "How'd you get onto them

so fast?"

It was a legitimate question. The Park comprised twenty million acres

and the year-round ranger staff was so small that most of the time

irresponsible hunters did their damage and were long gone by the time

Dan caught up with them.

"You'll like this." He drank tea, repressing a shudder. "They flew into

Niniltna in a Cessna 180, loaded-you should pardon the expression-for

bear. They got a ride to the Roadhouse last night and started asking

around for the best place to go hunting."

Kate laughed. She couldn't help it.

Dan grinned. "Yeah, I know. Like anybody at the Roadhouse would steer

them toward a bear they'd already marked out for themselves. So somebody

told them Fish and Game hasn't issued permits for a bear hunt in ten

years, the grizz population in the Park being down to what it is and all."

Kate was of the newly formed opinion that the Park's grizzly population

was in definite need of a brisk culling, but the Park's chief ranger was

highly unlikely to enter into her feelings on the subject. "I guess they

didn't take the warning to heart, did they?"

37 "Nope." Dan shook his head. "First they got drunk, and then they got

a couple of four wheelers-"

"Where from?"

Dan looked at her out of the corner of his eye and said, "Bought them

off Dandy Mike. Cash on the barrelhead. Twice what they were worth."

"Ouch." Like all Park rats open to opportunity, Kate prudently refrained

from asking him if the four-wheelers had belonged to Dandy in the first

place, and, like a good friend, Dan avoided burdening her with that

information. "Anyway, Dandy counted the cash, twice, made a few

suggestions as to where they might look for bear, and as soon as they

were out of sight he called me. I flew down and borrowed Billy Mike's

four-wheeler, and here I am."

Kate sat up straight. "Dandy sent them up here?" Dan grinned again, an

answer in itself. "That son of a bitch!"

"Now, Kate," Dan said soothingly. "To be fair, I'd rather they tangle

with you than anyone else in the Park, and Dandy knows it. Hell, they

all do."

Kate looked around at the shambles of her homestead, and her burst of

anger died away. "I don't feel all that formidable today, Dan."

The ranger raised his mug in salute. "A temporary setback, Shugak.

You'll have all this up and running again in no time, I guarantee it.

These go teams move fast, from what I hear."

They watched the NTSB work in silence for a moment. "So if he didn't get

brained by a piece off your engine-"

"It's not my engine."

"-what was he doing out here anyway? Hunting bear, do you think? That's

the only thing worth hunting this time of year."

"Don't know how long he has been there," Kate said, and shrugged. Okay,

she'd play. "If he really has been out there over the winter, he could

have gotten lost hunting, got hurt. Happens all the time."

"Maybe a bear ate him," Dan suggested.

38 Kate thought of Mama Bear coming at her flat out across the creek the

morning before. Maybe the sow's eagerness and speed hadn't entirely been

due to her protective instincts, but to the sight of what she had

already found to be an easy snack. Ursine finger food. Kate repressed a

shiver. "Maybe. Although it's not like a hungry bear to leave enough to

show whether a body is male or female, and Stewman was definite that it

was a man." She shrugged again.

"Aren't you even curious?" Dan was joking when he added, "What kind of

sleuth are you anyway, Shugak?"

She wasn't when she snapped out her reply. "A retired one."

Dan looked as if he'd like to argue the point but Chopper Jim's return

spared her. The helicopter settled into the clearing in the exact same

spot as before, this time with a body bag strapped to one of the skids

and a stretcher with a sandbag strapped to the other for ballast. Selina

got out the instant the skids touched down and walked away very fast

without looking back. Dan went to retrieve Whoopee and Powder River. Jim

waved Kate over. She went, reluctantly.

He opened the door as she approached, his earphones around his neck.

"What you got?" Kate shouted over the noise of the engine, the rotors

whapping at the air over her head.

He grinned at her. "Looking for business, Kate?"

Her expression told him what she thought of that question and he

laughed, kind of heartlessly, she thought, given she was standing like

Dido in the middle of Carthage after the sack. He nodded at the jet

engine. "It seems Chicken Little was right."

"So they tell me." She jerked her chin at the body bag. "What'd he get

hit with?"

"What do you mean, what'd he get hit with?"

"Didn't he get clobbered by a piece off that engine?"

"Kate. We found him three miles from here."

"When you drop an airplane engine from thirty thousand feet, I imagine

the parts tend to scatter just a tad."

39 "True, but he didn't get hit with a piece of your engine. He's been

there all winter."

Shit, she thought. "Who is he?" she said out loud, adding immediately,

"Not that I'm all that interested."

"No ID left on him. For sure he isn't my missing hiker."

It took her a minute. "You mean the guy you were looking for last June?

The one up in the Mentastas?"

He nodded.

She almost smiled. "Come on, Jim. The Mentastas are seventy miles north

of here. That would have been one hell of a hike."

Jim grinned again, unrepentant. "I hate open cases. And he almost fits

the description."

Kate nodded at the body bag. "How long's he been dead?"

"Longer than last night. Long enough for the critters to chow down some

on him." He raised an inquiring eyebrow. "Mutt bring home any

suspicious-looking femurs lately? He's only got one left, and it looks

kind of gnawed on."

"Yuck," said Dan O'Bftan, in the process of forcing the Great White

Hunters into the back of the chopper. Whoopee started to complain that

his butt was wet. The trooper turned his head and gave him a narrow-eyed

look that reminded Whoopee that he was soon to be two thousand feet up

with one potential witness dead and the other already snoring in a

drunken stupor. He shut up.

Kate heard a faint staticky noise and Jim raised one of the earphones to

his ear. "Roger that," he said into the microphone. "I'm on my way."

He resettled the headset in place. "Gotta run," he said, raising his

voice over the increasing whine of the helicopter's engine. "A Nizina

fisherman just shot his father over a Prince William Sound drift permit.

Seems he thought it was time for Dad to retire, only Dad disagreed." He

adjusted something on the dash and raised his voice over the increasing

whine of the engine. "I just love breakup, don't you?"

40 Kate and Dan duckwalked beneath the props to one side of the clearing

as the rotors spun into a blur. A tossed salute through the windscreen

and Jim was gone.

The sound of the chopper faded into the distance. "Well," Dan said,

"time I moved like I had a purpose." He surveyed her trashed yard one

more time and cocked an eye at Kate. "You going to be

okay?"

"Yeah."

"We got a bunk up on the Step with your name on it, if you need it."

She relaxed enough to smile, and mean it. "Thanks, Dan. I'll keep it in

mind."

"Come to that, there's a bed with my name on it you're welcome to, when

you've a mind to it." He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.

The attempt to commit lechery was tempered with too much humor to take

offense. It always was, but today found her wondering what Dan would do

if she took him up on his offer. The thought of his probable reaction

made her laugh out loud and she waved him off with a shooing gesture. He

mounted Billy Mike's four-wheeler with a swagger, pressed the starter

and was off in a roar of sound.

It faded just in time for her to hear a truck grind to a halt at her

trailhead, a quarter of a mile through the woods. She heard Dan shout

something, and a voice she recognized shout back. All amusement gone,

Kate swore out loud.

John Stewman, writing something on his clipboard, looked around- "Like

Grand Central Station around here today."

Mutt took off up the trail to investigate, and returned shortly with

three people in tow. One was Amanda Winthrop Baker, known to friends as

Mandy, to mushing fans as the Brahmin Bullet and to the couple behind

her as Amanda dear.

"Amanda dear," the woman said, "do you have to walk quite so fast?"

"Yes," the man said, "your mother isn't used to-what did you

41 call it?-bushwhacking. Try to keep it down to just under a gallop, if

you don't mind."

Only a friend who called her Mandy would have noticed the look of quiet

desperation that gleamed in her eyes. Only a friend who called her Mandy

would not have remarked on it. Kate, a very good friend, bade a mental

goodbye to any prospect of peace this day and with true nobility-because

she'd been listening to Mandy's stories of her parents for years-stepped

once more into the breach, holding out a hand and saying heartily, "Hi,

Mandy. And these must be your parents. Nice to meet you, folks, I've

heard a lot about you."

She didn't add what she'd heard. With the innate wisdom of all parents

everywhere, they didn't ask.

Mandy's parents huddled as close together as they could get without

actually sitting in each other's lap, not because there wasn't room on

the one undamaged arm of Kate's couch to spread out, but because they

were mesmerized by the unwavering yellow eyes of the 140-pound

half-husky, half-wolf lying in the middle of the floor. The expression

on their thin-boned, aristocratic East Coast faces was identical, and if

each hair of the immaculately groomed, distinguished white caps on both

their heads wasn't standing straight up, it was only because their fear

of letting down the side exceeded their fear of being ripped to shreds

by a wild animal.

Medusa had nothing on Mutt, Kate decided, and declined to reassure the

Bakers for the third time that since she had introduced them as friends

they had nothing to fear.

Mandy was staring, fascinated, out the kitchen window at the lump of

gray metal reposing in the yard. She'd finally noticed the shambles of

Kate's homestead, and had been sufficiently jolted from her

self-absorption to demand details. "Jesus, Kate. Forty feet north and

you'd have been bear bait."

"I am aware of that, Mandy," Kate said testily. She turned to the

parents. "Would you like something to drink? Some tea?

42 Lemon Zinger? Although I haven't managed a spring run for supplies

yet, so I'm out of anything to put in it."

"Thank you," Mr. Baker said, still hypnotized by Mutt's eyes.

"That would be lovely," Mrs. Baker said, just as mechanically. Mutt

stretched and let out a little whuff of a groan. Mrs. Baker inched

closer to her husband. Mutt rolled a yellow eye in Kate's direction.

Kate bit her lip and turned to pump up a kettle of water.

Mrs. Baker said, "Amanda dear, we appear to have imposed upon Ms. Shugak

at a rather unfortunate time. Perhaps we should just-"

Mandy aimed a broad, insincere smile in the general direction of the

couch. "Just a moment, Mother. Kate, take a look at this." Mandy grabbed

Kate's arm and crowded her toward the window.

Kate peered through the shards of shattered glass. The go team was going

about its business. The jet engine was still there. Her truck was still

flattened. She gave up the hopeful notion that Mandy had made it all go

away and said, "What?"

Mandy dropped her voice. "My folks want to see the mine. Can you take them?"

Kate stared at her friend as if she'd lost her mind. "What?"

"I told the folks about the copper mining the Astors and the Camegies

did up here around the turn of the century, and they want to take a look."

Kate took a deep, steadying breath. "Then I suggest you take them

yourself. For crying out loud, Mandy-"

"Shhh!" Mr. and Mrs. Baker stirred restively. Mutt opened one eye, and

they stilled.

"I just had a jet engine flatten my homestead and you want me to take

the afternoon off?"

"What is there for you to do until they get all that crap hauled out of

here? They're driving Chick nuts, Kate," Mandy whispered.

"Chick," Kate said, spacing her words with precision, "is a grown man."

"Oh, all right, they're driving me nuts, too. Just get them out of my

house for a little while, please?"

43 "How long have they been here?" Kate demanded.

"Thirty-eight hours," Mandy said. She checked her watch. "And forty

minutes."

"Not even two days?" In spite of herself, Kate's shoulders shook.

"Jesus, Mandy, get a grip." She waved a hand toward the window.

"Besides, what used to be my transportation is buried beneath four tons

of scrap metal. And it's breakup, I've got a thousand things to do."

"Like what?"

"Like finish my income taxes."

Momentarily diverted, Mandy said, "You left it to the last minute again

this year?"

Kate bristled. "You got a problem with that?"

"No, it's just that last year you swore-" At Kate's expression Mandy

floundered. "It's just that you're usually such a planner, Shugak, I'd

think-" She looked at Kate again and steered the conversation back to

where she wanted it in the first place. "You can use my truck to ferry

them up to the mine, and drop me off at my trailhead on the way."

Kate's expression did not noticeably soften, and Mandy dropped her voice

a persuasive octave. "Look, if you could just show them around the

place, tell them some of the good old stories. Shove them off the edge

of the glacier. Just kidding," she added quickly when Kate's brows rose.

"Ha. Ha ha ha. Seriously, Kate. If you could just get them off our backs

for three or four hours, I'd sacrifice a goat in your honor. Please, Kate."

Kate put her hands on her hips and demanded, "Did you hear a word I said?"

Mandy glanced over at her parents and lowered her voice further to a

whisper, as if she thought that if she did her parents couldn't hear

every word she said in a twenty-five-foot-square cabin. "They actually

think I'm going to come home. Can you believe it? It's like they're

deaf, Kate! When am I coming home, Amanda dear, Dad says, and I say, I

am home, Dad. Next fall, perhaps? he says, and I say, I am home, Dad.

There's this man at home, Amanda

44 dear, Mother says, he's a Cabot and so suitable, and I say, I'm not

getting married, Mother, and I'm sure as hell not coming home to get

married, and Mother says, He's so charming, Amanda dear, you'll adore

him. You'd think I was some kind of witless little deb, fresh from her

coming-out party!"

Her voice, having risen over the last words, stopped abruptly as Mandy

waged an obvious battle for self-control. Kate looked at her, at the

weathered skin that made her look older than Kate, though she was two

years younger, at the neatly trimmed cap of thick brown hair, the deeply

set gray eyes surrounded by wrinkles that came from years of squinting

into an Arctic sun from the back of a dopsled She was mostly muscle and

bone, and she was dressed in a fashion to wring her mother's heart, or

much as Kate was, in plaid flannel shirt, jeans and tennis shoes. She

didn't look much like a Boston Brahmin debutante, and in fact she wasn't

one, but only because she had made her escape the instant she was of

legal age.

Mandy had been born in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on Valentine's Day

thirty-two years before. The day after her birth her father, a banker

who inherited one fortune from a Carnegie forebear and made a second

lending overpriced money to Israel and Argentina, put her name down for

Vassar, eighteen years hence. That same day her mother, a great-niece of

Henry Cabot Lodge, began making plans for her daughter's coming-out

party, also eighteen years hence. The interim was taken up with piano

and ballroom dance and French lessons, instruction at a private,

exclusive girls' school and private, exclusive parties given in private,

exclusive homes to which children of only the most private, exclusive

families were invited.

Somewhere along the line the Bakers must have slipped up in their

indoctrination. No one knew it better than Mandy, who during childhood

and adolescence was able to conceal her deplorable preference for . .

Bean over Halston (who had been dressing Mrs. Baker since her coming

out), Robert Service over Robert Lowell (a second cousin once removed)

and hiking the Appalachian Trail over sailing off Cape Cod (Mr. Baker

maintained a

45 sloop in Newport), but the day she turned twenty-one and came into

her trust fund she came out of the closet. "I'm moving to Alaska," she

announced at breakfast.

Their maid Carlotta nearly dropped the bowl of muesli she was handing

around.

Her father laughed comfortably from behind his paper. "Don't be silly,

Amanda dear, you're graduating from Vassar next year."

"I'm moving to Alaska instead," she said, and her mother said, "What do

you think of this shade of taffeta for your ball gown, Amanda dear? Too

pink?"

"I don't know and I don't care, Mother," Mandy said. "I won't be wearing

it. I'll be in Alaska."

"It is too pink," her mother decided. "I'll have to ask Roy for more

swatches."

"Whatever, Mother, but you'd better get it sized to fit you, because

I'll be in Alaska when they strike up the first waltz."

Carlotta, who had been with them since before Mandy was born and who at

that point knew her rather better than her parents did, burst into

tears, threw her apron over her head and ran from the room. Mandy went

upstairs to pack.

They trailed after her all the way to Logan International Airport, she

in a Yellow Cab and they in the Bentley, driven by Carlotta's husband,

Alfonso (a Bentley because Mrs. Baker said that Rolls-Royces were

getting positively common when bourgeois entrepreneurs like Donald Trump

drove around in one). They protested her decision in louder and louder

voices right up to the time the hatch on the jet shut in their faces.

Mandy changed planes in Seattle and arrived in Anchorage on a cold,

snowy day in March. She transferred her trust fund to an account at a

local bank, found a real estate agent with a pilot's license and began

flying into remote properties in the Bush. It took her two months to

find exactly what she wanted. When she did find it, an abandoned lodge

on Silver Bottom Creek and 130 acres, she bought it, along with three

nearly feral dogs, without haggling. She knew from the real estate

agent's face that she'd overpaid. "I

46 don't care," she told Kate. "At least for the first time in my life

that damn trust fund is being used for something besides bachelor bait."

It took her the whole first summer just to clean up the mess the

previous owners had left and take inventory, her first winter included a

record snowfall that caved in a corner of the roof, and she learned the

hard way how not to attract the attention of hungry grizzlies. But she

did survive, which was more than most wannabe frontiersmen could say.

And out in the Great Alone, with a silence she almost could hear, she

was truly and deeply content for the first time in her life.

The following year, attending the World Championship Sled Dog Races

during Anchorage's Fur Rendezvous, she met Chick Noyukpuk, also known as

the Billiken Bullet, a two-time world champion dogsled racer and

part-time drunk. The attraction was instantaneous and mutual, and she

brought him back to the homestead with her. When he'd sobered up he made

friends with her huskies, half-wild half-wolf creatures that slunk

around the lodge and would approach close enough to snatch food from her

hand and no closer. Two were females and came into heat almost

immediately, followed by two litters, one of five and the other of

seven. Chick had them in traces before they were three months old. He

found an old sled in the pile of debris behind the cabin, mended it and

hitched up the team. Mandy, skinning her first beaver in the front yard,

paused to watch them parade back and forth, the short, stocky man with

the black hair and the big grin kicking off behind a tiny forest of

dangling tongues and plumed tails. "Hey," she said finally, laying down

her knife. "Let me try that."

Eventually she became the fourth woman to win the Iditarod and the third

to win the Yukon Quest. They traded off the team, Chick racing the dogs

one year, she the next, and the newspapers started calling her the

Brahmin Bullet. When they weren't racing they came home and oversaw

their breeding and training program, trapped mink and beaver, hunted

moose, caribou and black-tailed deer, dip-netted salmon out of the creek

and did a little desultory

47 gold panning, more out of the wish to maintain an Alaskan tradition

than out of any real desire to strike it rich. It was a good life. She

didn't ask for more.

Except, perhaps, Kate thought, to be left alone by her parents, and for

perhaps the first time in her life realized that being the only child of

deceased parents wasn't necessarily all bad. "Look, Mandy, make Chick

give your parents the tour. He's mushed over every inch of the Park, he

probably knows it better than I do."

"Kate," Mandy hissed, desperate now, "these are people whose closest

approach to a Native American has been a benefit revival of Nanook of

the North at the Boston Museum of Art. Mother asked Chick if he did rain

dances."

"What did Chick say?" Kate couldn't resist asking.

"Only if there was a forest fire that needed putting out. It's not

funny, Kate!"

Kate, choking, whispered back, "Mandy, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm

an Aleut. What makes you think they'll take to me any better than they

did (?hick?"

"You haven't had carnal knowledge of their one and only daughter," Mandy

said grimly. She brightened at a new thought. "I'll pay you."

"Good," Kate said, surrendering with a sigh to the unconcealed panic in

her friend's eyes. "Now we're getting somewhere."

"How much?"

"One million dollars."

"It's yours."

Kate laughed. "Or alternatively, the loan of your truck for a supply run

into Ahtna."

"You can have the million," Mandy said earnestly, "just as soon as they

die and I inherit."

She didn't add, The sooner the better, but they both thought it. "I'll

settle for the loan of the truck," Kate said dryly. "I'll need it anyway

if I'm going to ferry your parents around."

"It's yours," Mandy said, holding up both hands flat out. A

48 done deal. "You can have it. I'll buy another. No problem. My

dividends are up this year from last." Obviously afraid Kate would

change her mind, Mandy dug in her pocket and handed over the keys forthwith.

Accepting them, Kate wondered if the IRS would call this exchange barter

and subject to tax.

49

An hour later, she was wondering if there was any insanity in her family.

To the barely concealed relief of her two guests, Mutt remained behind

to keep the fear of God in the go team. Mandy had been dropped off at

the top of the trail leading to her lodge, and Kate had driven the

twenty-five miles of ice, slush, pothole, washboard and washout to

Niniltna in a loquacious babble of information about Alaska in general,

the Park in particular, and the Kanuyaq Copper Mine's life and death.

There followed a complete history of the building of the Kanuyaq River

and Northwestern Railroad, beginning in 1900 with the probably

apocryphal story of two old Ninety-niners prospecting for gold with a

couple of hungry pack mules. Casting about for graze, they looked up and

saw a green mountain, only to find upon arrival

50 that the mountain was not covered with grass, it was made of copper.

They carried the news Outside, and a couple of the robber barons of the

time, Carnegie and Mellon, or maybe it was John Jacob Astor, Kate

couldn't remember and by this time didn't much care-

"Guggenheim and Morgan," Mr. Baker said.

Startled, Kate looked over at him, and then had to grab the steering

wheel with both hands when the right front tire lurched into a pothole

and Mandy's brand-new, bright red, four-wheel- drive Ford Ranger XL

long-bed Supercab bottomed out. When they regained the horizontal-was

the play in the steering wheel just a trifle looser than before?-Mr.

Baker said, almost apologetically, "The Guggenheims are cousins."

"Oh."

"Distant cousins," Mrs. Baker added in austere reproof, and Kate

wondered how the Guggenheims had managed to offend Mrs. Baker's delicate

sensibilities. In the end, she decided that Mrs. Baker's beef probably

had more to do with money than sex; maybe the Guggenheims had rooked the

Bakers on a deal that rooked the shareholders even more. It had to be

one or the other; in Kate's experience, sex and money were the prime

motivating factors in every human quarrel. Look at God's fight with Adam

and Eve, and that was probably over sex only because money hadn't been

invented yet.

Or maybe it was just that she had sex on the brain this spring. She

brought herself firmly back into the present and her tour guide duties.

Guggenheim and Morgan, then, purchased leases from the federal

government, as Alaska was at that time a territory, finished the

railroad from Kanuyaq (kanuyaq was Aleut for copper) to Cordova by 1911

and ran raw copper ore down it for twenty- seven years. The ore played

out at about the same time the price of copper went into the toilet, and

it was abandoned in 1938, except by Park rats searching for useful

fixtures such as stoves, iceboxes and toilets, and by the ever heavy

hand of time.

Kate's voice, a broken husk of sound to begin with as a result

51 of the scar that nearly bisected her throat, a reminder of her former

job in the investigator's office of the Anchorage DA, was just about

gone. Mr. and Mrs. Baker had noticed the scar and ignored it, thereby

demonstrating how very well they had been brought up. They were a polite

and attentive audience, she'd grant them that. Still, the journey seemed

interminable. They passed Niniltna without stopping, Kate thinking that

Auntie Vi would be good for cocoa and fry bread on the way back and that

her passengers would need it then more than they did now. There were

only a few homesteads and a few lone cabins on the road between the

village and the mine, and the surface had deteriorated conspicuously

because of the lack of traffic to pound it into some semblance of shape.

Mandy's pickup bounced and jounced from pothole to pothole, so that

riding inside the cab was like riding inside a washing machine on the

heavy-duty cycle. Mr. and Mrs. Baker attached hands like limpets to the

dash and hung on for dear life.

It didn't help when Kate jammed on the brakes and no one was wearing a

seat belt.

"What-" Mr. Baker started to say.

There was an audible gasp from Mrs. Baker, and Mr. Baker looked around

to see a grizzly explode out of the brush onto the road, catch sight of

the big red truck, apply its own brakes by application of hindquarters

to the surface and slide to a halt six inches off the front bumper.

"Big one," Kate observed, trying to sound a little bored and succeeding,

she was pleased to note, fairly well.

Mr. Baker swallowed audibly. Mrs. Baker might have whimpered. Neither

was in any state of mind to hear the breathless quality in their

fearless guide's voice. A casual glance over her shoulder reassured Kate

that Mandy's .30-06 was hanging on the gun rack in the back window as

usual. Good to know.

The bear was a female in the prime of life, with a thick, glossy brown

coat, loose around her body after her winter nap. In the very short

space of time granted for reflection, Kate estimated the bear's weight

at approximately seven hundred pounds.

52 Picking herself up briskly out of a puddle of slush, the bear let

forth a roar of outrage, lowered her head and charged with a force and

speed unpleasantly reminiscent to Kate of the previous morning. All

seven hundred pounds hit hard. A high-pitched scream sounded from Mrs.

Baker. "Oh my God!" cried Mr. Baker, and a grim Kate, who had

automatically thrown out the clutch when she slammed on the brake, held

on to the steering wheel with both hands as the truck skidded back at

least four feet.

The grizzly roared and rammed again. The truck slid back again, but the

second ramming was less enthusiastic, and this time Kate had managed to

shift into second before the bear hit, so the backward motion was only

three feet and change. The grizzly bawled defiance a third time, reared

up on her hind legs and made one swipe with a paw at the front bumper,

which resulted in a screech of tearing metal. She placed her forepaws on

the hood of the truck and did a violent push-up. Her claws left parallel

grooves behind on the brand-new truck's brand-new paint job. The whole

front end sank two feet, the shock absorbers groaning beneath the

strain, and bounced back up again, so that Kate's head nearly ricocheted

off the ceiling. As he was a foot taller than she was, Mr. Baker's did.

Kate heard his curse as if from a great distance. Time seemed to have

decelerated somehow, as if they and the bear were passing through deep

water, the weight of it slowing action as well as reaction. There was no

time to be afraid, but there was all the time in the world to observe.

This bear was a beauty, standing eight feet or so at the shoulder. Her

hump was the size of a small mountain, well formed and mature. There

were dark red stains around her nose, mouth and throat, indicating a

recent feeding, in which case Kate couldn't see what she had to be so

cranky about. The silver tips of her coat caught the rays of the morning

sun.

There were no signs of a cub, which would have gone a long way toward

explaining her throwing down the gauntlet to a top of the line Ford

four-wheel-drive, one of the few mobile things in

53 the Park that outweighed her. She reared up on her hind legs again,

front legs curving in classic confrontational stance. Kate examined the

claws revealed thereby with detached interest. Shreds of something pale

were caught between the claws of the right paw.

The bear gnashed her teeth at them. The clicking sound of incisor upon

incisor was clearly audible inside the cab. It sounded just like an axe

chopping wood, in fact just like yesterday's visitor, only louder, more

solid and somehow infinitely more threatening. Someone whimpered.

The bear gave a fourth and final bellow, dropped to all fours, whirled

and charged headfirst through a thick stand of mountain hemlock, which

proved less unyielding than the Ford's front end. The green branches

crashed together, and as they quivered to an indignant standstill in the

grizzly's wake, time returned to its normal steady passage.

It was quiet in the cab of the truck for quite a while. At last Mr.

Baker stirred. "What," he said, striving for an even tone despite the

beads of sweat popping out on his forehead, "may I ask, was that

extraordinary creature?"

"That?" Kate said, and had to clear her throat. "Oh. That would be your

basic brown, or grizzly, bear. Ursus arctos horribilis. An omnivorous

North American mammal with a plantigrade gait. Plantigrade," she

explained kindly, "means it uses the entire sole of its foot in walking.

Homo sapiens is also a plantigrade mammal." It was difficult to shake

off the pedant, Kate discovered, once she got hold of the scruff of your

neck.

"Indeed."

"It's warming up," she added, "so they're waking up."

Mr. Baker refrained from remarking on the superfluity of Kate's last

statement and turned to his wife. "Are you quite all right, my dear?"

Mrs. Baker shifted in her seat. Her voice was thin but steady. "Ms.

Shugak, don't you think we should, perhaps, drive on?"

"Certainly," Kate said, because the West Coast has its end to

54 hold up, too. She let out the clutch and set off once again up the

road to the mine, only very slightly grinding the gears. "The indigenous

population of this area is largely Athabascan, but there has been a good

deal of immigration from other parts of the state over the years-"

A mile later the road mercifully ended in a cluster of shabby clapboard

buildings, all painted the same fading red with white trim. Kate parked

the truck in front of what had been the old mess hall and they got out

to look at the view.

It was sensational. The overcast had cleared and they were fifteen

hundred feet up, with the blue-white peaks of the Quilak Mountains at

their backs, stretching southeast to northwest, uncompromisingly

beautiful and, Kate was pleased to see, effortlessly outhaughtying the

Bakers. "Prince William Sound is that way," Kate said, pointing south.

"And this"- a sweep of arm indicated a wedge of area that stretched from

horizon to horizon-"is the Park. This valley is pretty much the Park's

center, and where most of the people in it live. Just around that bluff,

you can't see it from here, is a little plateau, we call it the Step.

That's where Park Headquarters is. And see the glaciers?"

It would have been hard to miss them. There were half a dozen in sight,

beginning with the Kanuyaq, a sheet of translucent blue ice a hundred

feet tall that formed the head of the Kanuyaq River. Water opaque with

gray glacial silt roared downstream at the base of the cliff on which

they stood. The glacier calved as they watched, an immense shard of

blue-green crystal detaching from the main body of ice to fall

ponderously into the river. A few seconds later the Crack! boom! crash!

splash! reached them.

The swift-moving surface of the river swelled into a wave that slammed

into both banks at the same time. It uprooted a clump of small alders

and washed out a boulder the size of Gibraltar, rolling it downstream as

if it were of no more consequence than a glass marble.

Even the Bakers seemed impressed. "Spectacular, really," said Mr. Baker.

55 It was better than nothing, and Kate had begun to shepherd them

toward the mill when Mrs. Baker said, "Why, who is that, do you suppose?"

Kate heard a sobbing kind of shout and turned to see a man stumble out

from behind what had been the company store. He fell practically at

their feet. "Help me," he said, clawing at Kate's legs. "Help me." He

fell forward, gasping for breath.

She knelt and took hold of the man's shoulders. "What is it, mister?

What's wrong?"

"My wife, my wife!"

"What about your wife?"

His voice rose to a scream. "My wife! My wife!"

"What about your wife!" Kate bellowed, shaking him. "What happened?"

"Bear," he said, pointing back in the direction from which he'd run.

"Grizzly attacked us. She's on the roof. Help her!"

"The roof of what?"

"One of the houAs! Help her!"

The memory of the grizzly female they had encountered on the road up

flashed through Kate's mind. The hairs prickling on the back of her

neck, she cast a quick look around, saw no bears and stood to haul the

man bodily to his feet. "Help me get him into the truck," she snapped at

Mr. Baker.

Together they got him into the truck, Mrs. Baker close behind. Kate

reached for Mandy's rifle. "You two stay here with him," she said,

checking the chamber. "I'll go round up the wife."

"Ms. Shugak-" he began.

"Stay here!" she barked. Without waiting for a reply she pivoted on one

heel and headed down the road between the mine buildings at a trot, head

up, eyes alert, a fine sweat of nervous perspiration breaking out along

her spine. She had the edge on vision and weaponry but the bear would

have the edge on smell, size, strength, quickness and claws. She knew

who she'd have put her money on.

Bears were odd beasts, she reminded herself; ninety-nine times

56 out of a hundred they'd pass ten feet in front of you, ignoring you,

at most roaring a challenge or faking a charge to satisfy honor.

Yesterday morning at the creek had been the exception, the young male

she'd run off from the meat cache far more the rule.

And the female with the stained muzzle? In which category did she belong?

Kate checked the safety a second time. It was still off. Good. She held

the rifle in front of her, right finger inside the trigger guard. Always

prepared. She and the Boy Scouts.

She cursed the couple who had picked this day to come up to the mine,

cursed them for making her a hero, cursed herself for being in the wrong

place at the wrong time and cursed them again for evidently coming

unarmed into a region well known for its active bear population. Just

the summer before, a grizzly had taken an eight-year-old boy in Skolai.

Didn't people read? Didn't they watch the news? Did they think all bears

were funny and cuddly like Baloo? Like Charles II, Walt Disney had a lot

to answer for.

The road turned right up the hill behind the mill. She followed it,

mouth dry, into the cluster of houses the mine owners had provided for

the manager and the senior staff and their families, ones with real

running hot and cold water, electricity and plumbing. There were plenty

of places all over America in 1911 that didn't have as much, but in

1911, with the price of copper what it was, money was no object, and

Morgan-Mellon-Astor-Carnegie-Guggenheim- whoever had wanted to keep

their upper-echelon employees happy and productive. The lower-echelon

employees, i.e., the ones who got the copper out of the ground and

loaded it on the railroad cars, stayed in the bunkhouse farther down the

side of the hill and shared the bathroom with ninety-nine others.

The houses were small affairs built of the same faded, peeling red

clapboard as the main buildings. There wasn't anyone on the roof of the

first house in line, and the soft, slushy, rapidly melting snow hid what

tracks there had been. She didn't hear the growl of an infuriated

grizzly, either, and she was listening for it pretty hard. All that was

audible was the roar of the Kanuyaq River, loud

57 enough to drown out the sound of an approaching bear until it was

right on her.

"Lady?" she called. "Lady? I've got a gun, I'm here to help. Your

husband's okay. It's safe to come down now." She walked forward.

One house. Around a corner and another. A cluster of scrub spruce and a

third house, a fourth and a fifth without incident.

"Lady?" she called again, and cursed herself again, this time for not

asking for the name. "Lady, can you hear me? My name is Kate Shugak.

I've got a rifle. Don't be afraid, you can come down now."

A sixth, a seventh, an eighth. The road wound around the ninth and Kate

halted abruptly.

The woman lay in the middle of the road, soaked to the skin from the

rapid melt of a winter's worth of snow, staring sightlessly at the sky.

Or she would have been, if she'd had any face left.

Her left arm was missing below the elbow, as was most of her belly and

thighs. Betrs were notorious for exerting the least effort for the most

result and went for the soft meat and the viscera first. The arm had

most probably been lost in trying to fight off the inevitable.

Blood was everywhere, the salty copper smell of it strong in her

nostrils, and the melting snow had kept it bright red, redder than the

fading walls of the little house in the background. The resulting slush

had mixed with the dirt track beneath and the area was a sea of

churned-up mud in which the paw prints of a very large bear were

prominent. The muddy, bloody prints led into the brush on the downhill

side of the road.

She couldn't move.

This could have been me, she thought.

If I hadn't moved fast enough, gotten up the bank when I did, this could

be me lying here. If the brush hadn't slowed her down coming after me,

if Mutt hadn't been barking, if her cubs hadn't been bawling for her.

This could have been me.

58 She could almost see herself, sprawled on her back in the little

swimming hole, sightless eyes staring up, the dark blood drifting out of

the backwater to be snatched into the swift, midstream current and

washed downstream, into the river and the gulf beyond. How long before

anyone would have known, if ever?

Her hands cramped, making her aware of how hard she was gripping the

rifle. She swallowed and forced herself to move forward, focusing

fiercely on one of the clearer prints, in which a puddle of reddish

water was already beginning to form. About six or seven hundred pounds,

she estimated, standing six to eight feet.

The pink shreds in the grizzly's claws had been human flesh.

She looked away, at the fading wall of the house, long strips of paint

peeling from its sides, and swallowed hard. Dimly, her own words echoed

in her head. It was that hundredth bear you had to watch out for.

She heard a sound behind her and spun around, rifle at the ready, to

find Mrs. Baker retching emptily on one side of the road. Mr. Baker,

white to the lips, was patting her shoulders soothingly.

"Oh great," Kate said before she thought. "Mandy is going to kill me."

59

George Perry ground-looped 50 Papa on a short final into Niniltna.

Two circumstances contributed to this unfortunate occurrence.

One, there was a fourteen-inch rut halfway down the icy surface of the

4,800-foot airstrip, which the latest grader pass had missed and which

the left front tire on 50 Papa had the misfortune to eaten precisely at

touchdown.

Two, Ben Bingley was barfing down the back of his neck at the time.

Kate drove up with the Bakers and the bereaved husband in time to see

the red and white two-seater pull sharply to the left, losing its center

of gravity just long enough to lean over and catch the ground with the

tip of the left wing. Newton and inertia took care of the rest as the

plane completed a snap roll so perfect it would have brought tears to

the eyes of an

60 Air Force flight instructor if only it hadn't been performed at zero

altitude.

In short, the plane flipped over and pancaked flat on its back. Under

the beneficent rays of the spring sun, the surface of the airstrip had

been reduced to a foot of packed snow, submerged beneath an inch of

water, providing a marvelous surface for a nice long gliding slide.

Five-zero Papa slid very well indeed, on a direct line heading for

Mandy's truck as it pulled to a halt in front of the post office. It was

a combination skid and spin; in fact 50 Papa was going around on its

back like a slow top for the second time, the ripping sound of tearing

wing fabric clearly audible to the stupefied witnesses in the cab of

Mandy's truck, just as the plane ran into them. Kate looked down,

fascinated, as one wing slid smoothly between the front and back tires,

and looked up just in time to see the wheel of one landing gear hit the

top of the driver's- side door with a solid thud that shook the cab and

rattled the passengers in it, although not as much as the grizzly had

done earlier.

The window bowed inward but did not break. There was the unmistakable

groan of bending metal, though. Kate, a little lightheaded, thought that

Mandy might not notice the dented bumper and the clawed finish and the

need for a front-end alignment on her brand new truck after all.

Her second thought was to wonder how full the Super Cub's tanks were,

one of which was at present resting directly beneath her ass.

Foolishly, she grabbed for the handle and shoved. The door, the right

gear of the plane jammed solidly against it, unsurprisingly did not

budge. "Out!" she roared. "Out! OUT! OUT!" Mr. Baker fumbled with the

passenger door and stumbled to the ground. Kate, not standing on

ceremony, shoved Mrs. Baker and the husband out after him and scrambled

out herself to run around the truck. She sniffed, tense. No smell of

gasoline.

She went around to the Cub's right side and squatted to fold up the

door. A smell hit her in the face like a blow, powerful

61 enough to knock her on her butt. It wasn't gasoline, it was vomit.

She took a couple of deep, gasping breaths, muffled her face with a

sleeve and spoke through it. "George, are you okay?"

George looked at her, still suspended upside down in his seat harness,

bits of brown something spattered across the back of his head and neck.

"I hate breakup," he said.

"Never a dull moment," Kate agreed.

A rustle and the snap of a buckle came from the seat behind him. "No!"

George said. "Ben, don't-"

But Ben did, releasing the buckle on his seat belt. He fell heavily on

his head and shoulders against the ceiling of the fuselage. A cry of

pain and some futile thrashing around followed, after which George

contributed some acerbic commentary, because he now could not slide his

seat back to get out. Matters did not improve when Ben threw up again.

"AUGGHHH!" said George. He braced his feet up against the dash, reached

for the lever and shoved with all his might. The seat slid back and hit

Befi in the butt. Ben tumbled backwards in a corkscrew somersault into

the pile of U.S. Postal Service mail sacks that had been piled on the

floor in back of his seat and were now piled on the ceiling. It was too

much for him and he threw up for the third time.

George braced himself on one arm, popped his harness buckle and was

outside and on his feet a moment later. Thin-lipped and furious, he

addressed the area in language suitable to the situation. George was an

ex-helicopter pilot who had learned his trade under fire in Vietnam and

perfected it on the TransAlaska Pipeline before deserting the rotor for

fixed wing and starting an air taxi in the Park. He was also one of five

ex-husbands of Ramona Halford, the right-wing state senator representing

the area of Alaska that included the Park, which all by itself had been

an education in expletive deleted.

Over his shoulder, Kate caught sight of the widower, staring down into

the bed of the truck at the body, cocooned in a blue

62 plastic tarp. A few feet away stood the Bakers, color back in their

faces and by the wideness of their eyes evidently improving their

vocabulary with George's able assistance.

Cravenly, Kate ducked down again to help Ben Bingley out of the plane.

This wasn't easy, as Ben had heard George's lengthy and comprehensive

address and somehow received the impression that George might hold him

in some small measure accountable for the ground loop. He was of course

absolutely innocent of anything of the kind, but he had decided he would

stay in the plane for a while, like maybe until George went home, or

perhaps left the Park forever.

So he held on to the back of the pilot's seat, refusing to let Kate pull

it forward, until she had to kneel down in the slush. The aroma of

beer-based puke was gagging and Kate lost her temper. "Ben, stop being

such a big baby and get your ass out of this friggin' plane."

Ben was more scared of a mildly pissed Kate Shugak than he was of George

Perry at full volume and he wavered. "You promise you won't let him hurt

me?"

"I'll kill you, you stupid little shit!" George said from above.

"I promise," Kate said, more temperate now. Somebody had to be. "Come on

out, Ben."

"I don't know," Ben said doubtfully, "he sounds awful mad."

"He's just shook up from dinging the plane. Come on out, Ben."

"I'll rip your fucking guts out and use them for crab bait! "

"Maybe you could just bring me a beer," Ben said hopefully.

"I'll feed your sorry ass to the first bear to come down the pike!"

Kate winced, and was glad that in her current position she couldn't see

the expression on her three passengers' faces.

George ran out of breath and threats and Ben finally did come out,

standing so as to keep Kate between himself and the enraged pilot at all

times.

Kate began negotiations toward a truce and was making some headway when

Ben's wife appeared on the airstrip. It became immediately apparent that

he had way worse problems to deal with

63 than a plane wreck, an enraged bush pilot and vomit down the front of

his shirt.

Cindy had left the house without her jacket but not without her 9mm

Smith and Wesson, which she held in a business-like grip with the

business end pointed at Ben.

