Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  When she stepped outside again, Luke Grosdidier was just pulling up on a four-wheeler with a trailer attached. The trailer had two newly fabricated metal bench seats bolted inside it and three people Kate didn’t even know sitting on them. They climbed out, counted money into Luke’s hand, and vanished inside the café.

  Kate looked at Luke. He grinned. “Niniltna Taxi, at your service. Sorry, gotta go, got another fare.” He fired up the engine, made a U-turn, and roared off.

  Kate headed up to the Step in a gloomy frame of mind. There, the double-wide trailers and modular buildings that formed Park Headquarters huddled together on a long, narrow plateau against the nearly vertical wall that was the western face of one of the more intransigent of the Quilak Mountains. A dirt strip ran a couple of thousand feet before disappearing into the tall grass and the encroaching alders, which were turning an autumnal gold. An unfamiliar helicopter was parked to one side, bright shiny new. Kate instantly began to think of ways to finagle a ride out of the Parks Service. George Perry, a fixed-wing man all the way, would disapprove, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Jim had left the helicopter that had given rise to his other nickname, Chopper Jim, in Tok when he’d made the move into the Park.

  Dan was in his office, filling out forms. “If we can’t do it in heptaplicate, the federal government don’t do it at all,” he said. He tossed the paperwork aside, gave Mutt an affectionate cuff when she trotted forward for the attention that was her due, and leaned back in his chair, linking his hands behind his head. “How the hell are you, Shugak?”

  A burly man with bright blue eyes in a red face beneath reddish orange hair cut in a flattop, Dan O’Brian had joined the Parks Service fresh out of college. He had served time at various parks across the nation before arriving in Alaska and in the Park, where he had thus far resisted every subsequent effort at transfer, promotion, or retirement. A confirmed bachelor, a raging heterosexual whose record for seduction was second only to Chopper Jim’s, Dan was a man of such highly developed interpersonal skills that he was the only ranger in the entire state of Alaska who had never been shot at, even while evicting squatters off Park lands, arresting bear poachers, and enforcing fishing regulations. “Ranger Dan isn’t an asshole,” Old Sam had once famously opined from the bar of the Roadhouse, “his job is.”

  Even this fleeting memory of the quintessential Alaskan old fart was enough to give her pause. “Fine,” she said, recovering. “I’m fine.”

  He rocked a little, looking at her, saying nothing.

  “Yeah, okay, I’ve been better,” she said. “Did you know he was eighty-nine?”

  “That all? I’d have figured a hundred and three, easy.”

  She had to smile. “New helo out there, I see.”

  He nodded. “AStar B3. The Lama burned too much fuel. This one’s got more power, more payload, and a hundred-forty-knot cruising speed with a full load.”

  “Do you even know what any of that means?”

  He laughed. “No. But it sounds good.”

  “Why didn’t you ever learn to fly, Dan?”

  He shrugged. “I never have a problem scoring a ride wherever I want to go.” He grinned. “It’s good to be king. How about you?”

  She reflected. “Have you ever noticed how when somebody gets their pilot’s license, they stop being whatever else they were the second before? Like if someone asks them what they do, from that moment on they say, ‘Oh, I’m a pilot. And, you know, a nuclear physicist.’ ”

  “What, Kate Shugak afraid she’s going to lose her identity at five thousand feet?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just scared of heights.”

  He laughed again. “Yeah, right.”

  “Who’d you get checked out on it?”

  “The new helo? Nobody, yet, but one of George’s new hires has an instructor’s rating. When things slow down this winter at the mine, I’ll send Ernie down to Niniltna to get qualified. What can I do for you today, Kate?”

  “I’m Old Sam’s executor. He’s got a piece of property listed in his will only by lat and long. Near as I can figure from the map I’ve got at home, it’s somewhere between here and Yakutat.”

  “That covers a few miles,” he said.

  “You’re telling me.”

