Killing Grounds

by Dana Stabenow

  Four

  KATE RESCUED A PATIENT MUTT from the sidewalk outside and walked back down to the boat harbor. The only other person she saw was one lone fisherman squatting on his hatch cover, needle and twine in hand, mending his gear.

  The harbor, on the other hand, was as full of boats as Kate had ever seen it, possibly because there was a whole float of pleasure craft, sloops, Liberty Bayliners and Boston whalers, all with improbable names like Windrover and My Retirement and Happy Hour, crowding out honest working boats with honest names, names of mothers and wives and sweethearts and daughters and recently even a few sons. The pleasure craft ran slip rentals through the roof, and their owners usually came down only once a year to fish in the Kanuyaq River Silver Salmon Derby. Kate curled her lip at them and moved on.

  The next row was a distinct improvement, where twenty-five- and thirty-foot bowpickers and drifters lined up gunnel to gunnel. Seiners with flying bridges and crow’s nests and masts with booms cocked just so nosed into the next row of slips in a lordly line. They seemed a little bit longer, their paint jobs just a little bit whiter, than the drifters. If seiners had noses, they would have been just a little bit elevated, all the better to look down upon their less elegant—and less profitable—counterparts.

  At the floats closest to the entrance of the harbor she found the crabbers, massive craft a hundred feet in length and more, deep-draft vessels with cold storage for the shellfish and hot showers for the crew, the closest a fishing fleet got to a luxury liner.

  Kate reached the end of the slip. Dwarfed between Derek Limmer’s Largane and Max Jones’ Asgard was a boat with a wooden hull eighty feet in length, similar in design to Old Sam’s Freya, with a high bow, a round stern and a cabin set aft of amidships. Unlike Old Sam’s meticulously cared-for craft, this old bucket’s sides were peeling black paint, the metal bulwark topping the gunnel in the bow was rusted through, and to add insult to injury, fireweed was growing from her trim line. Her name, once bold white letters a foot high, was a faded, ghostly presence, pride broken, spirit gone.

  Unconsciously, Kate pulled her hands free of her pockets, squared her shoulders and raised her chin, coming more or less to attention. Mutt, padding ahead of her, halted and turned to cock an inquiring eyebrow.

  The Marisol had been sailing the waters of Prince William Sound since before Kate was born. Her father had deckhanded for Eli Tiedeman during many very successful crab seasons, but it wasn’t crab fishing Kate remembered in connection with the Marisol, it was a week when she and her mother had flown out from Niniltna to board the Marisol to go deer hunting on Montague Island.

  It had been late fall, she remembered, a cold, clear, crisp November day. The limit had been four that year, four deer per hunter, and the party had split up in hopes of catching everyone’s limit. Zoya had gone with Eli, Eli’s wife Luba with their son, Ed.

  Kate had gone with her father. She was six years old and armed to the teeth with a .22 rifle that was as tall as she was. It might have slowed down a very small deer at point-blank range, but Stephan had insisted from the time Kate could walk that she become accustomed to always going armed on a hunt.

  There was only a thin crust of hard snow on the ground, and it crunched underfoot as they hiked Montague to the north. Eli had anchored the Marisol inside the lee of Jeannie Point, and there was a nice long beach where the deer often came down to eat seaweed and lick salt off the rocks. Zoya and Eli had headed up Torturous Creek, Luba and Ed up Jeannie Creek, and Stephan had made for the swamp that drained into Nellie Martin River. It was four miles as the crow flies, and slow going on foot through heavy brush and the occasional stream and an unending series of deserted marshes. Kate had found some blueberries still hanging on the bushes. They were as big as the top joint of her thumb and frozen solid. She held them in her mouth, the cold, smooth sphere melting into a half-sweet, half-tart mush. Stephan had laughed at her blue tongue.

  They’d found their deer, a fat doe, on a little rise overlooking the Nellie Martin, probably on her way to the beach. Stephan brought her down with a single shot, just above and behind her right shoulder. Together, he and Kate had fashioned a yoke with the rope he’d brought and they’d begun the hike back.