"Whoa!" George said, startled out of his wrath.

"You little prick," Cindy said.

"Now, Cindy," Kate said, eyes almost crossed on the barrel beneath her

nose, trying to see if the pistol was loaded. She could tell it was an

automatic, but the way Cindy kept waving it around she couldn't tell if

there was a clip in the butt Might be one in the chamber anyway, so she

wasn't safe whether she could see the clip or not, and stopped trying.

"Now, honey," Ben said, peering fearfully over Kate's shoulder.

"I hate breakup," George said.

"Get out of my way, Kate!" Cindy snarled. "That son of a bitch stole the

kids' quarterly dividends and probably drank up every last damn dime!

Why the hell don't you people do something so he can't get his hands on

the money!"

"I'm not on the board," Kate said.

Cindy dismissed this spineless and specious attempt at diversion with a

contemptuous wave of the pistol that brought George into the line of

fire. George took a hasty step backward, slipped and sat down hard in a

puddle. "You're Ekaterina's granddaughter, you say jump, they say how

high, who cares about titles! How am I going to feed the kids until the

salmon start running? Huh? How?"

Kate had no answer for her, and Cindy's smoldering gaze fixed upon her

cringing husband. "I told you, Ben, I told you if you ever did that

again I'd kill you!"

She meant it, too. Bang! went the pistol. The bullet went into the

driver's side door of Mandy's truck with a clang, missing the right tire

on the Super Cub by an inch.

Definitely loaded, Kate thought, orchestrating a graceful swan dive.

64 "Hey!" George roared indignantly. "Watch out for my goddam plane!"

Bang! went the pistol again, and George decided better the Cub than him

and dove after Kate.

Ben was left standing all alone, a sickly smile spreading across his

face. "Now, honey-" he began. Bang! went the pistol again, and he broke

and ran. Bang! Bang! and Cindy took off in pursuit.

Their thudding footsteps faded, followed by some crashing of brush and

yelps of pain. Kate, sandwiched between the Cub's wing and the pickup's

differential, raised her head to survey the area. Nobody shooting in her

immediate vicinity. This was good. She looked over at George. His eyes

were squeezed shut and he'd managed to jam himself almost all the way

beneath the truck, the bed of which had been ventilated at least twice

that Kate could see from her prone position. Kate wasn't worried. At

this point Mandy would barely notice the bullet holes.

"So, George," she said, "you think we should go after them?"

"Nope," George said, opening his eyes.

"Me neither," she decided. It was breakup, and she had nineteen other

things to do without adding the arbitration of Ben and Cindy Bingley's

marital spats to the list.

Bang! went the distant sound of the pistol a sixth time.

Especially when Cindy was so well armed.

George gave a long, shaky breath and climbed to his feet. "She's empty,

now, anyway."

"It was an automatic," Kate said, wriggling free and standing up. Her

Nikes were wet, dammit. Kate hated getting her feet wet. It ranked right

up there with turning her back on a bear.

Three more shots sounded in rapid succession, followed by a whoop of

triumph from Ben, a snarl of frustration from Cindy and the snapping of

tree limbs. "Now she's empty," Kate said, relieved.

"Unless it was a staggered clip," George said. "Staggered clips have

fourteen rounds."

"Shit," Kate said, with feeling. They both listened intently, but

65 there were no more shots. Kate bent to brush ineffectually at the mud

clinging to her knees. "Let's just hope she didn't have a spare clip."

"Gee, thanks for sharing, Shugak. You're always such a comfort to me."

"Mr. and Mrs. Baker?" Kate said belatedly. "Are you all right?" There

was no immediate answer. Alarmed, she started around the truck, where

she found Mr. and Mrs. Baker and the widower seated in a row on the

ground. The widower's hands were over his ears, Mr. Baker's over his

eyes, Mrs. Baker's over her mouth. Kate, reprehensibly, laughed.

Mr. Baker sensed movement and uncovered his eyes. He blinked up at Kate,

rose a little unsteadily to his feet and assisted his wife to hers. Kate

rearranged her face into a solemn expression and waited for it. It

wasn't long in coming. "Are you quite all right, Ms. Shugak?"

"Quite all right, Mr. Baker," she replied, with admirable gravity. "And

yourselves?

"Oh, quite," he said. He brushed at his once impeccably creased chinos.

The seat was soaked through to where you could see what he was wearing

beneath. Boxers. Only in Boston. "Who, may I ask, was that most

extraordinary young woman?"

"Ah," Kate said. "That was Cindy Bingley."

"And the young man was her husband."

"Yes."

"Who appears to have committed some sort of transgression."

Kate was beginning to be amused. "Some sort."

Mrs. Baker weighed in. "She certainly seems to have a temper."

"She certainly does," Mr. Baker agreed, and if Kate was not demented,

there was even something approaching a twinkle in his eye.

That was it? Evidently that was it. Kate didn't see any wounds or blood,

and by this time they had acquired an interested crowd, everyone from

inside the post office as well as most of the residents of the village

and a few AWOL high school students, about

66 three hundred in all and all clustered around George's pancaked plane.

There was much shaking of heads, a great deal of sagacious commentary,

which Ceorge bore with gritted teeth, and a few offers of real help,

which Kate promptly accepted on his behalf. They slid the plane sideways

until the wing was free of the truck, and George, outrage evident in

every line of his thin, angular body, marched off to fetch the crane

truck while the rest of them unloaded everything they could out of the

plane.

Between the crane and a dozen willing pairs of hands, the plane was

right side up again thirty minutes later. "Thanks," George said in a

gruff voice. The prop was bent into an artistic curve but the wing tip

wasn't and nothing else looked much hurt, although Kate knew that the

bent prop alone meant a complete teardown of the engine. George was a

certified A and P mechanic, but it wasn't much consolation, as he would

be spending a lot of hours on the ground when he should have been in the

air making money.

Everyone in the crowd was thinking the same thing, and Demetri Totemoff

cleared his throat. "George, you need a plane to keep the business

going. I'll trade you hours on my 172. It's got the Lycoming conversion,

so you can get in and out most of the places you do with the Cub."

George's expression lightened. "When's your annual due?"

"September."

"What about you? What will you be flying in the meantime?"

"The Tripacer's at Tyson's in Anchorage. He says the annual's done and

the plane's ready for pickup. You know that cantankerous bastard, he

wants it off the lot yesterday. We could take the 172 in, I can fly the

Tripacer back, and you can take the 172."

George considered. Demetri was proposing an hour of maintenance in

exchange for every hour in the air, the bulk of which would not be

payable for another five months, and he could work

67 on the Cub when he wasn't in the air. "Deal." He stuck out his hand.

"Thanks, Demetri."

They shook on it. Kyle Kirkus, one of the schoolteachers who had only

been in the Bush since the school year began the previous September,

blurted, "You're going to loan him your plane? He just wrecked his own!"

Demetri looked at Kirkus with his usual impassive stare and said flatly,

"At this moment, George is the safest pilot in Alaska."

Kirkus looked around for support, found none and wandered off, shaking

his head.

The Cub was rolled across the airstrip to George's hangar, the rest of

the crowd following with the seats. Once inside, it became obvious that

the inside of the Cub and its seats were in urgent need of immediate

swabbing down, preferably with an ammonia- based, industrial-strength

cleaner, but this task the helpers seemed to feel George was capable of

handling on his own, and scattered for home.

Kate crossed the "Strip and discovered that the Bakers had wandered into

the post office, presumably to see if the same wanted posters hung on

the walls there as in the post office on Beacon Hill, although now that

she thought of it, she was pretty sure the Bakers didn't do anything as

plebeian as post their own mail. The widower stood next to the truck,

staring vacantly off into some never-never land, surrounded by several

villagers who had by some subtle osmosis become aware of the bear attack

and clustered around in an awkward attempt at condolence.

She headed up the single road that connected the houses of the village

to the riverbank. The NorthCom shack was fifty feet up from the Niniltna

school, and it was just that, a shack made of plywood stapled to a

two-by-four frame and covered with tar paper. Behind it stood a 112-foot

steel tower surmounted by a satellite dish.

Inside, unfinished interior walls leaked pink insulation all over the

plywood floor and a tiny woodstove burned red-hot. A counter

68 divided the work space from the living space, if you could call one

room with a camp cot and no running water living space. The work area

was a counter with a bank of electronic gear stacked on it, surrounded

by a litter of notepads and a scattering of ballpoint pens. A thin

curtain of faded, fraying flowered cotton divided the two. The air was

redolent of hot grease. "Mel?" Kate said. "You in here?"

A head crowned with shaggy dishwater-blond hair poked around the

curtain. "Well, hey, Kate, how you doing?" The rest of his slight frame,

clad in jeans and bright red aloha shirt, followed, one hand holding a

plate of chicken-fried caribou steaks. Kate's mouth watered. She must

have looked extremely needy, because Mel grinned and held out the plate.

Melvin Haney was young, the only kind of people Northern Communications,

Inc., could bribe to stay this long at remote Bush earth stations with

their primitive living conditions, although working a month on and a

month off eased the pain somewhat. So did the salary, which astronomical

sum Mel considered barely adequate compensation for having to use a

chemical toilet he had to empty himself. A graduate of East High in

Anchorage, where he'd spent a thoroughly enjoyable five years majoring

mostly in trouble, his father, a NorthCom executive, had given him a

choice: the job in Niniltna offering the Park population communication

with the outside world via satellite, or a one-way ticket Outside. Mel

had been to Disneyland, and after one look at the L.A. freeways had

decided that while Outside was a nice place to visit, no sane person

would want to live there. To his own surprise and to his father's

amazement he had proved a success at the Niniltna site, and the rest,

along with a succession of girlfriends provided by Kate's extended

family, was history.

Kate liked him, scrawny, cheeky little squirt that he was. "Hey, Mel,"

she said, around a mouthful of steak. "Good stuff."

"The best." A generous and kindhearted young man, he put the plate on

the counter between them. "What can I do you for?"

69 "You can marry me if you can cook this good," Kate mumbled around

another mouthful.

"Nah," he said, snagging his own steak before they were all gone. "I

know you, you'd be the jealous type, you wouldn't let me play the field."

"True." She swallowed. "Can you raise the trooper's office in Tok?"

"Really, Kate." He licked his fingers and did his best to look hurt. "I

can raise the Viking Lander on this thing if I have to."

"You've been spending way too much time with Bobby Clark," Kate said.

Mel laughed and didn't deny it. "What's going on?"

"Bear attack up to the mine."

He made a face. "Is it bad?"

"She's dead." Remembering how dead, Kate lost her appetite and shoved

the plate of steaks to one side.

"I'd call that bad, all right," he said soberly. "Who was it?"

"Don't know. EveVi if I did know her, I probably couldn't say now." In

answer to his look, she added, "There's not much of her face left."

He shuddered, and moved to adjust a switch on a bank of electronic

equipment. He punched some numbers into a keypad and gave her the

handset. It rang twice before the other end picked up. "Alaska State

Troopers, Tok."

Kate recognized the voice. "Elaine, this is Kate Shugak in Niniltna."

"Well, hey, Kate. Long time no see. You survive the winter okay?"

"The winter was fine. I may not make it through breakup."

"Oh, yeah? What's up?"

"Bear attack. One woman dead."

"They're up, are they?"

"They're up and grouchy," Kate said. "Can you tell Jim to rod on over

here with a body bag?"

70 "Wasn't he just over there picking up another body?"

"Yes."

"Breakup," Elaine said. "Hang on." She muffled the receiver for a moment

before coming back on. "He's on his way, Kate. Don't you just love this

time of year?"

"I downright adore it, Elaine. Tell Jim I've got the remains rolled in a

tarp in the back of a truck parked on the Niniltna airstrip next to the

post office."

"Okay. He'll be there inside the hour."

Mel accepted the handset and signed off. "Want me to call Dan O'Brian next?"

In Alaska, every accidental death required an investigation and an

autopsy, and the ones involving close and fatal encounters with wildlife

usually involved a fish hawk or a ranger as well. "Might as well."

She visited with Mel for a while before returning to the airstrip. In

the post office she checked her mail, avoided looking at the ubiquitous

piles of tax forms stacked on the counter and went back outside in time

to see Dan's Super Cub lining up on final. He landed, taxied to the head

of the runway and got out. "Just couldn't wait to see me again, could

you, Kate?" he said cheerfully.

"It's not pretty," she warned him as he began to unroll the tarp.

"It never is," he agreed, but when the body was bared the muscles in his

face shifted. Kate watched him in silence. She had been too preoccupied

with her own problems that morning to take a good look at him, which was

a shame, because the view was not bad.

Armed with a degree in forestry, Dan O'Brian had come into the Parks

Service by way of the Everglades in Florida, where he discovered an

aversion to snakes, and Volcanoes National Park on Hawaii, where he

discovered an even greater aversion to lava.

He transferred to Alaska just in time for the d-2 lands bill, which

doubled the size of the Park. He'd been chief ranger for

71 fourteen years, steering a course between the Scylla of the rights of

the Natives and homesteaders and miners around whose property the Park

had been created, and the Charybdis of his responsibilities as custodian

of twenty million acres of public property. He succeeded so well that

not once had he ever been shot at on duty, which had to be some kind of

record for a federal employee in the Alaskan bush. Off duty was another

matter. As much of a skirt chaser as Chopper Jim, he was less successful

at it, and thus less irritating to local husbands, but they couldn't

shoot at a state trooper. A park ranger made a not disgraceful second-best.

About the time Kate started comparing the blue of his eyes with the blue

of Chopper Jim's, she came to her senses and pulled herself together.

She'd always had a healthy respect for the sexual urge but fantasizing

over a man she'd known as a friend for more than fourteen years veered

dangerously close to the ridiculous. She was angry with herself, and

deep down, a little afraid. Control was very important to Kdle Shugak,

and over the last two days control seemed to be slipping from her grasp.

"Nope," Dan said heavily, "not pretty at all." He quietly refolded the

tarp around the body. He looked up and surprised a look of fierce

concentration on her face. "What?"

"Nothing."

He waited, but that was all she was going to say. "So." He nodded at the

still figure in the tarp. "When did you find her?"

With a slight shock Kate realized that it was almost six o'clock. "Less

than two hours ago. Her husband said they went up to take a look at the

mine this morning, and the bear attacked them."

Dan frowned. "Tourists?"

"I don't know. That's him." Kate nodded at the man leaning up against

the post office wall just out of earshot. The little crowd of

sympathizers had dispersed once the mail started being sorted, and he

was alone again, head back against the logs, hands in his pockets, eyes

closed. "He hasn't said much."

72 "The bear just attacked them? Without provocation?" "I don't know,"

Kate said. "I didn't hang around to see if the bear wanted to make it

two for two. And I've got Mandy's parents with me."

Dan brightened. "You've got the Original Eastern Establishment Royalty

Couple with you?"

"Yes," Kate said, as the two emerged from the post office, bulging bags

indicating that the gift shop that took up the right side of the post

office had not gone unpatronized. "Allow me to introduce you. Mr. and

Mrs. Baker, this is Dan O'Brian, chief ranger of the Park."

"Hello," Dan said, shaking hands and looking over their matching

right-off-the-L. . Bean-rack safari outfits, soaked behinds and all,

with an appreciative eye. "Nice to meet you. Hell of a musher, that

daughter of yours. Don't often run into that much guts and talent

walking around on two legs. You must be proud."

That this was not a thought that had previously occurred to them was

obvious from the startled expression on their faces. Kate reflected that

both generations of the Baker family had a lot to learn.

Dan's gaze wandered past them to the widower, who had remained apart

from the rest of them, face averted. "How's he holding up?"

"He's on his feet," Kate said.

Dan nodded. "Shows something. What's his name?"

"I asked. He hasn't said anything yet."

"Probably in shock, poor bastard." Dan walked over and held out a hand.

"Dan O'Brien, chief ranger. I'm sorry about your wife, Mr. . . . ?"

"Stewart." The man stirred and gave a long, heavy sigh. "Mark Stewart."

He shook hands with Dan, and Kate stepped forward. "Kate Shugak."

"Oh. Right. I'm sorry, I-I just couldn't talk before."

"It's all right," Kate said. "I understand."

73 "Mark Stewart," he repeated unnecessarily. "I guess I should thank you."

"No need," she said, adding, "I just wish I could have gotten there

sooner." She didn't mean it, and Dan at least was fully aware that she

didn't, but it was the kind of thing one said at times like these.

Stewart's grip was warm and dry and so strong it was almost painful. The

man was of medium height with well-defined shoulders topping a rangy

frame. He had dark eyes beneath thick dark brows, a wealth of dark hair

that fell in a careless swath that must have cost $150 in some Anchorage

salon, and a wide, full-lipped mouth that undoubtedly spread into a

charming smile. That mouth was held rigidly now in a straight,

expressionless line that matched the bleak, unfocused look in his eyes.

At least, bleak and unfocused until they looked at Kate. As their eyes

met, a flash of visceral awareness leapt between them. Kate very

carefully freed her hand and took what she hoped was an unobtrusive step

back. Damn, damn, damn.

"I know you've just been through a horrible experience," Dan said to

Stewart, "but can you give us an idea of what happened? If we've got a

rogue bear on the roam in the Park, I need to know about it."

Mark Stewart looked down, long, thick lashes shadowing his cheeks. "I-

You're right, it was horrible. I-" He paused, and drew in a long breath.

"Mr. Stewart," Dan said, as if he couldn't help himself, "didn't you

bring a rifle with you? A pistol, even? Some kind of weapon for your own

defense? Surely you must have known that this was an area known for its

bear population?"

Stewart looked at the ground. "No," he whispered.

Dan met Kate's eyes and shook his head. Tourists.

"It's all so awful," Stewart muttered. "We came up here to be alone, get

away from everything. This morning was so nice, we decided to walk up to

the mine with a picnic lunch. And then we got

74 to the mine, and the bear came out of the woods, came right at us,

and Carol-"

"You said she was on the roof," Kate said. "When you first saw us."

He nodded miserably. "I gave her a leg up the side of one of those old

houses. I told her to stay there while I went for help. It-the bear must

have climbed up after her. I never would have left her if I'd thought- I

never- Then I heard your truck and-" His face twisted.

"It's okay," Dan said with quick sympathy. "Never mind. We can talk

about it later."

Stewart hid his face in his hands.

Dan was right, the poor bastard probably was in shock. Coldly ashamed of

her momentary awareness of him as an attractive man, and disregarding

his equally obvious appreciation of her as an attractive woman, Kate

said, "The trooper's on his way."

Stewart's head snapped up. "Trooper?"

"Chopper Jim?" Dan said, and Kate nodded. "The trooper from Tok," he

told Stewart. "Jim Chopin."

"How'd you talk to him?" Stewart said. "I thought- Are there phones in

Niniltna?"

"I called him from the NorthCom earth station." Kate indicated the tower

just visible over the tops of the trees clustered between the airstrip

and the village.

"The troopers are always called in on cases of accidental death," Dan said.

"Of course," Stewart said, head bent again. "Of course they are. Sorry,

I'm still a little out of it."

Dan regarded him with a puzzled air. "You know, I could swear- We've met

before, haven't we?"

Stewart shook his head. "I don't think so."

Dan's brows came together but he shrugged. "If you say so."

The Bakers had wandered across the strip to watch George swab out the

inside of his plane. Kate hoped George had simmered

75 clown some, but the rigid set of his shoulders didn't look promising,

in which case she hoped the Bakers would restrain any impulse they might

have toward commentary. She wondered what Mandy was going to say when

she heard the tale of the day's adventures. Somehow she felt that a

fatal bear attack, a plane wreck and an attempted homicide were not what

Mandy had had in mind when she sent her parents out that afternoon.

Dan strolled a little way down the runway, inviting Kate with a jerk of

his head to join him. "So what did Mandy bribe you with to get you to

play tour guide?"

She fell into step next to him. "The loan of her truck."

Dan grinned. "That's right, yours is slightly out of commission, isn't

it?" He looked at Mandy's brand-new Ford. The windshield had a

horizontal crack in it that started in front of the steering wheel and

progressed all the way across to the passenger side. The driver's-side

door was crumpled in and sported two bullet holes. The black plastic

bumper was cracked right down the middle. Dan inspected the claw marks

on the hood with a professional eye.

"Yeah," Kate said, "we had our close encounter with the bear, too.

His head snapped up. "Same bear?"

She nodded. "I think so. The way the road switches back, about the time

she hit us she could have come straight down the slope from where I

found the body." She paused. "She had blood on her face and muzzle, and

what looked like flesh between her claws."

"Jesus."

"Not a pretty sight," Kate agreed, and took a deep breath to steady her

stomach. "Still, hard to get too upset over bears acting like bears."

"Yeah." He didn't believe it any more than she did, but in the face of

nature red in tooth and claw he was damned if he'd let Kate outmacho

him. " 'She?' "

"It was a female, a big one, six, seven hundred pounds."

"Which way was she heading?"

76 "West, last I saw."

Dan's brows snapped together. "West from the mine?"

"West from a mile or so down the mine road."

"Heading away from the village, then."

"Last I saw," Kate repeated. They both knew how futile it was to try to

predict the path a bear might take.

"You scare her off her kill?"

"I don't know. Maybe. You know what the road's like, and I had the truck

in second gear. We were pretty noisy."

"And bears do tend to get a little cranky when their meals are

interrupted," Dan observed.

Kate remembered the enraged grizzly, standing on her hind legs, claws

extended, showing off a very long, very sharp, very fine set of teeth

and an even finer set of lungs.

Dan stood back and surveyed the truck again. "You're awful goddam hard

on trucks, Shugak." He poked a finger into one of the bullet holes, and

looked at Kate with a raised eyebrow.

She made a face. "Ben Bingley went on a toot on his kids' corporation

dividends, apparently. George had just brought him back-" She told him

about the ground loop and from his delighted grin knew his next stop

would be George's hangar. "Anyway, they'd just flown in from Ahtna when

Cindy showed up. She wanted to discuss the matter. Over a Smith and

Wesson."

"My, my," Dan said. "Bet the Bakers enjoyed that." He smiled slowly.

"Kate Shugak, tour guide. Wish I could have been along for the whole

ride. Did they say if they enjoyed themselves? They signed up for a raft

trip down the Kanuyaq yet? You could probably dump them in along about

Chitina without half trying, get 'em wet all over, maybe even get 'em

drowned. Worth a try, don't you think?"

Chopper Jim's arrival spared her the necessity of a suitably

discourteous reply. The Bell Jet Ranger settled down and Jim was out

before the rotors stopped turning. To Kate he said, "Just couldn't wait

to see me again, could you?"

Dan laughed. "My words exactly."

77 Jim hitched up his gun belt. "What have we got?"

They told him. He walked over to the truck and unwrapped the body. He

looked at it without expression, and listened to Mark Stewart's story

with even less expression.

Kate and Dan helped Jim load Carol Stewart's body into the back of the

chopper. Stewart got into the passenger seat and the trooper closed it

after him. Instead of walking around to the pilot's side, he walked out

from beneath the rotors and motioned to Kate. "He say the bear come

after him, too?"

"He said something about shoving her up on the roof of one of the staff

houses out back of the mine while he went for help. Other than that, he

hasn't said much of anything."

Chopper Jim was silent for a moment, staring at the end of the runway,

brows knit. "Okay. I'll fly him and the body to Tok. I got an emergency

call about a wreck on Sikonsina Pass. Some asshole's boat slid off the

trailer and front-ended a tractor-trailer full of liquid oxygen." He

adjusted the brim of his hat with a flick of his fingers, in a crisp,

somewhat exasperated manner that suggested he'd like to square away life

in all of rural Alaska, or at least that part under his jurisdiction, in

the same no-nonsense, no-action- wasted fashion. "I just love breakup."

They looked at the helicopter, Stewart waiting, silent and staring, the

tarp-wrapped body of his wife invisible behind him.

"He said they came up here to get away from it all," Kate said.

Jim's grin was taut and mirthless. "Didn't get quite far enough, did they?"

78

There was a lot more traffic on the road between the village and the

Roadhouse than there was on the road between the village and the mine,

so it was in better shape, with most of the winter's ice broken up and

potholes smoothed out to no more than on average a foot deep. It was

twenty-seven miles from Niniltna, and exactly nine feet and three inches

outside tribal jurisdiction, which location made it the only legally

licensed purveyor of liquor in twenty million acres of Park. A square,

solid building with a corrugated tin roof, a satellite dish perched on

one corner and a haphazard jumble of tiny rental cabins and Bernie's

home out back, it made up in atmosphere what it lacked in architectural

aesthetics.

There were no dogsleds and no snow machines visible in the parking lot.

There were three rows of vehicles, beginning with a blue Chevy crew cab

pickup.

79 Kate's face brightened. "Great, Bobby's here. Bobby Clark, a friend

of Mandy's and mine," she explained to the Bakers.

At the end of the same row there was a fifty-foot Pace Arrow motor home

with Pennsylvania plates, proudly displaying the wear and tear of twelve

hundred miles of Alcan and another four hundred miles of Alaska dirt

road. Kate shook her head. They were coming up earlier every year, and

it was getting so you couldn't get them to leave once they'd come.

Welcome to Alaska, now go home. Her eye traveled to the vehicle opposite

the RV. "That goddam Frank Scully," she said before she thought.

Mr. Baker cleared his throat. "And who is Frank Scully, Ms. Shugak?"

"He moved up from Washington last year, bought Greg Migaiolo's cabin."

Mr. and Mrs. Baker looked inquiring.

Kate pointed. "He drives that Cherokee Chief over there, and he still

hasn't got Alaska plates on it. That always ticks me off, people move

out into the Bush and think they can get away without paying for a new

license and registration."

They pulled in between a rusty black Ranchero and a rustier brown

Plymouth sedan with both bumpers missing. Kate put the truck in second

and shut off the engine. The Ford was running well even if the

driver's-side door still wouldn't open. "Now, folks, remember what I

told you, the Roadhouse isn't exactly what you're used to. Are you sure

you wouldn't rather head on back to Niniltna? My Auntie Vi makes great

cocoa, not to mention fry bread."

"Ms. Shugak," Mrs. Baker said, displaying a hitherto unsuspected

firmness, "if you are a friend of Amanda's, you know she doesn't keep

liquor at the lodge."

"Yes," Kate said meekly. "I mean, no."

"Well, after what we saw this afternoon, I for one would kill for a drink."

"I for two," Mr. Baker added.

They smiled at Kate. If they weren't careful, they were going to

80 upgrade from stereotypes to real live human beings before the day was

over. Kate grinned. "I'd kill for some rational conversation myself.

Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you."

But at the door to the Roadhouse, Mr. Baker paused. "Ms. Shugak-"

"Yes, Mr. Baker?"

"That woman at the mine-"

"Yes?"

"Was it our bear that killed her? The one that ran into us on the road?"

Kate briefly considered lying, and quickly discarded the notion. "Probably."

"There was blood on her muzzle."

"Yes."

"That woman's blood."

"Yes."

Mr. and Mrs. Baker exchanged glances. "Will someone go after the bear,

try to kill it?"

Kate looked surprised. "Why?"

Mr. Baker blinked. "Well, naturally, I assumed- I've been hunting in

Africa, Ms. Shugak. When a lion becomes a man-killer, the only thing to

do is to hunt it down and kill it, otherwise it will go on killing men."

Kate sighed. "Mr. Baker, an Alaskan grizzly eats anything that doesn't

move out of the way in time, animal, vegetable or mineral. That includes

bugs, canned goods, canteens, backpacks and people, as well as any and

every other mammal that comes down the pike. Protein is protein. They're

a perambulating appetite with a serious advantage in speed and armament.

Most of the time they leave us alone. Sometimes they don't."

Mrs. Baker regarded her with a quizzical expression. "It doesn't appear

to upset you very much, Ms. Shugak."

Kate shrugged, and repeated what she had said to Dan, this time with

more conviction. "Hard to get upset over bears acting

81 like bears. Comes with the territory. It's not pretty, but then

nature often isn't."

The Roadhouse door opened abruptly into the conversation, almost

catching Mrs. Baker on the nose and smacking into Kate's reflexively

upraised hand. A man somersaulted out of the building to roll down the

steps and fetch up flat on his back in a puddle of muddy slush. There

was a slurred curse.

The Bakers regarded the outcast for an expressionless moment before Mr.

Baker reached for the door, which was swinging slowly closed, and pulled

it open with a polite inclination of his head. Mrs. Baker swept through,

with Kate bringing up the rear, feeling like a very minor courtier in an

exceptionally regal retinue.

Inside, the bar was three deep, there wasn't an empty table in the

joint, and the floor was jammed with dancers in Pendleton shirts, Levi's

and wafflestompers, the men distinguished from the women only by their

beards. On a twenty-four-inch television screen suspended from one

corner of the roof Steven Seagal was putting out an oil fire in a series

of actions that would have put his ass into orbit on any oil field other

than Hollywood's. An enthusiastic audience led by Old Sam Dementieff was

improvising new dialogue. Half a dozen older women sat in a circle

quilting, mugs of hot buttered rum at their elbows, Auntie Vi firmly

guiding the gathered needles in some complicated knot. She looked up,

saw Kate and beckoned. Kate deliberately mistook the gesture and waved

back airily.

Another crowd stood around two pool tables in the back, the crack of

ball on ball muted by the occasional flush of a distant toilet. Jimmy

Buffett was on the jukebox, wanting to go where it's warm, accompanied

by half a dozen tone-deaf backup singers who felt the same way,

including Frank Scully, evidently suffering no guilt feelings whatever

at not contributing his share to the state treasury.

The tourists from Pennsylvania were easy to spot. They sat at a table by

themselves, attired in matching plaid polyester pantsuits.

82 Matching Pittsburgh Steelers windbreakers hung over the backs of

their chairs, matching potbellies pushed at their shirts, and matching

befuddled smiles spread across their faces as they took in Life in the

Alaskan Bush, a point-and-shoot camera at the ready on the table in

front of them, right next to a dog-eared copy of the Milepost,

Everytourist's all-purpose, super-duper utility guide to Alaska. In

spite of herself Kate thought they looked kind of cute.

The air smelled of stale beer, roll-your-owns of old tobacco and older

marijuana, and wet wool. Eau de breakup.

Kate broke trail to the bar, where Bernie was pouring out drinks with

all eight hands. He was a long, gaunt man with a receding hairline in

front and a ponytail that reached to his waist in back to make up for

it. He looked like an aging hippie only because he was one.

Bernie Koslowski was Chicago-born and Midwest-bred and all flower child.

He had been mugged by Daley's finest at the 1968 Democratic convention,

had danced in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 and had merrily burned his

draft card on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in 1970,

whereupon Attorney General John Mitchell, unamused, had had Bernie and

three thousand other demonstrators thrown behind a chicken-wire fence on

the Mall, in direct violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. Bernie

took it personally. Upon release, he walked by the White House to flip

Nixon the bird and hauled ass for Canada, eventually migrating into

Alaska through the Yukon Territories, working construction on the

TransAlaska Pipeline. He retired from the pipeline to buy the Roadhouse

in 1975. If the Roadhouse wasn't connected by road to the TransAlaska

Pipeline's right-of-way, there were other means of transportation an

ingenious and thirsty pipeliner could and did promote, including, one

glorious day two years before, a D-9 Caterpillar tractor. Business boomed.

Bemie's father, who never let anyone forget he had gone ashore with the

first wave at Anzio, had struck Bemie's name from the family Bible and

forbidden mention of it in his presence. His mother and sisters sent him

surreptitious care packages every year

83 at Christmas, filled with water filters, Swiss Army knives and

waterproof compasses ordered from the REI catalog. From time to time

they would inquire solicitously as to the state of his health, since

blubber couldn't be all that nutritious as a dietary staple, and did his

Eskimo friends live in igloos? Bernie had never met an Eskimo in his

life, or seen an igloo, and since whales had been put on the endangered

species list, muktuk was in short supply, and Aleuts ate seal muktuk

anyway. Or the ones he knew did.

One of his Aleut friends who ate seal muktuk jerked her head toward the

other end of the bar, where Bobby Clark was, as usual, sitting at the

center of a lot of laughter and rude comment. "Life of the party,"

Bernie said. "How you been, Kate?"

"Don't ask."

"All right," Bernie said agreeably, and poured Kate a Coke without

waiting for an order. "Where's Mutt?"

"Guarding the homestead from the federal government."

"What?" There was restive movement behind Kate, and Bernie said, "May I

help you"

"Bernie, this is Mr. and Mrs. Baker. Mandy's parents."

Bernie broke into a smile that lit the deceptively mournful lines of his

face with warmth and humor. "Of course. Mr. and Mrs. Baker. I've heard

Mandy talk about you." With the diplomatic dexterity of a career

bartender, he refrained from repeating precisely what he'd heard Mandy

say. "It's nice to meet you. May I pour you a drink?"

"I wish you would," said Mrs. Baker with feeling.

"You certainly may," said Mr. Baker at the same time, with even more

feeling.

Bernie glanced at Kate, and was intrigued by the suddenly wooden

expression on her face, although true to form he made no comment. "Fine.

What would you like?"

The Bakers eyed the assortment of bottles crammed into the shelves on

the wall behind the bar. Mr. Baker spotted a tall green bottle and

pointed. "Is that Glenlivet?"

"It certainly is."

84 "I'll have some," Mr. Baker said, in a manner that brooked no

contradiction. "Dear? Dear?"

Mrs. Baker's gaze was fixed and staring. Bernie turned to see what she

was looking at.

On a small shelf by itself perched a clear, square-sided bottle half

filled with golden liquid. It was what was lying on the bottom of the

bottle that had caught Mrs. Baker's fascinated attention, and Kate

smothered a grin as Bernie said with elaborate nonchalance, "Oh, that.

That used to be tequila. Now it's Middle Finger." Mrs. Baker's eyes

widened but before Bernie could launch himself on the saga of the

unprepared climber who had lost three fingers to frostbite climbing

Angqaq Mountain, one of which now reposed at the bottom of the bottle in

question, Kate said, "Bernie, these folks have already been through one

bear attack, one plane crash and one attempted murder today. Just pour

them some booze, okay?"

Drinks in hand, they moved down the bar, gravitating naturally toward

the spot generating the most noise. Bobby was accompanied by a

wraithlike blonde who caught sight of Kate before he did. "Hey, Kate."

"How you doing, Dinah?"

"Fine," the blonde said, smiling, blue eyes dreamy. "Incredible.

Wonderful. Sublime."

Impressed, Kate said, "Must have been one hell of a winter."

The dreamy smile widened. "You have no idea."

Dinah Cookman was a twenty-two-year-old strawberry blonde who, upon

graduation from Columbia the previous spring with a degree in

photojournalism, had armed herself with a video camera and a pale blue

1969 Ford Econoline van and driven north to Alaska, determined to make

her name with a breakthrough celluloid essay on life in the Alaskan

bush. By the time she got to Tok she had run out of gas money and

stopped off to pick mushrooms to sell to cash buyers from Outside, and

also to meet Bobby and Kate, but especially Bobby. Under their expert

tutelage, especially Bobby's, she was fast redeeming her cheechako

status. This

85 afternoon, for almost the first time since Kate had known her, she

was without her video camera. She looked unnatural, almost naked,

without it.

The black man with the impressive shoulders put his wheelchair into a

180. "Goddam! Shugak! Long time no see!" A long arm hauled her into a

comprehensive embrace, a hard kiss and a not so brotherly pat on the

ass. "How was your winter?"

"Not as good as yours, apparently," she said, returning the embrace and

the kiss and letting the pat go by without comment. No one else could

have patted Kate Shugak's ass in public and gotten away with it, not

even Jack Morgan, and the people around the group regarded him with no

little awe.

Bobby peered behind Kate. "And you are?"

"Bobby, Dinah, I'd like to introduce Mr. and Mrs. Baker. Mandy's parents."

"The snobs from Nob Hill?" Bobby said, not so sotto voce.

"No, the snobs from Beacon Hill," Kate said under her breath. "Behave."

More loudly she said, "Mr. and Mrs. Baker, these are some more of

Mandy's friends. Bobby Clark, he's the NOAA observer for the Park, uh,

that's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And this is

Dinah Cookman, Bobby's roommate and a photojournalist."

"Documentary filmmaker," Dinah said, the old her surfacing for a moment

before the rosy haze enveloped her once more.

Kate regarded Dinah with a wary eye. "I beg her pardon, documentary

filmmaker. And you've met Bernie Koslowski. He owns the joint."

Everybody shook hands. "Where's Mandy?" Bernie said.

"She's back at the lodge. I, ah, volunteered to give the folks the grand

tour." Nobody believed it, but nobody was brave enough to say so.

"You want a table?" Bernie said.

"You got one?"

"Always got one for you," he said. "Judy!"

"Yo!" A short, wiry woman in jeans and T-shirt whose fringe of

86 thin brown hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat peered at them

from behind thick round glasses that made her look like an inquiring

insect.

"Save that table for me!"

She stuck up a thumb, and was lifting an overloaded tray without

apparent effort by the time Mr. and Mrs. Baker, Kate, Bobby, Dinah and

Bernie reached her. There weren't enough chairs, which Bernie rectified

by snitching several from nearby tables while their occupants were on

the dance floor. "I'm on break," Bernie told Judy.

"Up yours," she replied with a grin. She shoved her oversize glasses up

the bridge of her nose and shot off to answer a cry for more beer.

Bernie shook his head. "That Judy, she only knows two speeds, fast and

stop. So, Mr. and Mrs. Baker, how are you finding Alaska so far?"

"Quite stimulating," Mr. Baker replied without missing a beat.

Kate choked over her Coke and Bobby demanded details. They took news of

the bear attack philosophically, pitying victim and survivor alike

without shock or horror. "Dumb to go up there unarmed this time of

year," Bobby said, which summed up the general consensus. George's

ground loop was received with glee, Cindy's ambush with applause. When

they stopped laughing, Kate said, "Yeah, right, hilarious," but she

noticed that Mandy's parents were looking much more mellow. Probably the

Glenlivet. Whatever worked.

Bernie had been in on the ground floor of Dan O'Brian's hot pursuit of

the two Great White Hunters, so the denouement was well received, but it

was the story of the 747 engine almost falling on her cabin that got by

far the most acclamation. "Jesus, Kate," Bobby said, wiping away tears

of mirth, "that's got to be the best story yet. You're getting better

and better at lying in your old age." He started to laugh again. "I knew

I was a good teacher, but damn, I didn't know I was that good."

"It's true," she insisted.

87 "Yeah, right, and the Nimitz just rammed my boat dock," he said, and

everybody laughed again.

"She really is telling the truth," Mr. Baker murmured, but no one was

listening.

"Is that what all that air traffic was this morning?" Bernie said.

"Yes," Kate said. "The NTSB and the FAA descended on my place at about

five."

Bobby's beer was arrested halfway between table and mouth. "Air traffic?"

"Yeah," Bernie said. "Didn't you hear it? Sounded like the U.S. Air

Force was staging an invasion from the Niniltna strip. Early," he added

with bitter emphasis. The Roadhouse didn't close until two in the

morning, and Bernie usually didn't hit the sack until three-thirty or

four o'clock. He was not a morning person.

Bobby looked at Kate. "It really is true? The engine off a 747 really

did land in your front yard?"

"Not fifty feet from my front door," Kate said ruefully. Mr. and Mrs.

Baker nodded in solemn agreement. Kate noticed their glasses were nearly

empty. So did Bernie, and he signaled Judy for a refill.

Bobby stared at her. "Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ," he said finally. "Now

that's what I call breakup."

The door opened and Mac Devlin came in. He spotted Bobby and bulled his

way through the crowd to the table. Kate was sitting a little in back of

Bernie and he didn't notice her at first. "Bobby, is it true what I

heard? Did a plane crash on Kate Shugak's homestead?"

Bobby raised his eyebrows, not averse to making a good story even

better. "Why, I do believe it did, Mac."

Mac Devlin was a short, barrel-shaped man with a red face and redder

hair that stood up straight in the standard ex-marine's crew cut.

"Jesus! I hear over a hundred people got killed."

Kate leaned farther back into Bernie's shadow, and obligingly he leaned

forward on his elbows, the better to keep her hidden. The Bush Telegraph

had never been known for its strict adherence

88 to the facts, and it appeared that today it had been working

overtime. Bobby was thoroughly enjoying himself, and no one at the table

gave him or Kate away. "At least."

"Jesus!" Mac Devlin said again. "I heard Kate was hurt, too."

"Intensive care at Providence in Anchorage," Bobby said.

"Serious," Bernie said solemnly.

"Critical," Dinah said, getting into the act.

"Near death," Bobby said, shaking his head mournfully. Dinah wiped away

a tear. Bernie gave a heartfelt sigh. Mr. and Mrs. Baker drank single

malt and kept their mouths shut, going up another notch in Mandy's

friends' opinion poll.

Mac Devlin thought for a moment. "Listen," he said, dropping his voice

to a confidential murmur, "you don't happen to know who Kate's heirs

are, do you?"

"I don't believe so," Bobby said gravely. "I'm not sure she had any."

"Other than us," Dinah said, and slid her hand into the crook of Bobby's

arm.

"Because then I could approach them about subsurface mineral rights on

her homestead," Mac said.

Kate felt Bernie shake next to her, and a responding laugh bubbled up to

the back of her throat. She pinched his arm in warning. He pinched her back.

