“They were drunks and dopers, and Louis was an accident Daisy couldn’t get rid of, although the story is she tried hard enough. Wesley drowned in the Cordova small-boat harbor the year Louis was fifteen. Louis pretty much raised himself.”
“And I bet Mary Waterbury’s parents think he did a hell of a job.”
There was no answer to that and Kate attempted none.
Little Mary Waterbury, brown as a nut and round as a ball. Homely, cheerful, kind to children and animals, born to be a mother, and so very young. Twenty-one years younger than Louis Deem, her first boyfriend.
And her last. Why didn’t you do something? Jim had asked. She had tried. She thought again of Mary Waterbury, that young hopeful life brought to a sudden and violent halt at the hands of a man who had pretty much perfected the art of ridding himself of unwanted wives.
Yes, she had tried, Kate thought now, but she hadn’t tried hard enough.
The rest of the journey was accomplished in silence. Twenty-five miles from Niniltna, they turned down the narrow rutted track that led to Kate’s homestead. Jim stopped the Blazer in the center of the flood of light pouring out of the tall windows that ran across the prow front of Kate’s house.
Her house. It still seemed so odd to come home to a whole house, all two floors and two bedrooms and two bathrooms and hand-carved pine dining set of it. To have so much room, to have hot running water instead of hand-pumped cold, to take a hot shower instead of a snowmelt bath in a galvanized round steel tub, to be able to keep half and half in the refrigerator instead of it freezing up in a cooler on the porch, and most miraculous of all, to be able to get up in the middle of the night to use a real live flush toilet ten steps from her bed instead of fumbling around in the dark for her boots and parka and traipsing outside to the outhouse—it still seemed too much, and she still felt unworthy of the gift the Park had so generously given her.
She had learned the hard way not to say so, however.
She opened the door of the truck, and Mutt leapt over her in a graceful gray arc. She landed easily and loped into the brush at the edge of the clearing and to all intents and purposes vanished. Kate looked at Jim. “Want to stay for dinner?”
He was tempted, as he’d missed dinner at Auntie Vi’s, where he was renting a room until he found a place of his own—which in Niniltna wasn’t going to be easy, inexpensive, or any time soon.
On the other hand, he knew there was a better-than-even chance that dinner wasn’t the only thing on offer in this invitation. At least the lights on inside the house meant that Johnny was home, so he would be chaperoned. He ought to be safe.
“Sure.”
He followed her inside, where they shed their coats and boots at the door and padded forward on stocking feet. Johnny was stretched out on the couch, so engrossed in a book that he didn’t hear them come in. Jim walked over and pushed the book up so he could read the title. “Reflex,” he said. “Any good?”
Two years into adolescence, Johnny’s towhead had turned a rich mink brown, over a face growing into strong, blunt features, including a formidable chin. He blinked up at Jim with a dazed expression. When Johnny read, he read. It was on such occasions difficult to remember that Kate really wasn’t Johnny’s mother. “Huh? Oh. Hi, Jim.” He sat up. “Kate,” he said, surprised. “You’re home.”
“That I am.” She nodded at Jim. “Company for dinner.”
Johnny shrugged. “Cool.”
Jim tapped the book. “Any good?” he said again.
“Huh? Oh. Yeah, real good. Science fiction. Sequel to Jumper?”
“I read that,” Jim said. “Good book.”
He sat down and they plunged into an animated debate on the desirability of teleportation as a human skill. Johnny, of that generation of instant gratification which ipso facto believed going anywhere took longer than they thought it ought to, took the pro, and Jim, as a practicing law enforcement professional with a lively sense of self-preservation, took the con.
Kate put John Hiatt on the boom box and got out the stock she’d made from moose marrow bones, onions, and carrots two days before. She sliced more onions into olive oil and butter and let them cook down while she sliced French bread she’d baked that weekend, brushed it with olive oil, and browned it in the oven on both sides. When the onions were ready, she poured in the stock, brought it to a boil, and let it simmer while she brought out three large bowls. She put the soup in the bowls, floated the bread on the soup, and grated Swiss and Parmesan cheese on the bread. She slid it into the oven to bake and brown, and set out spoons and knives and paper towels for napkins and more French bread and butter. “Soup’s on.”
