Killing Grounds

by Dana Stabenow

  “He loves women,” Kate said. “Just not on the deck of a boat, and in particular not on the deck of the Freya.”

  “How does he like them?” Jack said, pretty sure he already knew the answer but unable to resist.

  “Naked and stretched out on a bed. It’s our proper place in the cosmic scheme of things.”

  “I heard that.”

  So had Johnny, whose eyes were the size of dinner plates, but neither adult was paying any attention to him.

  Jack looked at Kate, at the tilted hazel eyes bright with humor, the breeze generated by their passage pulling a strand of her hair loose from its braid and bringing a glow to her cheeks, and knew a mighty temptation to tackle her right there in the stern of the skiff.

  Unfortunately, the presence of his son and heir was something of a hindrance, not to mention fifty fishermen who seemed to have gone collectively insane.

  All around them salmon jumped and splashed, the school a dark swath beneath the water that cut back and forth between the boats riding at anchor. Cases of beer had appeared on every deck, and aluminum lawn chairs upholstered in plastic green plaid unfolded themselves in bows and on the tops of cabins. A skiff whizzed by, towing Tim Sarakovikoff water-skiing on his hatch covers. His face was split wide in a grin, and he swerved toward them. Kate ducked in time, but Jack was sprayed and Johnny was drenched.

  The boy whooped. “Hey, come back here, let me try that!”

  “No way,” Jack said.

  “But Dad—”

  “No,” Jack said, and with a firm hand sat Johnny down hard on the bow thwart. Johnny pouted.

  They passed Cal Meany’s drifter, his net paid out over the stern, white corks bobbing like popcorn popping as the fish hit it. He and his deckhand were moving up and down the cork line, picking fish so fast their hands blurred in action. The skiff was already two-thirds full. Not a few fishermen were eyeing them with less than favorable expressions on their faces, and several comments were made in raised voices, “scab” being the nicest epithet hurled.

  “Is that going to be trouble?” Jack said as they left the no-namer behind.

  Kate nodded. “Probably.”

  “Should we do something?”

  “Like what? Tell Meany to slop fishing? He’d tell you to fuck off. Tell the fishermen to leave Meany alone? They’d just beat the shit out of you first.”

  Johnny leaned around his father to see if she was kidding. Her face was calm and unsmiling. He sat back, sober and a little regretful. He was going on adolescence, and this might be the closest he’d ever come to a shooting war. He was kind of sorry to be missing it.

  They passed the markers and entered the mouth of the creek, a broad stretch of water gray-blue with glacial silt, sandbanks on either side and a few sprouting midstream.

  Kate reduced speed and threaded a careful path upstream. No matter how many times you’d been up the Amartuq and no matter how well you thought you knew him, he was a noisy, contrary, temperamental beast who delighted in surprise ambushes that usually resulted in the loss of a kicker, if not a hull. Sandbars changed sides, deadheads lurked around every bend, boulders shifted location beneath the force of the spring runoff, until you thought you could hear a deep, mocking laugh in the rush of the water beneath the bow. Kate took her time. If they hit something, at least they’d hit it slow.

  Alders and cottonwoods and the occasional scrub spruce crowded the banks. “Look!” Johnny said, pointing. A grizzly lumbered out of the brush and waded out belly-deep into the water. As they watched, he caught a gleaming salmon in his claws and sat down in midstream to eat it. His matted pelt shone golden brown in the morning sun just breaking through the overcast. He didn’t bother to look around at the noise of the outboard, concentrating on breakfast instead.

  Around the next bend a wolverine snarled at them from beneath a clump of diamond willow. On the other side of the creek a family of otters played tag. Jack grabbed his son by the shoulders and turned him to look at a lynx crouched on the branch of a cottonwood, tufted ears cocked forward over glowing cat eyes. Two trumpeter swans paddled in a calm backwater, while high above an eagle beat his enormous wings steadily homeward.

  Jack shook his head. “You’ve sure got the wildlife out here well trained, Shugak, I’ll say that for you.”