Bobby almost forgot his part. "I've got to hand it to you, Mac, you

never give up."

Mac's ruddy skin became even ruddier. "Because you know I've been after

Kate for the mineral rights to that ridge above the creek back of her

cabin ever since I came into the Park."

Dinah eyed him, enthralled by his every word. "What do you think is there?"

"I think it's where the silver vein that played out in the Lost Wife

Mine reappears." Mac's chest puffed out. "I can show you the maps, and

the geologic charts."

"Gee," Dinah told Bobby, all earnest persuasion, "maybe we ought to let

him take a look."

89 Kate leaned forward into visual range and raised her voice. "Like

hell. I've seen what Mac can do with that D-6 of his. He could move all

hundred and sixty of my acres five miles west if he was of a mind to."

She met Mac's astounded gaze and smiled. "Thanks, Mac, but no thanks.

I'll pass."

Mac's jaw dropped, and the table erupted into laughter. He regained

enough self-control to curse them all roundly and bulled off in the

direction of the bar.

Still laughing, Bobby said, "There might be silver in them that hills,

Kate. Aren't you even a little excited at the prospect?"

"Oh," she said politely, "you think I don't get enough excitement out at

the homestead already?"

"Lay off, Bobby," Dinah said. "Not everybody's in the market to moil for

gold."

"I'll moil it for her," Bobby said promptly.

"Thanks anyway," Kate said. "I don't think so."

"Are you sure you're really okay, Kate?" Dinah said, sobering. "Sounds

like one heft of a close call to me."

"It was, but I'm fine."

"And may be richer for the experience," Bobby said, lifting his beer in

a toast.

"I'd better be," she said gloomily. "The damn thing flattened my truck."

"Not old Ichiban?" Dinah said in dismay.

"Stewart?" Bernie said suddenly. "Did you say Mark Stewart? Kind of

looks like Robert Redford, only with black hair?"

Kate blinked at him, lost for a moment. "Who?"

"The guy whose wife got eaten by the bear," Bernie said.

"Sounds like a book by John Straley," an irrepressible Bobby observed.

Bernie ignored him and persevered. "Does Stewart look kind of, I don't

know, not Redfordy exactly, but, I guess, sort of deliberately movie

star-ish? Lean, black hair?"

She paused with her glass halfway to her lips. Now that she thought

about it, she couldn't remember the color of Stewart's

90 hair, the jolt of awareness when their eyes met obscuring everything

else. She had been trained to observe, and she couldn't come up with

something as basic as a physical description. And she had at one time

called herself an investigator. She was even more disgusted with herself.

"Jesus, Bernie," Bobby said, unknowingly coming to her rescue, "you

sound like you're in love with the guy."

Bernie shot him the finger, and Kate was able to say with a laugh, "Now,

now, gentlemen. I happen to know the proprietor of this establishment,

and he frowns on fisticuffs. Yes, Bernie," she said, turning to him,

"that sounds like the guy. Why?"

"They were in here last night."

" "They?" Bobby said. "You mean the widower and the deceased?"

"Yeah," Bernie said. "They were really lovey-dovey." He paused, and

added, "Or at least he was. She didn't look like she was all that

excited to me."

Bobby made a rude noise. "Wishful thinking."

"Hey," Bernie said, wounded. "I'm a married man."

Kate was distracted by a burst of noise from the television screen,

where a little old Native man was being roughed up by a bunch of big

ugly oil field workers in what passed in Hollywood for a bar in the

Bush, which was about as accurate as the rig fire scene. Steven Seagal

entered the frame. Old Sam Dementieff, who was twice as old and twice as

decrepit as the little old Native man on the television screen, raised

up a thin, twittering voice. "Oh, please, Mr. Big Strong White Man, save

poor, weak, drunk little me from the Big Bad White Guys!" Obediently,

Seagal did, with the requisite amounts of testosterone and karate. "Oh,

thank you, thank you, Mr. Big Strong White Man!" Old Sam cried. "You

saved me! You shall be made a member of my tribe! Forever after you

shall be known among us by your secret tribal name, Biggest White Prick!"

Chuckling, Kate turned back to the table.

"He's a big-time Anchorage contractor," Bernie was saying.

91 "He built the Roadhouse for me. Back when we were both just starting

out. He cut his expenses to the bone, I'll say that for him, but he sure

was hard on employees. He paid them ten bucks an hour-for Bush work, no

less-and made 'em sleep in tents. Oh, and he refused to hire a cook."

"What'd they eat?"

Bernie grinned. "Surplus MREs."

"No fucking way!" Bobby roared in outrage.

"So," Kate said, with a quelling frown in Bobby's direction, "Mr. and

Mrs. Baker, how long will you be visiting? Mandy didn't say."

"The jet will be back in Anchorage for us next Saturday," Mr. Baker

said, and drained his glass as if it were the last drop of liquid

between him and the day of departure. Mrs. Baker wasn't far behind.

Bernie signaled for a second refill, as a brief silence, respectful of a

private jet, fell.

"It's great that you came up," Kate said. "I know Mandy's been wishing

you would f8r a long time."

Mrs. Baker's lips tightened ever so slightly. "We've been trying to talk

her into coming home for a visit for years."

Obviously dangerous ground, and Bobby said briskly, "Enough with the

small talk." He straightened in his chair, adjusted the set of the

wheels, brushed an imaginary speck of dust off his T-shirt and demanded,

"Ask me how my winter was."

"How was your winter?" Kate said obediently.

Bobby stroked his chin and seemed to consider. "Productive," he decided

finally. "Yes, I'd say productive was the appropriate word." Dinah

smiled again, the same dreamy smile as before. The rest of them sensed a

story, and waited in expectant silence. Bobby did not disappoint them.

"In fact," he said, regarding the level of beer in his glass with a

critical frown, "I'm glad you came in today, Kate, I need to ask you a

favor."

"Name it," Kate said, raising her glass.

"Will you be our best man?"

The Coke went down the wrong way and she choked and coughed

92 and Bobby, a huge grin on his face, wheeled around the table to pound

her on the back with more force than was absolutely necessary but she

couldn't catch her breath to complain. Meanwhile, Bernie exclaimed, Mr.

and Mrs. Baker added dignified congratulations and Dinah smiled her

dreamy smile. When Kate got her breath back she said, eyes watering,

"You're actually getting married?" She looked from Bobby to Dinah and

back again.

"Yeah, I know, sounds a little precipitous, don't it? We haven't even

been living together for a year yet. But, well, you know, we thought it

best, what with the baby coming and all."

This time the Coke came out her nose. Bernie was rendered speechless, an

event so rare it ought to have been recorded in the Park annals, if

there had been such a thing. Again, Mr. and Mrs. Baker leapt into the

social breach, not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash indicating any

disapproval of the sequence of events, or of anyone's relative age, or

of the color of anyone's skin, either, which made Kate wonder if perhaps

Mandy hadn't misread her parents' reaction to Chick. When she got her

breath back the second time, she said, "I'll be best man only if I get

to be godmother, too."

"Deal." Bobby stuck out a hand.

She took it and yanked him into a hug. "You lucky bastard," she said

into his ear.

He hugged her back hard. "I know." They both admired Dinah, who sat in

her chair looking positively angelic, which she was not. "I know," he

said again.

She watched him watching Dinah. Bobby's face was square and smooth and

black as coal beneath a tight cap of frizzy curls going gray at the

temples, his eyes brown and shrewd, his smile in turn charming,

seductive and downright wicked. Bobby Clark was a hillbilly turned Park

rat from Tennessee who had come to Alaska by way of Vietnam, where he'd

left both legs from just above the knee. What he didn't know about

surviving in Bible Belt, jungle or Bush wasn't worth knowing. He and

Kate had been lovers once and were friends now, and Kate was happy for

him and a little sad for herself, although she couldn't have said

precisely why.

93 They discussed names for the baby-Bobby favored Clyde, for Clyde

McPhatter, or maybe Chuck, for Chuck Berry, or, alternatively, Ronette,

Shirelle or Chiffon. Kate caught Dinah's eye, who shrugged resignedly

and said, "He could want to call her Dixie Cup."

"Or Supreme," Kate suggested, getting into the spirit of things.

"Or Jelly Bean," Bernie said with a grin.

They all considered that one for a moment, before saying in unison, "Nah."

Bernie six-packed the table (apple juice for the expectant mother, Coke

for the teetotaler) and rose to his feet to toast the imminent arrival

of the newest Park rat. They drank, and in the absence of a fireplace to

hurl the glasses into thumped them all down onto the table and raised a

ragged cheer.

"Katya!" She turned to see Auntie Vi waving at her again. There was no

ignoring the summons a second time, and she excused herself temporarily

from the celebration.

Auntie Vi was a tiny woman with defiantly pitch black hair cut short and

permed into a thousand tiny corkscrew curls around a face like an old

apple, red-cheeked and wrinkled but with plenty of juice still left

beneath the skin. Widowed, Auntie Vi fished subsistence during the

summer and ran a bed-and-breakfast out of her home the rest of the year.

She lived in a rambling cabin just outside Niniltna on the road to the

Kanuyaq mine. Since hers was the only noncamping place to stay between

Bernie's cabins and the pipeline-camp-converted-into-a-hotel in Ahtna,

she did a brisk business with hunters, climbers and other assorted

phenomena. In the past the latter had included an itinerant art

collector scrounging old ivory carvings and baskets and button blankets

and halibut lures and fishing visors and glory hallelujah, one time even

an entire kayak in astonishingly good condition, which nobody told the

collector had been made the previous summer by Gordon Tobeluk and sunk

in the river to age for a year, as well as a Stanford sociologist

writing his Ph.D. dissertation on the dynamics of subsistence survival

in an adulterated rural lifestyle, who jumped a foot in the

94 air every time a twig snapped and refused to go any farther from the

village than the last house, and a television reporter from ABC's L.A.

affiliate looking for the definitive story on the effect of the RPetCo

Anchorage oil spill, which he hoped would but did not get him an offer

from national.

Auntie Vi rented them all beds made with clean sheets, served up caribou

sausage and eggs, homemade toast and nagoonberry jelly the following

morning, and charged on a sliding scale according to what she perceived

to be her guests' net worth. She was the closest the Park had ever

gotten to having their own homegrown entrepreneur. Mac Devlin wasn't

even in the same class.

She was also an expert quilter. Close up, the quilt the circle was

working on looked even more beautiful than it had at a distance, an

organized swirl of shades of blue and white, with flowers made of a

combination of embroidery and applique spaced at regular intervals.

"Forget-me-nots?" Kate said. "My favorite flower."

"You hinting, Katya?"

Kate batted her eyes. "Who, me?"

Enid Koslowski, Bernie's wife, scowled at both of them. "She's not married."

"Nor about to be," Kate agreed, and nodded at Dinah. "She is, though."

"And Bobby's been here a long time," Auntie Joy said happily, knotting a

thread.

"I didn't know you were in town, Auntie," Kate said to her.

Auntie Joy heaved a gusty sigh. "I get hungry for family, so I come."

Over the tops of her half-glasses, she fixed Kate with a severe eye.

"How is it this is first time I see you, Katya? You too good, or maybe

just too lazy to come to town to visit your auntie?" Not waiting for

Kate to answer the unaswerable, she said, "Break time, Vi?"

Grinning, Auntie Vi nodded and the other five exchanged thimbles and

needles for mugs. Auntie Vi rose and stretched and took a few steps from

the table, nodding at Kate to follow her.

95 "So," she said, looking over Kate's shoulder, "I hear you give

Mandy's mom and dad the grand tour?"

"You could call it that."

Auntie Vi's eyes twinkled. "Mandy probably never let her folks back in

the state, much less the Park."

"Probably not."

"They look like nice people."

"They're coming around," Kate admitted.

"So maybe their shit stink like everybody else's," Auntie Vi said

complacently, and Kate had to laugh. "Katya, I need a favor."

"Sure, Auntie," Kate said, displaying about as much sense of

self-preservation as Kevin Bickford had that morning on her homestead.

"Anything you want, you know that."

"I want you to talk to Harvey."

Kate stiffened. Harvey was Harvey Meganack, one of five board members of

the Niniltna Native Association. He was pro-development to the extent

that he was willing to open traditional tribal lands up to mining,

logging and tourism, a subject over which he and Kate had locked horns

the previous October. The board, stable and unchanging for twenty years

beneath the firm hand of Kate's grandmother, had recently experienced a

sea change, losing three of its members and electing a new chair. It was

still sorting itself out, and no one really knew what direction the

board might take in the future.

Auntie Vi was only the board secretary, not a member, but she was a

tribal elder and as such had tremendous influence with both the board

and the shareholders. Kate, who had been waging a lifelong battle to

stay as far removed from tribal politics as possible, was thrice cursed,

first in that she was the granddaughter and only direct descendant of

Ekaterina Moonin Shugak, second in that she was smart, capable and a

natural leader, and third in that those qualities were recognized and

needed by her people. Authority is as often a burden thrust upon the

reluctant recipient as it is a prize pursued by the ambitious.

96 Kate, resolved to serve from outside the circle of power no matter

how often her elders tried to extend it far enough to draw her in, said

guardedly, "What about Harvey?"

"He's almost convinced Demetri and Billy that the profits we made last

year from the logging at Chokosna should go out in a supplementary

dividend to the shareholders."

Normally, the dividend check was a quarterly payment representing income

and interest earned on funds invested by the Niniltna Native

Association, one of hundreds around the state created by ANCSA, the 1972

Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which had traded money and land for

a right-of-way for the Trans- Alaska Pipeline across aboriginal

territory. Sound counsel and some lucky investing on the part of the

Niniltna board had produced dividends that had steadily increased over

the years so that individual shareholders now received almost a thousand

dollars four times a year. One was paid out on December 1, to help put

some spirit into Christmas; one in March, to help gear up for the

fishing season; one in June to help buy that new impeller the boat

needed after it went over the sandbar at the mouth of the Kanuyaq River;

and one in September, in case the fishing season had been lousy and

there was no money for the fall grocery run to Costco in Anchorage.

It wasn't a bad arrangement. Unfortunately, a quarterly payment was also

a fine way to finance a quarterly spree, as Cindy Bingley was all too

well aware. And when, as this year, additional income from investments

or, in this case, logging leases accumulated and had to be dispersed to

the shareholders, there was a great temptation to regard the resulting

funds as found money and blow it on a spree, or a third four-wheeler.

You can never have too much stuff in the Alaskan Bush. "And?" Kate said.

"And," Auntie Vi said, "Joy says we should maybe earmark a few of those

funds for a health clinic instead."

Kate looked at Auntie Joy, another round-shaped elder, whose chubby

cheeks gave an impression of youth, especially when two

97 deep dimples creased them, which happened frequently. Her cheerful

front hid a deep and abiding concern for her family and friends and for

the community as a whole, blood or not. For "Auntie Joy says," Kate

thought, read "the majority of the elders in the Association say." She

glanced at Old Sam Dementieff, the fifth, eldest and newest board

member. "What does Old Sam say?"

Auntie Vi shook her head. "Nothing, yet. Will you talk to Harvey, Katya?"

"What makes you think he'll listen to me? We haven't been on good terms

since last October. Hell, we've never been on good terms. He'll blow me

off." Try.

Kate's hackles instinctively went up at the tone of Auntie Vi's voice.

After a brief struggle, she said, "All right, auntie. I'll try."

"Try soon."

Kate took a careful breath, exhaled it. "Yes. As soon as I can."

"Good." Auntie Vi examined her critically. "I hear you almost get

flattened by airplane."

"Not a whole airplane. Just one engine."

Auntie Vi's eyes twinkled again. "Oh. Just the engine. That's all right

then."

Kate had to smile.

"And woman get killed by bear." Auntie Vi shook her head. "Bad thing."

"Were they staying with you?"

Auntie Vi nodded. "For a week, they said." Her smile was wide and

satisfied. "Now I got federal men staying. They pay more."

"Good for you."

"That wife nice lady," Auntie Vi said, smile fading. "She been here

before." She gave Kate a sly look. "But she not with him."

At that moment the door to the Roadhouse crashed open and a neon

Budweiser sign hanging on the back wall shattered and cascaded to the

floor in bits of glass.

98 In the absolutely still moment of silence that followed, Kate heard

the distinct echo of a rifle shot. A .30-30 she thought, but didn't have

enough time to make sure.

"Incoming!" Bobby put both hands flat on the table, vaulted across the

surface and tackled Dinah, who went over backward in her chair. They

both crashed to the floor with Bobby mostly on top. Kate, a nanosecond

behind him, caught Auntie Vi in one arm and Auntie Joy in another and

used them to take the rest of the quilting bee down. Bernie did his duty

by Mr. and Mrs. Baker.

"Well, really," Kate heard Mrs. Baker say when she got her breath back.

Bernie cursed.

Mrs. Baker shut up.

A second shot, a clang and the tin-shaded light over one of the pool

tables swung wildly back and forth. A figure loomed up in the open

doorway, outlined against the Park's one and only streetlight, and a

third shot rang out, followed by a shrill scream.

"Kay!" a man's voice screamed. "Omigod! Kay!"

The figure in the doorway disappeared. The door slammed itself shut,

cutting the light off as if someone had thrown a switch.

Bernie's comment came clearly to Kate from halfway across the room.

"Breakup."

99

The door banged open again. "They've shot my wife!" a voice yelled from

outside. "Somebody help! They've shot my wife!"

"Everybody stay down," Kate said, and got to her knees.

"Katya!" Auntie Vi said. "No!"

"Shugak!" Bobby yelled. "Now is not the time to play hero, goddammit!"

She ignored both of them and snaked a path toward the back of the room,

past bodies hugging the floor, hugging beer glasses, hugging pool cues,

and one uninhibited couple hugging each other as they took brazen

advantage of their suddenly horizontal position. Kate took a second

look. The guy was Dandy Mike. It figured.

There were more unintelligible yells from outside, more shots, more

thuds as bullets impacted the wall of the Roadhouse and a

100 lot of panicked shouts and questions from inside, chief among which

was, "What the fuck is going on?"

Seemed like all day people had wanted the answer to that question.

Someone was crying and someone was cursing and somebody else was

screaming and Kate looked up just in time to see the lady tourist from

Pennsylvania aim her camera and take a picture. Her husband, wide grin

intact, looked as if he'd gotten a bargain in front-row seats to a John

Wayne shootout.

"Get down, you damn fools!" Kate shouted.

They took her picture instead.

Kate crawled beneath the television screen, opened the back door a crack

and hooked one wary eye over the sill. Nobody shot at her. A

belly-scraping slither got her outside and down the steps. She sidled

furtively up to the corner and peered around. Nothing, but the yelling

was louder. She sidled even more furtively up to the next corner and

peered much more cautiously around it.

The yelling resolved itself into words. "You bastards, you shot my

wife!" The speaker was kneeling on the steps to the front door, a woman

draped over his lap, her left shoulder and breast stained red. He had a

pistol in his hand and a feral look in his eye. "You bastards, I'll kill

you for this, I'll kill you!"

"You deserve everything you get, you godless heathen!" was the response,

a woman's voice, high and shrill and determined. A shot followed and a

bullet hit the wall of the Roadhouse not a foot from his head.

"Get down!" Kate snarled. "Goddammit, you asshole, get down!"

He looked her way, half raising his pistol, a .357 magnum. At least it

wasn't an automatic; he could only shoot her six times. It wasn't a

comforting thought.

Another shot from the parking lot slammed into the building to Kate's

left. She jerked back instinctively and banged her head hard enough on a

protruding beam to see stars. "Ouch!" There was another shot and

another. From the front of the building

101 there was a scrabble of bodies; she hoped it was the man with the

pistol hauling his wife beneath the stairs.

Kate, rubbing her aching head, spared a moment to wish that Mutt was

with her, so she could have launched an attack on two fronts. In the

next moment she was just as glad to be alone, as not even Mutt was

immune to bullets. She gathered her courage and peeked around the corner

again.

"Mom!" The voice came from a jumble of vehicles a little to her left.

"Mom, where are you?"

"I'm over here, Petey!" came the reply. The same woman's shrill voice,

hard-edged, coming from somewhere near the Pace Arrow in the parking

lot. "Are you okay?"

"Yes! Where's Dad?"

"I don't know! Joe? Joe!"

"Dad! Dad, are you okay? Dad, answer me!"

Under cover of the yelling, Kate slipped out of the shelter of the bar

and ducked in between a red Suburban and a construction- orange Dodge

pickup. She dropped forward on her hands and looked underneath the

Suburban, getting a face full of mud and slush for her pains.

About six vehicles down she saw the bottom half of a body, clad in jeans

and shoepacs and holding a rifle into which a pair of hands was feeding

bullets. The hands were shaking and dropped every other bullet, but

enough were making it into the rifle for the rifle to accomplish its

designated task. Shit, Kate thought, and took a detour out to the

perimeter of the parking lot. Her feet crunched in the snow and it was

only a matter of time before Mom or Petey heard her, not to mention Joe,

wherever he was. She had to move fast if she was going to get a handle

on the situation before it exploded again.

She jumped when a shot boomed from beneath the front porch of the

Roadhouse. Dirty Harry warming up. The other two returned fire, Petey

with his rifle, the .30-30 maybe, from the sound of it, more firepower

than Kate wanted to go hand to hand against, and Mom with what sounded

like a popgun by comparison but

102 was probably a .22 and could kill her just as dead at close range.

She used their shots to cover the sound of her movements, duck- walking

behind the last row of trucks. Her Nikes, soaked once already that day

on the airstrip and just beginning to dry out, were soaked again. There

was just no justice in the world.

Nothing to be done about it now, but any feeling of mercy she might have

had in dealing with the cause of her wet feet died stillborn. A

stumbling rush brought her up behind the last vehicle in the row next to

the Pace Arrow, an old white International pickup the size of Rhode

Island. Three more booms sounded from the Roadhouse's front porch,

during which Kate crossed to the Pace Arrow, followed by a pause.

Probably reloading. Kate took the opportunity to peer around the corner.

A woman in jeans and sweatshirt was on her knees, leaning against the

Pace Arrow, her rifle grasped in both hands.

The RV was twenty-five feet long if it was an inch, too long a distance

for Kate to rush without Mom hearing, way too long for Kate to get to

her before she swung the rifle around. She cast about her for something

to even the odds. Nothing but half- melted snow and rotten ice and gluey

mud as far as the eye could see.

She looked back at the surface of the lot. Why not? She scooped up a

bunch of snow and packed it down, squeezing the muddy liquid out between

her fingers, rounding off the edges, shaping the mass into a solid ball

of ice, as fine a projectile as an attacker could hope for. She made

half a dozen more, stockpiling her arsenal. She waited until Mom was

sighting down the barrel before she raised her right arm and threw a

fast, hard ball that hit with a solid thump between Mom's shoulder blades.

"What the hell!" Mom was rocked forward on her knees but she didn't drop

the rifle. She turned and Kate threw again, as hard as she could, this

time connecting with Mom's shoulder.

"Ouch!" Rocked off her knees, Mom sat down hard in the slush, and Kate

threw again, this time adjusting trajectory for wind

103 resistance and gravity, this time putting every ounce of force in

her body behind it and this time smacking Mom squarely between the eyes.

The rifle dropped into the snow, Mom's eyes rolled up in her head and

Mom fell face forward into a puddle of slush, out cold.

Kate was rather pleased with herself. She was slightly less pleased when

the .357 opened up again, the bullets tearing into the Pace Arrow.

"Mom?" Petey's voice was sounding quavery, which Kate took to be a good

sign. "Mom? What are you doing? What do we do now? I shot somebody, Mom!"

Kate got Mom's face out of the slush before she asphyxiated and unloaded

the .22, pocketing the bullets and tossing the rifle into the back of

someone's pickup. The .30-30 had opened up again, exchanging desultory

fire with the .357 under the porch. Crouching down next to the wheel,

trying to make herself as small as possible in case the shooting started

coming at her from both directions, she raised her voice. "Petey! Petey,

stop shooting! And Wayne, if that's you under the porch, you do the same!"

A bullet hit the tire three feet from her head and the air sighed out of

it. "Goddammit, you two, this is Kate Shugak!" she roared furiously.

"You two idiots put down your weapons! Do it! NOW!"

A brief silence, into which a shaken voice said, "Mom?"

"Your mom's okay. Put down that rifle before you hurt somebody else,

Petey. Do it now."

"He had his gun out first!"

"Like hell I did!"

"I don't care who had whose gun out first," Kate roared again, "I want

them both down on the ground! Now!" Too angry for caution she surged to

her feet and swarmed down on Petey, a thin, pallid youth with the

scraggly beginnings of a beard and an incipient whine. He shrank back

against the truck as she approached and, lucky for him, wasn't fool

enough to raise the rifle. She yanked it out of his hands and unloaded

it. A fist knotted in his

104 collar pulled him to his feet. "You dumb little shit," she said, and

kicked his ass all the way across the parking lot. He uttered distressed

yelps with every contact, which only made her want to kick him harder.

At the porch, Kate bent down to peer through the risers. "Wayne? Is that

you?"

A burly bear of a man some twenty years the boy's senior crawled out

from beneath the steps, soaked, shivering and covered with mud, still

holding his pistol. Kate delivered a final kick up Petey's behind that

propelled him headfirst into the side of the building. There was a thud,

a groan, and he slid down on his butt in the mud, his head falling

forward, tears streaking his cheeks.

Kate removed the .357 from Wayne's unresisting hand and unloaded it.

"Where's the rest of it?" Wayne stared at her, uncomprehending, and she

snapped her fingers impatiently. "Come on, Wayne, where's your ammo?"

Mute, he produced a yellow cardboard box, half full of rounds. Kate

stuffed it into the pouch of her wind breaker, feeling like a pregnant

kangaroo, and tucked the pistol into her waistband at the small of her

back. "How bad is Kay?"

Recalled to his wife's presence, the burly man dove down and hauled out

a body that at first glance looked as if nothing could save it. Kay's

entire right side was covered in blood. Kate, who had seen more than

enough dead bodies for one day, swore and raised her voice. "Hey! Inside

the bar! We need a medic out here on the double!"

Since the Ahtna Native Health Foundation had begun running EMT classes

five years before, they had qualified ten Park residents in emergency

medical training. As the most serious hunting, fishing and flying

accidents tended to be instantly fatal, about the only thing the EMTs

got to do was deliver babies, which led to a certain amount of

professional frustration. Kate didn't have to ask twice; at least five

doctor-wannabes, some the worse for liquor but if anything more

enthusiastic because of it tumbled out of the Roadhouse to engulf the

victim in TLC. Bernie produced blankets

105 and they formed a makeshift stretcher and carried Kay inside, where

three tables had already been cleared to form an operating theater. The

lady tourist was hovering on the fringes of the action, camera snapping,

face flushed with excitement, her husband at her elbow. Mr. and Mrs.

Baker, thankfully, remained in the background out of the way, glasses

clutched tightly in their fists. Glasses, Kate noticed in passing, which

testified to the consummate professionalism and dedication of their

bartender. This was what, their fourth?

Kate was not an EMT and had no desire to become one. She shoved Petey

into a chair and Wayne into a chair next to him, and went outside to

fetch Mom, just regaining consciousness. When the three of them were

lined up in front of her she said, "Okay, what the hell is going on here?"

Wayne, face white and strained and eyes fixed painfully on the crowd

surrounding his wife, didn't answer. Mom was groggy but game. "Don't use

that foul language around me, if you please."

"I don't please," Kate said unpleasantly. The woman returned no answer,

and Petey's eyes slid away.

Behind her Bobby's voice said, "It's about the access road, isn't it,

Petey?"

Petey wouldn't look at Bobby, either.

"The access road?" Kate said. "I thought you people got that settled

last fall."

Mom, also known as Cheryl Jeppsen, Petey's mother and Joe's wife, raised

a hand to her eyes, which were swelling into twin shiners of historic

proportion and hue. "Godless heathens," she muttered.

A figure detached itself from the crowd around Kay and crossed the room.

"Wayne?"

"Dandy?" Wayne looked up, dazed.

Slim and handsome with laughing brown eyes and an infectious grin, Dandy

Mike had been one of the first Park rats to qualify as an EMT, from

motives Kate was certain had more to do with getting women's clothes off

them than ministering to the sick. He

106 was wiping red-stained hands on a bar rag. Wayne looked at the rag

and his face went even whiter.

Dandy took a swift step forward and reached out to keep the big man from

sliding off his chair to the floor. "Wayne, it's okay. Kay's going to be

fine. The bullet hit her high up in the shoulder, from the looks of it

small caliber, so there wasn't much damage." The .22, Kate guessed.

"It's a through-and-through. We'll clean it and slap a bandage on it,

and she'll be fine. She'll be hurting, but she'll be fine. Lucky thing

Cheryl and Petey are such lousy shots."

Petey began to weep, long, sad tears rolling down his face and into his

collar.

"Praise God," Cheryl said, although it didn't have quite the pious

effect she'd hoped for.

"Oh for Christ's sake," Bernie said wearily, "stop with the everlasting

Jesus-freaking, will you, Cheryl?"

Stiffening, Cheryl said, "You'll answer to the Almighty for that

blasphemy, Bernard."

Dandy used his free hand to chuck Cheryl beneath her chin. "Cheryl

honey, why don't you put a lid on it before I tell all these folks just

how godless you could be in the old days?"

Cheryl's mouth snapped shut like a live trap and she flushed a deep red.

"That life is all behind me now. I have confessed my sins to God and He

has forgiven me."

Dandy gave an evil chuckle. "Even the night up on the bridge over Lost

Chance Creek?"

Bobby, reprehensibly, grinned. "Tell us, Dandy. Sounds like a tale I'd

sit still for."

"Okay?" Wayne said, belatedly fastening on the one word of Dandy's that

mattered to him. "Kay's going to be okay?" His eyes fell on the bar rag

again. "But I saw her, I-"

Dandy, reminded of his duties, turned back to Wayne and shook him once,

gently, to stop the babble. "Wayne, Kay is going to be fine," he

repeated. He raised his eyes and looked at Cheryl. Lucky for you, his

eyes said. Cheryl's eyes held his for a moment

107 before sliding away. In that moment the family resemblance between

her and Petey was very clear.

It sank in, and relief washed over Wayne's face. He got to his feet. "I

want to see her."

"Fine," Dandy said soothingly. "Go ahead." They watched Wayne lumber

off, and then Dandy turned to look Kate's drenched and muddy self over

with a speculative eye. "Shugak, you are a mess." Gentle fingers touched

her left temple and came away bloody.

She looked at his hand in surprise. "What's that?"

"Blood. Yours." He turned for a handful of cotton and a bottle of

hydrogen peroxide. He dabbed at her temple and examined the result with

a critical eye. "Yeah, she grazed you all right. As clean a crease as

you'll ever want to see."

"I didn't feel it," Kate said blankly. The room took a half-turn around

her. "I didn't even hear it."

Auntie Vi said something in Aleut that was probably better left

untranslated, and came forward to grab Kate's arm and sit her firmly

down in a chair, where she suffered not in silence beneath Dandy's

ministrations.

"Oh, quit your bitching." Dandy shook his head, recapping the bottle.

"It's just a scratch. It's not even bleeding now. You always did have

more luck than you deserve, Shugak."

"You should talk," Kate retorted.

He looked her over again. "Anything else I should see to while I'm at it?"

Her head ached where she'd banged it against the side of the Roadhouse,

but not bad enough to let Dandy Mike anywhere near her. "No way, Dandy.

I don't need or want any more nursing."

He patted the air. "Fine, fine. Jesus, anybody'd think you were

somebody's maiden aunt. I just wanted to help." The wounded sound of his

voice was belied by a wide grin. "It's your loss, after all," he added,

and sauntered off to prospect the crowd for a female patient with less

resistance.

108 Kate remembered something still left undone. "I forgot about Joe.

Watch these jerks," she said to Bobby, pointing at Cheryl and Petey, who

she noticed for the first time was wearing a T-shirt inscribed "I Burn

Banned Books." She wondered if she could turn Petey loose up around the

Kanuyaq mine. Maybe the bear would get lucky a second time.

"Katya!" Auntie Vi said with indignation. Auntie Joy, who understood

Kate better than her sister did, put a restraining hand on Vi's arm,

although both aunties watched Kate leave the room in equally

disapproving silence.

She found Joe groaning under a flatbed loaded with PVC. He'd tripped and

managed to knock some of the PVC loose, which had returned the favor and

rolled over on him, whereupon he'd fallen and fractured his tibia. Kate

called Dandy out and he pulled an inflatable cast over the break with

gentle hands. "There now," he told Joe, patting his shoulder

comfortingly, "that'll hold you until you get to the clinic at Ahtna.

You ought to be fine so long as you don't make any sudden-"

Kate grabbed Joe by the scruff of the neck and hauled him to his feet.

Joe screamed.

"-movements," Dandy finished. "Jesus, Kate," he added, but it was more

in resignation than protest.

Inside the bar, Kate slung Joe down next to Cheryl and Petey, who was

still sniveling. Kate would have liked to kick the boy again just on

general principles.

"What you gonna do with them?" Bobby said, without much interest.

"I'm not doing anything," Kate said. "It's not my problem." Seemed like

she'd been hearing herself say that same sentence all day, too. "You can

call Chopper Jim if you want."

There was a brief silence.

"Well," Bobby said, "nobody's dead."

He looked at Bernie, who shrugged. No way was he going to swear out a

complaint and have to be a witness at some trial in Glenallen or Palmer,

or worse yet, Anchorage. Who would fill in

109 behind the bar? He looked across the floor at Enid, and shuddered.

She was still pissed about Lisa Gette. Best not to push it.

No one else wanted to get tangled up witnessing and testifying, either,

not with fishing season so close to starting. Wayne, asked if he'd like

to press charges, shook his head numbly and accepted assistance in

getting his wife into their vehicle. No one else stepped forward to

lodge a complaint. Mr. Baker squinted into his empty glass. "Well,

hell," Bobby said, disgusted. "Better get somebody to drive 'em to their

place."

"We can drive ourselves," Cheryl said, sitting up.

"Right, and have you play bumper cars with Wayne and Kay all the way

home," Bernie said. Just because he wasn't pressing charges didn't mean

he wasn't thoroughly pissed off. "I'd as soon let a drunk out of here

with his car keys in hand."

Kate had a fleeting wish that Ben Bingley confined his drinking to the

Roadhouse. Bernie was the only bartender she knew who had a real

conscience and acted on it. "You know, Cheryl," she couldn't resist

saying, even knowing it would do no good, "the Bible says, Love thy

neighbor. That's all it says. It doesn't say, Love thy neighbor only if

he's a straight white antiabortion meat-eating bom-again right-wing

Republican foot-washing Baptist. Love thy neighbor. That's all it says.

You miss that verse, or what?"

"I didn't miss the verse that says even the devil can quote Scripture

for his purpose," Cheryl snapped.

Feet wet, her head aching, Kate had to smile. "That's not in the Bible,

Cheryl, it's in The Merchant of Venice."

She repaired to the bar, intercepted along the way by Frank Scully, who

insisted on grasping her hand and shaking it warmly. "Goddam, if it

isn't our trusty Eskimo protector! You do good work, Shugak! Saved all

our asses yet again!"

The only reason he lived to see another dawn was that he was obviously

drunk. "I'm not an Eskimo," she snapped, and shouldered him aside.

Bernie poured her a fresh Coke, the Bakers more Glenlivet, Bobby a

bourbon and Dinah a glass of fizzy water with a twist of

110 lime. Steven Seagal was still on the television screen, now getting

on a horse in the company of a Chinese actress playing an Eskimo woman,

although judging by the thickness of the tree trunks in the background,

she should have been a Tlingit or a Haida or maybe even a Tsimshian.

"Can you ride a horse?" asked our hero, and the actress glowed and

replied, "Of course! I'm a Native American!" at which point Old Sam

Dementieff alarmed all the other old coots at his table by going off

into what appeared to be an apoplectic fit. "Horses!" he recovered

enough to wheeze. "In Alaska! Yah sure, you betcha! Head 'em up! Move

'em out! Ride 'em cowboy! Yeehaw! Just let me hitch my dogsled up to

those oat-burners, yawl!"

"I beg your pardon, but what is all this concerning an access road?" Mr.

Baker said. The weighty and meticulous manner in which he put his words

together caused Kate's eyes to narrow in sudden suspicion.

Bernie jerked his head toward the trio in the corner. "Those are the

Jeppsens. They homesteaded forty acres on Mad Mountain six years ago."

He jerked his head at the front door through which Wayne and Kay had

disappeared, Dandy helping her down the steps and copping a discreet

feel while he was at it. "Those are the Kreugers. They got the forty

acres next door to the Jeppsens, five years ago."

"Most of the problem," Bobby said, "is that Kay and Wayne have master's

degrees and Joe and Cheryl dropped out of high school."

"Yeah," Dinah said, "the Kreugers actually read books, can you imagine?"

"Dreadful," Mrs. Baker said, very much the dowager duchess.

"Deplorable," Mr. Baker said, eyelids closing and opening again in a

long, slow blink, like an owl.

"And of course," Bobby said, "the Jeppsens are your ordinary, everyday

born-again Christian fanatics, who think the Bible is the only book

necessary. They home-schooled Petey," he added, "so they could keep him

away from all those ungodly teachers at Niniltna High."

"And you see how well it took," Bernie pointed out, but then

111 Bernie, the local basketball coach, always resented any reduction in

the available talent pool for his team, and Petey was almost five foot ten.

"It used to be funny," Dinah said with a sigh.

"Not anymore," Kate said, rubbing gingerly at the sore spot on her head.

"Absolutely not," Mrs. Baker said, even more stately than before.

"Indutipably-inbutibaply-nope," said Mr. Baker.

Displaying a fine, if fraying sense of discretion for which Kate loved

them all dearly, the hippie, the hillbilly and the cheechako let this

pass. "Then winter before last," Dinah said, "Bonnie Jeppsen, Joe's

sister, got the postmaster's job instead of Kay."

"The latest installment in the saga," Bobby took up the tale, "is the

access road between the two homesteads. The Kreugers are higher up the

hill than the Jeppsens, and somehow the Jeppsens got to thinking that

the access road crossed their land and the Kreugers ought to hive to go

around. But since the Kreugers going around would entail them going

across Park land, Dan O'Brian naturally took a somewhat different view

of the situation."

"I'll just bet he did," Kate said appreciatively. This part of the story

was new to her.

Bernie added, "Of course, mostly they hate each other's guts because the

Kreugers grow better tomatoes in their greenhouse than the Jeppsens do."

People in the Alaskan Bush have been shot for refusing offers for

Boardwalk. "Breakup," Kate said, as if that explained everything, and

perhaps it did.

"Breakup," Bobby repeated, without affection. "What the hell is it with

breakup? We make it all the way through winter without going totally

insane and it's finally spring and we're gaining daylight and the kings

will be up the creek any minute and now we got to start shooting at each

other?"

"It's because people make it through the winter that they lose it during

spring," Kate said.

I'll

112 They looked at her askance. "Sure, Shugak, that makes just a whole

bunch of sense," Bobby said, and rolled his eyes.

"Think about it," Kate insisted. "The winter's long and hard and cold

and dark, but people can get through it by looking forward to

spring-hell, sometimes spring is all they've got. It's so cold their

water freezes, it's dark most of the day, maybe their spouse is sleeping

around, maybe the kids are acting out, maybe they're broke, but they

know spring is on its way, so they tough it out through the cold and the

dark, knowing better times are coming." She drained her glass and set it

down with a decisive snap. "And then spring comes, and their wives are

still screwing around on them, and their kids are still shits and

they're still broke. It's spring and nothing's changed, and something

snaps."

"I would prefer that it did not snap in my vicinity," Bobby said with

dignity, "thank you very much."

"Mine either," Bernie agreed.

"Nor nine niether," Mrs. Baker said.

"I'll too on it, pass," Mr. Baker said.

Dinah looked at the Bakers, a considering expression supplanting the

dreamy one in her eye. "You know, Kate, I think you'd best come to

dinner, and bring the Bakers with you. Caribou ribs and onions." She

looked at Kate and waggled her eyebrows. "And Bobby's lemon meringue

pie." She looked back at the Bakers. "And aspirin. And coffee."

Click! went a shutter, and they looked up to find the lady tourist from

Pennsylvania and her husband peering at them over the top of their

camera. "I hope you don't mind?" she said. "It's just that you all look

so-" she hesitated, and then said with a rush, "-so Alaskan."

The two of them beamed.

Mr. Baker belched.

"Come to think of it," Dinah said, "maybe you all should just stay the

night."

113

They reached the turnoff to Bobby and Dinah's, inches from a clean

getaway, just as Mandy and Chick came barreling down the road on Chick's

four-wheeler.

"Whoop!" said Mr. Baker, and rolled down the window to wave madly at his

only child. He would have fallen out if Kate hadn't grabbed his belt and

hauled him back in at the same time she jammed on the brakes.

Miraculously, they were still working.

The four-wheeler slid to a halt just off the truck's starboard bow,

squaring at the edge of the pickup's headlights like a malignant toad.

It wasn't possible to make out facial expressions in the evening gloom,

but Kate received the distinct impression that Chick was forcibly

holding Mandy in the driver's seat.