  As they were coming into a small clearing at the bottom of a hill, Stephan had paused for a breather. He looked up to see three grizzlies watching them from the top of the hill, a female and two males. The males were smaller than she was, but a grizzly, big enough to start with, looks twice its size outlined against snow, and the three of them together looked like all four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Even the first week of November, the last thing Stephan had been thinking about was bears, because any decent, upright, law-abiding bear was in hibernation by then. He was carrying a bolt-action .30-06 with five rounds, one of which he’d used on the deer and the other four of which were in the pocket of his mackinaw.

  He dropped the rope and reached for the ammunition. At the same time, the female caught the scent of the dead deer and exploded into a run. Her sons were right behind her.

  As long as Kate lived, she would never forget watching those bears tear down that hill in their direction, looming larger and larger against the snow. She unshouldered her .22.

  “No,” Stephan said. “Run, Kate. Run!”

  She ran a few steps and stopped, out of his eyesight, and watched, the .22 held in both hands across her chest. Her world narrowed down to her father and the bears, and suddenly everyone seemed to be moving in slow motion, slow enough for her to notice things and think about them, slow enough for her to feel the smooth metal of the .22’s barrel and the slick wood of its stock against the palms of her hands, slow enough for her to feel the bite of below-freezing air on the skin of her cheek, to smell the scent of pine, to taste fear bitter on her tongue, slow enough to notice the sun traveling the sky just above the horizon, two sun dogs guarding it like scimitars to the right and to the left.

  The three bears came at a gallop that covered the earth, claws tearing at the crust of snow and kicking it up in little puffs. One of the males caught his paw on a bush and tumbled forward into a somersault, his velocity carrying him as fast as his brother was running.

  Her father’s hand was shaking so badly he dropped the first round. It seemed to take forever to hit the ground, brass casing glinting in the slanting rays of the sunset. She had time to notice that her father didn’t even swear. By sheer effort of will he steadied his hands and fed the remaining three bullets into the magazine and slid the bolt home.

  The bears were less than fifty yards away when he brought the rifle up to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel. The first shot echoed in her ears, bang, bang, bang, bang, the rhythm sounding like a fading heartbeat. Slowly, ever so slowly, Kate’s eyes followed the line of the barrel. The female was still coming, so were the males, and she thought Stephan had missed.

  Then the female stumbled and went down, sliding forward another ten feet on her belly, her immense frame so agile in action, so incongruously awkward in death. The two males barely checked. Again, her father fired, again the echo, bang, bang, bang, bang, and the male on the right squealed and stumbled. He got back up, still squealing, and made for the edge of the trees, limping badly on his right foreleg. His brother skidded to a halt and howled a protest. The other bear answered him in kind, and he wheeled about to hurl defiance at Stephan. Stephan kept his eye to the sight but held his fire. The third bear gave off the grizzly’s signature sound, a cross between a donkey’s bray and a pig’s squeal, and retreated to the top of the hill.

  Kate, meanwhile, returned to real time. First she heard the sound of her own heart, beating rapidly high up in her throat, then her breath, then her father’s voice. She looked up to find him staring down at her, slanted hazel eyes so like her own, thoughtful and considering.

  “You didn’t run,” Stephan said.

  Kate swallowed hard. “No,” she admitted.

  “I told you to run.”

  “I couldn’t, Dad,”
Kate said. “I couldn’t leave you.”

  She’d been six years old and armed with a single-shot .22, and she had refused to back down or run away. Her father’s slight smile betrayed his pride, and she straightened her shoulders. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get back to the boat.”

  “What about him?” Her chin indicated the sounds of the wounded male.

  Stephan glanced at the sky. “It’s almost four o’clock. It’ll be dark in an hour. I’m not chasing around after any wounded grizzlies in the dark.” He stooped to pick up the rope handle tied to the deer.

  “We’re taking the deer with us?”

  “We worked too hard for her,” he said. “I’ll be damned if I leave her for them.” He looked at her. “You can shoulder your rifle now, honey,” he said, his voice gentle.

  She looked down in surprise. Sure enough, she had the rifle up, the butt pulled firmly into her shoulder. Her cheek hurt, she realized, from where it had pressed against the stock. Her muscles stiff and sore, she reset the safety. She didn’t reshoulder it; she carried it in both hands across her body, ready. Stephan gave it a long, thoughtful glance, her face another, and said nothing.