  Johnny was bug-eyed and speechless. Kate was unable to repress a grin, well aware of the absurdity of taking any responsibility for the perfection of the day or the proliferation of the wildlife, but proud that Calm Water’s Daughter was putting her best foot forward nonetheless. What The Woman Who Keeps the Tides was up to in Prince William Sound she preferred not to think about.

  Fifteen minutes later the left side of the creek spread out into a wide, flat area of sand and tall grass. A log cabin with a roof sprouting green moss sat on the bank behind. A smaller creek ran next to the cabin and into the bigger creek, and where the two met sat what looked like a miniature version of what pushed riverboats up the Mississippi a hundred years before.

  “What’s that, Kate?” Johnny demanded.

  “A fish wheel.”

  “Cool,” he breathed. “What’s a fish wheel?”

  “You’ll find out,” she told him.

  Of the two of them, Jack had more experience with that sweetly promising tone of voice. He looked apprehensive. She saw the look and smiled at him. He did not feel reassured.

  Six

  A WOMAN CAME TO THE DOOR of the cabin, saw them and called out, “Vi, Edna, Balasha, come see! Katya is here!”

  Kate cut the outboard engine and the bow of the skiff nosed up onto the gravel. Johnny jumped out and tugged them in the rest of the way, Jack following more slowly. Mutt took the bow in one leap and galloped madly up the bank as Auntie Joy and Auntie Vi and Auntie Edna and Auntie Balasha came out of the cabin, laughing and chattering excitedly, taking turns patting Mutt, who ducked her head at each in turn, very much in the manner of royalty granting an audience. When etiquette was satisfied, she led the way down the bank with her tail at a lordly angle, escorting the four old women as if it were their first trip to the water’s edge.

  Kate climbed ashore last, and looped the bow line around a low-hanging branch of diamond willow.

  Auntie Vi said with a twinkle, “The old man fire you, or you quit?”

  “Auntie!” Kate shook her head in mock reproof. “Old Sam can’t fire me, I’m too good to lose. And I can’t quit,” she added, “because without me nobody would deliver to him.” Everyone laughed. “You know Jack Morgan, don’t you, aunties? And this is his son, Johnny.”

  Jack inclined his head in a gesture that was half nod, half bow and all respect. Jack had always been good with Kate’s elders, possibly because he knew he would never have gotten anywhere with her if he hadn’t. Johnny followed his example, the gravity of good manners resting easily upon his youthful shoulders.

  “Jack and Johnny are on a fishing trip. We just stopped in to say hi.”

  Auntie Joy inspected father and son with bright eyes, head cocked to one side, looking like a plump, inquisitive bird. “You go up creek to fish?”

  Jack nodded. “Yes, Joyce. We do.”

  “What for you go up creek? You stay here. Plenty fish for everybody. Okay, girls?”

  Auntie Vi agreed heartily. Edna and Balasha, who didn’t live in Niniltna and therefore didn’t know Jack as well as the other aunts did, were shyer but just as hospitable, which had as much to do with the expectation of the free labor such guests would provide as it did with innate hospitality. When Calm Water’s Daughter sent such a gift up the creek, one was wise to accept it without complaint.

  “It’s settled then,” Auntie Joy said. She beckoned with an imperious finger, and Jack bowed to the inevitable and meekly shouldered pack and pole and sleeping bag and empty coolers up the bank and into the cabin. Johnny, who by rights could have expressed serious annoyance at this hijacking of his male-bonding fishing trip with his dad, looked at Kate for inspiration. She grinned at him. He was a go
od kid. He sighed, shouldered his own gear and followed his father.

  And the gates of mercy closed behind them, Kate thought, and followed both her men up the bank, still grinning.

  Auntie Joy bustled around and produced spiced tea in chipped mugs. She had to call Balasha and Johnny up from the creek, where Balasha was instructing Johnny in the mysteries of the fish wheel. “You should see how it works, Dad,” Johnny said around a mouthful of Oreo. “It’s so cool, it’s like this paddle wheel, only the blades scoop up salmon in them. And Balasha let me eat some eggs right out of the fish!” He demonstrated, holding his hands over his head with an imaginary salmon stretched between them. “You squeeze, and the eggs just shoot out into your mouth!”

  “Mostly,” Jack said, reaching out a hand to pick a cluster of pink eggs that had adhered to his son’s cheek.

