Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 06 - Blood Will Tell

by Blood Will Tell(lit)

  Problems of land ownership in Alaska were further compounded by the suit filed against the state by mental health advocates. Prior to statehood, Alaska had been granted a million acres of federal land with the proviso that some portion of revenues generated by the land be used to fund mental health programs in the state. Naturally the state reneged on the deal, and of course the mental health advocates sued, and at present the case languished in the courts. It was a complex, convoluted issue made more complex and infinitely more convoluted by the approximately 3,946 lawyers involved, all of whom billed by the hour, and it made Kate's head hurt just to think about it. "What about Iqaluk?" she said. "I thought title to the area was still being contested by everyone involved."

  "It is."

  "But?" Kate said.

  "But that lawyer tells the board that it looks as if the court is making a decision soon. That lawyer says he thinks the federal government will get it."

  "Could be worse," Kate said. "Could be the state government."

  Ekaterina nodded. "Whatever is decided, the board needs to make some decisions. If we get the land, we need to be ready."

  "Decisions? What are you talking about, what decisions? I thought the board supported leaving Iqaluk alone, keeping it for traditional purposes, hunting and fishing and like that."

  "I support that," Ekaterina said.

  "You support it?" Kate frowned. Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was the board of the Niniltna Native Association, its oldest member, chair and conscience. "What about what the board supports? What's going on?"

  "There are five members on the Niniltna board."

  A feeling of apprehension grew in Kate's breast. "You, Billy Mike, Enakenty Barnes, Sarah Kompkoff and Harvey Meganack. You've got a four-to-one majority. Don't you?"

  There was a dirge-like quality to Ekaterina's answer. "Sarah Kompkoff is dead."

  "What? Sarah? Emaa, are you sure?"

  Ekaterina's nod was heavy.

  Sarah Kompkoff was Kate's second cousin, or third cousin by marriage, or maybe both, she couldn't remember at the moment. They hadn't been close but Kate remembered her vividly, a short, compact woman with a quick lip and a quicker laugh, a first-rate cook and the first villager to sign on with the rural sobriety movement. She'd trained in and then taught substance abuse workshops at the school, and she had been the community health representative for the tribal association. "She couldn't have been more than fifty."

  "Fifty-two," Ekaterina said.

  "What happened?" Kate asked, afraid of the answer. Sarah had been sober for six years. The last thing Kate wanted to hear was that she'd fallen off the wagon. "Was there an accident?"

  "No."

  "What then?" "They said she died of botulism."

  "Oh, no," Kate said, surprised and appalled and, yes, a little relieved.

  "From her salmon?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh no. Did she make up her usual warehouse full of cases this year?"

  "Yes."

  "Damn," Kate said. "If she made a bad batch, we'd better track it down.

  You know how she gives it out to the whole town of Ahtna, not to mention anybody else who happens to be driving by her house."

  "Dawn and Terra and Rose are already asking around."

  "Good." Sarah's three daughters were reliable people. "Emaa. Even with Sarah dead, you still have a majority on the board." Enakenty Barnes was a first cousin, and unlike Kate, where Ekaterina led Enakenty followed.

  Billy Mike was Ekaterina's hand-picked successor as tribal chief, and had been in Ekaterina's pocket since before ANCSA. Harvey Meganack, on the other hand, wasn't a cousin that she knew of. He was a commercial fisherman and a professional hunting guide who sat on the state board of Fish and Game, and was so pro-development he was almost gubernatorial material. He openly supported developing Iqaluk, and a significant number of shareholders backed his stand, in particular some of the fishermen still suffering the effects of the RPetco Anchorage spill.

  Ekaterina had backed Harvey's election to the Niniltna board as a sop to the pro development forces within the Association, and because she thought she had him boxed in by the four traditional board votes. "It's still three to one," Kate said, relaxing.

  "Perhaps," Ekaterina said.

  Something in her voice made Kate sit up again. "Enakenty? It sure as hell can't be Billy, emaa." Ekaterina had the knack of saying more without saying a word elevated to a fine art, and Kate, openly incredulous, said," "But I thought Billy Mike held more for the old ways."

  "So did I."

  "You mean he's changed?"

  Her grandmother made no move except to lower her eyes. "I don't know."

  "But you are worried." Kate waited. Ekaterina didn't answer. "Emaa. I won't run for Sarah's seat." Ekaterina was silent some more. Kate set her teeth and groped around for her self-control, which seemed almost always to scuttle under the bed when Ekaterina walked in the door. "What reason do you have to suspect that Billy has changed his mind about Iqaluk?"

  Ekaterina practiced looking impassive.

  Kate took a deep breath and counted to ten. In Aleut, whose harsh gutturals were more satisfying. "So. The Niniltna board meets next week, at the same time as the AFN convention. The subject of Iqaluk is bound to come up. One, maybe two members of the board want Iqaluk opened for development, two don't. The fifth is dead. That about cover it?"

