Though Not Dead (20 page)

She hadn’t done any guiding in four years, she thought. Not since Jack’s death.

There was a wary look in Demetri’s eyes that would puzzle her later, but she didn’t have time to worry about it now. She explained and the wary look vanished. “Sure, no problem, put the tundra tires on last week,” he said, and raised his voice as he grabbed for the parka hanging next to the door and stepped into his Sorels. “Edna, I’m going to help Kate get her pickup out of a ditch. Be back in a couple of hours.”

It took more like four, but Demetri’s truck lived up to its reputation. Kate’s pickup was flipped right side up about as fast as it had turned turtle, if with less velocity, and the come-along had it on the snow-covered roadbed shortly thereafter. Demetri helped Kate replace the seat.

She grinned at him. “Here’s the acid test.” She climbed in, brushed off the ice that had collected on the keys, which were still in the ignition, and turned.

The engine ground a couple of times and then it caught. Kate whooped and thumped the crumpled roof. Demetri stepped back, and Mutt made a neat leap through the broken window, landing on the army blanket Kate had tossed inside.

“Let me put the tow rope on you now,” he said. “Easier on me if you get stuck on the way.”

She didn’t get stuck until the turnoff to her house, and the Wile E. Coyote tires make quick work of that. Once in the clearing Demetri helped get the truck into the garage next to Johnny’s. There they’d stay until the snow was packed down on the road, and if this was one of those winters where there was so much of it the snow never did pack down, the trucks would stay in the garage until breakup.

“Man,” Demetri said, staring at the once jaunty red pickup, now with a smashed-in roof on top of all the other injuries Kate had inflicted over the years. “That’s just pitiful.”

“It runs,” Kate said cheerfully, and closed the garage doors. “Coffee?”

Again that oddly wary look flashed in his eyes, and again was gone before she could put a name to it. “Sure.”

Mutt had disappeared into the undergrowth, probably making a beeline for the Arctic hare pantry across the creek. Demetri followed Kate up the steps and into the house. She put the kettle on. “Sandwich?”

“Sure.”

She pulled out a jar of ground cooked moose meat, mixed it with chopped onion and sweet pickle and mayonnaise, and served it on bread with a thick wedge of lettuce. The result was some four inches high. They were done the same time as the coffee and she carried it all to the dining table. For a while there was silence as they ate and drank, and when they were full they both sat back and looked at the world with new eyes. Food is a great leveler.

“Good bread,” he said. “Edna can’t make bread.”

“Why?”

“It won’t rise.”

“She kill the yeast? I’ve heard that happens sometimes.”

“I guess. We eat store-bought.” He shuddered, and looked around the room. “Place is looking good.”

She followed his gaze with satisfaction. “It is.”

He looked at her. “You finally forgive us for giving it to you?”

She was surprised into a laugh. “I guess I have. It was just that—”

He interrupted her. “I know what it was. You’re more used to being on the giving end than on the receiving.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. Well.”

His voice grew a little acerbic. “Yeah, well, sometimes accepting the gift in the spirit in which it was originally given is as important as giving yourself. Sometimes maybe more.”

They both shifted uncomfortably at this display of sentiment. “Why, Demetri,” she said, “I didn’t know you cared.”

He grunted something unintelligible, and changed the subject. “Heard something about you and Jim hauling somebody out of the Suulutaq in chains?”

“They weren’t in chains,” Kate said, annoyed, and when he grinned she knew that she’d been had. She caught him up on the latest criminal doings, although it felt as if everything she talked about had happened a year ago. The looming shadow of Old Sam’s death and the subsequent events had eclipsed everything in the recent past.

Demetri nodded, taking it all in. “Anybody going to lose their job over it?”

“That, thank god, is not my call. The best thing I can say about it is it turned into a job I can bill the state for. I want Suulutaq’s corporate and employee problems to stay their problems.”

He frowned down into his mug.

“What?” she said.

He looked up. “Their problems are going to be our problems whether we want them to be or not.”

There was a brief silence. “I know,” she said at last. “What can we do, Demetri? We can’t undiscover the gold. Anything that is selling on the open market for—What is it this month? Eleven hundred an ounce?—someone is always going to be wanting to pull that out of the ground and sell it to somebody else. That’s pretty much the history of Alaska: we pull stuff out. We pull it out of the ground and we pull it out of the water, and we sell it to the highest bidder. And I’ll tell you what else,” she added. “There is no point in demonizing these people; they legally obtained those leases. We keep bad-mouthing them and they’re going to start feeling like they don’t owe us any favors.”