  He got up and went to the map of the Park that, when pulled down, covered the better part of an entire wall of his office. It was mostly green in color, indicating twenty million acres’ worth of federal lands in the stewardship of the National Park Service. Niniltna, Ahtna, and Cordova, along with the few larger villages, were red specks within the green. Blue parcels indicated Native lands granted by ANCSA and ANILCA, most of them choice lots on or near the Kanuyaq River, the main highway for Park rats in the summer after it thawed and in the winter after it froze, not so much in the spring and the fall.

  Yellow dots, widely scattered and minuscule in size by comparison to everything else, indicated the 9.8 percent of the Park that was privately owned. Most of the dots had been homesteads, granted under the Homestead Act of 1862, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln himself, granting an applicant freehold title to a maximum of one hundred sixty acres, subject to said applicant’s improving the land while living on it for five years. Those still in possession in 1972 (“It’s amazing how many people just walked away from that much sweat equity in that much land,” Dan said) had had their parcels grandfathered in as the Park was created around them. Those who had missed the boat in 1972 jumped on the ANILCA bandwagon in 1979. Today many homesteads were still owned by descendents of the people who had built the first cabins on them. Kate was one of them, and, like her, most of them were friends of Chief Ranger Dan O’Brian’s.

  Which didn’t stop him from growling like an angry grizzly every time his eye caught sight of a yellow dot on his map. On principle, Dan hated the idea of privately owned property in the middle of a national park, and in particular his Park. In reality, he got along well enough with most of the owners to remain a lead-free zone.

  There were a very few widely scattered brown areas on the map, too, indicating areas of natural resources in which the Parks Department had with a show of great reluctance granted various exploration companies permission to look for natural resources—timber, copper, coal, and oil.

  And gold. Kate discovered that she and Dan were both looking at the bull’s-eye he had drawn around the valley that contained the Suulutaq Mine. He saw her looking, and made a great show of tracing the lines of latitude and longitude she had given him to the intersection on the map. He stared at his forefinger for a moment, brow creased. “That can’t be right.”

  “What?” Kate said.

  “Wait a minute.” He went to his desk and picked up a small rectangular device. He gave her a shamefaced grin. “GPS.”

  She was exasperated. “Why didn’t you just use that in the first place?”

  He squirmed. “I keep forgetting I have it. What were those numbers again?”

  She read them out. He tapped them in and then waited for the result. Mutt, who’d thought they were about to leave, decided all the effort of getting to her feet shouldn’t be wasted and departed for the kitchen in hopes of gustatory largesse.

  “What?” Kate said, when Dan stood staring at the tiny screen.

  He raised his eyes. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe what?”

  He walked across the room and after a brief moment put his forefinger on the map. Kate leaned in and squinted.

  Just above his blunt-cut fingernail was the black circle and attached squiggle that indicated Canyon Hot Springs. It was not colored yellow as private property, it was shaded green as being part of the acreage apportioned to the Park.

  “You’re kidding me,” Kate said.

  “Nope.” With a nearly grim intensity, Dan abandoned the GPS and headed for the door, Kate at his heels. He hoofed it down the hall to another room, this one filled with filing cabinets. “The records are being transferred into digital databases but it’s
labor-intensive and it takes a hell of a lot of time,” he said over his shoulder. “We’re transferring the newest records first, because they’re always going to be the ones most requested, so the older ones we have to look up by hand for now.” He pulled down an ancient volume.

  “What’s that?”

  “A cross-reference of anyone who has ever staked a claim or applied for an allotment anywhere in the Park.” He opened it. The pages, some of which were bound into the volume and some of which had been added later, were lined and dated and filled with writing in many different hands. “Jesus, there are a lot of people in the Park whose last names begin with D.” He ran his finger down one column, then another. “Dementieff, Dementieff.” He turned the page. Halfway down the column he stopped. “Samuel—Leviticus?” He looked at Kate.

  “That was his middle name.” Dan remained incredulous, and Kate said, “It was in his will and everything.”