Sitting very erect between Kate and Mr. Baker and always the critic,

Mrs. Baker said, "She's supposed to be a musher. Where's

114 her dogs?" Her severity was marred by a loud hiccup, brought on by a

particularly large pothole five miles back.

"That's gy mirl!" Mr. Baker whooped exuberantly. He leaned across Mrs.

Baker to inquire of Kate, "Did I you tell what a great musher is she?"

"Yes, you did," Kate said. Not a religious person, she was at this point

heard to call on a higher power for assistance. She wasn't picky, she'd

take anything. An earthquake would be good, something somewhere around 6

on the Richter scale, and the sooner the better. Unfortunately, the

higher power appeared to have retired for the night. Somebody had to

make the first move, so Kate shifted into second and turned to follow

the blue Chevy's taillights down the one-lane game trail that passed for

the access road to Bobby's homestead.

The toad fell in behind her.

The three vehicles rumbled across the plank bridge spanning Squaw Candy

Creek and pulled up into a neat row in front of the big A-frame.

Everyone filed inside, and Kate delivered Mr. and Mrs. Baker into the

wrathful arms of their child and bent her head against the coming storm.

It was not long in breaking. Mr. and Mrs. Baker sat at the kitchen

table, meekly drinking down mugs of hot black coffee, and Chick, Bobby

and Dinah hovered around the eye of the hurricane, trying for Kate's

sake not to laugh out

loud.

"I send them off for a lousy little sight-seeing tour of the Park, and

you almost get them eaten by a bear, involved in a plane crash and shot

by Cindy Bingley?" Mandy flung out a hand in her parents' direction.

Mrs. Baker gave her a low five, and giggled into her coffee mug when

Mandy's head swiveled around to stare incredulously.

Bobby abruptly wheeled his chair in a 180 and made for the console in

the center of the room at flank speed. Chick hightailed it after him.

Dinah stayed within earshot, pretending to assemble the ingredients

for,dinner. "And then, on top of everything else,

115 you have the gall to take them out to Bernie's and get them stinking

drunk?"

"She didn't get us drunk," Mrs. Baker said, sitting up straight in her

chair, suddenly very dignified.

"Nah," Mr. Baker said with an expansive wave of his hand, unfortunately

the one that held his coffee cup, and launched a spray of hot black

liquid across the kitchen floor. "We wanted the trough. She just drink

us to the led."

Mrs. Baker thought this so exquisitely amusing that she abandoned any

attempt at dignity and positively guffawed. Mr. Baker chose that moment

to erupt into poetry, and not just any poetry, either, but Vachel

Lindsay going "boomalay boomalay boomalay BOOM!"

There was an outburst of snickering from the console, quickly

suppressed. Dinah grabbed a sponge and bent down to mop up the spilled

coffee, effectively hiding her face.

Mandy shifted her glare from Kate to Dinah.

"BEAT an empty BARrel with the HANdle of a BROOM!" Mr. Baker surged to

his feet. "Be CAREful what you DO," he declaimed, forefinger raised

admonishingly, "or Mumbo-JUMBO, God of the CONGO, Mumbo-JUMBO will

HOO-DOO YOU!"

Dinner was served an hour later in an atmosphere redolent of caribou and

restrained wrath. Dinah kept up a steady flow of mild gossip concerning

various Park rats. Becky Jorgensen had passed away quietly in August,

never having left the Alaska Psychiatric Institute where she had been

resident since Roger McAniff had killed her husband and eight others in

a one-day massacre two years before. Breakups really were

better-than-average hard on the Alaskan Bush, they all agreed. After his

fifth bad fishing season in Prince William Sound following the RPetCo

Anchorage spill, Ethan Int-Hout, Abel's second son, was thinking of

moving his family from Cordova back to his father's homestead and opening

116 a bed-and-breakfast for fly-in customers. This naturally led to a

debate on the merits and demerits of finishing the road from Ahtna to

Cordova, a road in construction limbo since the Alaska Earthquake of

1964, which 9.2-on-the-Richter-scale event had taken out an essential

bridge across the Kanuyaq River fifty miles north of Cordova. Kate,

appalled at the thought of a paved, maintained road connected to the

Richardson Highway passing within three quarters of a mile of her

homestead, was adamantly against. Jack Morgan, she remembered, delighted

at the thought of a paved, maintained road connected to the Richardson

Highway passing within three quarters of a mile of her homestead, was as

adamantly for. Bobby pointed out that with the Prudhoe Bay oil field in

decline and salmon stocks around the state in chaos, tourism was a

lucrative, low-impact industry that ought to be given its chance.

"Low-impact?" Kate said, bristling.

Dinah hastily changed the subject, reporting that probate had finally

gone through on the Gette homestead and a distant cousin from

Plainville, Illinois, had inherited. No news yet on what he was going to

do with it. There was yet another rumor that the Fish and Game, bowing

to pressure from sports-fishing interests, was going to limit the red

catch on the Kanuyaq, a potential disaster for the many subsistence

families with fish camps along its banks. Rumor also had it that the

Fish and Game was thinking of limiting the commercial catch at the mouth

of the Kanuyaq as well. These two rumors had given rise to a third, that

subsistence as well as commercial fishermen were arming for Armageddon,

so that the fish hawks in the area were prudently avoiding any low

flyovers.

Conversation inevitably came around to the morning's bear attack. "Guy

was lucky," Bobby said. "Bear could have taken him out, too. You figure

he ran?"

"Wouldn't you?" Kate shot a glance across the table at Mr. and Mrs.

Baker. Food, drink and the accumulated events of the day had rendered

them oblivious. They sat unheeding, shoulders slumped, eyelids at

half-mast, dozing with their heads propped in their hands.

117 "Weird situation," Bobby said, ignoring the Bakers' potentially

delicate sensibilities.

"Why weird?"

"Why didn't they have a gun? It's spring, for crissake, the bears are

up, everybody knows that."

Kate licked her fork and put it down. "Bobby, how often have we had this

conversation? Every time some transcendentalist type reads too much

Rousseau and hikes out into the wilderness to become the neo-noble

savage and starves to death, you get up in arms. Carol Stewart was in

the wrong place at the wrong time. It isn't a pleasant way to die,

certainly. But it isn't all that uncommon, either. There are a lot of

bears in Alaska, and occasionally one eats somebody, usually somebody

who has broken the rules of human-ursine cohabitation. And therefore,"

she added, "somebody whose loss can only benefit the gene pool. People

are dumb, is all, even the experienced ones. Maybe especially the

experienced ones." The memory of her own close encounter by the creek

the day before lent an extra fervor to her words, and made Bobby give

her a curious look. "What was it somebody said, you can't go broke

underestimating the intelligence of the American people?"

"Human-ursine cohabitation?" Bobby said.

"So I have a vocabulary," Kate said. "Sue me."

After dinner Chick pretended an injury to the four-wheeler that needed

immediate attention requiring assistance and dragged Mandy outside.

Since Mr. and Mrs. Baker had passed out end to end on the long couch,

oblivious of any future malign influence Kate might exert, she went.

Bobby kicked back in front of his ham radio, shooting the breeze with

King Hussein of Jordan, a regular correspondent and another avid ham.

He looked sublimely at home, and he should have, because he'd built the

house to order when he came into the Park the same year as Dan O'Brian.

It was one big square room without any dividing walls or doors, except

to the bathroom, and no rugs, to accommodate his chair. The center was

taken up by a pillar of electronic equipment reaching high into the

peaked roof. A table buried in

118 more electronic equipment encircled the pillar, from which Bobby

talked to ham radio operators from all over the globe, took Park weather

readings for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and

broadcast his pirate radio station whenever he was in the mood. The rest

of the house was arranged around the pillar; a king-size bed in the

northwest corner, the kitchen in the northeast corner, the bathroom

between. The living area of the house took up the south side east to

west, a sprawling expanse featuring two armchairs and a ten-foot couch

placed strategically in front of a huge stone fireplace flanked by

triple-glazed picture windows framing a picture-postcard view, Squaw

Candy Creek in the foreground and the Quilak Mountains in the background.

As Kate and Dinah were clearing the table, a third voice interrupted

Bobby's conversation with the ruler of the sovereign state of Jordan.

Bobby listened, replied and said, "Gotta go, King, I got visitors. Been

nice talking to you."

King Hussein's deep, precise voice gave a courteous signoff. The

interrupt was KL7CC in Anchorage, with a telephone patch from Jack

Morgan. "Well, hey, Jack. How are you?"

In Anchorage, Jack leaned back and propped his feet on a thick pile of

case files, a broad grin spreading across his face. Bobby's voice

wouldn't have sounded like that if Kate had been hurt. "Well, hey,

Bobby, how you doing?"

"I'm fine, but Kate's looking a little flattened around the edges."

There was a brief, startled silence and Bobby said quickly, "Just

kidding, Jack. I guess you heard about the jet engine falling on her

homestead?"

The relief in Jack's voice was palpable. "Bill did, on the radio five

minutes ago. I've been stuck in the office all day, I didn't know

anything about it." A note of humor crept into the deep drawl. "They

said which park and they said the homestead belonged to someone named

Shaktoolik, so I figured it could only be Kate. You sure she's okay?"

"Absolutely, but I'll let her tell you that herself."

119 "Hey, Jack," said Kate, who had drifted irresistibly into range of

the mike. "I'm okay."

"I'm awful goddam glad to hear it, Shaktoolik. Bill says they're saying

that engine weighed about eight thousand pounds."

"It used to. It weighs about ten pounds now. Per piece."

A chuckle. "So Chicken Little was right. Mutt okay? The homestead?"

In Niniltna, Kate, well aware of listening ears tuned in from Chickaloon

to Chistochina, replied, "Mutt's fine, the homestead's fine and other

than being sick of hearing about Chicken Little, I am too."

"I'd like to see that for myself."

"Strap on the Cessna and come ahead on up."

"Soon's I get the chance, I'll take you up on that invitation."

The sooner the better, they both thought.

"So," Kate said lamely. "What have you been up to lately?"

"Oh, we got us a doozy this morning. Drunk stabs a buddy to death and he

feel so bad about it he tries to hang himself from the Captain Cook

statue at Resurrection Park, but the knot comes undone. He falls down

the hill through a bunch of devil's club and winds up in the mudflats."

A slow smile spread across Kate's face. "I like it so far."

"It gets better. He decides since he can't hang himself he might as well

go to work-he's a burger flipper at some fast-food restaurant-so he

climbs up the bank and walks down the middle of Fourth Avenue, covered

with mud and devil's club stickers and the dead man's blood and, get

this, with the noose still hanging around his neck." Jack paused

expectantly.

Kate was willing to play straight man. "And?"

"And nobody notices."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. Seven city blocks, and nobody notices, not even a tourist. Not

until he gets to the restaurant. They noticed him then, all right."

120 "I'll just bet they did," Kate said. Behind her Bobby and Dinah were

laughing, too.

"Yeah, well, my life as we know it. Look, we're taking up airtime here.

Just wanted to know you were okay."

Bobby said, "She's fine. There's a woman up here who ain't, though."

"I thought that engine falling didn't hurt anybody," Jack said, surprised.

With relish, Bobby said, "This one was taken out by a grizzly bear."

Jack was unimpressed. "Must be breakup."

Bobby scowled. Kate knew a warm feeling around her heart. "Gotta go,

Jack. You interrupted Bobby exchanging pleasantries with King Hussein.

Be talking to you soon."

"Be seeing you soon," he said, with feeling.

She avoided Bobby's eye. "Say to Johnny for me."

In Anchorage, Jack hung up the phone, a thoughtful crease in his brow.

Kate had sounded distant, more distant than the two hundred miles

between them would account for. It was probably his imagination. He

shrugged it off, or tried to, and returned to the case file that had

brought him into the office on a weeknight, a painstaking reconstruction

of a ten-year-old rape-homicide in Wasilla that the Alaska state supreme

court had kicked back on appeal. Because he knew how to concentrate, his

unease over Kate faded into the background, to be brought back center

stage in the wee small hours of the morning, the time when all one's

chickens, Little and otherwise, come home to roost.

In Niniltna, Bobby exchanged cordial insults with KL7CC and signed off.

A ham standing by in Tonsina couldn't resist keying his mike and making

kissy-face noises into it. Kate Shugak's Long-distance relationship with

Jack Morgan was a byword in the Bush.

Bobby looked over Kate's shoulder. "Dinah! I told you to get off your

feet!" He gave Kate a nudge. "Go do the dishes for her."

"I am perfectly capable of clearing the table and washing the dishes,"

Dinah said as Kate approached.

"I can see that," Kate said. "How have you been feeling?"

121 "I am feeling just fine," the blonde replied, raising her voice,

"but if I have to answer that question one more time I won't be. You'd

think this was the first baby to be born in the Park in this century."

Kate was pretty sure these bitter remarks had not been addressed to her,

and when Bobby called from the radio console, "Have you got your feet

up?" she was sure of it.

"Ignore him," she told Dinah.

"Easy for you to say, you don't live with him," Dinah muttered. She

carried a load of dishes to the sink and ran water.

Kate found a dish towel threaded through the handle of the refrigerator

door and started drying. "Need a ride somewhere?"

Dinah's hands paused in the dishwater. A smile appeared on her face.

"Not on your life."

"Didn't think so."

They cleaned the kitchen while Bobby pirated a little radio wave,

playing anything recorded on vinyl before Creedence Clearwater Revival

brokeup, interspersed with ads for a bake sale at the high school, a job

offer for a gear mender paying minimum wage, sale items including a used

freezer, a boom box and a 1964 Ford Falcon, and notice of the upcoming

Niniltna Native Association shareholders' meeting.

When Bobby talked to people face-to-face, his voice was usually at its

highest decibel level and the words tumbled out in a torrent; when he

talked over the air, it melted into the mike like maple syrup. He sang

the last lyric along with the Temptations. "Sorry about that," he said,

as the last note faded away, "but cut me some slack, people, I'm soon to

be married and raise a family, oh yeah, myself. Let's listen to what

Bonnie Raitt has to say about motherhood." The beginning bass notes of

"Baby Mine" reverberated up through the soles of their stocking feet.

Kate was pretty sure that cut postdated CCR by about twenty years, but

she wasn't fool enough to say so. Recently cuts from Mary Chapin

Carpenter, Billy Joel and the Indigo Girls had also made it onto Bobby's

playlist. The man really was mellowing out.

122 The women spoke in low voices, so as not to have their conversation

broadcast all over the Park, the Sound and, depending on the skip that

night, across the border into the next country. "I've never seen Mandy

look so frazzled," Dinah said. "What's the matter? Mom and Dad giving

her fits?" She looked over her shoulder toward the living room. Mr. and

Mrs. Baker snored on, oblivious.

Kate smiled. "They aren't so bad, once you get to know them." Dinah

looked at her. "Well, okay, at first you could tell they were thinking

they were going up the river with Axel Heyst."

"The benefit of a liberal education," Dinah agreed, the beneficiary of

one herself.

After Bonnie came the Beatles with "Baby, It's You."

Dinah washed a plate and handed it to Kate. "Jack sounded like he might

be missing you. When's the last time you saw him?"

Kate thought. "New Year's."

"Yikes," Dinah said mildly.

"Yeah," Kate said, with feeling.

The moon was coming up over the Quilaks, large and nearly full. No ring,

which meant the weather was going to stay the same for a while. There

was a sudden movement in the bushes at the bottom of the yard but it was

too dark to see what it was. Gee, maybe a bear.

Dinah said, "The two of you only see each other half a dozen times a year."

Kate came back into her body with a start. "Huh? Who?"

"You and Jack," Dinah said. "You don't get together that often."

Kate smiled. "Some men are like that."

"Like how?"

"Catch and release."

Dinah refused to laugh. "What keeps it going?"

On the air, the Fab Four were succeeded by Crosby, Stills, Nash and

Young. Teach your children well. Kate hoped the kid didn't turn out to

be a heavy-metal fan. Kiss didn't get a lot of

123 airplay on the Bobby Clark Show. "What keeps you and Bobby going?"

"We live together," Dinah said, perhaps more bluntly than she meant to.

"What is this," Kate said, amused, "matchmaking? And you not even an old

married woman yet." Dinah's blush revealed all, and she relented. "I

like my privacy, Dinah. I like making my own decisions without

compromise. I like coming and going as I please. There's no way I'm

moving back to Anchorage, and I can just see Jack giving up his job and

moving out to the Bush. Not to mention which, his son might have

something to say about that."

"You did."

"Did what?"

"Gave up your job and moved out to the Bush."

"That was different," Kate said curtly.

Dinah's eyes dropped to the scar on Kate's throat. "True." She washed a

plate, rinsed it and handed it to Kate. "You don't need him the way I

need Bobby. The way Bobby needs me." Thoughtfully she added, "That

probably comes from being orphaned so young. You had to become

self-sufficient a lot earlier than the rest of us. Got you out of the

habit of needing people." She dropped a handful of silverware into the

rinse water. "Got you out of the habit of letting people need you, too."

Kate thought of Auntie Vi's request that she sound out Harvey Meganack

on the health clinic, and of her reluctance to do so, overcome only by

an elder's authority. An authority, she admitted to herself in the

privacy of her own thoughts, that she avoided by living as close to the

edge of that authority as she could get and still be in the Park. It

wasn't the first time that Dinah, eleven years her junior, white and a

cheechako to boot, had come uncomfortably close to plucking out the

heart of Kate's mystery. "Thank you, Dr. Freud," she said. "Any other

observations you'd care to make while you've got my id pinned to the

drainboard?"

Dinah refused to be insulted. "I think you do love him, though."

124 "Him? Who him? Oh. Jack." She shrugged and stacked plates in the

cupboard. "I like him, I respect and admire the job he does, he makes me

laugh, he's great in the sack. And I do love the sound of his voice,"

she added, dwelling on the last morning that voice had woken her up. She

closed the cupboard and cleared her throat. "What else is there?"

Dinah, looking ever so slightly crushed, said unwisely, "Sounds kind of

cold-blooded to me."

"Cold-blooded?" Kate was surprised and maybe even a little hurt. "I love

men," she said. "I love the shape of their bodies. I love the sound of

their voices. I love it that they have to shave, and I love how their

skin feels when they don't. I love it that they will not, on pain of

death, ask for directions. I love it that they can make lifelong friends

with another guy over a brand of beer or a game of basketball or the

make of a pistol and never need to know another single thing about that

person except that he drinks Full Sail Golden Ale or shoots a thirty-two

percent average from the floor or owns a Colt Peacemaker. They're

another race entirely and I find the study of them fascinating." She

paused, and added, "I just don't expect a lot of them."

"Except for Jack," Dinah said, still bent on romance.

"Especially Jack. His hormones kick into overdrive whenever he's within

ten feet of me. His forehead lowers, his jaw starts to hang, a club

sprouts from one fist." Kate remembered her reaction to the NTSB man, to

Mark Stewart, to Dan O'Brian for crissake. "Dinah, have you ever been

physically attracted to a total stranger?"

The soapy dishwater stilled long enough for Dinah to give Kate an

assessing look. "Just how long ago was it that Jack dragged you off to

his cave?"

Their eyes met, and at the same time they said, "Too long." It made them

laugh, and they finished the dishes with only an occasional admonitory

roar from the DJ.

Jack Morgan would have slept better that night if he'd been listening to

their conversation. He wasn't. He didn't.

125

Kate was awakened by the sound of an approaching helicopter. "No," she

said, and pulled the sleeping bag over her head. After the alarums and

excursions of the previous twenty-four hours she had slept long and

hard, and she was in no mood for a one-on-one with Chopper Jim.

But the sound of the helicopter's engine got louder, and she heard the

others stirring, Mr. and Mrs. Baker on the couch, Chick and Mandy in

sleeping bags in front of the fireplace (the only warm spot on the

floor, which Mandy had pointedly preempted the night before), and Bobby

and Dinah in the monster bed in the back of the room. There were groans,

moans and a whimper or two. Kate added a few choice words and unzipped

the sleeping bag to wiggle into her jeans, feeling each and every one of

her thirty- four years. The bandage over her temple had rubbed off during

126 the night but the wound had crusted over and was barely sore to the

touch.

Some stretches and toe touches limbered her up enough to let her move

over to the front door and open it, just in time to see the

all-too-familiar Bell Jet Ranger settle into the clearing, looming

against the clear dawn like a gigantic black tarantula. She would have

greeted the tarantula with more enthusiasm.

Jim Chopin climbed out, resplendent in blue and gold even at cockcrow.

He was followed by a second man. It was with something of a shock that

she recognized Mark Stewart.

"Good morning!" Jim said, all bright and shiny with good cheer.

"I don't want to know why you're here," Kate said. "I just want to know

why you're here at the crack of dawn."

"Why, Kate," he said, hurt, "as a gentleman, it's my duty to return your

calls."

"As a gentleman it's your duty to let me sleep in."

The grin, as wide and predatory as a shark's, should have been licensed

to kill. "I'll mark that down that for future reference."

Kate refused to be lured. "How did you know I was here?"

The grin widened. "Heard you on the radio last night."

"Oh." She had said nothing over the air to embarrass herself, and

therefore she refused to be embarrassed.

He gestured. "You remember Mark Stewart?"

"Under the circumstances, it would be difficult to forget," Kate said.

"How are you, Mr. Stewart?"

"Fine."

The widower's expression was bland, his voice flat, uninflected. His

grip was warm and tactile. Kate looked up to find him watching her, his

face still, his dark gaze vibrant and compelling. She felt the hair on

the backs of her arms stand up, and very carefully pulled her hand free.

Jim said amiably, "Mr. Stewart has agreed to accompany me up to the mine

and walk me through yesterday's unfortunate incident, so that I can

complete my report."

It was an odd enough request, thankfully, to free her from

127 Stewart's mesmerizing gaze. She looked at Jim and thought, What are

you up to now, you sneaky bastard? "Why didn't you just go straight up

there then?"

Amiability turned to amusement. "And hello to you, too, Jim," he said.

"Beautiful morning, isn't it? Like a cup of coffee?"

Behind her there were noises, and with ill grace she held open the door.

"You might as well come in, now that you've gotten us all out of bed."

"Who's all?" Jim followed her inside, Mark Stewart one step behind. A

yawning Dinah was measuring scoops into the coffeemaker. "Morning, Jim."

"Morning, Dinah." The trooper doffed his hat, and raised an eyebrow as

he took in the crowd. "What's this? A sleepover and I wasn't invited?"

"Mr. and Mrs. Baker, this is Sergeant Jim Chopin, of the Alaska State

Troopers. Mandy's parents," she told Jim. "And Mr. and Mrs. Baker, you

met Mr. Stewart yesterday."

Mr. and Mrs. Baker blinked up from the couch. Probably they had been

expecting the maid with coffee, croissants and the Boston Globe. Mandy

and Chick were rolling up their sleeping bags. Bobby was glowering at

Jim from the kitchen table, but whatever pithy comment he had been about

to make was forestalled by the sound of an approaching four-wheeler with

the throttle all the way open.

"Jesus Christ," Kate said beneath her breath. Grand Central Station had

followed her to Bobby's. She yanked open the door, this time to see Dan

O'Brian roar up. He must have flown into Niniltna even before Jim was in

the air to get to Bobby's this early.

"Hey, K!ate!" he said, bounding up the steps. A morning person,

obviously. So was Kate, but then usually she'd had more sleep.

"How'd you know I was here?"

"Why are you so sure I'm looking for you?" he said indignantly, and

added, at the same time she did, "Heard you on the radio last night." He

caught sight of Mark Stewart and his chin dropped. "Mr. Stewart?"

128 "Ranger O'Brian." Stewart's expression didn't change, but Kate

received the distinct impression that he did not welcome Dan's

appearance on the scene. For reasons she shied away from examining, she

didn't want to be able to read Stewart that well, and deliberately stood

where he would be out of her line of vision.

Jim was finishing up the introductions with a placid air. "And this is

Bobby Clark, Mr. Stewart. This is his house."

Bobby shot the trooper a malevolent look. Bobby was not a morning

person. Dinah stepped into the apprehensive silence that followed his

nongreeting with mugs of coffee all around. Mr. and Mrs. Baker accepted

theirs in a manner strongly reminiscent of the Chosen seeing their first

water after forty years of staggering around the desert. Mandy looked

less ticked off than at lights-out the night before, but not much. Chick

was still restraining a belly laugh.

Always at ease, Chopper Jim sat down across from Bobby and added milk

and sugar, surveying them all with a glint of amusement in the back of

his blue eyes, and something else Kate couldn't quite identify. "Thank

you," Stewart said, and smiled at Dinah. Dinah returned the smile with

equanimity, a certain curiosity and a purely female appreciation, which

changed as Kate watched to a surprised understanding. She turned her

head and looked at Kate. Kate nodded. Bobby sat up straight in his chair.

Dan O'Brian virtually snatched his mug from Dinah's outstretched hand

and stepped out of range of Mark Stewart's vision. In a series of facial

twitches, winks and head jerks reminiscent of an epileptic with

Tourette's syndrome he managed to convey that he wanted to speak to Kate

privately. Unless they went into the bathroom together, which might

occasion some comment, there was only the porch. Resigned, Kate followed

him outside, cradling the warmth of her coffee mug in her hands against

the chilly dawn. Breakup was not known for its subtropical range of

temperatures.

There were no clouds in the sky, revealing the sun as a dull gold disk

low on the eastern horizon, outlining the jagged peaks of the Quilaks in

the thin light of an Arctic spring morning. There was a

129 steady drip of melting ice from the eaves, and the sound of a

winter's worth of snow rushing between the narrow banks of the creek at

the edge of the front yard. A mile downstream, the creek would merge

with the silted gray expanse of the Kanuyaq, and from there the two

would travel together to Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska.

Before long, the first king salmon would be beating its way upriver.

Kate's mouth watered at the thought.

Dan was almost beside himself with impatience. "All right, all right,

what?" she said.

He looked over her shoulder at the closed door, decided it didn't

provide enough privacy and lowered his voice to a whisper that could

probably have been heard on the next homestead. Subtle was not exactly

Dan's middle name. "I called Anchorage last night and got a buddy to log

on to Motznik for me. You know, the data base that accesses all state

records?"

"Yes, Dan, I know what Motznik is."

"Okay, guess what?"

Kate took a deep breath and let it out. All she wanted to do at this

point was go home and start reassembling the pieces of her life. There

were supplies to be laid in, dip nets to be mended, caches to be

repaired, snow-machine tanks to be patched, washing machines to be fixed.

Taxes to be filed.

On the other hand, it wouldn't hurt to drink Dinah's excellent coffee,

enjoy the glorious dawn and listen to Dan carry on. He could be fun when

he took up a cause, and his current mood had all the signs. "I don't

know," she said. "What?"

"MarkStewart has had a license for hunting everything on four legs in

the state of Alaska for the last twenty years." He paused impressively.

Kate, in the act of swallowing coffee, did not choke in surprise.

That was all right, because Dan had more than enough enthusiasm for the

both of them. "He applies for the moose lottery every year, Kate. He's

got himself a tag six times and a moose five."

130 Since he so clearly expected a reaction, Kate said obediently, "So

you're saying he is an experienced hunter."

Dan, losing patience, thumped the railing. "That's where I've seen him

before, Kate! He was up last fall hunting sheep. He flew in with someone

else and they stopped up on the Step for maps. I talked mostly to the

pilot, guy name of, hell, what was it, Hooligan or something like that.

That's why I couldn't remember Stewart at first, I didn't talk to him."

There was a crunch of twig and Kate looked across Bobby's yard to see a

moose cow with a yearling calf browsing contentedly through a stand of

diamond willow.

Dan demanded, "Don't you see? When I said I'd seen him before, he said

he couldn't remember. He lied."

Kate sighed and turned to look at him. "Dan, it was five minutes six

months ago. Maybe he's one of those people who just doesn't remember a

face. And what does it matter anyway?"

"What does it matter!" At his shout the low murmur of voices from inside

the house stilled momentarily. Dan whispered furiously, "It matters

because that whole story about his wife and the bear attack is as phony

as a three-dollar bill, and you know it, and it's even phonier if he's

an experienced hunter, and you know that, too. Now, what are you going

to do about it?"

Her lips compressed. "Et to, Dan?"

Dan, bewildered, said, "What the hell does that mean?"

"It means you and every other mother's son in this friggin' Park thinks

I'm in charge. In the meantime, I've got half a 747 scattered across my

front forty, my cupboards are bare, my truck's been flattened and my dog

probably thinks I'm dead. I'm going home." And she still had yet to talk

to Harvey Meganack, a chore she was convinced was futile anyway,

whatever Auntie Vi thought. "The situation's a little odd, I grant you,

but-"

"A little!"

"Dan." She said his name with enough force to shut him up, at least for

the moment. "Okay, so Stewart ran off on his wife. He

131 panicked. It happens. So he outran a grizzly. Grizzlies aren't

stupid, she probably stayed behind to feed on the wife." Kate controlled

a shiver. "So Stewart doesn't look as frazzled as anyone else we've seen

who survived a bear attack. Shock takes people different ways. None of

it proves anything."

"He lied to me," Dan said stubbornly. "I don't like him."

"I don't, either," she surprised both of them by saying. "It still

doesn't prove anything." She drained her mug. "If you want action, talk

to the man. I've got my own problems."

The man chose that moment to open up the door and step outside.

"Somebody call my name?"

"Ranger O'Brian, aka Sherlock Holmes, will be happy to fill you in." She

waved a hand at Dan. "The game's afoot. Have at it."

Too excited to take offense, Ranger O'Brian did, promptly and

thoroughly. In a minute, Dan was going to find a way to work the

Trilateral Commission into the scenario. Kate turned to go inside.

Jim caught her elbow. "Kate."

"What?" Kate snapped, yanking free.

"Wondered if you'd do me a favor?"

"Ef to, Jim?" she snarled.

He blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

Kate took a deep breath and counted to ten. "What favor?"

"Come up to the mine with Stewart and me." He saw the answer in her face

and said quickly, "You were first on the scene, you've spent a lot of

time in the area and you know bears. I want you to listen to his story

and pick all the holes you can. Dan's right. It's phony as hell."

"I didn't find anything, Jim," Kate said, with an awful patience she

hoped neither he nor Dan would mistake. "And I told you, we saw the bear

right after the attack. She'd been feeding, all right." She remembered

the red-stained fur, the shreds of flesh between the claws, and again

suffered through a flashback of the moments by the creek. She never

wanted to look down the snout of a grizzly bear at that close a range

again. What must Carol Stewart have

132 felt her last few seconds, knowing there was no escape? Had she been

conscious enough to feel the rip of the claws, the bite of the teeth?

Had she- Kate yanked herself away from that thought and said briskly,

"Believe me, that grizzly had been feeding, and recently. And she did

come barreling down the hill from the direction of the mine."

Dan O'Brian couldn't resist. "And you took the All-White Enriched East

Coast Couple up there anyway?"

Kate's eyes narrowed. "It was in the opposite direction from the way the

bear was traveling at the time. It seemed like a good idea." Dan started

to speak and she held up both hands, palms out. "Look, guys. If Mark

Stewart wanted to kill his wife, it would have been a whole hell of a

lot easier and a lot less risk to himself just to shove her into the

Kanuyaq River and let the glacier calve on her."

"Unless she was already dead and he needed the bear to cover up how she

really got that way in case the body was recovered," Dan hissed.

"There's bear attacks and there's bear attacks, Shugak. That grizzly

should have either run when she heard more than one voice, or taken both

Stewarts out. At the very least, Stewart should have been wounded. And

if he was an experienced hunter, he should have had a rifle with him."

"Even experienced hunters get brain cramps."

The door behind them opened and Bobby rolled out. "What's going on?"

With some asperity Kate demanded, "Is there anybody left in the house?"

She was ignored. Ranger O'Brian was more than happy to fill Bobby in.

Bobby, who had taken an instant dislike to the tall dark stranger making

eyes over the coffee mugs at his soon-to-be wife, entered into the

discussion with enthusiasm, endorsing Dan's assessment of the situation

without hesitation and heaping scorn on Kate for her steadfast dissent.

The third time around, Dan O'Brian had Mark Stewart cutting up his wife

with a hunting knife and feeding her to Ursus arctos horribilis one

piece at a time.

133 Kate snorted and set her mug down on the railing with a thump.

"Yeah, right. The first thing that bear would have done is take

Stewart's knife away from him and jam it up his ass. Bobby, can I borrow

your truck? I've got to make a supply run into Ahtna."

"But, Kate-"

"Dammit!" Kate turned on Dan so ferociously that he actually backed up a

step. "Dan, there's the cop on this porch." She pointed at Chopper Jim,

who had perched on the railing and was listening with a faint smile

creasing his face. "You got a problem, take it up with him. Like I said,

I've got my own to deal with. Bobby?" She held out her hand.

Meekly for him, Bobby fished keys out of his pocket. Kate fairly

snatched them up and stamped down the stairs. Chopper Jim made no

attempt to stop her. The trio of men watched as she backed the pickup

around and thundered over the little bridge and down the road.

When the truck was safely out of earshot Chopper Jim remarked, "She's

awful goddam cranky today. What's her problem?"

"Jack's in Anchorage and she's here," Dan said, the wisdom of the ages

sitting on his leprechaun face.

Bobby, who knew her better than either of the other men, frowned and

said nothing at all.

The old railroad roadbed was, if anything, in worse shape than it had

been the day before. Driving Bobby's Chevy required relearning all the

hand controls he'd had installed. Kate had them more or less mastered by

the time she reached her own turnout, pausing just long enough to check

on the cabin and fetch Mutt. The jet engine was still in the yard,

unchaperoned; the go team was sleeping in this morning. This lack of

attention didn't augur well for a quick reimbursement of funds, and Kate

continued her journey in a gloomy frame of mind. Mutt, annoyed at having

been left to her own devices the night before, rode shotgun in

unforgiving silence. They were home by one o'clock in the afternoon with

a truck

134 full of groceries and a receipt bearing testimony to Kate's good

credit with the Alaska Commercial Company, only to find the NTSB once

more in possession of the clearing. Or so she assumed when she had to

park fifty feet up the road because her turnout was full of vehicles.

She recognized most of them, from which she deduced the population of

Niniltna was exercising their right to a free market by renting their

personal vehicles out to the go team at undoubtedly exorbitant hourly

rates. Auntie Vi's Toyota Land Cruiser was first in line, which only

confirmed her hypothesis.

Nor was the NTSB crew destined to be her last visitors of the day,

more's the pity. She was lifting the first box of groceries out of the

back of the pickup when the sound of an approaching engine filled her

with foreboding. She raised her head to see her worst fears fulfilled:

Mandy behind the wheel of her brand-new, newly battered Ford, its

cockeyed front bumper making it look slightly tipsy. Mr. and Mrs. Baker

were sitting next to her, erect and composed and looking as if they had

suffered no ill effects from the previous day's strenuous activities.

Mandy didn't look happy. Kate had to resist the temptation to cross

herself and she wasn't even Catholic. At least Chick wasn't along to

titter in the background.

Mandy got out. The driver's side. She must have fixed the door. From the

looks of it, probably with a crowbar. Whatever worked.

"Hi," Kate said warily, holding the box of groceries like a shield. It

covered most of her major organs.

"Kate," Mandy said, voice curt. Great, she'd probably heard about the

shoot-out at the Roadhouse.

"Ms. Shugak," Mr. Baker said, handing his wife out. "How nice to see you

again."

"Indeed," Mrs. Baker added, unusually warm for her.

"Kate-" Mandy said.

"Mandy," Kate said, beating her to it, "I'm sorry about your truck but

it wasn't my fault. That bear charged us, there wasn't a thing I could

do about it. George ground-looped 50 Papa practically right on top of

us, and there was no chance to get out of the

135 way. And as for the bullet holes-you know what Cindy Bingley's like

when she goes after Ben. There was nothing I could do, and nobody got

hurt, not even Ben. At least the last I saw he was okay. And as for the

Jeppsens and the Kreugers, hell, there's no way I could have-"

Without doing anything so vulgar as making a face, Mr. Baker wore an

expression that nevertheless conveyed a distinct message.

"-no way I could have foreseen that, uh, Cheryl and Kay were going to

have such a nasty argument," Kate finished weakly. So Mandy hadn't heard

about the shoot-out. Yet. Kate thrust away the thought of what she might

say when she did.

"Truck?" Mandy said, fastening on the one word in the flood that meant

something to her. "Oh. Kate, don't worry about the truck. Besides, I

told you. She's yours."

Kate blinked at her. "What?"

"You know." Mandy gave her head a tiny jerk in the direction of her

parents, and winked reassuringly. "For what you did."

"Mandy-"

"That's why I'm here, actually," Mandy said, holding out the keys. "I

already signed over the registration. It's in the glove compartment. And

Mother and Dad wanted to say thanks for the tour." A faint grin crossed

her face. "They enjoyed it, even if it did take them till this morning

to dry out. Internally as well as externally."

She stood there holding the keys out, and was evidently prepared to

stand there holding them out until Doomsday, so Kate awkwardly shifted

the box in her arms and took them. "Well," she said. "Thanks." The one

word didn't seem like enough somehow, and she added, "Come on down. I'll

make you some coffee. Now that I have some."

Mandy looked at the boxes stacked in the back of the truck.

"Grocery run to Ahtna," Kate said.

"And you had to borrow Bobby's truck?"

"Well." Kate tried not to squirm.

Mandy looked at her, one eyebrow ever so slightly raised, and

136 for just a moment the resemblance to her father was very pronounced.

"You didn't believe me about the truck, did you?"

"Well," Kate said again, shifting from foot to foot. "I guess I just

didn't know how right Fitzgerald was."

"How so?"

"The rich really are different."

Mandy's mouth turned up at the corners. "Yeah, and you know what

Hemingway said in reply?"

"What?"

" 'Yes, they have more money than you and me.' "

"Glad to hear it," Kate said, regaining some of her composure. "If

that's all the difference there is, you can help me hump these boxes

down to the cabin."

They loaded up, even Mrs. Baker, and Mutt led her train of native

bearers single file down the trail with her tail cocked at a lordly

angle. "What's with all the traffic?" Mandy said behind her.

"I just got here, I'm guessing the go team is back."

At that moment a Sikorsky helicopter with a sling attached have into

view over the trees. "Great," Kate said, hastening her pace. "Now maybe

they'll get that hunk of junk out of my front yard."

It was unfortunate that just before reaching the clearing Mandy tripped

over a tree root and into a clump of alders, dumping her box of canned

goods and making enough noise for three bears, two moose and a hoary

marmot. Her subsequent crash and burn was loud enough to be heard even

over the Sikorsky's engine, because it became immediately obvious that

the Park Uninvitational Four- Footed Grand Prix across the homestead the

previous morning had had a strong and lasting effect.

A shot rang out and a bullet thudded into a tree trunk a foot above

Kate's head.

Mutt let loose with a ferocious bark.

Kate yelled, "Stay!" In a move that seemed almost routine by now, she

dropped her groceries and dove for the ground, grabbing for Mr. and Mrs.

Baker's ankles along the way, and none too soon,

137 because in the next moment there was a Whoosh! and a cloud of spray

hit the bushes directly in front of them.

Kate's eyes began to water and she pulled the neck of her T-shirt up

over her face. Mutt whined and dropped flat, rubbing her face in her

paws. Mandy sneezed violently. The whites of her parents' eyes turned a

bright red and their noses began to run. Mrs. Baker began to cough.

Another bullet thunked into the tree trunk.

The pilot of the Sikorsky must have thought he was back in Da Nang and

raised ship high and fast.

138

The noise of the engine faded.

Kate pushed herself up to her knees and yelled, "Hey! Whoever's in the

clearing! Cease fire, dammit!" punctuating her appeal with a tremendous

sneeze.

"I hate breakup," Mandy said, choking and coughing.

"Amanda dear, don't you think we should-"

There was another shot and another spray and, incensed, Kate yelled

again, "Cut it out, you guys! It's Kate Shugak, and you sonsabitches had

better either shoot me on sight or have an awful goddam good excuse for

shooting and spraying at me before!"

The shots and spray ceased. "Kate?" A voice she recognized as John

Stewman's spoke hesitantly. "Kate, is that you?"

Kate's reply was almost muffled by another tremendous sneeze. "No,

asshole, it's the tooth fairy!"

139 She saw Mrs. Baker reach as if to rub her eyes and snatched at her

hand. "No, don't rub it, that'll only make it worse." She stood, wet and

muddy and furious. "Stewman, you disarm those people of yours or my dog

and I will disarm them for you! And we won't care how gentle we do it,

either!"

There was a brief pause, a rustle of movement. "All right, Kate. You can

come out now."

They staggered down the path into the clearing to come face to face with

Selina and Bickford, white-faced and trembling. Bickford was holding a

rifle. Selina had acquired a bright orange can of bear repellent, still

held at the ready. The rest of the team were clustered protectively

together behind them. Kate couldn't imagine why, if the idiots had

thought they were about to be charged by a bear, they hadn't at least

run for the cabin.

A stray wisp of the pepper spray caught at her throat. "Put that down,"

she said, coughing. Neither Bickford nor Selina moved. Kate stepped

forward and reached for the rifle. Bickford seemed disinclined to give

it to her.