  Johnny grinned at him, unrepentant.

  “What did they taste like?”

  “Cold and salty.” Johnny smacked his lips together. “Better than popcorn. Yum!”

  Balasha said something in Aleut to Auntie Vi, who replied briskly. Kate caught the word qaryaq, which meant salmon roe, and “Siksik!” which meant, sort of, “No way!” and all four women looked on the boy with approval. Johnny, apparently, was in. Unaware, he crammed another Oreo down after the qaryaq.

  “So, Auntie Joy,” Kate said. “Has Lamar Rousch been around yet this year?”

  Auntie Joy curled a lip. “That boy don’t come back since I run him off last year.”

  Johnny looked curious, but he knew enough to shut up and listen.

  “Lamar’s the fish hawk for this area, and this fish camp is on federal land,” Kate explained.

  “Why’s a guy working for the state enforcing federal law?” Jack asked.

  Kate shrugged. “Probably because of the federal cutbacks in the Parks department. Dan O’Brian’s crew is stretched pretty thin. He probably asked Lamar to keep his eye out.”

  “Humph,” Auntie Joy said.

  “Of course, this is federal land only according to the federal government,” Kate added. “It wasn’t federal land until statehood, and our tribe has subsistence fished here since, hell, I don’t know, since forever.”

  “As long as the water runs and the grass is green, we been here,” Edna said. She blushed when everyone looked at her in surprise, and ducked her head.

  She had invoked the traditional words included in every treaty the federal government had entered into with the Native American peoples, “so long as the water runs and the grass is green”—a phrase that was supposed to imply forever regarding the terms of the treaty, but in reality had meant only until something of value was discovered on the lands the treaty referred to, something like gold or water rights or grazing lands or town sites or uranium, anything Manifest Destiny could be applied to and that therefore could be overrun by wannabe miners and ranchers and settlers and railroad builders.

  And national park managers, Kate thought, who wanted to annex every square foot of land they saw and keep it pristine and inviolate, unsullied by human hand. They failed to recall that the indigenous peoples who came across the Bering land bridge during the last Ice Age had had their hands all over anything that had the remotest possibility of nutritional value and were every bit as much a part of the landscape and the wheel of life as the fish and the birds and the mammals. It wasn’t until salmon started being taken commercially, in fish traps owned by Outside consortiums based in Seattle—fish traps that spanned the entire mouths of creeks and trapped whole schools of fish in their comprehensive maws—that the fish runs began to suffer their drastic declines.

  She waited in case Edna wanted to say more, but the old woman had lapsed into her customary silence. “Like I was saying, Johnny, we’ve always fished subsistence here, but then the feds selected this creek at statehood, and they closed the fish camp down. Five years ago, Auntie Joy and Auntie Vi petitioned for it to be reverted back to subsistence use. The feds turned them down.”

  “And?”

  “And, they sued.”

  “It still in court?” Jack asked with the cynicism born of long experience with the legal system.

  Kate nodded. “They lost at the state level, big surprise. They’re appealing to the supremes.”

  In sudden realization Jack sat up straight on his log. “You mean we’re busting a federal law, fishing on this creek?”

  Kate’s smile was sardonic. “Oh no, you can sport fish here all you want, so long as you’ve got a state fishing license and the fish hawks declare the stream open.” She nodded at the circle of women. “It’s the aunties who aren’t supposed to.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the creek. “That fish wheel’s illegal as all hell. Lamar comes upstream every year and tells Auntie Joy so, doesn’t he, auntie?”

  “Humph,” Auntie Joy said again.

  “Lamar’s not that bad, auntie,” Kate said gently. “He’s nowhere near as bad as some of the other fish hawks have been over the years.”

  The old woman’s face relaxed, and she sighed. “I know, Katya. But his rules are not our rules.”

  Auntie Vi was not so generous. “Who is he, this park ranger, tell us what to do like he own everything? He don’t own the creek. He don’t own the fish. Nobody own them, so everybody own them.” She sat back on her stump, dismissing the matter.