“You think we should just bend over?”

She was taken aback by what sounded very much like contempt in his tone. “No,” she said as mildly as she could. “I do not think that at all. This is our backyard, and we have the right, hell, the responsibility, to control access to it and activity in it. We owe at least that much to our kids.” She gave him an assessing look. “You’ve been pretty reticent about the Suulutaq Mine so far, Demetri. Do I understand you to say that you’re against it?”

He sat back and looked at the ceiling for inspiration. “Can we be simply for it or against it at this stage?” He looked back at her. “Are you going to take a stand one way or the other? Is the chair of the board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association going to come out for it, or against it? Fight it, or go along?”

“Jesus, Demetri, you’re starting to sound like George W. Bush. I’m either with you or against you, is that what you’re telling me?”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said, but he didn’t sound very convincing.

“How about none of the above?” she said, but he wasn’t in the mood for humor, either. “I don’t like either of those options,” she said. “Fighting Suulutaq strikes me as pissing into the wind. In the end they’ll dig that damn hole and start producing the gold and we end up wet and smelling bad. Going along means Global Harvest gets to do whatever they want, which makes me or anyone who thinks about it for more than five minutes nervous as hell. There has to be some kind of middle ground.”

“That hole is going to be a mile deep and two miles wide,” he said. “Square in the middle of the Park. A lot of people won’t ever be able to find middle ground with that.”

“You’re sounding like one of them,” she said bluntly. “Are you?”

He shrugged and went back to studying the ceiling. “It’s something to think about.”

She thought about his lodge, set on a pristine lake in the southern end of the Quilak Mountains. On a very clear day his guests could see all the way to Prince William Sound.

And then she thought of Old Sam, born into a Park with a fully operational copper mine. “It’s not like this hasn’t happened before,” she said. “Our grandparents worked at the Kanuyaq Copper Mine. They survived. The Park survived. And that was back when no one was watching, when Carnegie and Mellon and Rockefeller had it all their own way, laughable wages, no unions, no employee benefits, a company store. This time, all the lights are on, everyone’s watching, and Global Harvest knows it. They’re working on an environmental impact statement, which will take two years and cost millions of dollars. They’ve funded a grant program for just about anyone in the Park who wants to apply to work at the mine and needs to go to school to learn the necessary skills. They just donated a satellite dish and a computer for every kid in the school. So far, they’ve demonstrated pretty good faith.”

He was silent for a moment before he spoke again. “They say they’ll be in operation here for twenty years or more.”

“And that’s not a good thing, either? Good-paying jobs for the kids so they don’t have to move to Anchorage or Outside?”

He sighed and let his arms unknot themselves. “Ah, hell, Kate. You’re probably right. Control as much as we can, and make sure the mine pays its own way. Not a whole lot else we can do.”

It had been too quick a turnaround, but she let it go for the moment. Besides, there were other things on her mind. “Demetri,” she said, “aren’t you descended from Chief Lev somehow?”

“Chief Lev Kookesh?” He looked surprised, but was willing to let her change the subject. “Sure, he was a great-great-uncle.” He thought. “Maybe a triple great. Why?”

“Did you know Old Sam was his grandson?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I guess so. Maybe.” He frowned. “Wasn’t there some scandal about Chief Lev? Or no. Maybe his kid?”

“Old Sam’s mom?”

“Yeah. Chief Lev and his wife died in the flu epidemic at the end of World War I. His daughter hosted their potlatch, and a tribal artifact went missing.”

Kate blinked. “A tribal artifact?”

“Well, part of the tribal history, anyway. A Russian icon. You know, those saint’s pictures the Russian Orthodox have in their churches?”

“I didn’t know we ever had a Russian Orthodox church in Niniltna. I didn’t know we ever had a church of any kind in Niniltna.” She thought. “Except for the Pentecostal yurt.”

Demetri stood up and shrugged into his parka. “With a name like Kookesh, his people had to be from Southeast. Maybe they brought it up from Klukwan or Huna or somewhere. Anyway, the story is, there was this Russian icon, and it was supposed to have healing properties.”

“You mean like Our Lady of Lourdes? Are you kidding me?”

