"Where is it?" He told her and she rose to her feet.
"I'll be down later. This might be my only chance to get to Unalaska. I'd like to see what it looks like."
Amaknak Island was connected to Unalaska Island by a five-hundred-foot bridge, the Bridge to the Other Side.
Less than a mile beyond that bridge was the village of Unalaska, a town of less traffic and more village than Dutch Harbor.
Unalaska occupied a special place in Alaskan history.
The Russians came there, centuries before, for the same reason the crab fishermen were there now, and the military during World War II, and that was because it had the best natural harbor in a thousand miles of Aleutian Islands. But the Aleuts had been there before them all, rich in culture and natural resources, earning a living from a bountiful if harsh marine environment, eventually sitting ducks for civilization in the form of the Russian Orthodox religion, the company store and the clap. Dragooned into slaughtering seals and sea otters almost to the point of extinction to supply the Asian fur trade, the Aleuts fought back, only to be quashed by superior firepower. The fur market collapsed, Alaska was sold to the United States and Russian traders gave way to New England whalers, the whalers to gold prospectors, the prospectors to the United States military. And now this latest invasion: fishermen and processors, American, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Taiwanese, literally scraping the bottom of the North Pacific Ocean to feed the world's insatiable appetite for seafood.
The road topped a little rise between two small hills and the rooftops of the village came into view. It wasn't much more than a string of buildings lined up along the water, enclosed by one gravel road that ran down the beach and a second that ran down the side of the truncated river that drained Unalaska Lake into Iliuliuk Bay.
The buildings were a colorful jumble of frame houses, trailers and World War II-vintage cottages and cabanas, one and two stories high, some old and weathered gray by wind and salt spray, some new with the unmistakable mark of Outside prefabrication stamped firmly upon them. It reminded Kate of Niniltna, both in location and construction. She saw orange fluorescent buoys offshore, probably mooring buoys for the villagers' boats. There was an old clapboard church with two cupolas, each with onion domes surmounted by the distinctive Russian Orthodox crosses with the slanted foot bar that Christ was supposed to have twisted in his agony during the Crucifixion.
The beach was a narrow strip of gray sand, and Kate, always a sucker for beaches, walked around the end of the village, through the tall grass poking up through the crusted snow, and down to the wet sand separating sod and tide. The fog swirled overhead and offshore, and although she could hear Dutch Harbor going energetically about its business less than half a mile away across the water, the noise seemed muted. The beach stretched out before her, and she began to walk. A big New England dory loomed up out of the fog and grated against the gravel. Kate caught the bow and tugged it farther up the beach. The dory's owner hopped out and nodded his thanks. Kate walked on and the fog swallowed him up again. Farther down the beach two more figures resolved from shadow to solid shape, a father instructing his young, solemn son in the art of mending nets. The needle in his gnarled hands stilled and they looked at her without speaking until she moved on.
Wavelets from the wakes of passing boats lapped at the shore. The fog felt coot and misty on her cheeks.
Because it obscured her vision, her ears worked overtime and she heard them long before she saw them. A group of girls squatted in a circle at the edge of the water, where the sand was wettest. Soft-footed, Kate came up behind them and paused to look over their shoulders.
One of the girls' legs was twisted beneath her at an awkward angle. Her body was bulky, her head too small for it. Her nose seemed to have no bridge, only nostrils, and she wheezed a little when she breathed through it.
She was speaking, and at first Kate thought she must be speaking in Aleut, and then realized that the girl must have a cleft palate. She wasn't the only one who couldn't understand her because the girl next to her translated.
"Gakgak," said the girl with the twisted leg. "Kayak," the girl next to her repeated. "Kayak. Thunderbird.
Men. Do the men come in the kayak or the thunderbird, Sasha?"
"Kayak," Sasha replied. "Men. Thunderbird. Men."
"What's this?" another girl asked.
"It looks like 'home,' " another girl said, puzzled.
"I guess I'm dumb, Sasha," the first girl said apologetically.
"I don't get it. Is this a new story?"
The girls' heads remained bent, and Kate, curious, stood on tiptoe and peered over them to see what held so much of their attention.
Sasha was drawing in the sand. "Kayak," she said firmly, and a single line, curved up at both ends, appeared over three wavy, parallel lines. "Thunderbird." A few swift strokes and there was a pair of wings attached to a fierce hooked beak next to the kayak. "Men." A series of kinetic Y's with legs marched from kayak to thunderbird, three in all, where two other male figures waited. With a single sweep of her hand, all the drawings were enclosed in a perfect circle, almost encompassing the girls' toes.
Another circle was drawn inside the first, perhaps two inches from the first one and perfectly concentric. There was grace and assurance in every stroke.
Sasha wasn't drawing with her finger, as Kate had thought at first. She bent forward to see more clearly and realized that the misshapen hand clutched a knife carved from ivory. It looked like a small scimitar, and the thing gleamed up at her in the dull light of the afternoon, smooth and shining from years of use. "Oh!" she exclaimed involuntarily. "How beautiful!"
There was a muffled communal shriek of surprise and the circle of girls exploded in every direction. Sasha would have run, too, but her bad leg folded beneath her and she lay panting in the sand. She had dropped the ivory knife and Kate reached for it.
"No!" Sasha cried.
"It's all right," Kate said quickly, kneeling next to her.
"Here." She held the knife out and Sasha snatched it out of her hands, clutching it to her breast. "It's all right,"
Kate said again in a soothing voice. "I'm not going to hurt you. My name is Kate. What's yours?"
Sasha's eyes flickered beneath heavy lids. She was whimpering a little, and lay half in, half out of the water, which was rapidly soaking into her clothes.
Kate couldn't leave her like that. "Come on," she said, holding out her hand. "Let me help you up."
The girl cringed away from her, but Kate, moving slowly, letting the girl see her every movement as it was made, put her hands under Sasha's arms and raised her to her feet. She cradled the girl's arm in a comforting hand and matched her steps to the girl's lurching ones.
She was wet through, Kate noted with dismay. "Where do you live?" she asked, pitching her rough voice to be as nonthreatening as possible.
A small voice next to her made her jump. "She should go to Auntie's house. It's about six houses down. I'll show you."
Kate looked around to see the translator, a tiny, slender girl with long, tangled brown hair and a round face looking at her soberly.
"Hello," Kate said. "I'm Kate."
"I'm Becky," the girl replied. "You're not Anglo."
"No," Kate said. "Or at least not much." Becky's smile was shy, but it was a smile. Encouraged, Kate said, "I'm sorry I scared you. I was walking down the beach and I heard you guys and I walked over to take a look. What was that Sasha was doing with the knife?"
"Story-knifing," Becky said.
"Story-knifing? What's that?"
Becky looked up at Kate, her amazement written large on her face. "Didn't you storyknife when you were little?"
Kate shook her head. "No. I've never seen anything like it. I've seen art for sale in Anchorage, hell, I've seen art hung in the museum there that was drawn a lot worse than what I saw Sasha drawing down on the beach." At Becky's inquiring look, she said, "I heard you call her by name while I was watching her draw."