They came to the table, noses twitching. Johnny dug in with the finicky appetite of any normal fourteen-year-old vacuum cleaner. Jim tasted and considered. “Be better if you added a little cognac,” he said.
Johnny paused between one inhalation and the next, spoon suspended in midair.
Kate gave Jim a long, steady, fairly expressionless look.
“Not,” said Jim very carefully indeed, “that it isn’t absolutely perfect just as it is.” He slurped up some more, with sound effects. “Yessiree bob, the best French onion soup I’ve ever had in my life.”
Johnny sneezed something that sounded an awful lot like “suck up” into his paper towel.
Kate took firm control of the conversation and asked him how school had gone that day, and Johnny told them about the field trip his class had made to the dump to watch the eagles roosting there, not neglecting to include a vivid description of the projectile pooping incident. Jim retaliated with a description of the apprehension of that dastardly villain, Willard Shugak. Kate contributed a little Park gossip, including the Niniltna postmistress’s recent dalliance with the traveling dentist, ending unhappily with the appearance of a representative of the Alaska Division of Occupational Licensing, who informed everyone waiting in line in the makeshift clinic in the gym that not only was the traveling dentist not licensed to practice in the state of Alaska, but he appeared not to have attended medical school at all, anywhere. This came as something of a shock to the five patients he’d already treated that morning (one cleaning, three fillings, and a root canal) and who at last report were still investigating the teeth he’d worked on with cautious tongues. Bonnie Jeppsen, the postmistress, was heard to be mending her broken heart by beading everything that didn’t move out of the way first in bright primary colors, including a rock the size of a small suitcase.
It wasn’t until he was helping with the dishes that Jim realized how very domestic it all felt. A frisson of fear ran up his spine.
Kate smiled sweetly at her two men, or would have if she’d known how. “Would you like to spend the night, Jim?”
Johnny tossed down the dish towel and wagged a monitory finger. “I don’t want to hear any noises, is that clear?” He snatched up his book and shot down the hall, his bedroom door closing with unnecessary firmness behind him.
Kate laughed. It was the sexiest sound Jim had ever heard coming out of a woman’s mouth. It was also the most frightening sound he’d ever heard coming out of a woman’s mouth. “No, thanks,” he said through suddenly dry lips.
She sauntered around the kitchen island and backed him into a corner, there to run a delicate finger down his shirtfront. “Whatever can I do to change your mind?”
He knew this was a bad idea and he tried desperately to remember why, but his brains had relocated somewhere south of his belt buckle.
He thought, ruefully, that this was his own damn fault. He’d been chasing after her for years, even before Jack Morgan died. Now he had a tiger by the tail and he didn’t know what to do with her.
Wait a minute. Really, when he thought about it, it was all Kate’s fault. She was the one who had lulled him into a false sense of security, fooled him into thinking he could chase her forever with impunity because she had made it manifestly clear that there wasn’t a hope in hell he was ever going to catch her.
The pattern was set, he thought indignantly. He chased. She ran. Then, last year, something had changed. It was hard with that finger fiddling with the buttons of his shirt to focus on exactly what had, and how, but there was a fuzzy memory somewhere in the back of his mind of him trying to do the right thing, of telling her that he was calling off his pursuit, that she was a one-man woman and he was neither capable of being nor willing to be a one-woman man and that—oh hell. Now she was tracing the brass bear on his belt buckle.
Somehow him telling her it was over had been the beginning of her chasing him, and while he hated to admit it, she had been far more successful at it than he had. The last time she had managed to seduce him had been two weeks before at the New Year’s pot-latch, when she’d lured him out of the school gym and taken him standing up in a corner he fervently hoped had been too dark to see into because there sure as hell had been a lot of foot traffic on the sidewalk not twenty feet away. He had held out for a nice long time before that regrettable if thoroughly enjoyable incident, which he assured himself was the only reason he’d been such an easy target.