  Ekaterina hesitated a moment too long. "Emaa?"

  The old woman said firmly, "That's all."

  The two words were the same two words used to end every story and legend Ekaterina recited daily to an ever increasing horde of grand-and great-grandchildren jostling for position in her lap. Kate remembered Olga Shapsnikoff using the same words in Unalaska, and she wondered if the elders in Toksook Bay and Arctic Village ended their stories the same way.

  She also wondered what Ekaterina knew that she wasn't telling her. She went to bed wondering.

  The ladder squeaked beneath her feet the next morning as she slipped from the loft and went outside to the outhouse. The coals in the wood stove were buried in gray ash and still red hot beneath. Kate fed it bits of kindling until it reached out hungrily for a real meal of logs.

  She turned up the oil stove and put the kettle on for coffee. Her grandmother was a still lump of blankets on the couch. Kate brushed her teeth and sluiced her face with water from the kitchen pump, skin tingling from its icy touch. She pumped up more to drink and it burned clean and cold all the way down. When she leaned over to place the glass in the drainer, she caught sight of her reflection in the tiny, rectangular mirror hanging crookedly on the wall next to the window. The sun wouldn't be up for another hour and her slanting image was shadowed in the somber half-light of the single lantern she had lit and turned down low.

  Her skin was dark from a month of picking mushrooms at Chistona, and another month of gill netting reds on the flats at the mouth of the Kanuyaq, and still another month of picking blueberries and cranberries and raspberries in the Teglliqs. It had been a long, hot summer with record high temperatures; every hour of every day was burned into her skin, turning its natural light golden cast a deep and abiding amber.

  The black of her hair was unchanged, a shining fall straight to her waist. She bound it back in a loose French braid, fingers moving quickly, mechanically. Hazel eyes stared out at her from beneath straight black brows, the expression in them reserved, restrained, waiting.

  For what?

  Giving her head an impatient shake, she took the down jacket from the caribou rack hanging on the wall next to the door and slipped noiselessly from the cabin into the stillness of the morning. Mutt padded forward to thrust a cold nose into her hand and she knotted her fingers in the thick, comfortingly familiar gray ruff.

  Twenty feet behind the cabin was the bank of the creek, in which water ran clear and cold and deep. Beyond the far bank the land fell away to the east in a long, wide valley, to rise again in the distant foothills and peaks of the Quilak Mountains. Angqaq loomed
largest of all, rearing up against the dawn like a wild horse with a stiff white mane, the biggest and strongest and most headstrong of the herd. Kate grinned a little at the thought. More than one impertinent climber had been bucked off the Big Bump. She raised a hand in salute. As usual, Angqaq ignored her with aloof indifference, but she had stood once on his summit and they both remembered the occasion, whether he would admit to it or not.

  There was a large boulder on the near bank, the top worn smooth from years of use by Shugak backsides. Kate sat down. Mutt sat next to her and leaned up against her legs, a warm, heavy presence. They watched the horizon, waiting.

  At first it was no more than a luminous outlining of the distant peaks, a deceptively soft suggestion of what was to come. For a while it remained so, the light snared in the spurs and crags of rock and ice as it gathered in strength and presence. When the peaks could no longer contain the flood the light welled up and spilled through the gaps, glimmering trickles that swelled into gleaming streams and gleaming streams into bright rivers, the sun in spate. The bowl of the valley was filled to its ragged brim with a torrent of light that splashed down the Kanuyaq and up every feeder creek and spill stream. Engulfed in the backwash, the shallow canyon at Kate's feet was too narrow to contain it all and it splashed off the banks and fountained up to catch at the tips of an eagle's wings, soaring high overhead.

  Her heart ached with the beauty of it. She didn't want to leave, the Park, the homestead, her home, her place in the universe. Her grandmother had said she would not take Kate from the place that gave her strength, in truth had not asked her to come. She didn't have to.

  Implicit in her acceptance of Kate's right to remain was an expectancy of self-sacrifice upon the altar of Ekaterina Moonin Shugak's almighty tribe, and an equally implicit assumption of Kate's presence among the host of the all-volunteer army to preserve and protect it. Kate resented it, resented her grandmother's appropriation of her time. The garage walls needed insulating and she had planned to wire it for electricity so she could plug in a space heater and have a warm place to putter during the cold winter months. The snow machine needed a tune up to make it fit for the round trip to Niniltna, so she could pick up her mail each month. There were traps in need of repair, plans for a new bookcase, and long walks to take with Mutt before the first snow fell.

  She had books to read, and bread to bake, and wood to split. Her place was here, on the homestead, not two hundred miles away in a city she disliked as much as she distrusted.

  Mutt nosed her arm and Kate looked down. Mutt's eyes were wide and wise, as wise as Ekaterina's. She stood three feet at the shoulder and weighed in at 140 pounds, all of it muscle. There was Husky in her solid torso; her long legs and her smarts were all wolf. Proving it, she nosed Kate under the arm again. "All right, all right, don't get pushy." Kate rose on stiff legs and led the way back inside.