  When they got back to the beach, the others were there before them, Zoya and Eli with a stringy old buck and Luba and Ed with a couple of fat two-year-olds. They had been going to butcher out on the beach, but when they heard Stephan and Kate’s story they loaded the four carcasses in the dory and headed for the Marisol.

  Stephan strung their doe up by her hind legs from the boom. She was so fat, and her brown pelt so smooth and soft. Her eyes were open, big and brown, staring at the deck. Kate couldn’t look away from them. Stephan noticed, and came around to see what she was looking at. He reached over Kate’s shoulder and put a hand over the doe’s face.

  Almost thirty years later, Kate could still remember the gentleness of her father’s hand that day. It had worked; with the doe’s eyes closed Kate could help with the butchering out and even take an academic interest in the contents of the stomach—seaweed and an incautious hermit crab that hadn’t let go of the seaweed when the deer nibbled it up. The crab was still alive, and Kate tossed it in the water and hoped it made it back to its own tidal pool.

  The next morning, Kate had been left on the boat while the grown-ups (including Ed, who was only five years older than Kate, a fact she pointed out to her father) went ashore and tracked down the wounded bear. He’d died overnight, and they returned to the Marisol that evening with two bearskins and three more deer. Stephan had grinned at her as he swung a leg over the gunnel, and her determined pout had dissolved like mist beneath a rising sun.

  It had all been a very long time ago, but it was a memory Kate treasured, a memory inextricably entwined with the sorry shadow warped into the slip before her. Once the Marisol had been catered to, fussed over, no copper paint too good for her hull, no deckhand too young or too small to help scrub down her decks after a fall hunt. She leaned forward to rest her forehead against the flaking bow. “That’s okay,” she whispered. “You were high boat for a long time, and back when it counted, too.”

  The blistered wood felt warm to the touch.

  “Damn shame, isn’t it,” a voice said behind her, and Kate jumped a foot in the air. Mutt cocked a quizzical eye, and Kate felt her cheeks getting hot.

  “Hold still a minute, you got some paint on your face,” he said, and raised a hand to swipe at her cheek.

  She suffered the attention because her back was to the Marisol, but as soon as she could she stepped out of reach. He inspected his fingers and raised his hand. There were flecks of black paint on them.

  “Thanks, Gull,” she said gruffly. “How are you?”

  “Fine, Kate, just fine,” he said. He waved a proprietary hand at the boat harbor, rather in the manner of a medieval baron presenting his domain while retaining all rights and authority thereto, including scutage and droit du seigneur.

  Kate understood. She could look, but she couldn’t touch.

  Shitting Seagull had been born Ernest Lee Weustenfeld in Nooseneck, Rhode Island, fifty years before. So far as she knew, she was the only person in Alaska who knew this. But was it her fault that while she was paying Old Sam’s slip rent one morning that Shitting Seagull had seen a forty-foot pleasure cruiser trying to sneak into transient parking and had hotfooted it down the ramp to chase them off, leaving her alone in his office with nothing to read but the detritus on his desk, which just happened to include a letter from his sister in East Matunuck? A sister who called him Ernie LEE (the emphasis seemed natural to Kate) and, signing herself “Your sis, Sissy LU,” wanted to know when he was abandoning the Alaskan wilderness and returning to the bosom of his family, and oh, by the way, that useless bastard Kenny JOE had left her again, this time for that bleached bitch Leona ANN (it seemed that everyone in rural Rhode Island had two first names, a custom Kate thought had been rightfully restricted to south of the Mason-Dixon Line) and she was short for the rent, could Ernie LEE oblige? Just while she got on her feet, of course, and little Ernie LEE and little Martha RAYE sent oodles of love and wanted to know when their Uncle Ernie LEE was coming to visit? And not to forget the Eskimo yo-yos he’d promised them.

  Ernie LEE didn’t go by his given name in Cordova, however. Upon further investigation, Kate concluded that it was probably all Hawkeye’s fault. On a shelf in the harbormaster’s office sat the collected works of James Fenimore Cooper, as well as everything ever written by M. Scott Momaday, Dee Brown, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, David Seals, Thomas King, Tony Hillerman and Barbara Kingsolver. There was a two-foot-high stack of back issues of Indian Country Today piled in one corner. A folder of photocopied microfiche articles on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act spilled off the filing cabinet.