  “Vi is right,” Auntie Joy said, and added reasonably, “And besides, how our children and grandchildren living, if we don’t teach them the old ways?” She waved a hand at the shack full of drying racks standing behind the cabin, a quarter of them hung with the limp red carcasses of red salmon. Split, boned, soaked in brine, they would be left hanging until the oil ran, when the dried alder would be lit and the shack filled with smoke to dry, flavor and texture the meat. “Who knows how to smoke fish when we’re gone, if we don’t come to the river and teach the children?”

  “We always looking for children to come to fish camp.” Auntie Balasha sighed. “But children don’t come much no more.”

  A memory of the deer hunt with her father flashed through Kate’s mind. As small as she had been, as young as she had been, as unskilled as she had been, still Stephan had been determined that his child would learn the traditional ways, at the very least be able to feed and clothe and house herself without being dependent on anyone else. He had died the following year, but by then the pattern of self-reliance was set, forming the fabric of her life.

  She looked around the circle at the four old women, and saw her father staring back at her from every face.

  Edna surprised them again. “No, the children don’t come, but the white men do. They come with their planes and their powerboats and their four-wheelers, all the time making noise, leaving garbage all over.” She leaned forward. “You know what I hear about those ones? They don’t even eat the fish! They put them on the wall of their house, to look at! Why? Why is that?” she demanded. “Fish is food, for hungry in winter, not pretty for wall of house.” She sat back and stared accusingly at the two white men in their midst.

  Jack looked undeniably guilty.

  “Gee, Dad,” Johnny said, “maybe we should—”

  “We eat everything we catch,” Jack said hastily. “Don’t we?” he appealed to Kate.

  “I don’t know,” Kate drawled. “What about all those trophies you’ve got lining the walls of your den back in Anchorage?”

  There were gasps of horror from all four old women.

  “Den?” Johnny said. “We got a den?”

  “Kate,” Jack said ominously.

  “Let me see, now, there’s a moose, and a Dall sheep, and a goat, and two bearskins, and three king salmon, and I think there’s even a wolverine.” Kate added, “And he flies and shoots caribou the same day, too, and not for meat, for the racks, can you imagine?”

  “No,” Auntie Joy said, aghast.

  “Ayapu,” Auntie Vi said, appalled.

  “Alaqah!” Auntie Edna said, deeply offended.

 
“Kate,” Jack said.

  She went for broke. “Not to mention all those Outside hunters he flies out to Round Island to take walrus illegally for their tusks.”

  Auntie Balasha went so far as to put a hand to her breast and nearly swoon from shock.

  “Kate!”

  She couldn’t hold it back any longer and burst out laughing. The four women joined in, rollicking back and forth on their logs, teeth flashing, bellies shaking, hands clapping. The sound was loud, merry and unmistakable. Aleuts, one, Anglos, zip.

  A slow grin spread across Johnny’s face, and Jack mopped a heated brow. “Sheesh,” he said, “you broads sure are hard on a couple of simple guys just trying to follow the hallowed Western tradition of raping the environment.”

  “Well, aunties,” Kate said, draining her mug, “thanks for the tea. I’d better head on down the creek.”

  Jack shot up next to her. “Why? They aren’t fishing, so they won’t be delivering.”

  “You never know,” Kate said. “Maybe they won’t be able to stand Meany catching all that fish in their faces.”

  “Meany?” Auntie Joy said sharply. Auntie Vi looked at her.

  Kate couldn’t read either face, and her brows came together in a slight frown. “Yeah. The processors have dropped the price of reds to fifty cents a pound. The fleet’s on strike. All except for Meany,” she added, watching Auntie Joy. “Both his drifter and his setnet site have their nets in the water. The fish are hitting big-time, too. Even at fifty cents a pound, he’ll make money.”

  Auntie Vi started to say something and Auntie Joy cut her off. “That one always make money.” She snorted. “All he good for.”

  Kate looked at Auntie Vi, who was studying her toes with complete absorption. “Okay then,” she said, rising to her feet and dusting unnecessarily at her jeans. “I’m off.”

  Next to her, Jack looked over at the four aunties, clearly uneasy at being left to their mercy. Kate saw the look and dropped her voice. “Don’t worry, Jack, they’re nice, kind, cuddly old ladies. They won’t hurt you.”