  A neat pile of folded sheets and blankets rested on one end of the couch. Ekaterina was at the stove. She turned at Kate's entrance to hand her a plate full of eggs over easy, moose steak fried crisp on the outside and rare on the inside and toast made from homemade bread dripping with butter. Kate sat and began to eat. Ekaterina served herself and sat down across from her.

  When her plate was cleared, Kate poured coffee and carried both mugs back to the table. Ekaterina started to clear the breakfast dishes and Kate said, "No, emaa, sit. I'll do it in a minute." She sugared and creamed her coffee, blew across the steaming surface and sipped. "After, I'll take the truck into Niniltna and get Bobby to call Jack, see if he'll come out and pick us up tomorrow. If not, we can always fly George. If the Skywagon's running, which isn't likely. How much does he charge for a one-way into Anchorage these days?"

  "You are coming to town with me?"

  As if you didn't know, Kate thought, and gave a curt nod. "I can sniff around the convention, maybe talk to Billy, see how he feels so you'll know what to expect when it comes time to speak out on Iqaluk. Maybe talk to Enakenty, too, just to make sure he's still on our side. The board doesn't meet until a week from today, next Saturday, right?"

  "You are coming with me?" Ekaterina repeated.

  It could have been the hint of disbelief in Ekaterina's voice that did it. It might have been the slight, incredulous lift of her left eyebrow.

  Or maybe it was the way one corner of her mouth quirked in an expression that wasn't quite a smile.

  Whatever it was, it caused Kate to add, "My fee is four hundred a day.

  Plus expenses." She drank coffee, and said with elaborate nonchalance,

  "I'll throw in the expenses." She looked Ekaterina straight in the eye and added,"

  "Family rate."

  Ekaterina's eyebrow stayed where it was as one hand delved into a pocket of her jeans and produced a folded white envelope. Inside the envelope were ten one-hundred dollar bills, creased from residing in Ekaterina's pocket for the last three days. "You call that one a retainer, I think."

  On the face of another, less dignified woman, Ekaterina's expression might have been called smug. Ten years ago, even one year ago, Kate would have said so. Today, she closed the envelope, folded it twice and stuck it into the back pocket of her jeans.

  TWO.

  IN NINILTNA, THE VILLAGE TWENTY-FIVE MILES DOWN THE old Kanuyaq River &

  Northern Railroad roadbed from Kate's homestead, the airport consisted of a single dirt strip forty-eight hundred feet long with a wind sock stuck on a pole at one end. There were half a dozen planes tied down next to the hangar on one side of the strip and a log cabin post office on the other side, the U.S. flag flying next to it. On a busy day in the summer during the salmon season or in the fall during moose season there were maybe forty planes in and out every day, but that would have to be on a weekend and a CAVU weekend at that, ceiling and visibility unlimited. The Niniltna strip was just about Kate's speed, maybe even a little over it more often than she would like.

  In Anchorage, two air hours away southwest, Merrill Field handled up to a thousand operations per day, a traffic load generated by air taxies hauling passengers from Tyonek to Mcgrath, air freight outfits hauling cases of pilot bread to Nabesna and castellated wing nuts to Nome, and eight flight schools, whose students kept the dozen aircraft parts stores in business. The airfield was surrounded on four sides by the city of Anchorage, which included four other airports: Anchorage International Airport, these days a subcontractor for Federal Express;

  Elmendorf Air Force Base, which since the Cold War ended was doing more Air Sea Rescue operations than they were scrambling to intercept Soviet Backfire bombers; Lake Hood, which boasted the largest per capita population of float plane owners in the world; and Campbell Airstrip, a dirt strip cozied up to the Chugach Mountains, which made for interesting crosswinds.

  All of which meant that at any given moment on any given day of the year there were more people in the air over Anchorage than there were on the ground in Niniltna, including the student pilot who tried to land on Merrill's Runway 1533 at the same time they did. Jack's hands were steady on the yoke and his face was calm but Kate, holding the Cessna

  172 up in the air by the edge of her seat, noticed that the line of his jaw was very tight, never a good sign. Once they were safely on the ground, Kate could even find it in her heart to feel sorry for the student pilot.

  They taxied to Jack's tie down and he left Ekaterina and Kate to unload while he went over to discuss the little matter of the straying student pilot and his inattentive instructor with Merrill Tower. When he came back, his almost-ugly face was as serene as before. Kate looked for blood on his hands, didn't find any, and deduced that the tower had promised to handle the situation, though probably with less blood spilled than Jack had demanded. She tested the line on the right wing, judged it tight enough to hold the Cessna steady against any wind, stowed her duffel in Jack's Blazer and climbed into the back seat. Jack got in behind the wheel, next to Ekaterina. "Where am I driving you ladies?" he inquired, looking into the rear view a
t Kate.