Kate looked at him and said very carefully, "Give me that rifle before I

take it away from you and shoot you with it."

Bickford was not the stuff of which heroes were made. He surrendered.

She cleared the chamber and clicked on the safety. It was the .30-06

from the gun rack over her door. Now, that would have been downright

embarrassing, getting shot on her own doorstep with her own gun. Another

time Kate might have found the prospect mildly amusing, but considering

the accumulation of events during the past two days, too many of which

had offered bodily harm to her person, she was fresh out of a sense of

humor.

All Selina's attention was occupied in trying to clip the can of bear

repellent to her belt. Her hands were shaking so badly she wasn't having

much success, and irritated as always at a simple job poorly done, Kate

slung her rifle, snatched the can, yanked Selina's waistband away from

her waist until she could see all the way

140 down to her boots and jammed the clip over the belt. The elastic of

the waistband snapped back and the can smacked into her belly. The other

woman gave an inarticulate protest.

"Shut up," Kate said.

Selina shut up.

"The only reason you're still living," Kate told her, "is because you

didn't score any direct hits." It wasn't easy to glare with watery eyes,

but Kate managed it. "Now just what the hell is going on here?"

There was some shuffling of feet, a few inaudible mumbles and a great

deal of staring up at the sky or down at the ground or off into space.

After a moment John Stewman stepped manfully forward. "Well, Kate, some

of us got a little nervous after the bear incident yesterday. And then

we heard about what happened to that woman up to the mine-"

"That was thirty miles from here," Kate said. Nobody looked convinced.

She shook her head and swore tiredly. "I didn't used to feel this old,"

she said, mostly to herself. To Bickford she said pointedly, "I assume

that sky crane was to get that hunk of junk out of here once and for all?"

He nodded mutely.

"Good. Call it back. The sooner I see your backsides heading up that

trail, the safer I'm going to feel. Mutt!"

There was a rustle at the opposite end of the clearing, and Kate looked

around to find an extremely wary Mutt, yellow eyes turned an original

shade of magenta, standing at the edge of the clearing in what could

only be described as a tentative manner. Generally instinct and training

compelled her to protect, but after the last two days Kate didn't know

that she blamed Mutt if her first reflex was to run as far from the

homestead as she could get. "It's okay, girl, it's safe to come out now."

Mutt wasn't entirely convinced, but she did come out of the bushes.

Mandy, who had borne the brunt of the pepper spray, she gave a wide

berth. "Thanks a lot," Mandy told her, and gave a

141 convulsive sneeze, which was the signal for first her mother and

then her father to follow suit.

"Come on," Kate said, and led the way into the cabin, where she pumped

up a bucket of water into which Mandy immediately immersed her entire

head, and emerged snorting and trumpeting like an elephant down at the

local mud hole. Kate pumped up another bucket of water and Mandy's

parents made do with a more refined rinse. Kate simply stood at the

sink, head beneath the spout, and pumped. She wrung out her hair and

groped for a towel. Head wrapped in a turban, she blinked at the room.

Mandy had replaced the rifle in its rack over the door. The rest of the

cabin looked much as she had left it. Lucky for the NTSB.

Mr. Baker had dried off and gone back outside, and through the kitchen

window Kate could see him standing next to Kevin Bickford, who had his

Earlybird cap pulled low over eyes that were darting nervously back and

forth. The Sikorsky was back, and they were watching the sling being

maneuvered around the engine. Kate just hoped the corpse didn't

disintegrate when they tried to lift it into the air.

Mrs. Baker was standing next to the couch, staring down at the hole in

it. Evidently she'd missed it the previous morning. She looked up to see

Kate watching her, decided it would be a breach of good manners to ask

and moved to the other leg of the couch to sit down, a little heavily,

as if all this might have been just a little too much, finally.

"Goodness," she said at last. "Amanda dear, you never told us how

exciting life is in Alaska."

"It isn't always like this, Mother," Mandy said, but her voice was weak,

and Mrs. Baker looked about as convinced as Mutt had when Kate called

her into the clearing.

Mandy combed fingers through her damp hair. "We'd better get the rest of

those supplies down the trail before it gets dark."

It took the four of them three trips, by which time the jet engine was

gone. Stewman and the rest of the team remained behind for an hour or

so, locating, photographing, cataloging and bagging

142 any scrap of metal they had missed in the previous search that Kate

could not immediately identify or claim, all under Mutt's bleak and

intimidating eye. Kate gave her a piece of beef jerky in reward, and

something about the sight of those large, sharp teeth ripping into the

strip of meat made the investigators work faster.

The pickup looked even more flattened without the engine than it had

with it. Kate resolutely turned her back on the mortal remains. Mr.

Baker, chatting again with Bickford, beckoned her over. "Well, Ms.

Shugak," he said in his best lord-of-the-manor air, "I believe you know

Mr. Bickford of Earlybird Air Freight."

"We've met," Kate said, without enthusiasm.

"Splendid," Mr. Baker said jovially. "We've just been discussing your

little, her, dilemma, in regard to compensation for this, her,

unfortunate accident."

Kate opened her mouth to inform both of them that she didn't regard the

situation as a "little, her, dilemma," but something in Mr. Baker's gaze

stopped her. "Have you?" she said slowly.

Mr. Baker, hands in his pockets, rocked back on his heels and smiled at

Bickford, who smiled back, a little sickly, Kate thought.

"Mr. Bickford and I have found much to discuss," Mr. Baker said, even

more jovially. "It seems I am acquainted with his employer." He beamed

at the two of them.

"His employer?" Kate said, drawing a blank.

"Yes indeed. Patrick O'Donnell and I are old friends. We manage to get

in a game of squash whenever he's in town, and he's been out to the

house for dinner quite often. A charming man."

"Who is that, dear?" Mrs. Baker came out of the cabin dusting

fastidiously at her hands.

"Patrick O'Donnell, Margery," her husband replied. "You remember. The

chief executive officer of Earlybird Air Freight."

"Why, of course," she said. She slid an arm through her husband's and

bestowed a smile on the Earlybird man that was cordial without in any

way encouraging overfamiliarity. "And how is dear Patrick?"

Bickford's expression indicated that he had about as much to

143 do with dear Patrick as the parish priest did with the pope, but he

struggled gamely to keep up. "The last I heard, he was fine, ma'am. He

spends most of his time at corporate headquarters in New York, of course."

"Of course," Mrs. Baker agreed. "Will he be coming up to oversee this

fuss, do you think?"

Bickford tried not to look appalled at the thought. "I don't think so,

ma'am." He hastened to add, "I'm sure that he is in constant

communication with the Anchorage office, however."

"A pity," she said. "It would be so nice to see dear Patrick again."

Mr. Baker patted her hand consolingly. The hand was adorned with a

diamond solitaire the size of Plymouth Rock. Bickford noticed, and tried

not to goggle. "I was just telling Mr. Bickford, dear, that I know

Patrick would wish that every effort be made to redress this dreadful

situation. No one hates litigation more than he does, and I'm sure Ms.

Shugak would agree that there is nothing to be gained by action that

would be most distressing for all concerned." He raised an expectant

eyebrow in Kate's direction.

"Oh, of course," Kate said in a faint voice, mostly because it seemed to

be required of her. Litigation? Like with lawyers? Lawyers cost money,

and at this moment the one-pound Darigold butter can on the table in the

cabin held less than two hundred bucks, and that much only until she

filed her taxes. Mandy was watching from the doorstep of the cabin, a

slight smile that was hard to read on her face.

"So I feel that, really, for the best interests of all concerned, a

prompt, just settlement would be most beneficial. I'm sure Patrick would

agree, aren't you, dear?"

"Certainly," said Mrs. Baker. "He would be most upset at anything less."

"Where do you bank, Ms. Shugak?" Mr. Baker said.

Kate stared at him with the fascination usually exhibited by a deer

frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car. "Ah-"

"Yes?" Mr. Baker prompted.

144 "I really would prefer cash," she said, trying like hell not to

sound apologetic and failing miserably.

"Cash?" Both of Mr. Baker's eyebrows went up. "Are you accustomed to

keeping that amount of currency on hand?"

After a beat, Kate said, "How much-currency-are we talking about?"

"We were discussing an amount in the area of fifty thousand."

"Fifty thousand?" Kate's voice went up into a squeak, which what with

scar tissue and a naturally low register was quite a feat. Mandy hid a

grin. Kate cleared her throat and tried again. "Fifty thousand? Dollars?"

The eyebrows were still up, and Mr. Baker said blandly, "I believe so."

He glanced at the Earlybird man for confirmation. Bickford gave a glum

nod. "Of course, if there was some question-"

"No," Kate said, getting her voice back under control. "No indeed." She

acquired a little blandness herself and sent some of it Bickford's way

in a wide, bright smile. He looked even more glum. "I might be able to

stretch fifty thousand to cover the damages."

Bickford cast a disparaging eye around the sixty-year-old homestead,

including outhouse with ventilated door, cabin with patched roof,

trashed garage, smashed cache, speared snow machine and squashed but

obviously aged truck, and visibly restrained a disbelieving snort.

"Excellent," Mr. Baker said, and gave Bickford a warm, approving smile,

beneath which Kate, now that she was looking for it, could clearly

discern the feral grin. "There's no hurry, of course. Ms. Shugak will be

happy to take delivery of her settlement- tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow would be fine," Kate said happily.

Mr. Baker extended a regal hand. "I'll be speaking to Patrick soon, Mr.

Bickford, and I won't forget to mention how very helpful you have been."

"Thanks," Bickford muttered, and slunk off in the wake of the departing

NTSB crew. Stewman came over to say goodbye, but Mutt, who had yet to

forgive any of them for the bear repellent,

145 wouldn't let him get within speaking distance of Kate, and he was

reduced to waving a dismal goodbye. The Tom Sawyer grin was in abeyance.

Kate, dollar signs dancing in front of her eyes, wouldn't have seen it

anyway.

When the last of them had vanished up the trail, Kate regained enough

sangfroid to look Mr. and Mrs. Baker over with a speculative eye. "Just

how well do you know dear Patrick?"

Mr. Baker affected an elegant shudder. "Only too well. He sits on the

board of my bank. A corporate genius, but-"

"He's a ruffian," Mrs. Baker said, with a slight but nevertheless

distinctly disdainful lift of her upper lip. "He actually drinks his

soup from the bowl at table."

So do I, Kate thought, but decided it politic not to say so. Instead,

she said, "I think it's time you called me Kate."

"Why, thank you, Kate," Mr. Baker said, with a warm smile from which all

presence of jungle had been banished. For the moment. "My name is Richard."

"And I am Margery," his wife said, and in her smile this time there was

no repeat of the peer-to-peasant demeanor that had withered the speech

on Bickford's tongue.

"Richard, Margery, would you and your daughter care to join me for a

late lunch?"

"That sounds lovely, Kate. Thank you."

Kate stood to one side and let them precede her. "I should have known,"

she told Mandy once the couple was inside.

"Known what?"

"That your parents would be all right."

Mandy Hushed a painful red right up to the roots of her hair. "Up yours."

"Bite me," Kate replied amiably, turning.

Mandy put a hand on her arm. "Listen, Kate? Thanks. Thanks a lot."

"For what?"

"I'm not sure. All I know is, Mother and Dad have really relaxed. This

morning they were talking to Chick like he's a human

146 being instead of something out of an old Western movie." She paused,

and added, unable to conceal her surprise, "They've even been talking to

me like I'm a grown-up instead of a ten-year-old. I don't know what you

did-"

"I didn't do anything," Kate said honestly. "I didn't, Mandy." She

added, "Unless you count nearly getting them eaten by a bear, almost

getting them in a plane wreck and-" Almost too late she remembered Mandy

didn't know about the firefight and swallowed the rest of her sentence.

"Well. They won't go home complaining of an uneventful visit."

Mandy grinned. "Maybe that's what did it."

"Whatever. Anyway, if I helped, I'm glad. They're good people."

Mandy smiled, the slight smile she'd had as she watched her father go to

work on Kevin Bickford. "He's something, my old man."

"Your old lady's not half bad herself."

"No," Mandy admitted. "She's not."

"And together they make one hell of a team."

"Yes," Mandy said slowly, and smiled. "They do."

The lines of Mandy's face had relaxed, and the anxious look in her eyes

was gone. She looked ten years younger. Kate said, "Mandy, were you

afraid they'd talk you into going home with them?"

The other woman, hands in her pockets, studied the ground and thought

about it for a moment. "I guess I was," she said slowly. "I guess I

actually was." She looked up at Kate and laughed. "What an idiot.

Thanks, Kate."

"We do family therapy." Kate had held out her hand, palm up. "That'll be

five cents."

Mandy made a production of digging a nickel out of her pocket, and then

demanded a receipt for tax purposes.

Balance restored, they went inside, and were just sitting down to tuna

fish sandwiches (with mayonnaise, diced white onions and

147 sweet pickles on white bread, Kate's specialty) when from the

clearing Mutt gave a sharp, warning bark.

Kate's newfound sense of harmony with the universe shattered. "Oh

Christ, and what fresh hell is this?"

"And she reads Dorothy Parker," Mandy told her parents smugly.

Margery sniffed. "A vulgar woman."

Richard grinned. "You only say that because she insulted you at tea that

day in New York."

"She insulted everyone, from what I hear," Mandy said, biting into her

sandwich.

"You knew her?" Kate said, gaping. "You knew Dorothy Parker?" Mutt

barked again. "Dammit," she said impatiently and crossed the room to

wrench open the door. "Oh shit."

It was Billy Mike, coming down the trail as if the hounds of hell were

at his heels, his round face flushed, his barrel-shaped chest heaving,

his usually neatly combed hair standing up in tufts all over his head.

In a low voice Kate said a very bad word.

Her tribal chairman slid to a halt in front of her door. "What?" she

snapped. Her tone of voice was inappropriate for speaking to an elder.

She knew it and didn't care.

He knew it and took no notice. "It's Cindy and Ben Bingley."

Kate stiffened. "What about them?"

He gulped for air. "She's got him held hostage at their house."

"Their house? Their house in Niniltna?"

He nodded, panting.

Kate stared at him. "You drove twenty-five miles during breakup to tell

me that? What the hell am I supposed to do about it? Chopper Jim's up to

the mine, checking out that bear attack. Call him in."

He shook his head violently. "She says she'll only talk to you. She's

got a rifle, Kate. Billy's hunting rifle."

Kate thought of the scene at the airstrip the previous afternoon. "So

what's the big deal? Maybe she'll shoot him, maybe she

148 won't. And if she does shoot him, maybe she'll miss. She did

yesterday. Either way, it's no big loss." She turned to go back inside.

"You want some coffee and sandwiches?"

Billy's voice was panicked. "Kate! She said she wanted to talk to you!

Nobody else, only you! You've got to do something, you have to!"

Kate's outward indifference fooled no one, least of all herself. Her

eyes closed and for a moment, for just one precious moment, she

pretended she wasn't Ekaterina Moonin Shugak's granddaughter and

anointed heir. The same vacuum that had yawned at her feet at the

previous year's Alaska Federation of Natives convention yawned again, an

ever-deepening chasm of obligation and responsibility that threatened to

suck her in and rob her of her autonomy, her privacy, her solitude, her

independence, everything that was important to her.

More important than family? Emaa's voice said in her head. More

important than your tribe? For shame, Katya. For shame.

Damn you, old woman, she thought furiously, stay out of my head.

She opened her eyes and found the elder Bakers regarding her with

curiosity, and Mandy with more than a little sympathy. Kate was going

into town, and they both knew it.

She swore once beneath her breath. "All right, Billy," she said shortly.

"I'll follow you in."

"Good," Billy said, although he didn't look convinced. He pointed over

his shoulder in the vague direction of the road. "I'll just- I'll get my

car."

"Fine."

Mandy smothered a smile.

"Right," Billy said. He backed up a few steps. Kate did not follow him.

He paused to point over his other shoulder. "My car. I'll wait for you.

I'll just- I'll follow you in."

"You do that," Kate said evenly.

149

The Bingleys lived five miles outside Niniltna, in a subdivision of a

dozen houses whose construction had been subsidized by a low- interest

loan program offered by the Niniltna Native Association in conjunction

with the FHA. It was a pity the loan didn't extend to road maintenance,

because there was a pothole the size of a lunar crater at the turnoff.

There was no going around it, and Kate, calling curses down on Billy

Mike's head, set her teeth and geared down. Mutt braced her front paws

on the dash and dug in her claws. They climbed the opposite side of the

pothole to emerge bumper to bumper with Billy's Honda Civic Wagovan.

Billy's wasn't the only vehicle present, and all of the front-row seats

had long since been filled. Dandy Mike was there with Karen Kompkoff,

his GMC long-bed Turbo Diesel V8 backed around so they could snuggle

together in a sleeping bag in the bed and not

150 miss any of the show. Auntie Vi, never one to miss an opportunity to

make a buck, was selling Velveeta-topped pizza for a dollar a slice out

of her second car, a brand-new Ford Aerostar, evidently too new to rent

out to the NTSB. Old Sam Dementieff had Cab Calloway turned up to 9 on

his tape player and both windows on his Dodge pickup wide open so no one

would miss the beneficial effects of "Minnie the Moocher." Sergei Moonin

moved from group to group, freely taking bets on whether Ben Bingley

would survive the day.

Kate expected to see the Pace Arrow from Pennsylvania roll up at any

moment. Too bad Mandy had talked her parents into spending what was left

of the day at the lodge.

The sun, low in the southwest, cast a benevolent glow over the scene,

which lacked only steel drums for a calypso carnival. Jimmy Buffett

would have felt right at home. "I hate breakup," Kate muttered, but by

then she had said it so many times it sounded too cliched to be true.

Billy Mike came puffing up and yanked open Kate's door. Since she'd been

in the process of opening it herself, he yanked her halfway out of the

truck and she barely managed to catch herself before sprawling face

forward into the mud. As it was, she went to her hands and knees with a

solid splat.

Mutt peered at her over the side of the seat.

"Jesus, Kate," Billy said, staring down at her with a horrified

expression. "I'm sorry. Let me help you up."

"No." Kate held up one filthy hand to ward him off. She sounded

amazingly calm. "Mandy usually keeps a roll of paper towels behind the

driver's seat. Will you check for me?"

Billy, terrified by her apparent tranquillity, scrambled around and

found the towels and a plastic container of Wet Ones. Kate cleaned

herself off, with Billy bleating distressed little apologies every few

seconds.

"Billy."

"Yes, Kate."

151 "Enough." She looked at him; she even smiled. There was absolutely

nothing in her expression to make him take a step back, yet take a step

back he did. She stuffed the dirty towels into the plastic sack hanging

from the ashtray knob and shut the door of the truck. "All right. Tell

me what you know."

"Deidre-their oldest-came running over to my house with the other two

kids in tow," Billy said rapidly. "They told my wife that Cindy had Ben

at gunpoint and was threatening to shoot him if he didn't fork over the

rest of the dividend money."

"I thought he blew it all in Ahtna."

"I think he did, and I think Cindy knows he did, but you know, Kate, I

don't think Cindy cares." Billy's face worked. "The wife called me up to

the office, so I came down here and tried to talk to Cindy. She ran me

off with that .30-30 of his."

"Is it loaded?"

"I didn't ask her," Billy said indignantly, "and I sure as hell didn't

wait around long enough for her to show me!"

"When'd she ask for me?"

Billy's eyes slid to one side.

Kate sighed. "You are a scum-sucking, brown-nosing, bottom- feeding,

lily-livered son of a bitch," she observed, without heat. Even less of a

tone to take when speaking to a tribal elder, but nobody heard except

Billy, and he wasn't taking offense. She was pretty sure he wasn't even

listening.

"Whatever," he said, patting the air. "You're the closest thing we've

got to a cop, Kate. You used to be one, for crissake. Just see if you

can talk her out."

"Whar part of the house are they in?"

"They were in the living room when I saw them," Billy said. "You

familiar with the house?" Kate shook her head. "It's one of the prefabs

the Association underwrote, so it's just like mine, living room and

kitchen in front, bedrooms in back."

"Living room on the left or on the right?"

"Left."

152 "Can you see the front door from the living room?"

"Yes."

Kate sighed again. "Okay."

She closed her eyes for a moment and seemed to retreat inside herself.

Billy watched, half apprehensive, half curious. When her eyes opened

again, her chin came down so that she looked out from beneath suddenly

heavier straight black brows, her shoulders squared, her hands flexed.

Everything about her radiated the message, Mess with me, motherfucker,

and I will rip you three new bodily orifices before breakfast. She was

five feet tall and weighed 120 pounds, but the accumulation of power was

obvious and intimidating, and ignored only at peril of, at best, one's

dignity, and at worst, one's life.

Billy took another involuntary step backward.

"Keep everyone else out of the house," Kate said.

Unoffended, Billy nodded. What made him such a good tribal leader was

his ability to pick the right person for the right job, and the

self-control to stand back out of the way and let them do it. Besides,

he'd already looked down the muzzle of Cindy's .30-30 once that day, and

he wasn't eager to repeat the experience.

Kate walked through the crowd to the house, a buzz of speculation rising

behind her. Sergei's odds shortened. Her muddy jeans clung clammily to

her legs, an untimely reminder of the broken washing machine in her

garage. And Cindy thought she had things bad. By the time Kate got to

the front door she was mad all over again, and she thumped on it with a

vicious fist. "Cindy? It's Kate Shugak. I'm coming in."

There was a pause, and then the sound of a distant voice. Kate couldn't

make out the words. "Cindy," she said, raising her voice, "I can't hear

you, I'm going to open the front door."

She opened the door and stuck her head in. "My head's in the door,

Cindy. It's Kate Shugak. I'm alone, and I don't have a gun. I want to

talk, so don't shoot, okay?"

Nobody did, so she chanced sticking a foot inside, followed by the rest

of her body when no shots went off.

153 The hallway consisted of an anteroom between front door, kitchen and

living room. All three were empty. Kate listened and heard nothing.

"Cindy?" She took a step forward. "Cindy, where are you?"

Cindy wasn't in either of the bedrooms in back of the kitchen, she

wasn't in the bathroom at the end of the hall. The door to the bedroom

on the left was almost shut. Kate put her hand on it and pushed slowly.

"Cindy?"

The light was dim through half-closed drapes. When her eyes adjusted,

the first thing she saw was Cindy, squatting in a corner, hands

clutching a rifle, cheek leaning against the barrel. She didn't look up

when the door opened.

Ben was there, too, naked and spreadeagled across the queen- size bed,

tied to the frame at wrists and ankles with what looked like black wire.

He was also gagged, which Kate decided improved the odds of his

surviving the day tenfold. She knew a moment's regret that there was no

way to place a bet with Sergei before the booth closed.

Ben's eyes bulged at the sight of her, and he all but twisted himself

into a pretzel to preserve his modesty. She allowed herself a long, cool

look and a brief, pitying smile. He flushed. All over. Interesting.

She slipped into the room, Cindy on her right and Ben in front of her.

Leaning against the wall, she let herself slide down until she, too, was

squatting on her haunches, elbows resting on her knees, 'empty hands

hanging loosely, unthreateningly, between them.

Minutes passed. She let herself become a part of the interior landscape,

allowing her presence to seep into Cindy's consciousness. This landscape

included the bed, a straight-backed chair and a closet with folding

doors standing open to display Blazo boxes stacked side on side, shoes

on the bottom shelf, socks, T-shirts, bras and underwear on the middle

shelf, belts, hats, mufflers and boxes of cartridges and shotgun shells

on the top. There was a nightstand on either side of the bed, each with

a lamp. One was

154 piled high with Alaska Fisherman magazines, the other supported a

stack of romance novels, the top one featuring a cover with a

spectacularly endowed young woman with enormous quantities of golden

hair almost wearing a lavender gown. She was bent backwards over the arm

of a bronzed young giant almost wearing buckskin pants. He, too, had

enormous quantities of hair, only his was black.

Everything looked recently organized and folded and dusted. The hangers

were lined up like soldiers in the closet, the books and magazines were

in neat piles, the earrings on the dresser hung in neatly spaced pairs.

A hardcore neatnik herself, Kate would have approved if she hadn't been

so acutely aware that excessive outer neatness often indicated severe

inner turmoil.

She glanced across at Cindy. Cindy's cheek was still pressed against the

barrel of the rifle, vacant eyes fixed on nothing. Kate leaned her head

back into the corner and gazed at the ceiling, letting her mind drift.

It had been an eventful thirty-six hours, to say the least. Airplane

engines falling from the sky, bears on the attack, plane wrecks,

shootouts, bodies lying around indiscriminately. Not to mention the

Park's own generation gap in the form of Baker pere, mere et fille. Park

springs were always a little wacky but this one was pushing it- She

wondered if Jim Chopin was still in the Park, if Mark Stewart was still

with him. She wondered why Jim had brought him. She wondered why Jim had

come himself. He'd never been one to chase his tail. As the old saying

went, and yesterday with more emphasis than usual, some days you get the

bear, some days the bear gets you. The whole incident was cut and dried,

there wasn't going to be any way to prove otherwise. A grizzly bear was

one of your more efficient eradicators of evidence. There would be no

way to tell if the victim had been dead before or after the bear attack.

She forced herself to examine her memory of Carol Stewart sprawled in

awkward death. The torn face and throat, ripped belly, shredded thighs.

No. No way at all.

155

She swallowed hard, and as a kind of mental exercise retraced her route

through the abandoned mining community the previous afternoon. Sunshine,

brisk breeze, fluffy cumulus clouds. Roads muddy slush during the day,

frozen over at night. Houses peeling paint. Windows broken, doors ajar,

interiors stripped of anything useful long ago. Great view. Warm day.

And no claw marks. She had not seen any claw marks on any of the houses

she passed, and she had walked down to the last one in the row before

she found Carol Stewart's body. She had walked that far because Mark

Stewart said-what did he say? His wife was on the roof of a cabin. But

if he left her on the roof, and Kate found her in the middle of the

road, the bear would have had to get her down, and the bear would not

have been able to do that without leaving evidence of it behind. Kate

remembered the matching sets of five-inch claws on the upraised,

bloodstained paws, and thought, Deep scratch marks.

Come to think of it, there hadn't been any scuff marks on the peeling

walls, either, such as might be left by the toe of a frantically

scrabbling shoe. She tried to remember the kind of shoes Carol Stewart

had been wearing. Wafflestompers, weren't they? Leather and Gore-tex

uppers, Vasques, that was the label on the tongue. Decent brand, readily

available at REI, characteristic choice of the urban hiker. Herself, she

stuck to Sorels. Except in the winter, when she got out the bunny boots.

She looked at Cindy. Cindy hadn't moved.

Of course Carol Stewart, instead of climbing out of reach, could have

tried to run for it. People are dumb, and Kate had noticed that the

degree of dumbness increased in direct proportion to proximity to the

Bush. After all, the victim hadn't had any kind of a weapon with her,

either.

Kate would much prefer the bear attack that resulted in Carol Stewart's

death to be one of those random occurrences that wake up everyone to the

fact that they aren't in Kansas anymore, because the alternative was a

hell of a thing to contemplate. What was the line from the old song? You

always hurt the one you love,

156 or something like that. Kate wondered if that included feeding the

one you love to a bear. Could anyone deliberately inflict that kind of

damage, that kind of pain on someone they once loved enough to marry?

She thought of the five years she had spent in Anchorage investigating

cases of abuse inflicted by parents upon their own children. Yes, she

thought. Only too many could do exactly that.

At that point she realized with no little annoyance that she was

beginning to think there might be something to Dan and Jim's suspicions,

and was glad when Cindy stirred.

The other woman gazed around the room with a dazed look on her face.

"Kate," she said, on a note of discovery, as if she had only just

realized Kate was in the room, which in fact she probably had.

Kate kept her reply low and calm. "Hello, Cindy."

Cindy became aware of the rifle. "Oh." She leaned it against the wall.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to wave this thing at you."

Kate smiled without moving. The rifle was still within quick reach. "I

didn't think you did."

Cindy sighed and shoved a hand through her hair. "I've really fucked it

up this time, haven't I?"

"Not necessarily, Cindy."

As if she hadn't heard, Cindy looked at Ben and said, "I've just had

enough, you know? Enough. Enough of you drinking up every dime that

comes into this house, so that we don't have enough money to buy food

for our children."

Her voice was rising, and Kate said soothingly, "It's okay, Cindy."

Cindy's head snapped around. "It's not okay!" Her face contorted. "It's

not okay, Kate. It used to be, but it's not now, and it's never going to

be okay again. It was bad enough before, but since Becky-" Tears filled

her eyes and overflowed onto her cheeks. She snuffled and rubbed a

sleeve across her face. "I love my kids!"

"I know you do."

"I never pretended to be any kind of a saint, but there has always been

food on the table in this house!"

157 "I know there has."

"Now there isn't even that much!" Her head snapped around and she stared

at Ben, her face twisted. "Maybe if I keep you tied to that bed, you

asshole, maybe then I'll get to the mail before you do and to the checks

before you do and keep some of the money you've been blowing on beer and

whores!"

Cindy stood with an abrupt movement. Startled, Kate followed her, and

the blood rushed to her head. It took a dizzy moment to reacclimate, and

when she did Cindy had the rifle clenched in her hands again, lips drawn

back from her teeth. "You can't treat us like this, Ben! Your sister

might be dead but that's no excuse to pretend we are, too!"

Becky Jorgensen, nee Bingley, had been Ben's sister, Kate remembered

now. Ben and Becky had always been very close, and Becky had welcomed

Cindy with open arms. All of Cindy's three children had adored her, too.

Becky, one of Roger McAniff's victims two years before. Becky, she

remembered now from the conversation at Bobby and Dinah's, who had died

last August following two years spent at API trying to regain her sanity

after the massacre. Thinking it over, Kate realized that Ben's present

toot dated from the end of last year's fishing season, increasing in

idiocy through the fall and reaching its nadir on New Year's Eve, so the

story went, on which memorable night he'd been discovered in

flagrante'delicto with Nadia Kvasnikoff on the sink in the men's room of

Bemie's Roadhouse. Kate, conducting a New Year's Eve celebration of her

own on the homestead, had not been present for the denouement, but had

it on good authority that Bernie had chased the both of them out into

the frozen Arctic night with the baseball bat from behind the bar, and

had only tossed their pants and boots out as an afterthought.

Ben had never been what anyone would call a model husband or father, but

at Becky's death, something had gotten off the chain.

She looked at him. He had his eyes shut tightly; even so, tears seeped

from beneath his lashes.

158 "Cindy," she said, "give me the rifle." She stretched out a hand.

Cindy didn't move, and Kate remembered years before when Ben, fresh out

of the Navy, had brought his new bride home to the Park. Cindy had been

a lovely, slender, fair-haired, young woman, with melting brown eyes and

an open, friendly smile, excited at moving to Alaska, eager to learn

everything she could about Bush life. She was ten years older than Kate.

This afternoon she looked twice that, the light filtering in through the

drapes to darken the pouches beneath her eyes and deepen the lines at

the corners of her mouth. She looked old, and tired, her eyes dulled,

her prettiness faded, her youth gone.

There was no hope left in her, Kate thought, and something twisted in

her gut. "Give me the rifle, Cindy."

Without looking at Kate, Cindy handed over the rifle.

Kate emptied out the magazine and worked the action until the chamber

was empty before standing the gun in a corner. She pocketed the rounds

and said, "Let's turn Ben loose." Her hands went to the wire securing

his left ankle. From the corner of her eye she saw Cindy move as if in

protest. Her hands went on steadily unknotting wire, while she wondered

where the 9mm automatic was. After a moment Cindy began untying Ben's

left wrist.

When he was free Ben ripped the bandanna from his mouth and said in a

husky voice, "Give me my pants." He sounded sober and shaken.

Without a word, Cindy went to the closet and pulled down a pair of

Levi's. He grabbed them without thanks and stepped into them, a stocky

man with a middle-age spread threatening his waistband, dark, straight

hair thinning on top, eyes bloodshot, chin unshaven. Ben was Kate's

second or third cousin, she couldn't remember which, but she remembered

a visit to her grandmother's house as a child, when Ben, home on leave,

had made her an admiral's hat out of newspaper, complete with cockade,

and taught her six-year-old self her first sea chantey, "Rolling Down to

Old Maui." He'd had a fine, deep baritone that rattled

159 the rafters. Back then, there was always singing when Ben was around.

They weren't bad people, either of them, but they were going to wind up

in jail and their kids split between foster homes if something wasn't

done, and done soon. Kate waited until Ben got his zipper up before she

said, "Guys, this can't go on."

They looked at her, faces numb to the point of exhaustion. She spoke

slowly and deliberately, determined to get through to them. "You can do

whatever you want to to each other, but you can't keep doing this to

your kids. You know where they are right now? Annie Mike's. They ran

there when you corralled Ben at gunpoint, Cindy."

Cindy stared at her.

"It's not the first time, either. Pretty soon they're going to decide

they'd rather stay at Annie and Billy's than come home. And Annie and

Billy have plumb run out of kids of their own to fuss over, so their

house is probably feeling a little empty. Deidre's fourteen, Randy's

twelve, what's Tom? Nine? Ten? Three kids, three kids just like yours,

would just about fill up the cracks at the Mikes' house."

"They couldn't do that," Cindy said, her voice raw.

"Cindy," Kate said with as much force as she could muster, "how much

more do you think it'll take to have the state declare you both unfit

parents?"

Ben blinked at her. Cindy paled.

"How much Cindy?" Kate repeated. "One more time getting caught out on a

sandbar in the middle of the river with your jeans down around your

ankles in the company of a man not your husband? Ben? How much more?

Another score in the Roadhouse John? Another Association dividend spent

on booze instead of food or clothes?"

Ben flushed. Cindy said, weakly, "The state couldn't do that. These are

tribal lands."

"We don't have sovereignty yet," Kate said, "and DFYS doesn't take

kindly to neglect. You patch things up between the

160 two of you. I don't care how you do it, I don't care if you stay

together or you split up, but you patch things up enough to provide some

kind of stable home life for those kids, or, I guarantee you, they will

find one for themselves."

She reached for the rifle. At the door, she turned to deliver a parting

shot. "And I will help them."

She was almost to the front door when Cindy's voice stopped her. Kate

turned to see her coming down the hall cradling a sliming knife, a

filleting knife, a skinning knife and a well-worn Buck pocketknife.

"Here," she said, thrusting them at Kate. "If you're taking the rifle,

you might as well take these, too." She went into the kitchen and came

out with a butcher knife and three mismatched steak knives. "These, too.

Oh, and there's this."

She went to the coat hanger and fished around in the pockets of the worn

pink plush jacket Kate had seen her in the day before, producing a Swiss

Army Explorer knife flaking dried mud, complete with flat head and

Phillips screwdrivers, saw, magnifying glass, scissors and, if they were

lucky, maybe even a functional blade. "I tripped over this at the mine

yesterday."

Kate accepted the hardware. "You chased Ben all the way up to the mine?"

Cindy nodded.

"I would like to have seen that," Kate admitted. "Where is it?"

"Where is what?"

"The nine-millimeter. The pistol you had yesterday."

"Oh," Cindy said. "Right. I forgot."

Kate saw the blank expression on her face and believed her. "Where is

it?" she said, more gently this time.

"I tossed it."

Kate looked at her.

A bleak smile reached Cindy's eyes. "Really. I threw it in the Kanuyaq

on the way back down from the mine. What do we need a nine-millimeter

for? You can't bring down a moose with one unless he lets you walk right

up to him and stick it up his left nostril." The smile faded. "It was

just another one of Billy's toys."

161 The exhausted defeat in her voice pierced Kate to the heart.

Juggling rifle and knives, she struggled to open the door and get out of

that place of hopelessness and despair.

"Oh, here, let me," Cindy said, ever the polite hostess, and reached

around Kate.

Kate paused on the doorstep. "Cindy-"

The bleak smile came back. "Don't worry, Kate. I'm all over my mad."

"Yeah." Kate wasn't convinced. "Next time, throw him out before you get

mad enough to go for a weapon."

Cindy gestured. "Have to now. You've got them all."

162

The crowd parted before her like the Red Sea.

"What happened?"

"Yeah, Kate, what happened?"

"Did she shoot him?"

"Is he dead?"

"Of course he's not dead, you idiot, we didn't hear a shot."

"Maybe she knifed him."

"Kate, come on, talk to us!"

"Oh the hell with it, it's almost time for Alaska Weather on the TV.

Let's go home."

"I hear it's blowing up a storm in the Gulf."

"No lie? Might mean some decent beachcombing for a change."

163 "Yeah, remember last breakup? Wish we could expect a Sea- land

freighter to run aground every year. That was the best canned ham I've

ever had."

The crowd had thinned, probably soon after Kate's arrival, since it

signaled an end to the fun. Auntie Vi was among the missing, as were

Dandy Mike and Karen Kompkoff and Old Sam. Billy Mike was still there, a

very exasperated Mutt standing next to him. "Okay," Kate told her, and

Mutt sprang forward as if shot from a bow, almost knocking her over.

"Okay, Mutt," Kate said, juggling hardware, "I'm all right. I said

okay!" Mutt retired with a wounded look, and Kate dumped rifle and

knives into Billy's hands.

"What the hell-"

"Cindy thinks it's best she not have anything in the house with

targeting capabilities or sharp edges. I agree."

Billy accepted knives and rifle awkwardly.

She had her hand on the door of the truck when the second voice said,

"Kate."

She swore to herself, counted to ten and turned. "Jim."

The trooper was standing in front of the postmaster's truck. He must

have landed the helicopter at the village strip and borrowed the truck

from Bonnie Jeppsen to make the trip up to the mine. The mine was so

overgrown there weren't a lot of landing sites for a chopper, even for a

pilot with Jim's skill.

Mark Stewart was sitting in the truck's passenger seat. The windshield

was too dirty to see his expression.

Mutt, who all too often demonstrated no sense in men, gave a welcoming

yip and swarmed all over the trooper. "Hey, girl," he said, white teeth

flashing, long fingers finding exactly the right spot between her ears

and scratching hard. Mutt's legs nearly gave out under the ecstasy. Over

her head Jim said, "Got a call there was a problem at the Bingleys.

Thought I'd better check it out, since I was in the neighborhood. Want

to fill me in?"

Billy Mike shifted his portable armory and cleared his throat.

164 The Swiss Army knife slipped from his grasp and fell with a splat

into a puddle of melting snow.

Kate stooped to pick it up. "Ben's been on what amounts to a seven-month

drunk. Cindy took exception."

"What with?"

"Yesterday it was a nine-millimeter automatic. Today it was a

thirty-thirty." She jerked her chin at the rifle slipping from Billy's

arms. "I, ah, I straightened things out. For now."

She paused, aware without looking at him of the unspoken plea in Billy's

eyes. It wasn't as hard as she'd thought it would be to get the words

out. "Jim, as a favor? Leave it alone."

"Is there abuse of wife or children?"

"No." Kate's voice was certain. "No spousal or child abuse." Yet, she

thought. Where there was substance abuse of any kind, spousal and child

abuse were never very far behind.

"Are the children at risk?"

Kate thought of Cindy crouched down in her marital bedroom, clutching

the rifle, and of the three children running to Annie Mike for help.

Yes. But if she said so, Jim would call in the Division of Family and

Youth Services and the children would be placed in a foster home,

probably in Anchorage or Fairbanks, probably not together. Would that be

any better for the kids than what they had now? At least here they had

Annie and Billy Mike, and the rest of the village.

And Kate herself.

She looked down at the knife she held in her hands, wet from its fall.

Idly she began folding out all the implements, drying them carefully,

one at a time.

"Kate?"

She looked up to meet Jim's steady gaze, and saw that it was her call.

The trooper would be guided by her, would leave the children with their

parents if she said so. She didn't want the responsibility, but it

didn't look as if she had a choice. As if she'd ever had a choice. The

words came out involuntarily, distant, as if formed

165 by someone else and then placed in her mouth. "I don't think so,"

she said. "No," she added, more strongly.

It was the first time in her life Kate Shugak had sided for the tribe

and against the law she had admired, respected, studied and sworn to

uphold. To serve and to protect. She fought a sense of disorientation

that threatened to overwhelm her, a dizziness that included a distinct

impression of her grandmother's presence, transitory but strong.

She shook it off, almost angrily, and looked up to find Jim regarding

her with an impassive expression. He held her eyes for another moment,

before nodding once, very crisp, a conspicuous transfer of authority.

"All right. If there's a problem-"

"I know, it'll be all my fault," Kate muttered. She closed the knife and

pocketed it.

"Don't put words in my mouth," he said, mildly enough. "I was going to

say, if there's a problem bad enough to remove the children from the

home, call me and I'll see what I can do to get them placed somewhere

without taking them out of the Park."

She felt heat rising up into her face. "Sorry, Jim." He nodded. It took

an effort, but she got the words out. "Jim?"

"What?"

"Thanks."

The shark's grin was back. "Don't choke on the word, Shugak."

"Up yours, Chopin." The insult, freely given and as blithely accepted,

restored the relatively noiseless tenor of their way and Kate's sense of

equilibrium. Over Jim's shoulder she spotted Harvey Meganack, the

ruby-eyed ram's heads on his gold nugget watchband flashing in the

setting sun.

What the hell, if she had the Alaska State Troopers on the run she had

to be on a roll. "Harvey! Hold up there, I need to talk to you!"