  “Jesus,” Dan said again, “the things some people name their kids. You’d think they wanted them to get beat up in kindergarten. Okay, Samuel Leviticus Dementieff, a single man, applied for”—his voice changed, acquiring an edge—“a hundred and sixty fucking acres of unimproved land in March of 1938.” There was a corresponding file number, and after ten minutes of yanking open various file drawers, swearing, and a paper cut that left a trail of bloody fingerprints from 1935 to 1939, they had the file open on the table and were standing side by side, staring down at it.

  There were three documents, all handwritten in that spiked longhand with the sky-reaching P’s that dated its creator as having learned to write English in America sometime before Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley. Each document was clearly marked “Copy” with a black stamp. The first was the application itself, in two paragraphs, dated March 30, 1938. The paper was yellowed with age and the ink had bled and faded but the words were perfectly legible.

  “ ‘I, Samuel Leviticus Dementieff,’ ” Kate read out loud, “ ‘of the city of Cordova, Alaska Territory, do hereby apply to enter under the provisions of the Homestead Act of 1862 the one hundred sixty acres in the Quilak Mountain foothills located approximately eighty-five miles east of the village of Niniltna.…’ ” There followed latitude and longitude of the four corners of the property, with a note made thirty-six years later of the property tax number given the parcel by what was then the state of Alaska.

  “How did he get a surveyor out there?” Dan said. “He’d have had to import one from Fairbanks, or even Anchorage. Must have cost him a bundle.”

  Kate shook her head. “You’re forgetting the Kanuyaq Mine.”

  Dan frowned. “It was closed by then, wasn’t it?”

  “It closed that year, but until then they would have needed their own surveyor on staff. With the right encouragement, he probably wasn’t averse to doing a little moonlighting on the side.”

  “I hope he charged Old Sam a chunk of change. Jesus, think of the bushwhacking it would have taken to get back there then, not to mention humping the theodolite and the tripod in. And a tent, and food, and a gun. Hell, I’ll bet you couldn’t get a GPS to work back there today.”

  The second paragraph began, “Land office at City of Ahtna, Alaska Territory.” This time Dan read it out loud. “ ‘I, Frederick Cyril McQueen, Register of the Land Office, do hereby certify that the above application is for surveyed lands which the applicant is legally eligible to enter under the Homestead Act of 1862’ ”—Abraham fucking Lincoln—“ ‘and that there is no prior valid adverse right to the same.’ ”

  “Title search should be so easy nowadays,” Kate said. “Or so cheap. Not to mention which, I think you might have gotten Lincoln’s middle name wrong.” Dan rolled a fulminating eye in her direction and she added hastily, “Just a guess.”

  They turned back to the file. The second document was a printed form titled “Proof Required Under the 1862 Homestead Act,” the blanks filled in by the same hand than the application. “ ‘We, Peter Everard Heiman’ ”—

  “Hey,” Kate said, “must be Pete Heiman’s dad.”

  “Or his grandfather, more like. ‘We, Peter Everard Heiman and Chester Arthur Wheeler, do solemnly swear that we have known Samuel Leviticus Dementieff for over five years last past; that he is the head of a family…’ ” Dan looked at Kate. “I never heard Old Sam was married.”

  “Me, either,” Kate said.

  “ ‘… that he is the head of a family’—okay, wife and number of children left blank—‘and is a citizen of the United States, and that is an inhabitant of,’ yeah, yeah, we know the numbers, ‘and that no other person resided on the said land entitled to the right of Homestead or Pre-Emption.’ ”

  “I love the idea that anyone could pre-empt the federal government’s ownership of land.”

  “You would. ‘That the said Samuel Leviticus Dementieff entered upon and made settlement on said land March 31, 1938, and has built a house thereon.’ ”

  A description of the house followed. Kate stared at it, trying to reconcile “part log, part frame, two doors, two windows, shingle roof” with the near ruins she remembered from the previous winter, when she and Mutt had apprehended three Kanuyaq River highwaymen at Canyon Hot Springs. “I never knew Canyon Hot Springs belonged to Old Sam. And nobody said, not the aunties, Emaa, Old Sam himself—no one. Why the hell not?”