“No. Chief Lev would bring it out whenever there was a potlatch or a gathering. People who were sick or blind or lame or had something else wrong with them would come from all over to pray to be healed. And it, you know, would heal them.”

“Right.”

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just telling the story the way I heard it.”

“Wait a minute,” Kate said. “If it was a family thing, should somebody still have it? You, or maybe, I don’t know, Old Sam?”

“That’s just it. At Chief Lev’s potlatch, it was stolen. Vanished overnight. A lot of people said Chief Lev’s daughter stole it and hid it because she figured they’d take it from her.”

“Why?”

“Because she was a woman and she couldn’t be chief.”

She wouldn’t have been able to be, then. Kate suffered a moment of nostalgia for the good old days. “So did she? Steal it?”

“The story says not. There was something about some stampeder who came into the Park and charmed it out of her.”

Kate stiffened. “He have a name?”

“Oh, geez, now you’re asking. Something about a bucket? Kick the Bucket? Bucket of Blood?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Ruthe?”

“Ruthe Bauman?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would she know what his name was?”

He looked at her as if she were an idiot. “Didn’t you know? Dan O’Brian hired her to write a piece on the history of the Park for the Parks Service website. Old Sam spent a lot of time with her lately, telling her stuff.” He paused. “You better be careful how you go there. The aunties are all pissed off that a white woman’s writing it.”

“They’re pissed at Ruthe?” Kate’s voice went up high enough to bring Mutt up on her feet.

“No, at Dan.” Demetri stamped his feet into his boots and paused, a hand on the door, and said in a casual tone, “Not that I mean to rush things, but who do you want to name to replace Old Sam on the board?”

“No one can replace him,” Kate said flatly. “We can fill his seat, and that’s about all we can do.”

Demetri wasn’t going to let it go. “Okay, then, to fill his seat?”

He was right, she told herself. The sooner it was done, the better, to get the new board member up to speed on Association issues and shareholder politics. “I was thinking we ought to pull in someone from Anchorage. One of the shareholders who live outside the Park. Bring a different perspective to the board.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” Kate lied. “A discussion for around the table next month, maybe?”

“Maybe. Might be a good idea if we had some names to put forward by then, though. Then we could just vote on it and whoever it is would be worked in by the shareholder’s meeting in January.”

“Be thinking, then.”

He nodded. “You, too.”

“And Demetri? Thanks.”

He waved her off, and she stood there as the door closed behind him, as his footsteps receded down the stairs, as the engine of his truck turned over, and wondered if she had been reading Demetri Totemoff wrong all these years.

Kick the Bucket? Bucket of Blood?

Fifteen

Ruthe Bauman opened the door and said, “You look exactly like a green-spectacled eider.”

“I really, really have heard them all,” Kate said. “Although, now that I think of it, no, I hadn’t heard that one. But now I have, so you’re done. I need to talk to you about Old Sam.”

“Come on in.” Ruthe stepped back and opened the door wide. Galadrial was stretched out in front of the woodstove. She hissed at Mutt without moving. Mutt growled back without showing her teeth. Honor served, Mutt curled up in front of the stove on the opposite corner from Gal and stuck her nose under her tail, and cat and dog ignored each other from that moment on.

“I’ll get some coffee while you shuck out,” Ruthe said, and bustled over to the kitchen.

Ruthe Bauman was in her late seventies and still thin and spry, with clear brown eyes and an untidy head of hair that was a very attractive white gold. There were wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and her lean cheeks were lined, but like Old Sam she seemed ageless. Barring illness or injury, longevity was something the Park seemed to confer on residents who stuck around. When her time came Ruthe would probably go out the same way Old Sam did, just sit down and not get up again.

She had first come to Alaska with her friend Dina Willner, both of them ex-WASPs who couldn’t find jobs in aviation Outside after World War II and so came looking for them in Alaska. They had joined forces with and then bought out a big-game guide in Fairbanks, and in the fifties started Camp Teddy, one of the very first resorts that catered to eco-tourists, on eighty acres twenty-five miles south of Niniltna. Ruthe was the Park’s self-styled conservationist. She kept independent population counts of the various species of wildlife that challenged all Dan O’Brian’s counts of those same species, and she wasn’t shy about saying so when her counts came in lower than his. When Dan okayed a moose hunt on Nugget Creek, he’d by god better have checked with Ruthe first, because she could and would challenge him on whether the moose population of Nugget Creek would stand up to the harvest.