There was no such excuse this evening. He had a perfectly serviceable vehicle parked right out front, too, providentially positioned for a quick getaway.
“What the hell did you put in that soup?” he heard himself say as she led him up the narrow wooden stairs to the giant sleigh bed in the loft.
“Not cognac,” she said.
TWO
JANUARY
Ahtna
They took off from the Niniltna airstrip before dawn. The sun was taking its own sweet time climbing up over the mountains, grudging every ray as it spilled over peak and crag to wake up the Park, all twenty million acres of it. It was home to six thousand people living in two towns, a dozen villages, and on hundreds of homesteads, traplines, and mining claims.
And that was only if you didn’t count the squatters, Kate thought, more of whom seemed to arrive every day. Most of them had roseate expectations of a life at one with nature, and nature was reliably and enthusiastically prompt in disillusioning them. One guy pitched a tent on a bear track, and the bears, delighted by this change of diet, obligingly ate him and his girlfriend. Another guy hiked out to a broken-down bus and sat there until he starved to death, having neglected to study the part of the noble savage lifestyle about learning how to hunt. A team of Korean climbers went up Denali and got stuck in a storm without a radio. Rescued by a passing Italian climber, they were back the following year, this time with a radio with which they got stuck in another storm and used it to yell for help. Unfortunately, they hadn’t bothered to learn English.
“Suicide by Alaska,” Kate called it, and everyone within hearing at Bernie’s snickered and repeated it to the first six people they met. As any Park rat could tell you, there was far more truth than hyperbole in her gibe.
Most of those who survived were on the first available plane south. A hardy few stuck it out to take up residence. Now and then George Perry, owner and operator of Chugach Air Taxi Service, would spot a roof he hadn’t seen before tucked into a stand of trees. He never reported it. If he had, Dan O’Brien would have had to try to run them off, to which they might not have taken kindly, like with maybe a .30-06. Dan was a friend of George’s. Not to mention, the Park Service was a good client whose checks always cleared the bank.
It wasn’t like the Park couldn’t absorb them all, Kate thought, riding shotgun in Jim’s Cessna at a thousand feet. Four times the size of Denali National Park to the west, the Park’s north and east boundaries were the Quilak Mountains, which included Angqak, or Big Bump, a sixteen-thousand-foot peak that straddled the Canadian border and provided a rite of passage for many a climber longing to see the view from the top. A hundred glaciers wrapped icy arms around the Quilaks. Some of those arms were three thousand feet thick and thirty miles long.
Others hung from the sheer sides of cliffs or inched their way to the coast and calved into the Gulf of Alaska, which formed the Park’s southern border. Also known as the Mother of Storms, the gulf was half a hemisphere of water congenitally prone to every kind of meteorological mischief, to be approached with prudence and vigilance by any seaman of sense.
The Park’s western edge boasted its only man-made boundary, but more than made up for it by boasting of three, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the Glenn Highway, and the Alaska Railroad.
As the Cessna droned westward, the mountains gave way to foothills, the foothills to a broad valley. The sun summited Big Bump and turned the frozen surface of the Kanuyaq River into the Yellow Brick Road. A 250-mile serpentine strip of water, the Kanuyaq rose in the Kanuyaq Glacier and wound its tortuous way around mountain and foothill, over fall and through canyon, gathering to itself the runoff from a thousand creeks and streams and rills and becks and depositing them into the gulf through a vast delta that spanned fifty miles of coastline and was home to a thousand species of shorebirds, including many that were of a size to fill a pot, and very tasty. The river was navigable in summer only as far as Niniltna, Kate’s village. In winter, when it froze over, it became a Bush highway, an ice road for anyone with a snow machine.
What wasn’t Park was wilderness, and what wasn’t wilderness was wildlife refuge. Less than 1 percent of it was privately owned, that tiny portion shoe-horned in by sourdoughs and stampeders who came north during the gold rush in 1898, who saw to it that their property rights were grandfathered in when the Park was created around them. Another, larger fraction belonged to the resident Alaska Natives, some Eyak, some Athabascan, a few Tlingit, and a lot of Aleuts transplanted there by World War II. They’d come into the land in 1971 with the enactment of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, when they traded the federal government an oil pipeline right of way over aboriginal grounds in exchange for money and land.