  Kate, a trained detective as well as a natural snoop, feared the worst, and time proved her right. Ernie LEE was a wannabe Indian. He had migrated first west and then north, rejecting White America and all that it stood for (in his mind, broken treaties, Custer and Wounded Knee) and wholeheartedly embracing the Native American ethic and everything it represented (in his mind, sovereignty, Black Elk and Wounded Knee). He was a card-carrying member of AIM, tithed regularly to the Free Leonard Peltier Committee and was eager to explain the legal differences between being a Native American and an Alaska Native— even lo Alaska Natives, who suffered in silence, because after all, Shitting Seagull did control access to the small boat harbor.

  He got the harbormaster job because he was seven feet two inches tall, weighed 350 pounds and had hands like the shovel on a front-end loader. The mayor took one look at Ernie LEE and saw an immediate end to any unnecessary roughhousing or drunken boat driving down on the docks, which until then had contributed heavily to the repairs and maintenance of slips and pilings.

  On his side, Ernie LEE took one look at Cordova and knew his odyssey was over. He settled in, not bothering to look for a place to live other than the room behind the harbormaster’s office, where he slept on a cot beneath army blankets, cooked on a hot plate and read sitting on a Blazo box, his back to the wall and his feet on the windowsill. He had one pinup: Wilma Mankiller.

  As far as the name went, after some tactful inquiry Kate gathered that Ernie LEE had read something somewhere about Native Americans naming their children after the first thing they saw after the child’s birth. Since his mother (probably Carolina MOON or Georgia PEACH) had not had the foresight to do so, after much thought he had decided to rectify his lack. He fasted three days and three nights in a lotus position (it didn’t matter that yoga wasn’t a necessarily Native American practice, it was indigenous to somewhere and it was spiritual in nature and that was enough). On the fourth morning, just before sunrise, eyes firmly closed, he uncranked himself—painfully—into an upright position, hobbled to the door and felt his way outside. He’d been unable to keep from speculating what he would first see, and was guiltily aware of choosing names in advance of the culmination of the ceremony. Morning Star? Rising
Sun? Tall Tree? White Cloud? Flying Eagle?

  Breathless with anticipation, he opened his eyes. At that moment, a twenty-three-inch immature female specimen of Larus glaucescens, startled awake from her roost on the harbormaster’s roof by the vibration of the opening door, launched herself from the ridgepole and unloaded right in Ernie LEE’s face.

  In other words, a seagull shit on him.

  Now another, lesser man might have rejected Native American traditions at this point and moved on to a less stressful spiritual discipline, like the Jesuit priesthood, but it must be said that Ernie LEE had the courage of his convictions. If a seagull shitting on him was the first thing he saw on the morning of his spiritual birth, then Shitting Seagull was the name by which he would be known from that time forward. It was a decision that gave the fishing community no little enjoyment, and the city clerk heartburn every month when she had to print out his paycheck. A prim throwback to a more Victorian era, she wouldn’t say “shit” if she had a mouthful.

  “So, Gull,” Kate said. “How’s business?”

  Gull considered. “Busy,” he pronounced. “Lots of in-and-out, like usual this time of year.”

  They were walking down the slip, back toward the ramp, when movement caught the corner of Kate’s eye. Gull walked on a few paces before he realized he was alone, and stopped to look around. “Kate?”

  She held a finger to her lips, and he, surprisingly light-footed for one of his bulk, came back to stand next to her. “What?”

  She pointed with her chin. He looked, and his face darkened. “Ah.”

  It was Cal Meany, boarding his drifter, and he wasn’t alone. She had a mass of dark hair that rioted around her face in artificial curls and a figure lush enough to give the Pope whiplash. Her plaid shirt was unbuttoned and her jeans were falling down and her back was against the bulkhead of the cabin on Meany’s boat. As they watched, one of his hands fumbled with his zipper. A second later the woman let out a shriek that echoed around the boat harbor. Meany clapped a hand over her mouth, wrenched the door of his cabin open and stumbled inside, her legs wrapped around his waist. The door slammed shut behind them.