Whisper to the Blood (21 page)

Auntie Vi raised her eyebrows in a faint shrug and bent back over the gear.
"You not interested enough in Association business to learn how to run
board, you not interested enough in Park business to need to know all that goes
on."

"I see," Kate said. Something very like rage rose up over her in a
red wave and she fought an inner battle to keep her composure. Mutt, who read
Kate better than most humans, looked longingly at the door. "Is this the
way it's going to be, Auntie? You're going to shut me out unless I do what you
want?"

Auntie Vi didn't answer.

"Well, I know about them now, and I'm going downriver to see what the
hell's going on. I'm going to find out who's pulling this shit and I'm going to
kick their collective ass. It's a darn shame I didn't know about it before, so
I could have stopped it earlier, and Grandma Riley and little Laverne Jefferson
and Ken and Janice Kaltak wouldn't have been terrorized and robbed."

Kate left before Auntie Vi could reply.

Her next stop was Auntie Edna's, a prefab home in a little ten-house
subdivision at the south end of Niniltna, perched precariously on the edge of
the river. This time she knocked, instead of walking in like she did at Auntie
Vi's. Auntie Edna's face was stony when she came to the door, but then Auntie
Edna's face was always stony. "Auntie Edna," Kate said without
preamble, "you know about the attacks on the river?"

Auntie Edna shrugged. "I guess."

"You should have told me."

Auntie Edna raised her eyebrows in elaborate surprise. "You
interested?"

Kate could feel her temper begin to rise again, and bit back her first
retort. "I'm headed downriver. Do you know who they are?"

Another shrug. "Nobody say."

"Well, I'm going to find them, and I'm going to beat the crap out of
them when I do. And after that I'm going to feed them to Mutt. You can put that
out on the Bush telegraph if you've a mind to."

She turned to leave.

"Katya."

Kate was in no mood. "What?" The curt tone, the omission of the
usual honorific, both were significant, and they both knew it.

"That man that live with you."

This was so out of left field that Kate was momentarily speechless.
"There's no man- Oh. You mean Jim?"

Auntie Edna gave a curt nod.

"What about him?"

"White man."

Kate snorted out a laugh. "Unregenerately."

"Not right for Association chair, Native woman, to be sleeping with
white man."

At that Kate turned completely around and said incredulously, "Are you
kidding me, Auntie? You of all people dare to lecture me on my love life?"

In her youth, Auntie Edna had been married three times, and in between and
sometimes during those marriages had enjoyed the company of many other men. She
had more children than the other three aunties put together. Her romantic
history probably ranked right up there with Chopper Jim's in number and
variety.

Auntie Edna thrust out her jaw. "Don't change subject, Katya. You
sleeping with that man don't look good. You boot him out, get you a nice Native
man. That be better for everyone. Your kids be shareholders on both
sides."

"Just for the sake of argument, Auntie, what nice Native man would you
recommend?"

At this Auntie Edna looked momentarily at a loss, and then rallied.
"Them Mike boys is all good men, Annie raised them right."

"And they all live in
Anchorage
,"
Kate said, and made a come-along motion with her hand. "Come on, Auntie.
Serve 'em up. Who else is vying for my hand?"

"Martin Shugak, he—"

Kate's rage dissipated in an instant and she burst out laughing.
"Martin! Oh, Auntie!"

"What wrong with him?" Auntie Edna said pugnaciously.

"What's wrong with him?" Kate rolled her eyes. "Well, first
there's the little problem of his being my cousin—"

"Second! Second cousin!"

"—and so our children would all be born with two heads. Not to
mention he's a drunk, so they'd all have FAS, and he's chronically unemployed,
so they'd all be hungry, and—" Kate shook her head. "I'm headed
downriver, Auntie. Do you know who's doing these attacks?" She waited, and
when Auntie Edna said nothing she started down the steps.

"Not necessary, Katya," Auntie Edna said behind her.

Kate paused in the act of mounting the sled, and looked at Auntie Edna with
a gathering frown. She didn't like what she heard in Auntie Edna's voice.
"Why not, Auntie? Somebody has to stop them. And," she added with
little satisfaction and less pride, "it's almost always been me."

"Maybe already somebody stop them," Auntie Edna said.

She gave Kate another long, hard stare, and then Auntie Edna turned and went
back inside, the door closing firmly behind her.

J
im gassed up the Cessna and flew back
to Suulutaq. There was a thin line of clouds on the southern horizon, the edge
of a low front that had so far been held off by the high hanging in over the
Park. Otherwise it was another clear, calm day, and this time he knew where he
was going.

In half an hour he was over the trailer. He continued on up the valley, all
the way to the end, as far as he could get without running into a cloud filled
with rocks. Here the landscape closed in, a series of pocket basins that in
spring were carpeted with grasses, interspersed with rocky crags clothed in
lichen and kinnikinnick. There was one exit, a high, narrow pass where rose the
spring that formed the headwaters of the Gruening River, which cricked and
jigged and jagged down the other side, collecting the flows of errant streams
and creeks to itself before its course smoothed out to join up with the Kanuyaq
River at Red Run.