They called themselves Park rats. Some of them did a little farming for barter, many of them trapped, and all of them hunted and fished. Salmon ran up every stream, mountain goats and Dall sheep made a good living off the mountain kinnikinnick, and two different caribou herds disregarded the Alaska-Canada border on their migratory routes. Moose were plentiful. So were the wolves, the black bears, the grizzly bears, the wolverines, and all the other smaller fur-bearing mammals.
Kate had watched a lot of people come into the Park. She had watched even more of them go, traveling the only road in, the surprisingly solid remains of a gravel roadbed laid down nearly a hundred years before for a railroad from Cordova on the coast to what had then been the richest copper mine in North America in the interior. After forty years, the ore got harder to get at, and war came, and the copper company turned off the lights in Kanuyaq and pulled up the tracks behind them as they left. The ties were immediately scavenged by those who stayed behind. Once every spring or so, the state road grader would scrape off a layer of frozen dirt to reveal a rusted spike and the grader operator would carry it into Niniltna and hand it over to the school, where the teachers would pass it around their classes, a useful aide-memoire in underlining the boom-and-bust nature of Alaskan history.
There was only the downriver road from Niniltna to Bernie’s Roadhouse, the up-the-mountain road from Niniltna to the Step and Park headquarters, and the fifty miles of road from Niniltna to Ahtna, which connected the Park to the Glenn Highway, or it did when it was navigable, which it wasn’t most of the time. Which helped explain why flying was the number one means of transportation. One in seven Park rats had a pilot’s license, and every family owned to at least one pilot, most of them private but some commercial. There were dozens of airstrips. Two were paved, Ahtna and Cordova, and the rest were gravel, including Niniltna’s 4,800-foot strip, courtesy of a USGS survey forty-odd years before. Most were narrow strips carved out of the forest or riverbanks or lakeshores or the one mostly level spot on the side of a hill, access for fishing lodges and gold mines and hunting parties, plus the occasional airstrip for companies exploring for oil or minerals. Those were always the best airstrips, because they’d
had the most money spent on them, but almost every homestead had a mowed strip of grass out back long enough to get a Piper Super Cub into the air with a haunch of moose loaded in the back.
Which reminded Kate. “Who did you say got a moose?”
“Eknaty Kvasnikof.” Jim leveled off at a thousand feet and adjusted the prop pitch. The engine smoothed out. “He was coming home from Betty Moonin’s late. He said he didn’t see the moose until he hit it. His bumper caught the ass end of the moose, which then slid over the top of his hood and busted out his window. The moose then took a dump in Eknaty’s lap.”
He grinned when Kate laughed. “Both the moose’s back legs were broken, so Eknaty shot it and butchered it out before it froze solid. He loaded it in the back of his pickup, which actually still runs even though the front end is totally trashed, and brought it to me.” He added parenthetically, “We really could use a brown shirt in the Park. I don’t have time to be screwing around with critter problems.”
Brown shirts were Alaska State Troopers who enforced those wildlife regulations with regard to animals. Blue shirts were Alaska State Troopers who enforced those wildlife regulations with regard to humans. “Tell your boss, not me,” Kate said. “What’d you do with the meat?”
“I told him to have Billy Mike distribute it to elders.”
“You didn’t keep the liver?”
“Was I supposed to?”
“You were supposed to keep it and give it to me.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that. Next time.”
Kate subsided, mollified. “I love a moose liver.”
“Tasty?”
“And huge. You can get half a dozen meals out of one moose liver. Remind me to make you my moose liver pate one day.”
“I like mine fried with bacon and onions.”
She gave him an approving smile and he felt his heart turn over, before he remembered his heart had no business doing any such thing.
Kenny Hazen, Ahtna’s chief of police, was waiting for them at the airport. Mutt, who woke up from her comfortable snooze on the backseat as they landed, greeted him with her usual excessive enthusiasm for the male of the species. “You are such a slut,” Kate told her.
A Deeper Sleep Page 3