Harvey had started backing up as soon as he registered in her direct

line of sight, but she was too quick for him. He halted, trying not to

look like the stag at bay and not succeeding very well. "What?" he muttered.

166 "Nice to see you, too," she said blandly, and he flushed. She let

him see her enjoying his discomfort before she said, "Auntie Vi wanted

me to talk to you about the dividend the board is thinking about issuing

for the Chokosna timber profits."

He didn't like the sound of that. "What about it?" he said guardedly.

"She and Auntie Joy think that some of it ought to be spent on a health

clinic."

His face changed. "We've got a compact with the health clinic in Ahtna."

"Fifty miles away," Kate agreed.

"It's close enough for minor health problems," he said.

If he'd looked any more stubborn, she could have accused him of having a

jackass for a father. Harvey Meganack had the high, flat cheekbones of

his Aleut ancestors combined with the height of his Norwegian ones. He

was further distinguished from his fellow Park rats by affecting the

dapper in dress. True, he wore jeans, but they were pressed, as was his

oxford shirt with the button- down collar. The latest in Eddie Bauer

parkas topped the ensemble, and he wore a baseball cap with an Alyeska

logo covering a bald spot he hid when the cap was off by parting the

rest of his hair just above his right ear and combing it over. His smile

was toothy and full of empty charm.

Harvey was a commercial fisherman and self-proclaimed independent

businessman, whose pockets were frankly to let to the highest bidder

when it came time to assign construction contracts on tribal lands, and

who knew just enough about business to get the Association into real

trouble. Kate was pleased not to be related to Harvey in any way at all,

although that probably only held if she didn't climb her family tree

more than two generations.

"Fishing was lousy last summer," Harvey added, "and it's been a tough

winter. The money should go out to the individual families."

Kate held his gaze for a moment, and then deliberately looked beyond him

to the Bingley house. When she looked back at him,

167 he'd flushed again, the brown of his skin darkening to an

uncomfortable bronze.

Unwisely, he attempted bluster. "Dammit, Kate, that don't happen all the

time, it don't even happen most of the time. So Ben Bingley went on a

tear with his kids' dividend checks, so what's new? All shareholders

aren't Ben Bingley. Association money should go into the hands of the

shareholders by as straight a line as possible, not be spent on some

health clinic it'll cost us most of our logging profits to build and

most of the yearly dividends for the rest of our lives to maintain."

It was the same line of reasoning he spouted at every Association

meeting, an effective line that had gotten him elected to the board for

four consecutive terms. Kate did not burst into applause, so he cast

about for support. Demetri Totemoff stood stolidly at his elbow, looking

at Kate out of tranquil eyes. A square-bodied, blunt-featured man with a

permanently cautious expression, Demetri was a big-game guide who

specialized in European hunters, spoke fluent German from his twenty

years of Army service in Diisseldorf and was Kate's second cousin once

removed.

"Maybe you'd better think this over, Harvey," Kate said. "And maybe

you'd better talk it over with the board, the whole board, before you

start spending your dividend." She nodded at the Bingleys' house. "We

could use a substance-abuse counselor in Niniltna."

Involuntarily, he followed her gaze. He couldn't deny it, but he wasn't

convinced, either. Fine, she hadn't expected de Lawd to pass a miracle;

she had only promised Auntie Vi she would try. About to make good her

escape, she was halted by Demetri's voice.

"Harvey, the girls are all out to the Roadhouse today, working on their

quilt." Kate remembered that Luba Totemoff, Demetri's wife, had been one

of the quilters the day before. "Joyce is visiting, so she'll be there,

and you know Old Sam practically lives at the Roadhouse this time of

year. Maybe we should head on out there, talk it over." He raised an

eyebrow at the board's chairman. "Billy?"

168 Face as blank as a pane of glass, armed like Rambo about to head

into the jungle-or Steven Seagal into the Alaskan Bush- Billy nodded

obediently.

"Good," Kate said, "great," and headed for her brand-new, much-abused

truck. "Good luck. See you all later." Later in the year, she thought,

but didn't say.

"Kate." Again Demetri's voice stopped her in her tracks.

Without turning she said, "What?"

"You've taken an interest in the subject. Seems only right you should

attend."

Her tired brain chased itself in circles trying to find a way to get out

if it, but her synapses were starting to close down, and besides, this

was an elder making a request. "Sure," she said, turning and mustering

up a smile, albeit one that could have used work on its sincerity. "I'm

right behind you."

Harvey reluctantly and Demetri inexorably shepherded Billy into his

pickup, and climbed into Harvey's brand-new Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer.

They moved off down the road, the Yuppiemobile in the lead.

"You know, I think I'll come along," Jim said, readjusting the set of

his hat. Beneath the brim his eyes laughed at her. "I'd like to see the

end of this story." He looked back at the cab of his borrowed truck,

where Mark Stewart still sat, motionless, expressionless, a graven image

to loss. In a lower voice he added, "And I just might get to the end of

another story while I'm at it."

In no mood to suffer gladly the all too often painfully observant eye of

the Alaska Department of Public Safety's finest representative, still

Kate could think of no way to prohibit Chopper Jim's attendance at what

showed every sign of being a knockdown, drag-out family fight in which,

if Demetri had his way, she feared she was meant to figure prominently.

"It's a public bar," she said ungraciously. "Mutt! Come!"

Mutt, sitting in blissful inattention with her head pressed adoringly

against Chopper Jim's knee, came awake with a snort and launched herself

at the open door of the truck.

169

The convoy pulled into the Roadhouse parking lot and parked in the last

row closest to the road. Kate sat for a few moments, examining the

various vehicles and the surrounding area with care. Demetri, Harvey and

Billy waited for a moment, shrugged and went inside. Mutt looked over,

head cocked. "In a minute," Kate said. She completed her inspection,

listened for shots and heard none, and decided it was safe to turn off

the engine.

Silent still, silent all, and Kate relaxed and climbed out. The first

thing she saw was Frank Scully's Cherokee Chief, brazenly sporting its

green-and-white Washington plates. She approached for a closer look. Its

out-of-date green-and-white Washington plates. That did it. She wheeled

and went back to the truck. Aha. Like every good sourdough, Mandy had a

tool chest built into the back. The key was on the ring.

170 Inside the tool chest was a pair of vise grips. Mutt looked a little

alarmed.

Kate returned to Frank Scully's truck, fastened the vise grips to his

back license plate and ripped it off. She went around to the front of

the truck and performed the same service for the front license plate.

Both plates went sailing across the road to disappear into a stand of

alders.

"There." Kate strode to the truck, replaced the vise grips, closed and

locked the toolbox. She dusted her hands. "All done."

Bonnie Jeppsen's truck pulled in next to hers, and Chopper Jim and Mark

Stewart climbed out. "You took your time," Kate said.

"This thing needs a new gearbox."

"Oh. Good thing Bonnie's got a steady job."

"Yeah."

He started to head for the bar and Kate touched his elbow. "Look at

this, Jim, here's a vehicle with no license plates."

"Why, so it is," Jim said happily, and extracted a book of tickets from

an inside pocket. The Chief was unlocked, and the

registration-Washington state, Kate noted-was in the glove compartment.

Jim positively glowed. Chopper Jim was never so happy as when he was

writing someone a ticket. He'd been ecstatic when two years before the

state had changed the law so he could write tickets on private property.

For her part, Kate just loved keeping Chopper Jim happy, and her sense

of well-being increased as she walked in the door of the Roadhouse and

the first person she saw was Frank Scully.

"Ah, my good Eskimo friend," he said, lurching forward to drape a

friendly arm around Kate's shoulders. "How ya doing, Katie?"

Oozing cordiality, Kate said, "I'm not an Eskimo, Frank, I'm an Aleut.

Try to keep up."

Clearing a nearby table, Bernie blinked and poked a finger in his ear to

see if it was still working.

Frank blinked bleary eyes. "Aloot. Right. Sorry. Keep forgetting." He

weaved off to annoy someone else.

171 "Is it safe?" Kate said, peering into the bar's gloomy corners.

"Have the Hatfields and the McCoys all gone home?"

"So far," Bernie said darkly. A new thought brought a hopeful sparkle to

his eye. "Maybe they've killed each other and there's nothing left to do

but bury the bodies."

"The sooner the better," Kate agreed.

Unfortunately, Demetri was right. Auntie Joy and Old Sam were both

members of the Roadhouse quorum that evening, Auntie Joy sitting between

Auntie Vi, who had abandoned Velveeta pizza sales for handwork, and Enid

Koslowski, who was looking in a much better humor this afternoon than

she had at the previous day's meeting of the quilting bee. Probably got

lucky last night, Kate thought disagreeably, and didn't pause to

speculate on whether that cranky little internal comment might arise

from jealousy. Luba, Demetri's wife, rounded out the circle. Quiet, a

little shy, she kept her neatly braided head bent over her work.

Harvey, Demetri and Billy sat at a table a safe distance from the

quilters. The old women had a tendency to start in on the nearest man

just for the pure enjoyment of it, and since Auntie Joy and Auntie Vi

had changed all three men's diapers, a safe distance in this case meant

all the way across the room.

Old Sam was seated at his usual table, surrounded by the usual suspects,

watching more television. Today the arts had been abandoned for sport,

in this case basketball, and from the hooraw going on in that corner of

the room it would appear some money was riding on the outcome.

Ralph Estes was passed out with his head on the bar. Must be Saturday,

Kate thought. If he was running true to form, he'd been drinking since

Bernie had opened the front door at eight that morning, and had been

asleep since three or four that afternoon.

In a far corner Dandy Mike licked the tip of one finger and ran it

across Karen Kompkoff's collarbone. From the dazed look in Karen's eyes,

it wouldn't be long before Dandy was beating feet out back. Dandy's

custom alone probably paid the overhead on Bernie's cabins.

172 At Kate's entrance, Billy stood up and went over to murmur something

in Old Sam's ear. The old man, eyes on the television screen, ignored

him. Billy was insistent. Old Sam swore loud enough to be heard over the

Unitarian congregation practicing their hymns in the opposite corner,

and shoved his chair back. Meanwhile, Demetri went to talk to Auntie Vi

and Auntie Joy. Auntie Vi gave her crisp nod, Auntie Joy her joyous

smile, and both rose to follow him back to his table, from which he

actually crooked his finger at Kate.

Chopper Jim, standing at her shoulder, exacerbated her irritation with a

deep, rich chuckle. Mark Stewart, still the pillar of sorrow, stood at

his side. They both watched as her chin came up, her shoulders stiffened

and she all but marched across the room.

"Katya." Auntie Vi looked mildly surprised but welcoming. Auntie Joy

beamed. Harvey looked apprehensive, Demetri stolid and Old Sam thin and

gaunt and apparently immortal. He distributed his thin, gaunt and

apparently immortally nasty grin around the group and straddled a chair

from a nearby table, his hands on the back and his chin on his hands.

Kate looked slowly from face to face, as if she were seeing them all for

the first time. Harvey, the self-important businessman and incipient

dandy. Demetri, the guide, square and stolid and as monosyllabic as his

wife. Billy Mike, the tribal leader and commercial fisher with the

bright button eyes and the wide, cheerful smile. Auntie Joy, subsistence

fisher, housewife, mother, grandmother, robust, laughing, her tubby

figure dressed always in flowered, be- furred and rickracked kuspuks.

The fifth board member was its newest, Old Sam Dementieff, commercial

fisher, tenderman, movie critic, basketball fan and father of twelve,

who had outlived his wife and five of his children and three of his

grandchildren and for whom Kate occasionally deck- handed in the summer.

Old Sam had taken Kate's grandmother's place on the board, reflecting

the shareholders' need for an elder of stature in the governing body.

173 Auntie Vi, the board secretary, acquired a lined school notebook and

a pen with two spares, one behind each ear. Auntie Vi believed strongly

in redundancy.

Kate stood around the perimeter of the group, unable or unwilling to

bring herself to sit down. Harvey was the youngest board member at

forty-five. Billy was what? Forty-eight? Demetri was fifty, Auntie Joy's

entire family had just celebrated her sixty-fifth birthday, and Old Sam

was a hundred and three if he was a day. Auntie Vi had been thirty for

the last forty years and was determined to remain so until she died.

Harvey was pro-development, period. Demetri usually sided with Harvey,

Auntie Joy usually against him. Auntie Joy would vote for anything with

the word "education" in it, Demetri for anything prefaced by the phrase

"rural preference." Billy Mike changed sides so often there was no

decoding his bias, and as for Old Sam- She pulled herself up short. She

had no business analyzing and measuring their characteristics, their

prejudices, their strengths, their weaknesses. They were her elders and

betters, who, like Emaa, always had looked and always would look at

events through a local lens and would adjust accordingly their vision of

what should be. These were Emaa's sisters and brothers, her daughters

and sons, her mothers and fathers, and Kate would defer to them and to

their wisdom. She would, she repeated to herself sternly.

Together, they had lived a total of more than three centuries and were

at present marching resolutely toward their fourth. It was an impressive

accumulation of wisdom and perspective. The difficulty was that

sometimes that wisdom and perspective hardened into a stance inimical to

change, to new ideas, to fresh faces, to youth. Kate had been born and

raised among them, but at thirty- four she was by far the youngest

person in the group, and she knew that had she not been Ekaterina's

granddaughter she would have had no place there.

In this, she was less than perceptive of the considerable regard

174 in which she was held in the Park. Whether she knew it or not, she

wore authority like a long cloak, with much was that swept up in its

weighted hem of which she was unaware, including the undivided attention

of the six people sitting before her now. Six pairs of sharp eyes

watched her without seeming to, noticing the lines of control bracketing

the usually mobile mouth, the fresh scab on her temple. None of them

lingered over the scar on her throat, but then they'd all seen it

before, and most of them knew the story behind it, or thought they did.

Like the presence of the wolf-husky hybrid chowing down on beef jerky at

the end of the bar, it only added to the accumulating legend.

The six elders sipped coffee brought by a self-effacing Bernie, who

recognized a tribal council meeting when he saw one. They chatted in low

voices, settling into their seats and getting comfortable with one another.

"Well," Billy said, setting his coffee down. Auntie Vi flipped open her

notebook and retrieved one of her pens. Old Sam's bright eyes flicked

from one face to another. Harvey frowned into his mug. Auntie Joy's

needle flashed through a square of cloth. "I'd like to thank you all for

assembling on such short notice." There were grave nods all around,

except from Old Sam, who grinned his vulpine grin. "We've invited Kate

to sit in on the meeting. She's got a proposal she'd like to lay before

the board."

"What?" Kate said.

"Go ahead, Kate," Billy said encouragingly, and the other four board

members swiveled their heads in unison to look at the youngster come

amongst them.

On her best day Ekaterina Moonin Shugak couldn't have passed a better

buck. You son of a bitch, Kate thought furiously, you set me up.

She sent a scowl across the table that should have fried Billy's brain

in his skull. He took no notice of this lapse in generational respect,

only continued to look at her, waiting, face schooled to an expression

of innocent inquiry. So did the rest of the board.

175 The weight of their expectancy had a perceptible drag all its own,

towing her in, sucking her under. She wasn't strong enough to resist, so

she took a deep breath and waded in. "Cindy Bingley nearly killed her

husband, Ben, this afternoon." Auntie Joy's beam vanished, and Kate

waited for those who had been present to fill in those who hadn't been

before continuing. "This wasn't the first time she's tried it. The next

time he uses his and his kids' dividend checks to finance a drunk, she

might get lucky. I don't think anyone here wants that."

Going immediately on the attack, Harvey went straight for the jugular.

"So what are you saying, Kate? You want the Association to hold back

Ben's and the kids' dividend checks?"

"I don't know, that's pretty extreme action you're suggesting," Billy

observed without heat, "holding up a dividend for a lousy toot to Ahtna."

Kate hadn't suggested it, in fact hadn't even thought of it until now,

but was willing to discuss the red herring Harvey had dragged across the

trail just to get it out of the way. She might score some points of her

own in the process. "It wasn't his first toot, Billy," she said, "and he

isn't alone, as you very well know. Half the shareholders blow their

dividends when they come in. Most of the time it's the wives and kids

who suffer for it."

"They get their own dividends," Demetri said.

"Not if somebody beats them to the mailbox."

Harvey's glassy stare made him look as if he'd been stuffed and mounted,

Auntie Joy beamed at her placidly, Old Sam examined Kate with a critical

eye.

"I suppose we could hold Ben's and the kids' checks for Cindy to pick

up," Billy said.

They studied that in silence for a while. From the expressions on their

faces they were all entertaining visions of shareholders storming the

Association offices for their checks and not relishing the prospect.

"You know," Demetri said, "Cindy's not exactly blameless in this

situation. She's done plenty of partying herself."

176 "She takes good care of those kids," Auntie Joy said.

"He'd sue," Harvey said flatly, because that was what he would do and

don't any of them forget it.

"Not if he doesn't have any money to hire a lawyer," Auntie Joy said,

because she hadn't had much use for Harvey since he hogged most of the

fry bread at a dinner she cooked for the high school basketball team on

which Harvey was a starting forward. That had been over twenty years

ago, but Auntie Joy never forgot an act of greed or selfishness.

"Someone would take it on spec," Demetri said unexpectedly. "There are a

thousand Philadelphia lawyers in Anchorage just drooling at the prospect

of taking on a solvent Native Association for costs alone. They could

drag the case out for years and run their billable hours into the

stratosphere. We can't chance it."

Everyone was impressed by this professional assessment of the situation.

Everyone also wanted to know where Demetri had come by the easy

familiarity with legal jargon, but Bush manners prevailed and no one asked.

Personally, Kate didn't think Ben could leave off drinking and chasing

women not his wife long enough to retain an attorney, so the point was

moot. "Ben is a shareholder, like the rest of us," she said. "ANCSA

funds were allocated by congressional act. It's probably a federal

offense to interfere with their distribution. Ben gets his check, same

as you, same as me, same as every other Niniltna shareholder."

They thought about that for a while. Tribal elders spent a lot of time

thinking in silence, which led to rational problem solving and sensible

decision making. It was one of their greatest strengths.

Demetri stirred. "She could divorce him. That way, she could attach his

dividend for child support."

"If she hasn't divorced him yet, she's not going to," Billy said.

"He is a charmer," Auntie Joy admitted with a rueful sigh.

"What the Association could do," Kate said. Billy looked at her

encouragingly. "What the Association could do," she repeated, setting

her jaw, "is tackle it from the other end."

177 Bernie returned to refill their mugs and set a plate of Oreo cookies

on the table, his inspired contribution to a harmonious meeting. Seven

hands reached out, and everybody except Harvey opened up the cookies and

licked the frosting off the inside.

"It's not just Ben and Cindy and their kids who need help. I'm sure

you've all heard about the shoot-out the Jeppsens had with the Kreugers

here yesterday," Kate said. "Some of you were present for it." Her hand

moved to her left temple to finger the scab left by the

too-close-for-comfort graze. Six pairs of eyes followed the gesture. Old

Sam chuckled, and Auntie Joy looked at him, scandalized. "Three people

were hurt. But," she said, and paused for effect. "But," she repeated,

"because we had emergency medical technicians in the bar, we had

treatment ready to hand."

"There wasn't anybody hurt that bad," Demetri observed. He'd had too

many near misses with wannabe Great White Hunters for a couple of minor

bullet holes to upset him.

Auntie Joy transferred her scandalized look from Old Sam to Demetri.

"True," Kate said. "But I believe the result would have been the same

even if someone had been badly hurt. The point is, we had trained people

at the scene to deal with the situation." She paused again. "People

trained in Ahtna, by the Ahtna Native Health Foundation."

She held up her right hand. "I caught myself a splinter the other day, a

bad one. Figured I'd need a tetanus shot. When I was in Ahtna this

morning, I stopped by the health clinic and talked hina Barnes into

giving me a DPT booster. You all know Irina. She's the community health

representative for the Ahtna Native Association, trained in town by the

Public Health Service in emergency medical care and standard

immunization and testing procedures." Kate paused. "A useful person to

have around. We could do with one of our own."

This time it was Billy who broke the silence. "What are you saying, Kate?"

178 Kate took a deep, steadying breath and spoke her first words in an

advisory capacity to the Niniltna Native Association board of directors.

"I'm saying it's time we started some kind of clinic of our own, right

here in Niniltna. Half the villages in this state already have some kind

of health care clinic. Why not ours? Raven Corporation has a nonprofit

health branch that's been trying to get a foot in the door here for years."

Harvey said, face set in taut lines of disapproval, "We don't want any

outsiders telling us how to live. We can take care of our own."

Kate thought again of the Bingleys, of her cousin Martin's lifelong

struggle with alcohol and drugs, of Chick Noyukpuk's, of her parents'.

Of her mother's. Yeah, she thought, and we've done such a good job of it

so far. She had to fight to keep from saying so out loud, and tried

instead for a placating smile, but her facial muscles were unaccustomed

to the effort and she gave it up. She did take a beat to rein in her

temper, because abusing elders, especially in the presence of other

elders, was no way to get anything accomplished in the village. On the

other hand, she and tact were no more than passing acquaintances.

Learn, then, Katya, a stern voice said.

She closed her eyes. The board, watching and waiting, saw a shadow pass

across her face, the usually smooth skin acquire lines that aged it into

a harsh mask that had seen too much of suffering and sorrow. A mask that

recalled the presence among them of an older, wiser woman whose

deliberate and resolute speech echoed in the rasping voice of her

granddaughter.

Kate opened her eyes and the mask vanished.

"We could try circulating a petition to go dry again," Auntie Joy said

doubtfully.

Harvey rolled his eyes, but then Harvey liked a martini before dinner

and a shot of Drambuie afterward. Niniltna had gone dry once, by a

three-vote margin. Dry meant that no alcohol, not for retail sale or

personal consumption or gin for Harvey's martini, was allowed on tribal

land, none, zero, zilch, zip. The Association had

179 hired shareholders to act as guards to check planes at the airstrip

for incoming contraband, armed guards that were empowered to break up

any intercepted shipments on the spot. It was a miracle that the Dry Act

had passed at all, a miracle aided by a sagacious decision to hold the

election during the summer, when most of the fishers were out in Prince

William Sound.

When the fleet got back into town, another petition was circulated and

another vote was taken, this time for the village to go damp, which

meant alcohol couldn't be sold but it could be imported in small

quantities for personal use. The second petition passed by a four-vote

margin, having been held during the AFN convention, when all the dry

votes were in Anchorage.

Everyone was afraid of what the circulation of a third petition might

bring. No one wanted any bars opening up again in the village; at least

the Roadhouse was twenty-seven miles away and Bernie was a responsible

bartender. He didn't serve drunks or pregnant women, and he forcibly

removed truck, snow machine and D-9 keys from driving lushes and bedded

them down in one of the cabins out back.

For a nominal fee, of course. Social work came a long way behind

capitalism on Bernie's list. "Certainly we can try, Auntie," Kate said,

"but since the last vote went against us, maybe we should try something

else. Like a clinic," she added doggedly.

"What's a clinic got to do with Ben and Cindy Bingley?" Harvey said.

"Everything," Kate said. "If we fund a clinic, we can hire counselors.

If we have counselors on staff, locally accessible so our people don't

have to go to town for treatment, which they won't anyway, we can tackle

this problem at the roots. Other associations and corporations have

already done so. Look at Ahtna. They've got a full-time substance-abuse

counselor wired into the AFN sobriety movement."

"Our people won't go to Anglo doctors," Harvey said.

Kate said patiently, "They will if the board members are the Anglo

doctors' first patients. In the meantime, why don't we set

180 up some kind of additional funding to apprentice our own people to

the staff of the clinic and, if they are so inclined, maybe pay to send

them to medical school? They don't have to be doctors, they could be

nurses, nurse-practitioners, physician's assistants, counselors. That

way, eventually we would have our own people treating our own people."

"And," Auntie Joy added, "it might keep the kids home." All five of

Auntie Joy's children had moved to Anchorage to pursue education and

careers. Auntie Joy lived up the Glenn Highway from Anchorage, but it

was a long, cold drive in the winter and she never saw enough of her

grandchildren.

"Most of our money's tied up in capital construction or investments,"

Billy said, doubtful. "The sawmill at Chokosna. The salmon plant in

Cordova. The market holdings Outside."

Auntie Vi glanced at Kate from the corner of her eye. "What about the

dividend you're about to declare from the Chokosna logging profits? The

shareholders aren't expecting that, so they wouldn't miss it."

Harvey bristled. Billy shook his head and said, "I don't know. The

shareholders want money, and the Association has given it to them from

the first year it showed a profit. They've been happy with that for a

long time, going on twelve years now."

"And what do you think they are going to say," Harvey said triumphantly,

"when we cut back on the quarterly dividends to maintain this clinic?"

"And this will be something new," Demetri observed, as dispassionate as

always, "and you know elders. They like to move slow. And they vote."

Oh, Kate thought, you mean like the six people at this table right now?

"Shareholders are used to going to Ahtna or Anchorage for health care,"

Harvey said, and smiled at Kate. "I haven't heard any complaints."

"But then," Kate said, with a smile as false as Harvey's, "you

181 weren't looking down the wrong end of Cindy's thirty-thirty today,

were you, Harvey?" That was too close to impudence for her elders, and

five different kinds of disapproval radiated in her direction. Again,

Kate reined in her temper. "Where's Suzy Moonin going to get prenatal

care for her and my cousin Martin's first baby? When Carl Stoff broke

his leg, he had to be medivacked to Anchorage. When Eknaty Kvasnikoffs

little brother-I forget his name-"

"Brian," Auntie Vi said.

"When Brian Kvasnikoff got appendicitis, he died because the weather was

socked in and we couldn't fly him to a hospital in Anchorage. It's not

just the substance-abuse treatment we need."

"The community is a small one, for the supporting of an entire clinic,"

Uemetri observed.

"It isn't if you include everyone," Old Sam said, "Natives and whites."

Everyone was taken aback, especially Kate, since she'd been planning on

saying that herself.

"Pay for white care out of Native funds?" Billy said, shocked.

"Nope." Old Sam shook his head. "Charge everybody on a sliding scale, a

percentage based on their annual income. If they don't have any annual

income, they don't pay. If they have a little, they pay a little. If

they have a lot, they pay a lot. Harvey-" he grinned his desiccated grin

at Harvey, who didn't grin back "-and, say, Bernie Koslowski, now,

they'd pay a lot. Ben and Cindy, they'd pay a little."

He surveyed their startled expressions with tolerant contempt. "Else how

we going to do it? We all live here, all together, Native and white and

Negro or black or African American or whatever the hell Bobby Clark's

calling himself this year. We're neighbors." He added, his sarcasm

deliberately heavy-handed, "You all may be too young to remember the

ructions we went through over ANCSA, but I'm not. Lot of resentment

between the races because of it. Lot of it."

182 Billy opened his mouth and Old Sam raised his voice. "I don't want

to hear it, Billy. It don't matter a hoot that we deserved restitution

for getting our asses kicked around for three hundred years. We got

money and land because we had brown skin and the people we'd been living

next to for a century didn't. It's taken us twenty years and change to

smooth over the bad feelings. No point in stirring it up all over again

by starting a clinic-which idea by the way I like and will vote for-that

only serves us Natives. Dumb." He met Harvey's glare with another of his

patented nasty grins. "Dumb and divisive."

"Where'd you get the idea about payment, Uncle?" Demetri said. "I like it."

"Caught myself the clap the last time I was in town, over Fur Rondy in

February," Old Sam said, and winked at Auntie Joy, who for once was not

beaming. "Didn't want to stand in line at the Native hospital. Somebody

told me about Family Planning. I went down there and they took real good

care of me, and that's how they charged me. I was interested, so I

asked." He grinned. "Got an awful cute little nurse behind the counter

there, explained it all to me. Plan on visiting her again, next time I'm

in town."

Kate's lip quivered at the fascinated way the rest of them sat staring

at the wizened-up old coot. "Could the board maybe think about this for

a while?" she said, sternly controlling the quiver. "Maybe you could

meet next week and take a vote on whether to present it at the next

shareholders' meeting."

Old Sam hooted. "Good God, girl, don't give them time to think. Make

them vote, right here, tonight. If you don't, they'll talk it to death,

just like Congress, and the damn thing'll never get built. The

Association charter provides the board authorization for the creation of

something like this, so we don't have to put it before the shareholders,

which I for one don't think we should. I never noticed nobody in the

Park ever voting for something just because it might actually be good

for them."

After that comprehensive, scathing and unfortunately accurate

assessment, no one could think of a thing to add, or they were too

183 scared of Old Sam to try. Old Sam moved for a vote, Auntie Joy

seconded it, and the measure to fund a community health clinic out of

funds from the Chokosna logging project passed four to one, Harvey

voting against, which was only to be expected.

Everyone looked as dazed as Kate felt as the meeting broke up. Auntie

Vi, scribbling furiously in her notebook, said, "Who took over for Sarah

Kompkoff as head of the local chapter of the sobriety movement, does

anybody know?"

"Ethan Swensen," Auntie Joy said.

Surprised, Kate said, "Isn't he a little young?"

"He's twenty-two," Billy said. "He started drinking when he was nine.

He's been sober three years. Who better?"

He jerked his head, and Kate followed him across the room to the bar.

"What'll it be, Billy?" Bernie said.

"How about a beer?" Billy said.

"Coming right up. Kate, look what I've got." He reached beneath the

counter and pulled out a six-pack of Diet Seven-Up. "George brought it

in from Anchorage and dropped it off. Said he owed it to you."

"Bernie," Kate said, "I want you now."

"Kate," Bernie said, "I'm yours."

"You handled yourself pretty well over there," Billy said after Bernie

had served them and moved on to another customer.

"You sandbagged me," she said. "You prick."

His smile was merry and totally lacking in remorse. "Yes, I did. And you

handled it well."

"Thanks," Kate said, giving up for the moment any attempt to bring Billy

to recognition of his bad behavior. "I think."

"No. It needed saying. The clinic's a good idea. I've been thinking a

little along those lines myself. That's why I okayed subsidizing our

people's EMT training in Ahtna out of the discretionary fund. Yes, we

have one, your grandmother saw to that. I figured once the EMTs got back

and showed their stuff, the board would be more receptive to the idea of

a clinic." He saw Kate's look and smiled again, a movement that creased

his moon face in two and

184 made him look like a billiken. "I know, I know, it didn't sound like

I thought so." His eyes were lit with mischief. "Let you in on a little

secret, Kate. Sometimes I have to be against, to make everybody else

for, just to get the job done." She looked at him, surprised, and he

nodded, smile widening. "You helped the process along this evening, and

for that I thank you." His smile faded. "Come a time, I'll want more. We

all will."

"Come a time," she said promptly, "you'll whistle down the wind for it."

He didn't believe her, and smiled.

She didn't believe herself, and didn't.

He drained his beer and departed, leaving her with the uncomfortable

suspicion that Billy Mike was much more than the part- time clown she'd

always seen him as.

Of course, he was Emaa's handpicked choice to succeed her as chair. Kate

would do well to remember that.

185

Kate was still staring after him when Auntie Vi spread her notebook out

on the bar, finished off her notes, and dated and signed them with a

flourish. "Well. That was one of our more interesting board meetings.

You do know how to liven things up, Katya."

"It wasn't me, Auntie, it was Old Sam. He pretty much rolled right over

the whole bunch of them."

"He did, didn't he?" Auntie Vi grinned. "It was fun to watch."

Kate had to laugh. "That it was, Auntie."

"Ekaterina-" Auntie Vi hesitated, and glanced at her great- niece.

Kate smiled faintly. "It wasn't the way Emaa would have done it, no, but

she wouldn't have cared, so long as it got the results she wanted."

"Whatever works," Auntie Vi said, nodding. "Thank you, Katya."

186 "What for? Like I said, it was all Old Sam."

"No, Katya," Auntie Vi said firmly. "It was you. You set up the meeting

because I asked you to talk to Harvey. Thank you. Now say, You're welcome."

"You're welcome, Auntie," Kate said obediently.

Old Sam was back at his original table, yelling, "Free throws win ball

games!" as Michael Jordan bounced one off the rim. Kate looked across

the room at him, watching as Jordan went up after his own missed foul

shot and slammed the ball home for two. Old Sam pounded his approval on

the table, upsetting several drinks in the process. Who would have

thought that Old Sam, cantankerous old reprobate that he was, would step

forward into Emaa's place so aptly, so ably, so opportunely? A sense of

relief swept over Kate, and she turned back to Auntie Vi with a lighter

heart. "How have you been lately, Auntie? I didn't get a chance to visit

with you yesterday. I haven't seen you since-when?"

"Since you came in for starring at Russian Orthodox Christmas," Auntie

Vi said.

"That's right, January," Kate said. It had been a crisp, clear night,

and she had stood with her aunt at her aunt's front step to welcome and

pass out treats to the carolers as they went singing from door to door.

She'd ridden her snow machine in that afternoon, she remembered, which

naturally led her to wonder now if she was going to be able to patch the

gas tank on it. She hoped so. In spite of her new truck, the dwindling

wad of cash in the Darigold butter can wasn't going to go far if she had

to repair or replace all of her vehicles. So far the Earlybird

settlement was just talk. Maybe she could work out a trade for the Great

White Hunters' four-wheelers, both of which were still sitting in her

front yard. Kate had no wish to learn how to mush dogs this late in

life, and she'd never liked four-wheelers. It was a problem. She

frowned, and then, when she felt Auntie Vi looking at her, shrugged off

her woes. "You making good money off the feds, Auntie?"

187 "I made out okay," Auntie Vi said, which Kate took to mean she had

made out like a bandit.

Chopper Jim was down at the other end of the bar, talking to Demetri.

They'd both done time in Europe with the armed forces, and bored

everyone very much with Cold War stories whenever they got the chance.

Mark Stewart was sitting at a table against the wall, brooding over a

bottle of beer. He was brooding so well that both Jackie Webber and Tina

Moonin were trying to minister to his grief. He wasn't exactly beating

them off with a stick.

"Auntie, did you know they were going up to the mine?"

"Who?"

Kate nodded imperceptibly toward Stewart. "The woman who died, and her

husband. You said they were staying with you. Did you know they were

going up to the mine?"

"Of course. I packed a lunch for them."

"Did Mark Stewart have a rifle or a pistol with him?"

Auntie Vi pursed her lips, and shook her head. "I didn't see one."

"What did their luggage look like?"

"I know what a rifle case looks like, Katya," Auntie Vi said tartly.

"I know you do, Auntie. But sometimes people put rifles in suitcases or

duffel bags."

"Those ones had packs," Auntie Vi said firmly.

But you can break a rifle down, Kate thought. All it takes is a

screwdriver to reassemble. Half the time the pieces will even pass

through an airport security check.

"Why do you ask all these questions, Katya? He didn't have a rifle." She

thought, and added, "He had a fancy knife, though. Had a screwdriver on

it. He fixed the hinge on the door to their room." She grinned. "Good

thing, too. They make lot of noise, and they were booked for all week."

She saw Kate's expression. "What? What is it, Katya? Why you look like

that?"

Kate's hand closed over the Swiss Army knife she had absentmindedly put

in her pocket after Billy dropped it in the slush. The

188 one Cindy had found up at the mine in her mad chase after her errant

husband. She pulled it out and gave it to Auntie Vi. "Like this one?"

Auntie Vi took it, and after a few moments' fiddling, managed to open

out the Phillips screwdriver. "Yeah, just like this one." She handed the

knife back. "Why?"

"Did you warn them about the bear activity in the area?"

The old woman ruffled up. "Of course. Not my fault if they can't take a

hint. I'm not their mother."

Kate turned away and caught a sly look in Auntie Vi's eye. "What?"

Auntie Vi took a ladylike sip from the glass of red wine that had

replaced the mug of coffee with the council meeting's adjournment. "I

see that woman before. That woman who died."

"Carol Stewart?"

Auntie Vi nodded.

Bobby and Dinah came in and were surrounded. Over the hubbub their

entrance caused, Kate said, "Do you mean the Stewarts had been here

before? When?"

"One year ago. Last spring. But that one was not with this husband."

Auntie Vi's smile spread slowly across her face, her eyelids drooping so

that she looked like the Cheshire cat. "But she make even more noise

with him."

Kate stared at her, brows knit. "Wait a minute," she said slowly, "you

were saying something like this last night when all the shooting

started. Carol Stewart was in the Park last spring?"

"Yes."

"But not with Mark Stewart?"

"No."

"Auntie, I'm sorry, I have to get this straight. Carol Stewart stayed

with you last spring, with a man who wasn't her husband?"

"Not this one. Maybe she change in the middle of the year." The old

woman's eyes sparkled with mischief. Auntie Vi loved a good, nasty

story, especially if it concerned no one she was related

189 to, one reason she was a huge soap opera fan. She had had a

satellite dish installed just so she could watch The Young and the

Restless every day instead of waiting for the damn state to put it on

Ratnet. In her presatellite days, she'd once had to wait two weeks to

find out if Nicholas Newman had gone to jail for a murder he naturally

had not committed. She was resolved never to let that happen again.

An argument broke out at Bobby's table. "Kate!" he roared. "Shugak, get

your butt over here, they're ganging up on me!"

"Auntie," Kate said urgently, "who was it? Who was the man Carol Stewart

was with last spring?"

"Vi!" Auntie Joy called from the quilting bee. "We need help with this

stitch!"

Auntie Vi ripped her notes from the notebook, stuffed them into the hip

pocket of her jeans for later transcribing to the Association computer

and drained her glass. "I don't know, I don't care who they are or what

they're doing here as long as they got cash."

"Try, Auntie."

Auntie Joy called again, and Auntie Vi huffed out an impatient breath,

running a hand through her corkscrew curls. "I don't know. It was a fish

name, or something like that. Sardine?" She frowned. "No, that's not

right. I just don't remember, Katya."

"What did he look like?"

"It was a year ago, Katya. Skinny guy, I remember thinking he weigh less

than she did."

"Was he dark? Blond? How old was he?"

Auntie Vi shrugged. "Brown hair, maybe. About her age, I guess, maybe

couple years older. Look, I have to go help those ones finish that

quilt. If I don't, they sew it to their laps."

Kate watched her cross the room with her bouncy, birdlike step. She

turned back to the bar to find Chopper Jim lying in wait. He'd taken his

hat off, which meant he was available to talk other than business, his

dark blond hair smooth and shining. "I don't see any blood on the

floor," he said with a grin.

190 "Where's your prisoner?" said Kate, who knew perfectly well where he

was but didn't see any reason not to rag a little on Jim.

"He's not my prisoner.'7

"Why'd you bring him back?" she said bluntly.

"I told you, I wanted to walk over the ground with him."

"What did you find?"

"Nothing."

"Did Stewart show you which roof his wife was on?"

"He was a little confused," Jim drawled. He looked over her shoulder at

Mark Stewart, and the blue eyes narrowed. "He couldn't remember which

roof it was. Said he was in kind of a hurry at the time."

"There are a dozen houses back there," Kate said with acerbity. "Did he

manage to narrow it down to two or three? Or maybe even just one, with a

few scuff marks from the sole of a hiking boot or a few claw marks from

a grizzly?"

"You noticed that, too," Jim said, satisfied. "Nope. He sure couldn't."

Dan O'Brian stamped inside. Kate saw him and waved vigorously. He looked

right through her and joined the group around Bobby and Dinah.

"Still mad from this morning, I guess," Chopper Jim, a trained observer,

said.

Kate set her glass down on the bar with a bang and stalked across the

room to tap Dan on the shoulder. "O'Brian."

He sent her a cool look. "Shugak."

"You said you had a friend look up Mark Stewart on Motznik."

Dan almost sniffed. "I thought you weren't interested."

"I'm not. Did your friend happen to mention if Stewart has a pilot's

license?"

Dan pushed back from the table and regarded her. "You're not interested,

but you want to know if Stewart flies."

Kate felt the creep of warmth up the back of her neck. "There's no law

says I have to be consistent," she snapped. "Does Stewart have a pilot's

license or not?"

191 "No, he doesn't. I told you, when I saw him last fall the other guy

was flying. Hooligan, or something like that. What's this all about, Kate?"

"Were he and Carol married in Alaska?"

"Yes, what-"

"Did you get the date on the marriage license?"

"Yes."

"Well? When? When did they marry?"

"Six years ago," Dan said. "Why the sudden interest?"

She stood still for a moment, frowning. "No reason," she said. "Excuse me."

Dan, sputtering, half rose to his feet to go after her. "Goddam that

Shugak! Who the hell does she think she is! I oughta-"

"Don't," Bobby said. "I've seen her like this too many times. Don't bother."

Dan watched Kate halt in front of the trooper and start talking rapidly.

He settled back into his seat, fuming. "Women," he said, and the word

was not complimentary.

"I hear you," Bobby said, one hand massaging the back of Dinah's neck.

Dinah looked dangerously close to breaking into a purr. "I hear you, boy."

Across the room, Kate said, "Jim, how does Stewart say he got here? Him

and his wife? Dan says he doesn't have a pilot's license."

"Air charter out of Merrill Field."

"Did he say which one?" Jim shook his head. "I think you should find out

which one."

"Why?"

"So you can ask the pilot if he had a rifle with him."

"Did somebody tell you he had one?"

"No."