  Dan kept reading. “ ‘… and has lived in said house and made it his exclusive home from March 30, 1938, to the present day.’ ” He looked up. “No way, Kate, did these guys go all that way, with no road—hell, no trail—through all that brush and muck to check that Old Sam had built his house.”

  But the witnesses had signed the document of proof, with flourishes, as did Frederick Cyril McQueen, Register. “Present day” for the second document was October 3, 1945.

  “When he got home from the war,” Kate said.

  “Which war? World War Two?”

  Kate nodded. “He was in the Aleutians. One of Castner’s Cutthroats.”

  “Wow.” In spite of himself, Dan was impressed. “I bet he could tell some stories.”

  “I bet he could have, but he never did. What’s next?”

  The third document was Old Sam’s certificate and patent, signed the same day as his Proof of Improvements. This, too, was a printed form. “ ‘Now, therefore, let it be known, that on presentation of this Certificate to the Commissioner of the General Land Office, the said Samuel Leviticus Dementieff shall be entitled to a Patent for the Tract of Land above described.’ ”

  It was signed, again, by Frederick Cyril McQueen, Register.

  Kate and Dan stood staring down at the three documents until a low “Woof” made them both look up. Mutt was standing in the doorway, head cocked, a quizzical eyebrow raised.

  Kate looked at Dan. “May I have copies of these?”

  Dan hesitated a little before answering, an unreadable expression on his face. “He should have had the originals,” he said at last.

  “I haven’t found them,” Kate said. “At least not yet.” Her brows drew together. “That is odd. You’d think he would have kept them in the file box with his will and the rest of his papers.” She shook her head. “They’re probably tucked into a book on one of his shelves. So, may I have copies for the meantime, until I find them?”

  He hesitated a little longer before he said, “Sure.” As if making up his mind, he scooped the documents back into the file. “Sure you can have copies. But they won’t be official documents, you understand. There could be problems if they were all you had to establish title.”

  She looked at him, a little puzzled. “Let’s hope I find the originals, then. What’s the problem, Dan?”

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “May I make a suggestion?”

  “Who’s ever been able to stop you?” she said, even more puzzled at this unaccustomed deference. Dan O’Brian was notoriously loud and up-front by nature, it was one of the reasons he got on so well with the Park rats.

  It seemed t
o her he chose his words with care, as if he were tiptoeing over a minefield expecting one of them to explode whether he stepped on it or not. “You might like to consider the possibility of deeding Canyon Hot Springs over to the Park Service.”

  Her eyes widened. It might even be fair to say they nearly popped out of her head.

  “We have the ability to look after it,” Dan said. “Maybe even develop it as a remote, hike-in-only campsite.”

  Kate’s laugh was deep and spontaneous, and then she realized he was serious and the smile vanished from her face. She squared her shoulders and pushed out her jaw. “Old Sam left it to me,” she said. “Why would I give it to you? The Parks Service has made a career out of sequestering millions of acres of public land that is public only insofar as people can afford to get to it. At least if I keep hold of the springs I can say they’re open for everyone to use.”

  His mouth pulled up at one corner. “Yeah, and how much do you think the shareholders of the Niniltna Native Association are going to like that idea?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I heard Auntie Joy wants to start charging people for berry picking on Native lands in the Park.”

  “Canyon Hot Springs belongs to me, not the NNA.”

  Dan looked down at the file in his hand and didn’t say anything.

  She remembered that Canyon Hot Springs was colored in in green on the map in his office. “Dan? Would you have even told me about the homestead Old Sam filed on Canyon Hot Springs if he hadn’t mentioned it in his will?”

  Dan didn’t answer.

  She looked around the room, at the file cabinets lining the walls. “How many so-called abandoned claims have you got in these files, Dan? Have you even tried to find the claimants’ heirs? Or do you just ignore them in hopes people will forget about them?”