Auntie Edna thrust out her jaw. "Don't change subject, Katya. You sleeping with that man don't look good. You boot him out, get you a nice Native man. That be better for everyone. Your kids be shareholders on both sides."
"Just for the sake of argument, Auntie, what nice Native man would you recommend?"
At this Auntie Edna looked momentarily at a loss, and then rallied. "Them Mike boys is all good men, Annie raised them right."
"And they all live in Anchorage," Kate said, and made a come-along motion with her hand. "Come on, Auntie. Serve 'em up. Who else is vying for my hand?"
"Martin Shugak, he-"
Kate's rage dissipated in an instant and she burst out laughing. "Martin! Oh, Auntie!"
"What wrong with him?" Auntie Edna said pugnaciously.
"What's wrong with him?" Kate rolled her eyes. "Well, first there's the little problem of his being my cousin-"
"Second! Second cousin!"
"-and so our children would all be born with two heads. Not to mention he's a drunk, so they'd all have FAS, and he's chronically unemployed, so they'd all be hungry, and-" Kate shook her head. "I'm headed downriver, Auntie. Do you know who's doing these attacks?" She waited, and when Auntie Edna said nothing she started down the steps.
"Not necessary, Katya," Auntie Edna said behind her.
Kate paused in the act of mounting the sled, and looked at Auntie Edna with a gathering frown. She didn't like what she heard in Auntie Edna's voice. "Why not, Auntie? Somebody has to stop them. And," she added with little satisfaction and less pride, "it's almost always been me."
"Maybe already somebody stop them," Auntie Edna said.
She gave Kate another long, hard stare, and then Auntie Edna turned and went back inside, the door closing firmly behind her.
Jim gassed up the Cessna and flew back to Suulutaq. There was a thin line of clouds on the southern horizon, the edge of a low front that had so far been held off by the high hanging in over the Park. Otherwise it was another clear, calm day, and this time he knew where he was going.
In half an hour he was over the trailer. He continued on up the valley, all the way to the end, as far as he could get without running into a cloud filled with rocks. Here the landscape closed in, a series of pocket basins that in spring were carpeted with grasses, interspersed with rocky crags clothed in lichen and kinnikinnick. There was one exit, a high, narrow pass where rose the spring that formed the headwaters of the Gruening River, which cricked and jigged and jagged down the other side, collecting the flows of errant streams and creeks to itself before its course smoothed out to join up with the Kanuyaq River at Red Run.
The Gruening River had a healthy run of red salmon, which was why the origins of the fish camp on the confluence of the two rivers went back a thousand years. The smoke fish from Red Run was prized above all others, and the lucky recipients of Red Run canned smoked salmon hoarded it more jealously than they did their wives and girlfriends.
But that was the other end of the river. At present Jim was circling cautiously over the river's beginnings, keeping a weather eye cocked toward the south. At the first hint of the shred of a cloud he would turn and skedaddle for home. It was amazing how crowded clouds could make a pilot feel, and Jim had not accumulated 2,722 accident-free single engine hours by letting weather jog his elbow.
The head of the valley was the winter grounds of the Gruening River caribou herd. He could see some of them now, groups of five and ten far below, scraping a meal out of the snow and ice with their small, sharp hooves. The big bulls had shed their antlers two months before but there were still racks on a few of the smaller bulls and most of the cows. They looked to be in pretty good shape. Of course this was still only November. Another couple of months and all the fat they had stored up over the summer and fall in those big old jiggly butts would be almost gone.
Like most but not all of the Alaska herds, the Gruening River herd migrated annually. When spring came, usually around mid to late May, they migrated over the narrow pass and down the Gruening River to where it met the Kanuyaq, about forty miles, where they calved and fed on willow and blueberry leaves, sedge grasses, tundra flowers, and mushrooms. In September, they moved back up the mountains, feeding on shrubs and lichen and kinnikinnick.
It was a small herd, never over five thousand on its best year, as there was a very healthy wolf population in the area, and then there were the bears. So far, the three species were holding fairly stable. For now, it was a matter of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The state and the feds were less concerned about the Gruening River herd than they were about the Central Arctic herd that migrated through Prudhoe Bay, whose population had dropped precipitously in the last twenty years, or the Mulchatna herd that had increased so geometrically that they were letting hunters take five each, including cows, and one season going so far as to allow hunters to fly and shoot same day.
If the mine went in, of course, much more attention would be paid. The herd would be tagged and monitored to a fare-thee-well, as would the wolves, the bears, the eagles, geese, ducks, wolverines, foxes, marmots, porcupines, pika squirrels, voles, and mosquitoes. Jim wasn't saying the attention would be a bad thing, but it had been his experience that the more attention was paid to an ecosystem, the more alarm was raised when that ecosystem changed in even the smallest degree.
It didn't matter if the change was the natural order of things. Say the herd decreased after a die-off following a hard winter. There would always be someone to tie it to the mine. Someone, say, like Ruthe Bauman. She wouldn't necessarily be wrong, either, but it was true that wildlife in Alaska could be used by any side to bolster whatever viewpoint was held to be most politically correct or economically feasible by the group in question, corporate, legislative, environmental, Native, whoever. The oil companies in Prudhoe Bay claimed that the caribou liked the gravel pads built for the roads and structures, where the wind kept the mosquitoes off them, and that some small groups of cows and calves had wintered under some of the structures.
Even the devil could quote scripture to his purpose.
Meantime, Jim drew a series of economical circles in the sky. He didn't know what he was looking for, exactly, but his gut was telling him that Howie was out here.
Howie Katelnikof was a liar and a thief and a bully and an all-around waste of space, and he might even be a murderer, although Jim wasn't sure he was the murderer of Mac Devlin. There was no bad blood between Mac and Howie so far as Jim knew, and while Mac might hate Global Harvest and all who sailed in her, he wouldn't go out to Suulutaq with the intention of picking a fight with Howie. Howie was little more than a gofer and, as Macleod had discovered to her dismay, from the get-go had been ripping off everything that wasn't nailed down. Far more likely Howie was fencing the stuff he stole to Mac.
Which might be a thought worth pursuing, Jim thought, checking again for weather before easing into a lazy figure eight that gave him a commanding view of the upper valley. Howie, ever on the alert to make a buck, might have sold Mac a look at the trailer and its contents. Mac might have paid for it on the off chance that he'd find something to help him pressure Global Harvest, in hopes of causing enough irritation that they would at long last buy him off.
That, Jim thought, seemed much more in character for both men. Weasels once, weasels ever.
Then his attention was caught by something on the ground. Color and movement, that's what Ranger Dan counseled when looking for wildlife, and that's what Jim had been looking for when he spotted a flash of blue through a dense stand of dark green spruce tucked into one of the little pocket basins. He banked left and continued a tight spiral downward, until he was circling a hundred feet over the spot where he'd seen the color flash. The nearness of the mountains was uncomfortable to him, but the weather was still holding. He throttled back as far as he could without losing lift and stood the Cessna on its left wing for a good, long look.