"Did he even have a bag that might look like it could hold a rifle?"

Reluctantly, she shook her head. "No, I asked Auntie Vi. Both Stewarts

carried packs."

192 "Than what makes you think he had a rifle?"

"You can break a rifle down, Jim. The individual pieces don't take up

much room. You could pack for a romantic week for two and still have

room left over for a barrel, a stock and a trigger."

"Not to mention ammunition."

"Not to mention."

He looked down at her and quirked an eyebrow. "I thought you weren't

interested."

"I'm not, goddammit," she said.

He continued to look at her, saying nothing.

"Oh hell," she said. "Bernie! Can I have another of those Diet Seven-Ups?"

The noise in the room grew to the point that Old Sam let loose with a

vivid curse and turned the volume on the television up to 9. One of the

pool players was in the process of running the table and she offered up

an even more vivid curse, which Old Sam applauded politely before

sitting back down. Luba glanced sideways at her husband and said

something and Enid, Auntie Joy and Auntie Vi threw back their heads and

laughed. Demetri, Harvey and Billy shifted uncomfortably in their

chairs. In the far corner, the Unitarians were trying "Amazing Grace" on

for size and finding it fit their soprano profundo section, if there was

such a thing, rather well. Through it all Ralph Estes snored peacefully.

Bernie refilled Kate's glass with ice, popped open another can, served

Jim another beer and, in response to a slight jerk of the trooper's

head, drifted back down the bar.

Kate took a long, reviving drink. "Auntie Vi said something else, Jim."

"What?"

She had to raise her voice over the music. "Auntie Vi said Carol Stewart

was up here last spring, too."

Jim was quick. "Alone?"

She shook her head. "With another man."

His brows rose. "Hmm. I suppose she could have been married to someone

else a year ago."

193 "She could have been, but she wasn't." Kate nodded in Dan's

direction. "Dan's Motznik buddy pulled up a marriage certificate for

Mark and Carol dated six years ago."

"Really," Jim said, glass arrested halfway to his mouth. "Did Viola know

who the other guy was?"

The jukebox blared out Aerosmith and Kate winced. "She can't remember

his name. It reminded her of fish. She said sardine, and then she said

that wasn't right."

"Description?"

Kate shrugged.

"Great." Jim drained his glass, and regarded Mark Stewart over the rim

of it. "You ever been charged by a bear, Kate?"

Kate took another drink. "Does day before yesterday count?"

"I thought the three of you were in the truck."

She shook her head. "I got charged on the homestead the day before that."

Jim gave Kate a sharp look that held the beginnings of understanding.

"Tell me."

She told him. When she came to the part where the bear stood up and

snapped its teeth, Jim didn't go all manly-man on her and try to hide

his shiver. "I hate that sound. Did you go for your rifle?"

Kate was silent.

"Kate?"

She raised her eyes, the expression in them rueful. "I didn't have it.

Both the rifle and the shotgun were back in the cabin."

He closed his eyes and shook his head.

He hadn't said anything, but she agreed anyway. "Yeah, I know. Dumb.

Especially for someone who is supposed to know what they're doing out

here." She remembered the conversation at Bobby and Dinah's table the

night before and one corner of her mouth curled in self-mockery.

He shook his head. "Close."

"Too damn close," she agreed.

"You gonna take the shotgun down to the creek when you go fishing from

now on?"

194 Kate gave a short laugh. "From now on, Jim, the shotgun goes with me

to the outhouse."

"Good." He paused. "So that's it, huh?"

"So that's what?"

"You got charged and survived. Carol Stewart got charged and didn't.

Could have been you and wasn't. That's why you're finally asking

questions. You want to find out what happened."

She shifted uncomfortably and didn't reply.

He looked over her shoulder, and she knew he was looking at Mark Stewart

again. "I got charged once myself, hunting on Montague Island. Big male.

Real big, and there was snow on the ground, which as you know makes 'em

look twice as big as they already are. False charge, he stopped about

fifty feet away from me and reared up like a goddam jack-in-the-box. He

ran off after he let me know I was someplace I shouldn't be and he

didn't like it and he was sure I knew he didn't like it. I've never

forgotten it." He dropped his eyes to Kate's and added in an even tone,

"I've never forgotten what happened afterward, either. It took twelve

hours to come down off the adrenaline high, and I was still jumping at

noises a week later."

Kate nodded. "It's not something you get over overnight."

They both looked around at Mark Stewart. Evidently Tina had ceded the

field to Jackie, who had Stewart's hand pressed between hers, soothing

away whatever strain might remain from grizzly- induced nervous trauma.

The treatment appeared very effective. Tina was across the room,

flirting obviously and outrageously with Frank Scully. One of the Moonin

boys-Sergei, or was it Tom?- didn't like that any more than he'd liked

her making up to Stewart. "Of course," Jim said thoughtfully, "if you

were expecting a bear charge-"

"-like if somehow you managed to provoke one-"

There was a brief pause, broken by Jim. "He said he'd gotten her up on

the roof before he ran for help, but he didn't have a mark on him, like

the bear had taken a swipe at him, or like he'd gotten in between the

bear and his wife."

195 Kate remembered the long strips of paint peeling back from the

clapboard sides of the buildings. "I didn't see any trace of anybody

climbing up any walls to a roof." ,

"Me either, and I looked pretty carefully this morning."

There was another, longer pause, broken again by Jim. "Well, if he did

what I think he did, he took one hell of a chance."

"I wouldn't care to hand-feed a grizzly myself.'' She drained her glass

and frowned. "You'll never prove it, you know. If there's no forensic

evidence, all you can prove is that the two of them came into the Park

and acted dumb, and unfortunately, dumb is not a capital crime." She

drained her glass. "No, you'll never prove it."

"Aside from finding the rope he tied around her neck with the stake

attached to it, that is." He saw her expression and gave an apologetic

shrug. "Sorry, Kate. Remember, by the time I saw her, she was no longer

a woman. She was just a hunk of leftover meat."

"Me, too," Kate said softly.

"Bears," he said. "They wake up cranky, the way everyone does when they

wake up hungry. If they stumble over a patch of horsetail first, fine.

If they stumble over a nicely decomposing body instead, that's fine,

too. If they run into a couple of idiots setting themselves up as the

main course, all the better. Hell, nobody ever got mad at Binky-God rest

his ornery little soul-when somebody tried to crawl into his cage at the

Alaska Zoo. If you're the kind of person who thinks crawling into cages

with polar bears would be, like, totally rad, dude, you're doing the

whole human race a favor when you do."

"And if the bears get an assist on the goal?"

"As you so astutely pointed out, Kate, we don't have any evidence." The

quickly bitten off words indicated that he was not as resigned to the

situation as he would have her think. "Hell, we don't even have motive."

He brooded for a moment. "Thought I'd give jack a call, have him run a

make on Stewart. Purely unofficially, of course."

"Oh, of course," Kate said courteously, and wondered what Jim's boss

would have to say if he thought for one moment that

196 Sergeant James M. Chopin, pride of the Alaska Department of Public

Safety, was treating a random bear attack as a murder investigation.

Dan O'Brian had bellied up to the bar and was holding forth on the

trails, trials and tribulations of a ranger's life for the edification

of one Amy Kasheverof, a medium-size brunette with flashing dark eyes, a

dimple in her right cheek and an impressive cleavage displayed to

advantage in a tight scoop-neck T-shirt.

Kate caught sight of Ben Bingley, sitting alone in a corner, nursing his

head and a beer. "Only one so far," Bernie said in answer to Kate's

inquiring glance.

Old Sam Dementieff caught her eye and raised his Irish coffee in salute;

she bowed slightly in return, feeling unsettled that he evidently

regarded them as being somehow in cahoots.

Karen Kompkoff's husband had shown up in time to rescue her from a fate

worse than death and Dandy Mike was now hustling Shirley Inglima around

the pool tables (didn't the man ever let up?). The four Grosdidier

brothers, who at one point had constituted four of the starting five of

the Kanuyaq Kings, had joined Old Sam beneath the television monitor,

dwarfing the old man, who more than made up in noise what he lacked in

size. The Unitarians had moved on to "The Old Rugged Cross" and were

making an even better job of it than they had of "Amazing Grace." The

quilters were doing finish work. Kate wondered if Dinah knew the end

product had her name on it.

All in all, kind of slow for a Saturday night, but then it was early.

"Not to change the subject," Jim said, "but Nathan Harrigan is your DB.

Ring any bells?"

"I don't have any DBs," Kate said instantly, but something nagged at the

edge of her consciousness. She puzzled at it for a moment and got no

change. "You mean the body the go team found near to but not on my place

yesterday?"

He nodded. "I talked to the coroner this morning. It's too soon for a

positive identification, but the body matches a missing person

description. Guy from Anchorage, electrician, contract hire for

197 Northern Enterprises-now there's an imaginative name-anyway, he

didn't come in for work one day last October. After three days' no show

and no call-apparently Harrigan was the responsible type-the boss got

worried and sent his secretary to check out Harrigan's apartment. Nobody

home, nothing missing except maybe a few clothes, truck parked in the

lot. Nobody's heard from him since."

"No family?"

He shook his head. "There was a girlfriend a while back, last summer

sometime according to the apartment manager, but he couldn't remember

much about her except that he thought she was blonde. Or maybe brunette.

I love eyewitnesses. Almost as much as I love breakup. And of course he

didn't know her name or anything about her. Nobody at work did, either."

"A man who kept himself to himself," Kate murmured, still trying to

scratch the little itch at the back of her brain. "How'd he die?"

"Coroner says he's got a crack on the back of his skull, and his right

femur is cracked about halfway down."

"So he fell down and broke his leg and hit his head while he was at it?"

"Something like that."

"Did you find a rifle or gear or anything at the scene?"

Jim shook his head again.

"Then what the hell was he doing out there?"

Jim smiled his carcharodonian smile, all teeth and appetite. "I was

hoping you'd check around a little, take Mutt, see if the two of you can

sniff out something."

She opened her mouth to tell him exactly and precisely what she thought

of that idea when the window to the right of the door shattered, and the

neon Rolling Rock sign with it.

"Shit!" Bernie said, and dropped for cover.

198

The second bullet shattered the mirror behind the bar.

Chopper Jim clapped his hat on his head and performed a neat,

economical, 5.4 swan dive over the bar to land with a breathless thud on

Bernie's other side. Bobby had his chair in overdrive with Dinah in his

lap as he skidded around the other end. Dan was left sitting,

open-mouthed, where he was, one arm around an equally befuddled Amy.

Kate tackled the gray streak as it launched itself from beneath her

stool. "No, Mutt, no! Stay!" Mutt, growling and barking, was an inch

away from fighting free when Kate got a headlock on her. "No! Calm down,

girl, calm down. Dammit, stop that!"

She got to her knees and knotted a hand in Mutt's ruff. "Come on,

sweetheart, there's a good girl. Come on, dammit!" With a mixture of

curses and endearments she managed to

199 crawl around the bar, hauling Mutt behind her. They took cover next

to Bernie.

The door banged open and a figure backed in. Kate, sneaking a look over

the top of the bar, saw that the figure, which looked ominously

familiar, held a rifle at waist level and was firing pointblank into the

parking lot. For the moment the target had shifted, and she motioned to

Jim and together they rose to grab Dan and Amy and haul them over the

bar to safety, where they landed on Bernie, hard. Bernie complained.

All around the bar, tables and chairs overturned as everyone in Bernie's

Roadhouse dove for cover for the second time in two days, with the

exception of Ralph Estes, who remained head down on the bar, snoring

peacefully. The six Unitarians charged off in six different directions,

uttering loud cries to the Lord. Dandy Mike wound up on top of Shirley

Inglima, which was what he'd been trying for anyway, and all four

Grosdidier brothers were jammed into the same corner.

Mark Stewart and Jackie Webber were on the floor beneath their table.

Harvey, Demetri and Billy Mike had sought refuge with Old Sam, whose

gleeful expression was clearly visible from where Kate crouched. The

quilting bee rose to its collective feet, folded and stowed their work

and made for the back door in calm, orderly procession, bullets flying

all around them. Kate, furious with fear, saw the door close safely

behind Auntie Joy and suffered a wave of relief that had her sagging

weakly against the bar.

"GodDAM!" Bobby roared. "We didn't use this much ammo at Hue!"

"Do something, Kate!" Bernie said, shoving her. Kate shoved Bernie.

"It's your bar, you do something!" Bernie shoved Dan. "It's your Park,

you do something!" Dan shoved Jim. "It's your state, you do something!"

The trooper might have been able to hold out against everyone else, but

Mutt barked an endorsement of their views right in his face. Until then

he had regarded Mutt as his love slave, but sometimes love is not

enough. He cursed, thrashed around until he got

200 his .357 out and very slowly and very carefully got his feet under

him to hoist a wary eye over the top of the bar.

The next round took his hat off.

Chopper Jim sat back down again and said very calmly, "I think we'll

wait a bit longer before we mount a frontal assault."

"What do you mean we, white man?" Bobby said.

Kate cursed them all with impartial fervor. "Bobby, hold Mutt." Mutt

didn't like it, neither did Bobby, and Jim said sharply, "Kate!" but she

was up on all fours and peering around the end of the bar before he

could stop her.

The figure in the doorway was reloading and a positive hail of bullets

smacked against the outside of the building. Kate recognized Cheryl

Jeppsen feeding shells into the stock of a Winchester. She ducked back.

"It's the Hatfields and the McCoys again."

"Gee, why am I not surprised?" Dinah said wearily.

Bernie swore loud and long. "Goddammit, why do they always have to come

and shoot up my place? Why can't they stay home and shoot each other's

places up! I hate breakup!"

"Give it up, Kay!" Cheryl shouted. "Go on home and I'll forget you

started this!"

"I started it!" a furious voice yelled from outside. "Like hell! You

started this, you bitch, I was driving down the road minding my own

business, and you shot my husband!"

"It's not your road, and it's not your land!"

"Bullshit! We've got a right of way!"

A shot was her reply.

"Can't you throw them out of the Park or something?" Kate said to Dan.

"You tell me how, legally," Dan said grimly, "and I'll be more than

happy to oblige."

Another flurry of shots and everybody ducked. "I don't know, get

creative, take their land back or something!"

"What land?" Dan hissed back. "Their homesteads? It's not federal land

anymore, it's state land, or it was until the Jeppsens and the Kreugers

won it in the lottery, now it's private property.

201 Both families have already proved up, it's theirs, nothing the Parks

Service can do about it now," Dan said, adding with heartfelt sincerity,

"thank God."

"You think maybe you guys could discuss who owns Alaska some other

time?" Bobby said politely, adding in a ferocious bellow that could

probably be heard in Whitehorse, "LIKE AFTER SOMEBODY COLDCOCKS THOSE

TWO CRAZY BITCHES OUT IN FRONT OF THIS FRIGGIN SALOON!"

Kate swore ripely-there'd been a lot of that going around lately-and

raised her voice. "Cheryl? Cheryl, it's Kate Shugak."

"What do you want?" the woman with the rifle snarled without turning around.

"You think you could kind of take it easy? There are a lot of people in

here who don't use your land to get to their homestead. No reason for

them to get hurt."

"I don't have any intention of shooting anybody, except that red-haired,

brass-plated bitch outside!"

Cheryl's Christian charity was slipping along with her language. As if

to underline the thought, there was another loud Bang! and Kate

flinched. So far, it had been the noisiest spring in the Park in her

memory. "Cheryl," she tried again, "this is silly. Are you and Kay just

going to keep shooting at each other until you run out of bullets?"

Cheryl fired, Kay fired a return volley and a bullet hit the bar right

in front of Kate with a businesslike thud. Another shattered a bottle in

back of the bar and showered them all with glass and liquid. Kate sat down.

"Offhand," Dan said, picking brown glass out of his hair, "I'd say the

answer to your question would be yes."

Dinah tasted the back of her hand. "I always did like a shot of Grand

Marnier after a meal. Settles the stomach, promotes digestion, gives you

that nice little glow, you know?"

Bobby slapped her hand away. "You're pregnant, you're not supposed to be

drinking."

There was another shot and almost simultaneously another

202 bottle shattered on a shelf in back of the bar, raining tequila and

shards of glass mostly on Bernie. A second later a withered finger

dropped to the bottom shelf and rolled off into Bemie's lap. Dan and Amy

both let out involuntary yelps.

Bernie's sense of outrage swelled to heroic proportions. "There goes the

Middle Finger bottle! Goddammit! I just refilled it, too, and with Jose

Cuervo Gold! This bullshit's starting to cost me money!"

He leapt to his feet and started around the bar. "All right, you two,

that is just about enough!"

Cheryl swiveled and brought the rifle up. "Don't move, Koslowski! Don't

take another goddam step!"

"Such language, Cheryl," Bernie said mildly, but he froze where he

stood. One of the Grosdidier brothers said, "Oh hell," sounding more

disgusted than alarmed. "I can't look!" Frank Scully screamed from

beneath a table, and buried his head in his arms. While Shirley

Inglima's attention was distracted Dandy Mike slid one hand beneath her

blouse. She didn't object. As far as Dandy was concerned, Bernie ought

to throw a shootout every day.

Kate rose to her feet to give Cheryl two people to cover. "Cheryl, this

has to stop." There was a furtive noise from behind the bar and she knew

Jim was crawling down to the opposite end. She raised her voice to cover

the sound of his movements. "Put the rifle down, and maybe the Parks

Service can get some kind of arbitrator in to resurvey the land and

reroute that road."

Dan O'Brian might have had his own ideas about that but he kept quiet,

for which Kate was profoundly thankful.

It didn't do any good. "You go to hell," Cheryl said tightly. "This has

gone way beyond some arbitrator." The muscles in her shoulders tensed,

the barrel of the rifle began to rise, and in that moment Old Sam

Dementieff lunged forward to grab hold with both hands, gnarled knuckles

gleaming against the dark metal.

Cheryl was around five foot ten, weighed in at 160 pounds and

203 was a hale and hearty forty years old. Sam was five foot one,

weighed maybe 100 pounds with his boots on and had at least forty years

on Cheryl, but he had a grip like the big claw on a king crab and he

hung on like grim death as Cheryl tried to throw him off. The barrel

swung first to the left and then to the right and then back again, this

time all the way around in a circle so that it pulled Old Sam into a

smart trot.

Kate and Bernie both took a step forward, but Old Sam's palms were

sweaty and his grip slid down the barrel and off, right over the sight,

which must have been fairly painful. Centrifugal force did the rest: Old

Sam, moving by then at a medium gallop, slammed into Ralph Estes's back,

which caused Ralph's gut to slam into the bar. Rudely awakened, Ralph

sat up with a disbelieving snort, turned green and blew chunks across

the bar, showering Dan and Amy with predigested popcorn and beer. It was

as efficient an example of projectile vomiting as an admiring Kate had

ever seen, but then she was out of the line of fire.

Cheryl, momentarily stunned, was motionless for one second too long,

just long enough for the basketball fans to switch sports and sweep down

in a group tackle. She fought hard, letting out a primal scream that Kay

must have heard outside and correctly interpreted, because when Kate

crashed through the front door and skidded to a halt in the middle of

the parking lot, all she saw were the taillights of Wayne's old

International bouncing down the road to Niniltna.

Kate swore in disgust and was turning to climb back up the steps to

Bernie's front door when it burst open and Cheryl came flying out. She

knocked Kate flat, left the footprint of a size-nine shoe on Kate's

chest and made tracks for an ancient and filthy white Econoine van.

Kate sat up, only to be knocked flat for the second time that evening by

the Grosdidier flying squad in hot pursuit. The door to the Econoline

slammed, the engine started and the van fishtailed out of the parking

lot and onto the road, moving at about the same pace as the now

long-gone truck.

204

The Grosdidiers stamped and kicked and cursed, and only belatedly

remembered Kate, still prone at the bottom of the Roadhouse's front

porch trying to catch her breath. They stood around in a circle peering

down at her, identical expressions of gathering concern on their nearly

identical faces. "Are you okay, Kate?" Peter said, stretching out a hand.

Her breath returned with a great whoosh and she took in grateful gulps

of cool night air. Ignoring Peter's hand, she got to her feet, wincing a

little on the way up. "I hate breakup," she said, very quietly but with

great feeling.

"She is hurt, guys," Luke said in an odd voice. "Look." He pointed.

Everyone looked, including Kate. Her right biceps was soaked in blood,

and she became aware of a throbbing ache in the same area.

"Holy shit," Peter blurted, and the Four Musketeers exploded into action.

"Help her up the stairs!"

"Pressure, we've got to apply pressure directly to the wound!"

"Antiseptic, we need antiseptic!"

"Shock! She's going to get shocky!"

"We need to lay her down, put her feet up!"

Four pairs of hands reached for her.

"No!" Kate yelped. "I'm fine! Really! It's no problem. Don't touch that

arm, Luke!"

Johnny said earnestly, "It's okay, Kate. We're just trying to help."

"I know," she said, still fending them off. "And I appreciate it. But

please don't. I'm begging you. Please." The stairs rocked gently beneath

her feet. Wet mud seeped through her shirt to her skin. Her left knee

thought about giving. She strengthened it with a mental threat. "I'm

fine, guys. Really. I'm fine." She turned and took the steps at a slow

limp, followed at close range by a fourGrosdidier escort.

Inside, Bernie was surveying the shambles of his bar. He closed

205 his eyes and shook his head. "Breakup," he said with loathing.

Resentfully, he cracked the seal on a new bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold.

The withered, slightly yellow middle finger floated down through the

amber liquid to rest gently on the bottom.

Mutt left a handful of hair in Bobby's fist and bounded over to Kate,

placing her paws on Kate's chest. Kate would have fallen right over if

Paul, bringing up a close rear, hadn't slapped both hands on her

shoulders. A rough tongue slurped the side of Kate's face, once, a

second time, followed by an inquiring yip.

"I'm okay, girl," Kate said, not at all sure that was the case. "I'm all

right. Settle down now."

Jim reholstered his pistol, which he had never fired. His eyes narrowed

on Kate. "Is that blood?"

"I caught one in the arm," she muttered, sitting down heavily. "It just

creased me. You got something I can tie it up with, Bernie?"

"Sure," Bernie said, long-suffering. "I got nothing better to do with my

linen inventory." He produced a clean square of worn cotton sheeting,

and the four Grosdidiers jumped forward as one.

"Hold it!" Kate barked. They halted, identical expressions of

disappointment on their faces. Kate handed the cloth to Bobby and sat

down so he could reach her.

Behind them furniture shifted as tables and chairs were righted. The

back door opened and the quilting bee filed back inside in effortless

dignity. Auntie Joy and Auntie Vi saw the blood on Kate's arm and

hurried over to exclaim and offer Bobby advice. Bernie handed out broom

and dustpan, and someone dropped change into the jukebox. The first song

to play was, appropriately enough, Jimmy Buffett's "Boat Drinks," which

made everyone laugh, a little shakily, and feel better.

"Doesn't look too bad," Bobby said, tearing the cloth into two strips.

"Bullet or glass?"

He scrutinized the wound. "If you made me pick, I'd choose

206 glass." He looked at her and smiled, without much more humor than

Mutt showed baring her teeth. "Another battle scar for you, Shugak."

"Yeah," she said, closing her eyes for a moment, "now I can strip my

sleeves and show my scars with the best of you."

"Whatever." He folded one of the strips into a pad and used the other to

tie the pad to her arm, his hands deft and gentle. It smarted, and Kate

winced. When he was done she said to Bernie, "You got some aspirin?"

He produced an economy-size bottle of Bayer. At her look, he said,

"After the last two days, you don't think I need this much aspirin to

run this place?" Kate took four and washed them down with warm Seven-Up.

"That's twice, Kate," Bobby said, his outward calm belied by the rage

simmering beneath. "That's twice those bitches have taken their best

shot at Dinah." They hadn't been shooting only at Dinah, but under the

circumstances Kate respected his tunnel vision and didn't comment.

"They've managed to clip you both times."

"Not to mention what they've done to my bar," Bernie growled.

"Not to mention," Bobby agreed. "Maybe it's time for a little executive

action, you know?"

"Kate?" Jim said, studiously polite.

"Yes, Jim?"

He had replaced his hat, adjusting it so the brim formed a level line

just above his eyes, which were steady and very, very cold. The bullet

hole through the crown, above and just a little off center of the gold

braid tie, lent a certain emphasis to his calm, precisely spaced words.

"Would you drive me out to the Kreugers' and the Jeppsens' homesteads,

please? I'm afraid I don't know exactly where they are."

"What are you going to do, once you're there?"

"Gee, I don't know," Jim said, descending momentarily into mild sarcasm.

"Arrest them?"

"What for?"

"I'll think of something," he said, very dry.

207 Bobby's roar was back, with interest. "Yeah, attempted murder kind

of leaps to mind!"

The wound on Kate's arm throbbed painfully. She looked past the trooper

to see Mark Stewart standing very close to Jackie Webber. His chin was

up, his shoulders back, the rangy, youthful body held gracefully erect.

His clothes fit well, his face was clean-shaven, his smile swift and

charming. He was a looker, and he knew it. He was accustomed to the

adulation of the female of the species, and expected it.

His eyes met hers with easy, unworried self-possession.

He smiled.

Something inside her clicked into place.

Something else snapped in two.

It was the last straw. It was the final nail, it was too much on the

plate, it was too many irons in the fire. It was jet engines falling out

of the sky, it was bear charges, it was plane crashes, it was bodies

revealed by melting snow, it was wives shooting at their husbands and

too-heavy duties assumed too soon and it was murder most foul and it was

overload, it was too much, it was breakup, that was all, the breakup of

winter, the breakdown of marriage, of the social fabric, not to mention

the very fabric of modern technology itself, and there was no shelter

from the fallout.

Kate felt disoriented, frayed at the edges, and in self-defense she

withdrew, took a step back, out of herself. It changed her perspective,

as if she were perched on her own shoulder.

"At the very least, aggravated assault," Jim added. "With intent. So

let's go."

Kate's second self whispered in her own ear. "I've got a better idea,"

she said.

Bobby was inspecting Dinah for wounds over her exasperated protests when

the tone of Kate's voice got through to him. His head snapped around.

"Kate?"

The second self whispered again. Kate got to her feet and smiled across

the room at Mark Stewart. "Mr. Stewart? Would you like to come with me?"

She sounded like Mae inviting Cary to come up and see her

208 sometime, like Circe convincing Odysseus to stay an extra year on

Aeaea, like Eve encouraging Adam to take just one bite.

Dan sighed.

Bernie shivered.

Jim Chopin, not a fanciful man, felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

"Jesus, Kate," Bobby muttered.

"Down, boys," Dinah said, and wondered if Kate was aware of the power

she had, when she bothered to use it.

Jackie Webber gave Kate a dirty look.

As the events of the past forty-eight hours-of the past year- had

demonstrated, Mark Stewart was not a stupid man. Careful, methodical, a

planner, he was a man who did nothing on impulse, a man with no nerves

to speak of and no conscience to bother him after the fact. He had to

know what Kate suspected, why the trooper had asked him to return to the

mine, that they had learned at least some of the truth and guessed at

the rest. But they had no proof, and as long as he continued to say as

little as possible, they never would have. It would be foolish to go

anywhere but back to Anchorage by the first available transport, and

sheer madness to accompany this woman anywhere else.

But he was still a man who saw himself reflected in every woman he met,

and the challenge in Kate's invitation made his hunting instincts sit up

and howl.

As she had been certain they would. "I think you might enjoy it," she

added, and smiled, a lush, lavish smile that promised him everything.

"Kate," Bobby repeated, this time a wealth of warning in the single word.

Her second self stopped her ears. "Stay," she said to Mutt, and

sauntered to the door. She turned to look over her shoulder at Stewart,

and smiled again. "You coming?"

No fool, Mark Stewart wasn't a coward, either.

And she was only a woman, after all.

He picked up her gauntlet and followed her into the night.

209

The road wasn't much more than a tractor trail, full of deep ruts,

yawning potholes, treacherous glaciation and the occasional malevolent

washout. It didn't help that it was now full dark before moonrise, but

by that time Kate's second self had firm hold of the scruff of her neck

and was whipping her unrelentingly onward. Lights flashed in the

rearview mirror, showing one vehicle faint but pursuing. Branches

scraped against metal. Tires cracked through thin layers of ice to

splash into puddles beneath. The cab of the truck rocked back and forth.

In the passenger seat Mark Stewart rode silently, one hand braced

against the dash. A thread of tension, taut and humming, quivered

between the two of them, but he didn't speak. Neither did she. The

challenge had been made and accepted, and they were both infected with a

kind of reckless madness.

210 Twenty minutes later the convoy pulled up in front of a snug little

cabin next to a two-story barnlike structure at the base of a hill.

Halfway up the hill was the timbered entrance to a mine; from the

entrance ran a wooden sluice that was falling apart, one twelve-foot

plank at a time. The sluice ended in a creek, next to where an old steam

engine stood, shedding flakes of rust into the water.

Bobby's truck pulled up next to her, and people literally poured out of

both doors. Kate walked past them as if they weren't there, marching up

to the large building like she owned it and tugging at the doors. They

gave but wouldn't open all the way. Her second self noticed the Yale

padlock hanging from the hasp, and whispered to her that the key was

probably in the cabin.

The cabin door was unlocked, the cabin itself unoccupied, Mac Devlin

probably away on a mission to strip-mine an especially scenic part of

the Park. Inside, a key rack hung from the wall next to the door. She

sorted through them until she found a Yale key and brought it back to

the barnlike structure. The key slid smoothly into the padlock and

turned without a hitch. The padlock snapped open, and she folded the

double doors back one at a time.

Her second self began to hum the "Hallelujah Chorus."

It was a D-6 Caterpillar tractor. The body was a bright and gleaming

yellow, the ten-foot blade a ton of shining silver steel. Two, almost

three years before, Mac Devlin had been enjoined from excavating mining

claims on Park lands, grandfathered or otherwise, and since then this

gleaming monster had not been used for its original purpose. Mac never

failed in the hope that one day restrictions would ease, or in cursing

the memory of Park Ranger Mark Miller, whose murder had been, in Mac's

view, timely, if not downright providential. In the meantime, the Cat

paid for its keep by building access roads and digging foundations for

construction.

The perfect weapon, and in excellent repair. Kate checked the gas tank.

Full. Her opinion of Mac Devlin rose. She went back to

211 the cabin, traded the garage key for the ignition key and clambered

up into the Cat's roomy seat.

Mark Stewart stood next to the right tread. She held out an imperious

hand. "Well, Mr. Stewart?"

A smile spread slowly across his face, a smile that, again, physically

jarred her with its appeal. It was almost enough to kick her second self

out of the driver's seat, but not quite. "It's Mark," he said, and took

her hand, following her up.

Lined up outside the barn, waiting for what they hoped might be a little

less than Armageddon, Bobby, Dinah, Dan, Bernie and Chopper Jim watched

Kate and Stewart settle into the cab of the Cat.

"I want to make one thing perfectly clear," the trooper said. "Which

is?" Bobby said. "I am not here."

"Shit, Jim," Dan said, "none of us are."

The key in the master switch turned easily and just in time Kate

remembered to preheat for thirty seconds. The engine turned over on the

first try and a cloud of black smoke issued from the exhaust. A great

throaty bawl rattled the rafters in the roof and the teeth in Kate's

head. Her heart thumped in her breast, and there was such a rush of

blood to all the extremities of her body that she felt even more

light-headed than she had before. All she could feel was the shuddering,

rumbling beast beneath her, straining at the leash. The sense of power

that comes with sitting up on a Caterpillar tractor is absolute. At the

controls of 31,000 pounds of metal with the power of 140 horses behind

it, you become unstoppable, invincible, omnipotent. In a day you can

alter the course of a river, in a week you can demolish an entire

forest, in a month you can move a mountain. You can reshape your entire

physical world with the shift of a lever, the roll of a track, the bite

of a bright, sharp blade. It is the ultimate toy in the biggest sandbox

of them all.

With a D-6 Caterpillar tractor and enough gas, you might even be able to

demolish a blood feud by building a road to nowhere

212 and back again. In the driver's seat of this growling yellow

monster, neither Kate nor her second self had any doubts. She reached

for the master clutch. There wasn't one.

Kate had driven a Cat only once before in her life, the summer she was

sixteen, when Abel had apprenticed her and his third oldest son to a

miner outside Nizina for casual labor. The miner had been in the process

of shoving the bottom of a creek down the maw of a sluice box with a

D-5. At first he wasn't going to let Kate drive it, but he needed Seth

to cut supports for the tunnel he was digging into the hill above the

creek, so, mumbling and cursing and spitting a lot of tobacco juice, he

put Kate up on the D-5. She learned to drive it and drive it well,

because the old miner had a habit of shoving her off the seat and taking

over himself whenever he was displeased with her performance. It

wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't usually been in the middle of

the creek at the time, but then she wouldn't have learned so well or so

quickly if they'd been on dry ground, either. Kate really did hate

getting her feet wet.

Cat skinning was not a skill forgotten in a moment, or even in years,

but an old D-5 was not a new D-6, and it took some time to figure out

the controls, long enough for some of her audience to become restive.

"Kate," Bobby said, raising his voice over the sound of the engine,

"maybe this isn't such a good idea."

"Yeah, Kate," Dan said, "maybe we ought to-"

Jim said nothing, because he wasn't there.

Dinah said nothing, because she knew it wouldn't do any good.

, Bernie said nothing, because he was beginning to have an idea

of what Kate was going to do, approved Wholeheartedly and

wasn't about to do anything that might cause her to think twice.

Her second self scoffed at all of them and instructed Kate to pay no

attention. She obeyed without question. It seemed there was no master

clutch on this Cat. A pedal in front of her right foot acted as a

decelerator and allowed her to change gears. There were

213 still two tracks, right and left, and two steering levers, one for

each, and two brakes, one for each. The hydraulics on the blade control

lever took some getting used to and after she dropped the blade for the

second time she was glad Mac hadn't put a floor under his tractor shed.

She stepped on the decelerator, raised the lockout bar to put the tracks

in gear and let out the decelerator. The wide metal tracks began rolling

beneath the bright yellow body of the machine, right out the door. She

found a switch for the lights. In the sudden glare people scattered like

marbles.

"Shugak," Bobby yelled, "you are out of your fucking mind!"

The Cat rolled forward, in a direct line for Mandy's truck. After all it

had been through during the last two days, Kate could almost hear it

give a pitiful moan. At the last possible moment she stopped grabbing

for the nonexistent master clutch, stepped on the decelerator, thought

her way into a left turn, pulled back a little on the left track lever

and pushed forward a little on the right lever, took her foot off the

decelerator and started forward again. The Cat swerved abruptly away

from the truck and onto the tractor trail leading from the mine, leaving

no more than a six-inch gouge down the right-hand side of the pickup.

Not fatal, not even serious, and she accepted her second self's

congratulations with pride.

Everyone else ran for the trucks. They all thought she was insane but

nobody wanted to miss a minute of it, not even Chopper Jim, who removed

his hat and jacket and tie so as to be less identifiable as the

enforcement arm of the law.

Choking from the exhaust, deafened by the engine, eyes straining to see

beyond the floodlights mounted on the cab, Kate took the Cat down the

tractor trail that separated Devlin's mine from the road and roared into

an enthusiastic left turn that doubled the size of the intersection with

one swipe.

The light-headed feeling persisted. She laughed once, a mad sound that

should have alarmed her but didn't. It should have

214 alarmed Stewart, too; instead, he laughed back at her, a husky,

deep-voiced sound of pure male enjoyment. "Jesus," he said. "You really

are something."

A responsive shiver traveled up her spine. The aches and pains of her

various wounds were hushed. She didn't question what put her in the

Cat's seat, she didn't try to rationalize inviting Stewart along for the

ride, she didn't attempt to talk herself out of any of it. She couldn't

bring Carol Stewart back to life; worse, she couldn't bring Carol's

murderer to justice. Ben and Cindy Bingley might kill each other before

the solution she had set in motion this evening reached them. She

couldn't unwreck George's plane, she couldn't give Margery and Richard

Baker the society babe daughter they had always wanted, she couldn't

make the jet engine not fall off the 747, she couldn't make spring be

over and summer begin.

She couldn't bring her grandmother back to lighten her own increasingly

heavy load.

But there was something she could do to make things a little safer for

her family and friends and neighbors, to restore a little order to the

Park.

She laughed again.

Stewart's deep voice was amused. "Ride 'em cowgirl."

A bright, slashing smile was her reply. His grip tightened on the dash.

It was two miles up the old railroad roadbed to the turnoff to the

homestead area, and along the way Kate practiced moving the enormous

steel blade on the front of the machine up and down, remembering as she

did most of the vocabulary required to skin a Cat, some of which would

have put George Perry to the blush. She even tried her hand at grading a

section of the roadbed, digging up fifty feet of it before she got the

hang of just where the bottom edge of the blade was in relation to the

controls.

"She really is out of her fucking mind," Bobby said, wrestling his

pickup over one of the speed bumps Kate had inadvertently left behind.

215 Dinah and Dan did not disagree.

Jim, right behind him in Kate's truck with Bernie riding shotgun, had an

inconvenient attack of responsibility and wondered if perhaps, after

all, he ought to stop this before it went any farther. "Think I should

stop her?" he asked Bernie.

"Think you can?" Bernie said.

They looked at each other. "Nah," they said in unison.

The turnoff to the homestead area appeared and Kate cautiously

negotiated the Cat onto it. By then it was purring beneath her hands,

the purr of a Bengal tiger, one prepared to turn on her the minute her

attention was distracted, but a purr nonetheless.

She remembered pretty much how the homestead area was laid out and who

owned what from the flyer the state had mailed everyone in the Park. The

sixteen forty-acre lots were crazy-quilted over a short, broad valley

and a gradual rise ending in a small plateau. The plateau dropped off to

the Kanuyaq River, into which all the streams in the area drained. The

Jeppsens were lower down and on the left, the Kreugers a little higher

and on the right. The only place their properties touched was northeast

corner to southwest corner. According to the terms of the sale, the

disputed road was supposed to have right-of-way over both borders, as

was standard in state land transactions-Kate was pretty sure that it was

in fact the law-but the Jeppsens had in their infinite wisdom decided to

deny the Kreugers access to their own property; that is to say, access

over the portion that belonged to them, right of way or no. This would

have entailed the Kreugers building an entirely new road from some other

access point, an access point located on Park land, a plan to which Dan

O'Brian could be expected to take instant and vociferous exception.

It was obvious where the Jeppsens' land ended and the Kreugers' began,

even in the lurching light of the Cat's floods. As soon as the one-lane

track crossed into Kreuger territory, the scenery changed from overgrown

Alaskan bush to near lunar desolation. Kate stepped on the decelerator

and paused to size up the situation, the Cat rumbling a protest.

216 The Jeppsens had dug holes big enough to float a boat, and a

winter's worth of snow had melted inside them, the water in several

coming up almost to the top of the Cat's treads. Breakup, with its

twenty-four-hour freeze-and-thaw cycle, had nibbled around the edges of

the original holes and doubled the size of some of them. Entire trees,

not an asset frivolously uprooted in the Bush, had been felled across

the track, trunks splintered by an inexpert but indisputably thorough

hand. Several crooked manmade ditches traversed the width of the road,

and in one stretch the floodlights winked off a scattering of metallic

objects. Kate didn't stop; if someone had sprinkled a handful of screws

or nails-galvanized steel, from the silver reflection-across the path,

it wouldn't matter to the Cat's metal treads. She hoped.

Even in a Caterpillar tractor the ride was rough and rocky, as much

because of the attempts made at repair as the initial sabotage. The

Kreugers had used the felled trees and what loose, unfrozen gravel they

could find to fill in the holes, rerouting the track around the ones

that weren't stable enough to drive over, but it looked as though they

were fighting a desperate rearguard action against a superior and much

more destructive force, with little hope of victory.

"No wonder they went to the mattresses," Kate said out loud, a fine

phrase she'd picked up from Mario Puzo.

Stewart chuckled, and again she felt that shiver of response ripple up

her spine. She dropped the Cat's blade with a solid CHUNK! and let out

the decelerator.

The enormous blade scooped up mud, snow, dirt, boulders and trees

regardless of size, weight or shape, filled in holes and tamped them

down again beneath the crushing weight of the tracks. This continued all

the way up the gentle incline past the turnoff for the Jeppsens'

homestead and well into the Kreugers' front yard, where Kay and Wayne

Kreuger, one holding a rifle, shirt bulging from the bandaged shoulder

beneath it, the other with a bandage around his head, stood on their

front porch, faces white with shock.

217 Kate swept into the yard, taking out a corner of garden fence along

the way, and remembered just in time where the decelerator was. The Cat

rolled to a halt, shuddering and shaking unhappily in neutral, tugging

at the reins. Raising her voice over the noise of the engine, she

shouted, "This is the end of it, do you hear? You've got a road now.

This fight between you and the Jeppsens is over, as of today."

Wayne, a stocky, olive-skinned man with a jutting chin and a scowl,

recovered from his shock and yelled, "That depends on the Jeppsens! They

started it!"

"I'll take care of the Jeppsens! You've got your road! Put away those

frigging guns and start acting like civilized human beings, or I'll be

back with this Cat and I won't stop until this valley has been returned

to its natural state!"

