"Oh."
"So tell me about story-knifing,"
Becky's brown eyes examined Kate in a way that made her feel as if she were being dissected in preparation for study beneath a microscope. "It's just a game," she said at last. "A girl's game. Auntie showed us how.
She said her mom showed her, and her mom showed her.
We draw pictures in the sand, sometimes in the snow, and tell stories to each other. Up here."
Becky climbed the stoop and opened the door without knocking. "Auntie! Sasha fell down and got all wet!"
"Oh, that girl!" A tiny woman with a face whose features were almost swallowed up by the wrinkles on it shot out of the kitchen and buzzed around them like an infuriated bee. "Sasha," she said, her voice scolding but affectionate, "you naughty girl! What a mess! And you're shivering! Get out of those wet things this instant!
Becky, take her down to the bathroom and run her a bath. There are clean towels in the linen closet. Scoot, Scoot!"
Over her shoulder Becky said, "This is Kate, Auntie.
She helped Sasha."
The bee turned to Kate. "Well, don't just stand there, you must be chilled through, come into the kitchen and have some tea."
"No, really," Kate said feebly, at the same time being swept into the old woman's irresistible wake. They went down a hallway and through a door into a large kitchen that took up half the square feet of the house and whose floor was covered in what looked like white straw. Kate stood still, ankle-deep in the stuff. "You look like you're busy, maybe I should go."
"Nonsense," the other woman said firmly, "come in this instant and sit down next to the stove. How did you find Sasha?"
Kate subsided meekly into the chair next to the oil stove. It gave out a warming, radiant heat and Kate realized how chilled she was. "Don't just sit there, take your jacket off," the older woman said. "I'm Olga Shapsnikoff, by the way."
"Kate," Kate said. "Kate Shugak."
Olga stopped short in mid-career. "Shugak? Any relation to Ekaterina Shugak?"
Kate was tempted to lie. "Yes," she said. "Ekaterina Shugak is my grandmother."
"Really." Olga busied herself with the teakettle, and her back looked somehow less than enthusiastic. Kate warmed to her.
"I attended a meeting chaired by Ekaterina at the last Raven convention," Olga said. "She certainly is a-" She hesitated, and looked over her shoulder. "She certainly is a strong, woman."
The word you're looking for is "dictatorial," Kate thought. Also tyrannical, imperial and just plain pushy.
She said nothing. Ekaterina might be all those things, but Ekaterina was her grandmother and this woman was a stranger. "Tell me about story-knifing," she said. "I've never seen a storyknife before. Is it an Aleut custom?"
After a long, thoughtful look that gave Kate the distinct impression that she had been tested and, thankfully, not found wanting, Olga smiled. "It's more of an Eskimo custom," she replied, turning back to the stove. "My grandmother was from Alakanuk."
As Olga boiled water and made tea, the rest of the girls from the circle on the beach drifted into the house one at a time, taking a seat around the large, scarred kitchen table, warming their hands around mugs of hot tea and casting shy, surreptitious glances at Kate. After a while Sasha lumbered in, dressed in clean, dry clothes, her skin flushed with the heat of her bath and her wet hair slicked back like a seal's. She sat down on the floor close to Olga's knees and took up a handful of the white straw.
"What is all this?" Kate asked, gesturing at the haystack with her mug.
"The girls and I are weaving baskets." Olga whipped a length of damp sheeting from the back of the table and displayed the beginnings of a dozen baskets that at first glance seemed to be made of cloth.
"Oh," Kate said, on a long note of discovery. "You're an Attuan basket weaver."
"Unalaskan, now," Olga said, her lips curling ever so slightly. One of the girls gave a giggle, quickly smothered.
Kate touched one of the tiny things. It was soft, even silken to the touch. The weaving was very fine, the stitches minute. None of the baskets were more than three inches in diameter. Each one had the same intricate pattern woven around its base in a different color of grass.
" 'Baskets of grass which are both strong and beautiful,'
" she said softly. She looked up at Olga. "Captain Cook wrote that in his log, when he visited Unalaska in 1778."
Becky sniffed, disdain sitting oddly on her young face.
"The Unalaska baskets were very coarse."
"So I've read," Kate agreed. "The ones on Attu were supposed to be the best, weren't they?"
This time Olga sniffed, and being older and more experienced carried it off better than Becky had. It was a sound of profound disdain. "If you say so."
"I don't know anything about it really," Kate admitted, "except for what I've read about it. And I've seen the baskets in the museum in Anchorage, of course. How long does it take you to make one of these?"
"Six months," Olga said. "Maybe six years."
Kate looked at her incredulously. "It's true," Olga insisted. "It depends on how big the basket is. A basket two and a half inches high takes about forty hours. But when the old ones made shrouds, it could take years to finish just one. Would you like to try?"
"Making a shroud?"
Olga laughed. "We'll start you on a basket."
There was a shuffling around the table as each girl found her own basket. Half a dozen dark heads bent forward, identical intent expressions on each small face.
Evidently this was serious business, and Kate said as much.
"One of these little baskets can bring as much as two hundred and fifty," Olga told her.
"Dollars?"
"Dollars," Olga confirmed with a twinkle in her eye.
Kate looked at the baskets the girls were working on with a new and growing respect. "This how you girls make your spending money?" Six heads nodded without looking up, six pairs of fingers worked steadily without missing a beat. Kate turned back to Olga and found a handful of the bleached grass under her nose.
"Peel the outer layers off, like this. You see?"
"Uh-huh," Kate lied. She got the definite feeling that Olga explained things one time and one time only.
"There are inner blades, here, and outer blades, what we call seconds. Keep them separate."
One blade of grass looked pretty much like another to Kate, but she sorted hers into what she prayed were the correct piles. "Okay."
"You split it, like this, with your thumbnail."
After nearly a month at sea on a crab boat. Kate didn't have much in the way of thumbnails and her first efforts were clumsy at best.
"All right," Olga said. "This is the spoke, and this is a weaver. The spokes are the frame, and the weavers are twisted around the frame. Okay. You take a piece of grass and twist it. Here, I'll start yours for you.
Remember, you work always from the bottom up, and clockwise."
"Who taught you how to do this, Auntie?"
"My grandmother, a little. The rest I taught myself by taking some old baskets apart."
"No one else does this anymore?"
"Very few. Many of the old weavers who were left died in the flu epidemic in 1919," Olga said, "and of course none of them told anyone else how they did their weaving."
"Why not?"
"Because every weaver had her own special weaving styles, and there was jealousy between the villages.
Each one always wanted to be the best, so each one kept her ways secret from the others." Olga sighed a little. "Now they are all dead, and the weaving is almost dead, too."
"Not as long as you're alive, Auntie," Becky said, and the girls giggled.
"For which you should be glad," Olga told them, "or you wouldn't be able to buy that new Michael Jackson album. No," Olga told Kate, "dabble your fingers in the water first. The grass must be damp to work. Not too much! Only wet down as much as you are going to use at one time. You have to wrap up what you don't use, and it will mildew if you put it away damp."