Speaking of the dead. Jim Chopin came out for dinner on Friday, partly to talk to me about the body we found. I didn’t remember anything I hadn’t told him before but I remember from Dad how cops always like to check everything over again. Plus I think he might have been a little worried about me finding the body.
Finding the body was weird. First time I’ve ever seen somebody dead. The other kids either, I guess. I thought Andrea was going to hurl. Betty was pretty calm but then she never gets excited about anything. Except maybe Eric. Van was scared but she held it together.
I don’t believe in god or ghosts or anything like that. Still, that body was weird. There used to be somebody home and then there wasn’t. So there is something that makes us all us.
Mostly I think Jim came to see Kate. He practically walks into the wall when she’s in the room, always looking at her, always smiling at her. Probably wants to sleep with her. Dad did, it was Mush City when she was around. I remember once Dad made her get dressed up to go to some party or other when she was staying with us in town. Man, she was gorgeous, she had this sparkly red jacket on and her hair was all stylin‘, she looked as good as anyone you ever see watching the Oscars on TV, and Kate can shoot a moose, too. She’s got two guns in a rack over the door, a.30-06 rifle and a twelve-gauge pump action shotgun. She says we’ll take the shotgun with us when we go duck hunting down on the Kanuyaq River delta in the fall and I’ll have a chance to shoot it then. She says I have to know how to protect myself in case something happens to her. I can’t imagine anything ever happening to Kate Shugak. But then I couldn’t imagine anything ever happening to Dad, either.
Saw two eagles on Sunday on the way back from the outhouse. They looked like they were fighting. Kate said they were mating. They’d fly real high and then they’d sort of smoosh together and fall, and then before they got too close to the ground they’d break apart and fly up again. Kate says she knows where their nest is, downstream in the top of an old dead cottonwood tree. She says she’ll take me to see it in a week or so, after the eggs get laid. I drove the four-wheeler to Ruthe’s in the afternoon and she told me it can take an eagle nine or ten days to lay two or three eggs. She had some cool pictures, one of a raven stealing a salmon right out from under an eagle who was eating it. I like ravens, too, but eagles are the coolest. I remember when I stayed on the river with Kate’s aunties I saw an eagle swoop down on the surface of the water and snatch up a salmon in its claws. Red salmon weigh an average of eight pounds, Ruthe says. That’s a big load for something that only weighs fourteen pounds, even if it does have wings eight feet across. What’s delta vee for an eagle, I wonder?
I like the way Kate is never embarrassed to talk about stuff. Van didn’t even know where babies came from until I told her.
She’s fourteen, the same age as me, and she’s hanging with me, you’d think the Hagbergs would have told her. But then maybe the Hagbergs don’t know. They don’t have any kids of their own, maybe they haven’t figured out how it works. Maybe the eagles will give them a clue. Showing is better than telling anyway.
I’ve figured out a plan to stay in the Park. I haven’t told Kate. Showing her is better.
4
Kate surveyed the charred remains of Leonard Dreyer’s shack and said one succinct word: “Shit.” It had been a small cabin made entirely of peeled spruce logs, and it had burned like one. She waded gingerly into the wreckage and found ice beneath the first layer of debris.
Mutt, lifting her lip, retreated to the far edge of the clearing and sat down to wait out Kate’s investigations with an expression of saintly patience on her face. Mutt had learned from a forest fire two years back that she didn’t like cleaning between sooty toes with her tongue.
There was nothing to be found beyond the square bulk of a small woodstove, upon which rested a cast-iron skillet. A lump of metal might once have been a coffeepot. Kate kicked a hole in the pile and bent over to sniff without much hope. She straightened up without having smelled anything except the memory of a fire of which the coals were only an old, old memory. “Damn it,” she said out loud.
And there was no sign of any kind of transportation. No truck, no four-wheeler, no snowmobile, there wasn’t as much as a bicycle or a pair of snowshoes. A handyman had to have something to haul tools around in. Dreyer must have gone to his death, as opposed to death coming to him.
Or not. Someone could have come here, shot Dreyer, and driven him to Grant Glacier in his own vehicle. Thinking of the rolling hills of moraine that surrounded the mouth of Grant Glacier, much of it covered in impenetrable stands of alder and birch and spruce and all of it an excellent hiding place for anything up to and including a belly dumper, she might have whimpered a little.
She drove up the road to talk to Howard Sampson, the next neighbor north of Dreyer’s. Howard, mending a net in his shop, had spent the winter in Anchorage and hadn’t seen Dreyer since the previous spring. “He ever do any work for you?” Kate said.
Howard tongued the wad of Copenhagen in his right cheek over to his left and spat a blob of brown fluid directly between Mutt’s forefeet. Mutt’s yellow eyes narrowed and her ears went back. “I do for myself,” Howard said.
Kate got Mutt out of there before Mutt did for both of them. Howard never had been what one might call neighborly.
The Gette homestead was on the downhill side of Dreyer’s cabin. It had been deserted for four years, but as Kate came up to the driveway she noticed a thin plume of smoke curling into the air. The drive in was challenging, as the brush and tree roots had been allowed to reclaim a greater part of the road, but she emerged into the clearing eventually to find two men standing in front of the cabin. One of them was holding a shotgun.
“Whoa.” She hit the brakes and rolled down the window. “Hello.”
The man with the shotgun peered suspiciously into the cab of the truck and recoiled when Mutt lifted her lip at him. “Jesus! Is that a wolf?”
“Only half,” Kate said.
“Jesus!”
“Don’t worry,” Kate said, lying with a straight face. “She’s harmless.”
“Well.” The man with the shotgun swallowed hard, and exchanged an apprehensive look with the other man. “Just keep her in the truck, okay?”
“Okay,” Kate said, and took that as an invitation to get out. She mistakenly didn’t tell Mutt she was supposed to stay in the truck. Mutt was out and standing next to Kate, shoulder to hip, yellow eyes fixed unwinkingly on the man with the shotgun before he could lodge a protest. He swallowed again instead, audibly this time.
Kate smiled at the other man. “Hi. I’m Kate Shugak.”
He smiled back. “I’m Keith Gette. The Neanderthal with the artillery is Oscar Jimenez.”
“Oh,” she said. “You must be the long-lost heir. Lotte and Lisa Gette’s cousins, am I right?” Lotte and Lisa Gette having been sisters who had inherited this homestead from their parents. Lisa was dead and Lotte long gone. At least Kate hoped she was.
Keith nodded. “That’s us. Or me. Oscar’s my partner.”
“Heard the lawyers had found an heir. We’ve been wondering when you’d show.” If ever. “Where are you from?”
“Seattle.”
She surveyed the cabin behind them. Four years of neglect lay heavily on it, but it had good bones. The greenhouse behind it was twice the size of the cabin and showed signs that it was being restored first. To the right of the greenhouse an area was being cleared of the heavy brush that always moved into cropland in the Arctic when people stopped tending to it. “How long have you been here?”