The Cat made known its intentions to start forward again, with or

without Kate, and she grabbed the controls and hung on for dear life.

The right side of the blade ripped the rear bumper off the old

International pickup parked in front of the porch and the tractor swept

out of the Kreugers' yard and back down the trail, nearly sideswiping

Bobby's blue pickup.

It was a lot smoother going back, Kate noted with satisfaction. Her

second self radiated warm approval.

The turnoff for the Jeppsens came so fast she almost missed it, and it

was considerably wider than it had been once the Cat passed through. She

kept the blade down, mowing down everything that got in the way,

including a raspberry patch, an empty drum of thirty-weight and a boy's

bike, right into the Jeppsens' front yard.

Stewart laughed again. He sounded excited, even aroused, and why not? He

would revel in outlawry, in destruction.

In murder.

As Kate herself was reveling in this very moment. The realization should

have stopped her, at the very least given her pause. Instead, she pushed

both levers forward with a cry that raised an answering yell from the

man next to her.

The sound of the Cat's 140 horses must have been audible for

218 miles, because the floodlights caught Joe and Cheryl Jeppsen

standing on their front porch with much the same expression on their

faces as the Kreugers had had on theirs. The Cat gave Kate just enough

time to notice that Cheryl's twin shiners had achieved a yellowish

purple of truly historic hue.

More practiced now, she drew the tractor around in a magnificent sweep,

barely nicking the bottom stair of the porch steps, and stepped once

more on the decelerator. The engine idled and the yellow monster slowed

to a reluctant halt, its menacing growl muted.

"What the hell do you think you're doing, Kate?" Joe yelled. He was a

thin, bony man with a cadaverous face and dark, burning eyes. One calf

was in a cast, one hand held a shotgun. Cheryl had a rifle. The edge of

the lights reached just far enough to illuminate Petey on the throne of

the one-holer outhouse, reading a copy of Road and Track. Stunned, he

gaped through the open door.

"I think I'm building a road," Kate yelled back. "You people have taken

enough shots at me in the last forty-eight hours to run out my luck for

a lifetime! You put those goddam guns away and start trying to get along

with your neighbors!"

"They started it! They-"

"I don't give a rat's ass who started it! It stops today!"

Forever after, Kate would swear she hadn't meant to do it, that she'd

once again forgotten the lack of a master switch and the substitution of

a decelerator, not to mention that it was pitch black at the time and

she couldn't really see where she was going. No one ever believed her,

but whether she meant to or not, the Cat took the turn too wide. Petey,

with a front-row seat, so to speak, recovered from his stupefaction in

time to leap for safety, although it was difficult for him to move very

fast with his jeans around his knees. His ass flashed white in the Cat's

mercilessly bright halogen floodlights, denim hobbling his steps as he

hopped awkwardly out of the way, as the wide steel blade mowed down the

thin walls, the tracks crunched over them and the aromatic fragrance of

the outhouse filled the clearing.

219 To Kate's profound relief the Cat did not founder in the hole left

behind. She pulled back on the left lever and pushed on the right and

the Cat turned left. Joe and Cheryl, joined by Petey, pants up now,

stood watching in open-mouthed silence as she passed in review before

them and rolled out of sight. No one shot at her, probably, she decided,

because of the two truckloads of people following her, not that that had

ever stopped the Jeppsens before.

The air was cool on her cheek. A few stars were beginning to peer warily

through the torn wisps of April clouds. The now full moon emerged from

behind Angqaq and threw the peaks of the Quilaks into jagged relief

against the eastern horizon. Deaf from the noise of the engine, hoarse

from shouting over it, Kate was exhilarated and drunk with power.

"I love breakup," she told the full moon rising up over the Quilaks.

The noise of the engine overwhelmed the words, and Kate half stood and

shouted out to the entire Park, "I love breakup!"

A warm, firm hand settled on the back of her neck. She didn't so much as

jump, merely turned her head to meet Stewart's eyes. He smiled at her,

his teeth a white slash in the dark cab. She smiled back.

If anything, the trip back to the Cat's garage was even faster and more

reckless than the trip out. Kate knocked down three cottonwoods and

graded a five-hundred-foot section of roadbed along the way. She pulled

into Mac Devlin's yard with a grand flourish and drew to halt in front

of the open doors of the garage.

She didn't turn the Cat's engine off, liking its dangerous growl, as if

at any moment it might throw off the leash and head out on its own.

The warm, heavy hand on the back of her neck tightened. She felt rather

than saw the almost feline ripple of awareness that ran over him, and

smiled to herself.

"That's how we take care of problems in the Park, Mr. Stewart," she

said, leaning back against the seat, and with the words

220 her several selves merged back into one. Her mind felt extremely

clear. She turned toward the man seated next to her, her left hand

resting casually on the gearshift, her other moving to lie almost

naturally along the back of the seat, causing his to drop away. A breeze

rippled through the tops of the trees, and in the distance they could

hear the sound of the two trucks laboring down the track toward them.

"We have a problem, and we take care of it. We don't bother the troopers

if we don't have to. We try not to have to."

"So I see." His voice was thick, and he shifted in his seat. He began to

lean toward her.

"The way I figure it happened is this," she said.

He paused, his face in shadow.

"When you found out your wife was screwing around, you decided to teach

her and her lover a lesson they would never forget. The last lesson they

would ever learn." She began to sound less and less like the Lorelei and

more and more like the big trooper with the cold blue eyes. "And you

decided to teach it to them where you were surest of your ground."

He didn't move, and she couldn't make out his expression. "So, last

fall, you brought her lover up here, probably on a hunt. And you left

him here to die."

She raised her left hand and tucked back a stray lock of hair that had

come free during their wild ride. The motion pulled the fabric of shirt

and wind breaker tight against her breast, and she saw his eyes drop

involuntarily. If he were standing in front of a firing squad and one of

the shooters was a woman, he would die taking her measurements with his

eyes. Kate knew a sudden sympathy for his dead wife.

She let the hand lying on the back of the seat slip down to his thigh.

He started. "And then you went back to town, and you watched your wife

grow frantic at the loss of her lover, and you were probably just

sympathetic enough to keep her from leaving you altogether." Something

in the quality of his silence changed,

221 and she said quickly, "Or perhaps you smothered her with affection.

It's always fun to make someone who has wronged you feel guilty."

She felt a muscle flex beneath her hand, and was satisfied. "Of course.

So that this spring, you could seduce her into coming to the Park for a

second honeymoon. To get away from it all, I think you said yesterday.

And you took her up to the mine. For a picnic lunch, you told her."

Her voice was like sandpaper, scraping at all the rough edges. "You

killed her there, and you made enough of a mess to fetch every bear

within ten square miles."

She gave his thigh a gentle squeeze, and dropped her voice to a raspy

whisper. "And then you came looking for me, or someone like me, to tell

your sorry story to." She paused, waiting.

He wanted to test her. She could see it in the set of his shoulders,

feel it in the tension of his thigh, could almost taste it on the tip of

her tongue.

The wind was increasing in volume, a real chinook by the warm feel of

it, the leading edge of the storm brewing in the Gulf. A cloud crossed

the face of the moon. The trees rustled, snow melted from branches like

rain, and a chunk of ice slid suddenly from the cabin to crash to the

ground beneath.

It broke his spell. He reached for the hand on his thigh and flattened

it against his crotch. He was hard, but then she'd known he would be.

"You can't prove anything."

"No, I can't," she said. The first ray from Bobby's headlights hit the

clearing. She tightened her hand and he gasped. "I don't have to prove

anything, Stewart. I know what happened. I've told you because I can't

bear the thought that you think you're so smart you've committed the

perfect crime and gotten away with it. You haven't."

Her hand tightened further. "Hey," he said, alarmed, and tried to pry

her loose.

She squeezed, hard, with her right hand and with her left

222 grabbed for a handful of his throat, her nails sinking deep into his

skin.

Stewart's whole body jolted with shock, and the first inkling of how

much he had underestimated her. This was not how he had imagined this

prolonged period of sexual titillation would end. The shock was closely

followed by fury, with the sudden realization that she'd played him like

a harp to just this end, but the fury was quickly supplanted by fear.

Her grip was unbelievably, terrifyingly strong for such a small woman.

He went limp, like an animal playing dead so the bear won't be

interested. It didn't work all that well with bears, as he had cause to

know, but it was the only option he had.

It wasn't working with this woman, either. Kate chuckled, and he

shivered at the sound. She tightened her right hand, and he whimpered.

She leaned closer, her lips brushing his ear, and dropped her voice.

"You think with your dick, Stewart. Not all that impressive an organ, is

it? After all, it led you here."

That stung his pride, and he choked and tried to twist away. She

tightened her grip again. He was still erect, he didn't seem to be able

to help it, but the skin of his throat gave beneath her nails, and a

warm trickle of fluid ran between her fingers. "This is how we take care

of problems in the Park, Stewart," she repeated. "We see something

wrong, we fix it. Don't come back here, or I'll fix all your problems,

once and for all." She squeezed again. "Got it?"

He gave a half-gasping, half-choking kind of gurgle. She took that as a

yes. "Good boy," she said, for all the world as if she were praising a

not very bright pet dog. She smiled at him for the last time and, one

hand on his crotch, one at his throat, raised him up and pitched him out

of the cab of the Cat.

He fell hard, and lay still for a moment, long enough for the trucks to

slam to a halt and empty their occupants into the yard. "Jesus Christ,

Shugak," Bobby said, trying to unfold his chair and stay between Dinah

and Stewart at the same time.

"He's not dead, is he?" Dan said, aghast.

223 "No," Jim said with more assurance than he felt, and was immensely

relieved when Stewart staggered to his feet.

When Jim would have helped him to one of the trucks, Kate's voice, a low

rasp of sound, came clearly over the sound of the Cat's idle.

"No. Let him walk."

Jim's hand dropped as he stared up at the dark figure in the cab.

The full moon was up high enough for the rest of them to watch in

silence as Stewart limped shakily out of the clearing, shoulders

hunched, hands clasped protectively over his crotch, something dark

staining the front of his shirt.

He bore only the very slightest resemblance to the tall, good- looking,

confident ladies' man who had left the Roadhouse two hours before.

224

The next morning she finished her taxes and made an early trip in to the

post office to drop her tax form into the mailbox, a whole day before

the deadline. She exited the post office feeling efficient and virtuous

and every inch the franchised American, and very nearly saluted the flag.

She got the hell out of Dodge unambushed by anybody bent on drafting her

to do good and returned to the homestead to rebuild the base of the

couch with plywood and two-by-fours. There was no more of the blue

canvas she'd used for upholstering fabric when she'd built it years

before, so she improvised with a piece of olive drab Army blanket. She

hated sewing; consequently her stitches were small and neat, so as to

get the job done as fast as possible and not have to go back and redo it

later. Finished, it looked like a splotch of pond scum floating on a

blue lake. Or, if

225 she squinted, maybe a lily pad. She'd have to check the Sears

catalog for new material and reupholster the whole thing. Oh. Right.

There was no more Sears catalog. Great.

She set up the ladder again and sanded the Spackle on the ceiling patch.

There was a little less than a gallon of the flat white latex paint in

the garage, left over from the last time she'd painted the interior of

the cabin, more than enough to cover the area involved. She had been

right; the paint had faded and she had to paint the whole ceiling to

make it match. Fortunately, the cabin was only twenty-five feet square

and the loft ceiling was easily reached. At noon she took down the

ladder for what she devoutly hoped was the last time and trundled

everything back out through the slush to the garage.

The chinook had blown itself out by six that morning, leaving

temperatures in the upper forties and climbing. The roar of runoff down

the creek had increased and she climbed down the bank, shotgun in hand,

to assess the boulder situation. It looked solid, and a good thing, too,

because there would be no muscling of rocks against the force of that

water. Her judgment may have been influenced by the rustling of brush

she heard across the creek, and the infrequent grunts and groans of her

local grizzly, letting her know he was there.

The Park was just lousy with bears this spring.

Bad news for Carol Stewart.

The grizzly gave another grumble of discontent and Mutt barked sharply

from the top of the bank. "All right, all right, I'm going," she told

the grizzly. "All right, all right, I'm coming," she told Mutt.

There was no salvaging the Isuzu. Even the metal of the wheels was bent.

She started up one of the four-wheelers and towed the corpse to the

garbage dump a thousand feet from the clearing. She'd bury it as soon as

the ground thawed. At least until then it would be out of her sight.

A hammer and a fistful of nails and the cache was almost as good as new.

Two of the four legs were intact and quickly reattached. She fetched the

axe from the garage and shoved through

226

the brush to a stand of slender birch about a quarter of a mile from the

cabin. She found two of the right diameter and length, and felled them

and hauled them back to the clearing, where she stripped them of bark

and let them sit. It took fifteen minutes and a quarter of a can of Goop

to clean the sap from her hands.

"Oh to be anywhere else, now that spring is here." Mutt, curled up in a

patch of sunlight on the one dry piece of ground in the clearing, gave

her a quizzical look and tucked her nose back beneath her tail.

Like burying the truck, setting the cache back up would have to wait for

the ground to thaw. She checked the meat in the root cellar beneath the

garage. It was still mostly frozen. She pulled out a package of caribou

backstrap steaks for dinner. It was too much for her to eat alone, but

she felt she had earned a treat, and she didn't want her tenderest cut

of last fall's moose to thaw and spoil.

After lunch she pushed the snow machine into the garage and was draining

the tank of its remaining fuel so as to begin work on a patch when Mutt

gave a sharp warning bark from the yard. "What now?" she asked the

rafters, and went to see.

It was Bickford. He apologized for not making it out sooner. The thick

manila envelope held fifty thousand dollars exactly, in cash, half in

hundreds, half in fifties. Kate went dizzy at the sight of so much green

and hoped it didn't show.

She made Bickford wait while she counted it. He made her sign a receipt.

Honors about even, he departed, and she sincerely hoped that was the

last she was going to see of anyone for a while.

She went inside and sat down at the kitchen table to admire the cash and

think warm fuzzy thoughts of Mr. and Mrs. Baker. After a nice long while

she tucked the money back in the envelope and got out pen and paper to

write two letters, the first a list of books to Rachel at Twice Told

Tales in Anchorage, the second a list of cassette tapes to Susan at

Metro Music, also in Anchorage.

She peeked in the manila envelope again. Surely there was enough there

to finance a trip into town. She could get a new tape

227 deck and a supply of batteries at Costco, have a Reuben at the

Downtown Deli, check out the latest in snow machines.

Spend quality time with Jack.

Blood suddenly humming with anticipation, she added notes to Rachel and

Susan not to mail her orders, she would pick them up in person.

The second envelope had just been sealed when Mutt barked again. Kate

swore. Was she never to be left in peace?

She went to the door and beheld Bobby jouncing into the clearing on his

wheelchair, Dinah trotting along behind.

Kate frowned at her. "Take it easy, you're walking for two now, you know."

Around Mutt's enthusiastic licks of welcome-every now and then her taste

in men showed signs of improving-Bobby managed to say, "I keep telling

her," and Dinah rolled her eyes.

"You got coffee?" Bobby demanded. At her nod he roared, "Well, don't

keep us standing out here in the cold, woman, pour it out!"

It wasn't cold, it was in fact getting fairly close to the Big Five- Oh,

as the much anticipated fifty-degree mark was known, but Kate resigned

herself to the inevitable and led the way inside without comment.

When they were all around the kitchen table, Bobby stirred in creamer

with a decisive hand and fixed Kate with a piercing stare. She met it

with a bland expression. "We've been playing this game of Clue," he said.

Kate raised an eyebrow.

"And we thought we'd try out one possible solution." He looked at Dinah.

"Carol Stewart," Dinah said.

"In the Park," Bobby said.

"With a bear," Dinah said, and giggled.

Bobby looked at Kate. "Well?"

"Well what?" Kate sampled her own coffee, rejoicing in the

228

fact that she had coffee again, not to mention corn Niblets and Darigold

butter, which would go fine with tonight's backstrap. She'd better boil

up some rice, too, seeing as how it looked like she was going to have

company for dinner.

More company than she'd thought. "Hi," Dan O'Brian said from the

doorway. Behind him could be seen the distinctive outline of a

round-crowned, flat-brimmed trooper hat.

Kate sighed. "Jim, it's breakup, you have to have business somewhere in

the Park other than on my homestead."

"Kenny Ellis in Glenallen's got me covered for today," he said, stepping

inside, immaculate as always.

"Bernie coming, too?" Kate said as she poured out.

"No, he's busy, puttying up the bullet holes in the bar." Jim pulled out

a chair and sat down.

Dan found an empty Blazo box and perched on it. "We had to promise to

stop in on the way back, though, and give him the straight scoop."

They all stared at her expectantly.

"So," Bobby said.

"Carol Stewart," Dinah said. "Actually Mark, because you're supposed to

say whodunnit first."

"In the Park," Bobby said.

"With a bear," Dinah, Dan and Jim said together.

Nobody laughed this time. After a pause, Jim added, "We know he did it,

Kate. You know how. Tell."

She rubbed a hand over her face and sighed again. "I never would have

figured it out if Earlybird hadn't dropped that engine on me," she said.

"But it was the sardine that really put it all together. Finally."

"Sardine?"

"Sardine?"

"You didn't tell me about any sardine," Dan said accusingly.

"Wait a minute," Jim said. "Last night, when Viola-"

"Yes." Kate nodded. To the others she explained, "Auntie Vi

229 said Sardine was the name of the guy Carol Stewart came to the Park

with last spring. But then she said no, that wasn't right, and then she

couldn't remember what was."

Bobby thought it over and didn't get it. He said so.

"I didn't, either, at first. Then there was the shoot-out." She

fortified herself with a Fig Newton. There was a forty-eight-ounce bag

of chocolate chips in the cupboard but what with one thing and another

she had yet to get around to baking. With luck, she could seduce Jack

into baking for her, chocolate chip cookies being his specialty.

"And," Jim prodded.

"And, I've always found that flying bullets really focus my attention,

you know? I was lying there in back of the bar, and I remembered sardine

is a kind of herring."

The other four exchanged speaking glances. "Hooligan," Kate said,

unperturbed, "is also another name for herring, right?"

"Yeah," Dan said, brow furrowed, "or it's a family member, or something

like that."

"And hooligan sounds pretty close to Harrigan, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

Kate leaned back and stared at him. "Ring any bells?"

Dan stared back, bewildered. "No, I-"

"Kate-" Jim said.

"Wait a minute!" Dan said, sitting bolt upright. "Of course! Harrigan,

Nathan Harrigan! That was the name of the pilot! The one who flew

Stewart into the Park last fall!"

"Yes." Kate waited for Dan to fill in the rest of them on his first

meeting with Stewart and Stewart's pilot.

Jim's brows snapped together. "Wait a minute. You mean Nathan Harrigan,

your DB"- he pointed at Kate -"was the same guy you"- the trooper

pointed at the ranger -"saw with Mark Stewart in the Park last fall?"

Kate refrained from repeating yet again that Nathan Harrigan wasn't her

dead body, and simply nodded. "Yes. And, according

230 to Auntie Vi, Harrigan was also in the Park with Carol Stewart last

spring. According to Dan, he was back, this time with Mark, Carol's

husband, six months later." She drank coffee. "And Stewart, Dan informs

me, has had permits for moose, caribou and bear, not to mention fishing

licenses, in this game management unit for the last ten years. You were

right, Dan, he's an experienced hunter. There was no excuse for him to

go up to the mine unarmed."

"Wait a minute," Jim said. "Wait just a damn minute. Are you talking

about a double homicide here? You think Stewart killed his wife and

Harrigan, too?"

"I know he did," she said, and polished off the cookie and reached for a

second. "You said the coroner said Harrigan was an electrician in

Anchorage. Bernie says Mark Stewart is a longtime contractor, also in

Anchorage, one of the good old boys who went into business during the

oil boom in the seventies. He put up the Roadhouse back when they were

both starting out."

"I didn't know that."

"Bernie was telling us about it, day before yesterday," Bobby said.

Kate nodded. "Anyway, Anchorage isn't that big a town, so my best guess

is Harrigan probably worked for Stewart at one time or another. Probably

how Harrigan met Stewart's wife, too."

Bobby and Dinah and Dan exclaimed together, but Bobby's stentorian

bellow naturally won out. "Harrigan, who you're saying is the dead body

got found out here the day the sky fell, was screwing Carol Stewart?"

Kate nodded again. "Yeah, and right here in the Park, too. Auntie Vi

said she'd met Carol before, on a visit to the Park last spring, only

she wasn't with Mark, she was with some guy called-"

"Sardine!"

"Only she remembered by association, a sardine is a hooligan, and

hooligan sounds close enough to Harrigan."

"Let me get this straight," Jim said. "You're saying Harrigan actually

came out hunting to the same place he'd been screwing the wife of the

guy who invited him on the hunting trip?"

231 Kate shrugged. "I don't know much about Harrigan, but I do know

enough about contract hiring that he'd think there might be a job in it

if he accepted Stewart's invitation."

"He was taking an awful chance," Dan said.

"Dumb," Bobby said. "Dumb to come back to the Park with Stewart, dumb,

dumb, dumb."

Kate's smile was thin and noticeably lacking in amusement. "Stewart

probably insisted on it."

The three men didn't get it, but Dinah did. "Returning to the scene of

the crime?"

Kate nodded. "First with Harrigan, then with his wife. Rubbing their

noses in it."

They thought about that for a while. "If you're right, this guy's some

kind of sadist," Dan said.

"Some kind," Kate agreed.

Dinah shuddered.

"Dumb," Bobby insisted. "If I'd been Harrigan, I would have run a mile

from the guy."

"Maybe," Kate said. "Maybe not. You read the papers. The state economy

hasn't been the same since the pipeline years. Construction jobs are few

and far between. If he needed the work, and if he thought the hunting

trip meant work, Harrigan would want to believe Stewart knew nothing of

the affair. He'd will himself to believe it."

"You're guessing," Jim said flatly, leaning back in his chair. He

sounded disappointed.

"About all the Anchorage stuff, yes," Kate said. "Did you get a positive

ID on the body?"

Jim nodded abstractedly. "It came in this morning. It is Nathan

Harrigan. But-" He fell silent.

Kate finished her cookie. "Two wounds, the coroner said. One blow to the

head, hard enough to knock him unconscious, not hard enough to kill him.

While he was out, another blow to his leg, hard enough to break it, to

incapacitate him, so Stewart could walk away and let it look like an

accident."

232

Jim thought about it, and gave a slow nod.

"Maybe Stewart waited until Harrigan woke up, maybe he was gone when

Harrigan woke up, and so was anything Harrigan could have eaten, or used

for warmth, or for shelter. So Harrigan lay where he was and waited for

death."

Her voice lowered, her words taking on an unconscious rhythm.

"Maybe Agudar was kind, and let him slip into the long sleep in peace

with the cold of the night.

"Maybe Raven led the bear or the wolf there first.

"I don't know."

She paused. "All I know is it took a while, and during that time he knew

who, and he knew why, and Stewart wanted it that way."

The room was silent. In the distance a raven croaked at a squirrel, and

got a chatter of outrage in return.

Dan stirred. "The murder weapon?"

"I imagine the coroner's report will say a blunt instrument of some

kind." Kate looked at Chopper Jim. "Used properly and with enthusiasm,

the butt of a gun is a fine offensive weapon. They teach you how to use

one in the service, I hear. Stewart didn't need any special tools.

Enough fools out here already fall over their own guns and shoot

themselves; it doesn't take much imagination to turn one into a murder

weapon."

Dinah shivered, all trace of fun wiped from her face. "It's so- so cold."

Kate nodded. "Literally." She reached for another cookie.

Incredulously, Jim said, "Did Stewart admit all this to you last night?"

"God, no." Kate shook her head. "He's too smart for that. This guy

diagrammed the whole operation, like a military exercise. You might want

to check on that, Jim," she added dispassionately. "Be interesting to

know if he's ever seen military service, and if he did time in tactical

command."

Jim's expression was pained. He hated it when a soldier went bad.

233 "Yeah," Kate said, thinking it over some more, "he was smart enough

to take a rifle when they went up to the mine-"

"But he said-" Dan burst out.

"He lied."

"You don't know that."

"Yes," Kate said. "Yes, I do." And she did. "He's too smart not to. He

broke it down and carried it in his pack. He waited until they were out

of sight of the village, maybe pretended he heard a noise and stopped to

assemble it. Carol Stewart probably watched him do it. For their

protection, I'm sure he said. For his protection, really. So whatever he

suckered out of the woods to eat on her wouldn't turn on him." She used

a swallow of coffee to wash the bitter taste out of her mouth.

"What did he do with it?"

"He tossed it. Probably used it first to scare the bear off. We never

would have heard the shots over the noise of the road or the truck's

engine."

Dan sat up straight in his chair. "Remember, Kate, when we said we'd

called the trooper? Stewart was surprised. He didn't think anyone

official could make it to the scene so quick."

"He was probably counting on it," she agreed.

"Maybe we could go back up there," Jim said, "run a search pattern, see

if we can dig that rifle up."

"You know that nine-millimeter Cindy took out after Ben with?" At their

nods, Kate said, "She told me she pitched it into the river. Hell, it's

right there, all you have to do is step to the edge of the cliff and let

go. Stewart's rifle is probably offshore of Port Dick by now, and

probably the pack with it, so we can't look for gun oil or anything on

the fabric."

"But-"

"It's in the river," Kate said flatly. "I'd bet every dime I've got on it."

Her eyes fell on the fat manila envelope reposing innocently on one

shelf. Well. Maybe not every dime.

234 There was no dragging the Kanuyaq, which emptied into the Gulf at a

gallop during a spring thaw with heavy runoff. "So," Jim said heavily,

breaking the glum silence, "Harrigan and Carol Stewart were having an

affair."

"His landlord said there had been a girlfriend," Kate said. "He said she

was blonde. Carol Stewart was blonde."

"The landlord also said the girlfriend might have been a brunette," Jim

said. "So, Stewart finds out about Harrigan and his wife, and he plans

his revenge. He brings Harrigan up last fall, breaks his leg and leaves

him for dead, and brings his wife up this spring and feeds her to a

bear? This what you're telling me here, Shugak?"

"Yes."

"How did he kill her?" Jim asked. "He couldn't have used the rifle,

there's no way you could hide that from the coroner. You're the one says

he's so smart, he'd have to have known that. So how did he kill her? You

hardwired into that, too?"

She ignored the sarcasm in his tone because she knew it wasn't really

directed at her, and reached in her pocket. The Swiss Army knife

clattered to the table. They stared at it, mesmerized. "Auntie Vi says

he had one of these. Maybe even this one. Cindy stumbled over it the

morning of the attack, when she chased Ben up the road."

Chopper Jim picked up the knife and located the blade. Over it, his eyes

met Kate's. "You didn't think to bag it?"

"At the time, I didn't know it might be important. Besides, it'd been

lying in the slush and the mud before Cindy found it. Cindy's handled

it, I've handled it, Auntie Vi's handled it."

"Hell, I remember now, I watched you clean it yesterday afternoon."

She nodded.

"Not much of a killing machine," Dan said, examining the two and a half

inch blade critically.

"One slice from behind." Kate's hand went to the scar on her

235 throat, a thin ridge of roped flesh that had healed badly and now

would never fade. "You take the victim by surprise, you're stronger than

she is anyway-" Her hand dropped. "You don't need a bowie knife to get

the job done." She added dispassionately, "He would have waited to kill

her at least until he heard the bear. Fresh blood, hungry bear.

Unbeatable combination."

Dinah shoved her chair back. "Excuse me," she said, and left the cabin.

Bobby started to go after her. "Don't," Kate said.

He scowled at her.

She shook her head. "Don't," she repeated.

He looked at the open door, hands resting on the wheels of his chair.

With an oath, he brought them back up to the arm rests. "And if Stewart

hadn't heard a bear?"

Kate's shoulders rose and fell. "It didn't have to happen the first day.

Auntie Vi said they were booked in for a week. He had time to wait for

the perfect opportunity. He just lucked out the first day. A bear showed

up on schedule, Stewart killed Carol, let the bear chew on her enough to

obliterate the evidence." She reflected. "Then he heard us coming, and

either chased the bear off or it ran off. Stewart didn't have time to

break the weapon down again, so he pitched it into the river and came to

meet us." She frowned down at her coffee. "Too bad we couldn't have

tested his hands for residue."

"I don't know." Dan crossed his arms and frowned. "Seems awfully iffy to

me."

"Then he would have fallen back on plan B."

"There was a plan B?"

"Dan," Kate said with finality, "there is always a plan B for the Mark

Stewarts of this world."

"Hell." Jim sat back, lips flattened into a thin line. "It doesn't

matter much whether he used the knife. Even if we found his fingerprints

on it, which we won't, and traces of her blood on it, which we won't, it

wouldn't be enough."

236

"No." Kate shook her head. "It wouldn't."

"Especially if he's as smart as you think he is, and loved her up in

front of all their friends in town. No motive."

"Oh yes there was," Kate said. Sex or money, she thought, the two most

popular motives for murder. She was pretty sure it was one of Morgan's

Laws, but she couldn't remember which one. She'd have to ask Jack the

next time she saw him. Soon, she thought. Tomorrow would be good.

"Whether anyone saw it or not, there was motive up the wazoo."

"Come on, Kate," Dan said. "A lot of wives screw around on their

husbands. A lot of husbands don't take them out and feed them to bears."

"A lot of husbands don't have Stewart's ego." Kate remembered Stewart

forcing her hand against his erection. It had been a taunt, a blatant

provocation, his response to her challenge. He must have thought she

just wouldn't be able to resist all that male pulchritude and would

fling herself on him. She'd met men like him before, men whose certain,

unwavering belief in their own irresistibility formed the pillar of

their existence. It was imprudent to disillusion them, imprudent and

dangerous and potentially fatal. As Carol Stewart and Nathan Harrigan

had discovered, at the cost of their lives. "It's all ego with him."

"And how," Dinah said from the doorway. Her face was pale, but she met

Bobby's questioning look with a reassuring smile. "Mr. Stewart thinks

very well of himself. What was it Bernie called him? Something movie

starish?"

"Redfordy," Dan supplied.

Dinah nodded. "Right. And he'd encourage the resemblance. King stud.

He'd take adultery as a personal affront. Especially if the guy worked

for him."

"And especially if they did it here," Kate said, waving a hand to

indicate the Park. "Stewart's very own personal hunting ground. Adding

insult to injury."

"I wonder," Dinah said thoughtfully.

"What?"

237 "If maybe Carol Stewart didn't bring Nathan Harrigan here for that

very reason. Stewart's kind always screw around. Maybe she was making a

point, taking her lover on her husband's own ground."

Kate's mouth twisted up at one corner. "If she did, her revenge was very

short-lived."

Jim tossed the Swiss Army knife down in disgust and folded his arms. He

didn't want to believe any of it, not because it wasn't true, but

because he was afraid that it was and he had not a shred of hard

evidence to back any of it up.

"He make it back to Niniltna?" Kate said.

"Stewart?" At her nod, the trooper nodded.

"Too bad. I was kind of hoping that bear would show up again." Her smile

was cold. "Mandy's dad, who has been big-game hunting in Africa, assures

me that once a lion tastes human flesh it won't eat anything else. Be

nice if the same held true for bears. In this one case, anyway."

"Where is he now?" Dan said. "Stewart."

"Back in Anchorage," Jim said. "No help for it, Dan," he said in

response to the ranger's disbelieving look. "No probable cause, no hard

evidence of foul play. He cooperated fully. Couldn't hold him."

"As a matter of curiosity," Kate said, "was Carol Stewart insured?"

"Yes, but just a standard policy through his business. He had an

identical policy, and they both took them out years ago."

"Ought to pay for both trips, out and back," Kate said coolly. "Like I

said. Smart."

Dinah made an inarticulate protest, quickly smothered. Bobby caught her

hand and glared at Kate.

"Son of a bitch," Jim said suddenly, and brought his fist down hard on

the table in an uncharacteristic display of temper. Everybody jumped.

"Son of a bitch."

Kate thought of Pastor Seabolt, and of the long, hot June days in

Chistona. "Something I learned last summer, Jim," she said.

238

"What?"

"Sometimes? There's just no cure for a situation."

He didn't like it. None of them did.

Dan broke the silence this time. "What did Stewart say to you last

night, Kate?"

"Nothing," she said, with perfect truth. "Nothing at all."

Bobby said shrewdly, "What did you say to him?"

She chose her words with care. "I suggested he make this his last visit

to the Park."

"Breathing the air here might be hazardous to his health, is that it?"

Bobby barked out a humorless laugh. "So might riding shotgun on that

damn D-6 with you on the throttle. Jesus, Shugak, when I said you should

take executive action, I didn't mean you should take it on a Caterpillar

tractor. You got a death wish or what? My eyes about dropped out of my

head when you took off outta that barn." He looked her over critically,

and added, "You sure that was really you in your body last night?"

"Maybe it was her evil twin," Dinah suggested, recovering enough to join

in. "Brought out by the full moon."

"I figured the Antichrist," Dan said.

"Nah, pod person," Jim said, adding hastily, "Not that I would know,

since of course I wasn't there."

The taut atmosphere of frustration and anger eased to where laughter and

friendship might be possible once again.

Kate drained her mug and pushed back her chair. "It's moose backstrap

for dinner. Who's staying?"

They were gone by nine, and there was still enough light left for Kate

and Mutt to walk out back and sit down on the large, smooth boulder

embedded in the edge of the creek bank. Overhead the sky turned from

blue to pink to orange to red and back to blue again. The stars came out

one at a time, Venus first, brighter than every other body in the sky,

save the sun and the moon.

239 Soon the stars would be burned out of the sky by the light of the

midnight sun, and Venus would fade into the east for the summer. Kate

had an affinity for the stars, for the constellations, especially for

Orion. As a little girl she had pictured him standing, harpoon in hand,

poised at the water's edge, intent on spearing his next meal. Much

later, in Masterpieces of World Literature at the University of

Fairbanks, she had learned he was supposed to be carrying a sword and

shield, and still later that he raped one of the Pleiades, or maybe it

was Artemis, the first in a long line of the disillusionments that come

with growing up and leaving the magic behind.

Breakup certainly qualified. The season was supposed to be one of hope

and renewal, spent gathering rosebuds while ye may. Instead, it all too

often degenerated into destruction and despair. It had been a clear,

cold April night when her mother had begun the long walk home from a

party, only to pass out at the side of the road and die of exposure.

Well, she thought with cold satisfaction, it might have taken thirty

years, but she had paid back for her mother, in spades. It had been a

long time since they'd had a bootlegger in the Park.

Her satisfaction was fleeting. People got away with murder during

breakup. People got away with murder and then got away. First Lottie

Gette, now Mark Stewart. Kate shifted restlessly on her rock. Failure

was not an option open to her, and yet here it was, staring her in the

face, and for an instant panic clawed at the back of her throat.

She beat it down before it could take over. All right, it had been three

days of frustration, personal and professional. And sexual. This last

was going to be the easiest to relieve; as soon as the homestead was in

decent enough shape she was headed into town in her brand-new, slightly

bruised truck. She would go into Niniltna to tell Bobby to call Jack and

let him know she was coming. Jack was a smart man; by the time she

managed the two hundred-odd miles into town he would have farmed his son

out to a friend's

240 house for the duration. She had a sudden vision of going through his

front door like a conquering army and her need was so great she couldn't

even smile.

Hormones had even more to answer for than Charles II and Walt Disney.

But it was the personal and professional frustration that nagged at her

most. What was her profession nowadays? She'd been absent from the DA's

staff for, what, four years now. In the blank marked "Occupation" on her

tax form she had written "private investigator" for the first time,

mostly because the bulk of last year's income had been earned in that

capacity, but the truth was she didn't even have a Pi's license. Hell,

in Alaska, there wasn't any such creature, there was only a state

business license, available to anyone who could fill out the form and

produce fifty bucks. That was it, that was all you needed, bing, bang,

boom, you were in the peeper business.

But if she wasn't a private investigator, what was she?

And then there was the acute personal frustration of being thrust into a

position of responsibility for the tribe, of shouldering duties and

assuming obligations she had never sought and had certainly never

wanted. It wasn't just the tribe, either, it was the whole goddam Park,

Native and white, cheechako and sourdough, ranger and miner and

homesteader, fisher folk and fish hawk. Predicaments R Us, You Bring

'Em, We Fix 'Em, K. Shugak, Proprietor. Meetings Mediated, Marriages

Counseled, Murders Solved. She didn't even have to advertise, they came,

bringing their baggage with them, whether she wanted them to or not.

The first shoot-out at Bernie's flashed through her mind. Nobody had

told her to break it up. There had been fifty, sixty people in the

Roadhouse that night. Any one of them could have taken the initiative,

could have restored the peace, but no, Kate Shugak had ridden to the

rescue yet again. Or crawled, in this case. And of course she had had to

answer Mandy's cri de coeur, and there was no denying Billy Mike,

invested with all the weight and majesty of tribal tradition, and Dan

seemed to take it for granted that

241 it was her job to bring Mark Stewart to justice, and how could she

stand by and let Bernie get shot up a second time, and even that prick

Jim Chopin regarded her as Tonto to his Lone Ranger, and . . . oh, the

hell with it.

The hell with all of it.

Twenty feet below, cold, crystal water rushed downstream between narrow

banks. From beneath a budding salmonberry bush, a snowshoe hare poked

its head out, coat already turning brown for the coming season. An eagle

passing high overhead called out a melancholy good night.

A passing breeze caught at the branch of a fir tree. It reached down and

brushed her cheek, the needles scratching gently at her skin.

"Emaa?" Kate said softly.

At her knee Mutt stirred, looking up at her with patient yellow eyes,

and unthinkingly she knotted a reassuring hand in the coarse ruff.

The bark of the branch smelled strongly of resin. "Emaa," Kate said into

the gathering night, "they lean on me. All of them, they lean on me. How

do I stand against it? How did you, all those years?"

The silence was the silence of the living land, water tumbling stone,

wind through the trees, the chatter of squirrels, and the song was

almost lost in it.

She sat up straight, watchful, waiting, listening. It came again, three

pure descending notes, floating to her on the wisp of a breeze. The

golden-crowned sparrow, the spring-is-here bird, the first one of the year.

It sounded again, nearer this time. Her eyes groped for it in the dusky

twilight, and after a moment there it was, six inches long, light brown

with darker streaks on its plump body and a golden one on its head. It

perched at the end of an insubstantial alder twig, swaying a little as

it cocked its head, looking at Kate alternately from each bright eye.

The song sounded again, Spring is here, here is spring. That

242 was its job, to usher in spring in song. That was what it had been

made for, what it was best at. It might dream of being an eagle,

soaring, aloof, detached, but it was the spring-is-here bird, and it

sang the news from the branch of an alder.

Kate let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding. "All right, Emaa."

She got to her feet, and in a flutter of wings the sparrow was gone. "I

love you, Emaa," Kate said, raising her voice. "I miss you."

Mutt trotted ahead. Kate paused, shotgun cradled in the crook of one

arm, and looked over her shoulder at the fading outline of the

mountains, the lambent glow of the rising moon.

"I need you," she said, almost whispering the words.

Her only answer was the song again, three notes, coming clearly over the

wind in the trees, the howl of a distant wolf, the drip of melting snow.

It was enough.

It would have to be.

243

Set against the stunning backdrop of the Alaskan wilderness, the newest

Kate Shugak mystery unfolds during the time of year locals love to hate:

spring thaw.

"Stabenow offers a knowing portrait of Alaska, its soul-stirring

landscape and fascinating culture."

-The Seattle Times

"An intriguing blend of modern morality tale and ageless legend . . .

The talented Stabenow tells a riveting tale that's as satisfying to the

soul as it is to the intellect," Booklist proclaimed of last year's

Blood Will Tell. In Breakup, Kate Shugak's loyalties-to the land, her

heritage, her home-are put to the test when a series of mishaps lead to

murder.

April in Alaska is typically a period of rebirth and renewal, and after

the long winter Kate has nothing more strenuous on her agenda than

paying her taxes. But mayhem abounds as the meltoff flows; this year's

thaw is accompanied by rampaging bears, family feuds, and a plane crash

quite literally in Kate's own backyard. What begins as a series of

headaches escalates into possible murder when a dead body is found near

her homestead.

Initially unwilling to involve herself in the investigation, preferring

in- ' write off each odd occurrence as a peculiarity,

244 yet she continues irresistibly to seek the

truth. Compelled by her friends to act as problem solver and guided by

the spirit of her Aleut grandmother, she finds herself slowly taking on

the role of clan leader, a post she is bound to by honor and blood.

As breakup becomes increasingly fraught with danger and destruction,

Kate must decide whether she can cross the line from passive observer to

instrument of change, assuming the role of elder as the mantle of

responsibility is passed. Breakup proves once again that Dana Stabenow

is "Alaska's finest mystery writer' {Anchorage Daily News).

Dana Stabenow is the author of six other Kate Shugak mysteries: A Cold

Day for Murder, A Fatal Thaw, Dead in the Water, A Cold- Blooded

Business, Play with Fire, and Blood Will Tell. She lives in Anchorage.

Jacket design and illustration Honi Werner Photograph of the author

Linda Longstaff

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.