The
Gruening
River
had a healthy run of red salmon,
which was why the origins of the fish camp on the confluence of the two rivers
went back a thousand years. The smoke fish from Red Run was prized above all
others, and the lucky recipients of Red Run canned smoked salmon hoarded it
more jealously than they did their wives and girlfriends.

But that was the other end of the river. At present Jim was circling
cautiously over the river's beginnings, keeping a weather eye cocked toward the
south. At the first hint of the shred of a cloud he would turn and skedaddle
for home. It was amazing how crowded clouds could make a pilot feel, and Jim
had not accumulated 2,722 accident-free single engine hours by letting weather
jog his elbow.

The head of the valley was the winter grounds of the
Gruening
River
caribou herd. He could see some of them now, groups of five and ten far below,
scraping a meal out of the snow and ice with their small, sharp hooves. The big
bulls had shed their antlers two months before but there were still racks on a
few of the smaller bulls and most of the cows. They looked to be in pretty good
shape. Of course this was still only November. Another couple of months and all
the fat they had stored up over the summer and fall in those big old jiggly
butts would be almost gone.

Like most but not all of the
Alaska
herds,
the
Gruening
River
herd migrated annually. When
spring came, usually around mid to late May, they migrated over the narrow pass
and down the Gruening River to where it met the Kanuyaq, about forty miles,
where they calved and fed on willow and blueberry leaves, sedge grasses, tundra
flowers, and mushrooms. In September, they moved back up the mountains, feeding
on shrubs and lichen and kinnikinnick.

It was a small herd, never over five thousand on its best year, as there was
a very healthy wolf population in the area, and then there were the bears. So
far, the three species were holding fairly stable. For now, it was a matter of
if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The state and the feds were less concerned
about the Gruening River herd than they were about the Central Arctic herd that
migrated through Prudhoe Bay, whose population had dropped precipitously in the
last twenty years, or the Mulchatna herd that had increased so geometrically
that they were letting hunters take five each, including cows, and one season
going so far as to allow hunters to fly and shoot same day.

If the mine went in, of course, much more attention would be paid. The herd
would be tagged and monitored to a fare-thee-well, as would the wolves, the
bears, the eagles, geese, ducks, wolverines, foxes, marmots, porcupines, pika
squirrels, voles, and mosquitoes. Jim wasn't saying the attention would be a
bad thing, but it had been his experience that the more attention was paid to
an ecosystem, the more alarm was raised when that ecosystem changed in even the
smallest degree.

It didn't matter if the change was the natural order of things. Say the herd
decreased after a die-off following a hard winter. There would always be
someone to tie it to the mine. Someone, say, like Ruthe Bauman. She wouldn't
necessarily be wrong, either, but it was true that wildlife in Alaska could be
used by any side to bolster whatever viewpoint was held to be most politically
correct or economically feasible by the group in question, corporate,
legislative, environmental, Native, whoever. The oil companies in
Prudhoe Bay
claimed that the caribou liked the gravel
pads built for the roads and structures, where the wind kept the mosquitoes off
them, and that some small groups of cows and calves had wintered under some of
the structures.

Even the devil could quote scripture to his purpose.

Meantime, Jim drew a series of economical circles in the sky. He didn't know
what he was looking for, exactly, but his gut was telling him that Howie was
out here.

Howie Katelnikof was a liar and a thief and a bully and an all-around waste
of space, and he might even be a murderer, although Jim wasn't sure he was the
murderer of Mac Devlin. There was no bad blood between Mac and Howie so far as
Jim knew, and while Mac might hate Global Harvest and all who sailed in her, he
wouldn't go out to Suulutaq with the intention of picking a fight with Howie.
Howie was little more than a gofer and, as Macleod had discovered to her
dismay, from the get-go had been ripping off everything that wasn't nailed
down. Far more likely Howie was fencing the stuff he stole to Mac.

Which might be a thought worth pursuing, Jim thought, checking again for
weather before easing into a lazy figure eight that gave him a commanding view
of the upper valley. Howie, ever on the alert to make a buck, might have sold
Mac a look at the trailer and its contents. Mac might have paid for it on the
off chance that he'd find something to help him pressure Global Harvest, in
hopes of causing enough irritation that they would at long last buy him off.

That, Jim thought, seemed much more in character for both men. Weasels once,
weasels ever.

Then his attention was caught by something on the ground. Color and
movement, that's what Ranger Dan counseled when looking for wildlife, and
that's what Jim had been looking for when he spotted a flash of blue through a
dense stand of dark green spruce tucked into one of the little pocket basins.
He banked left and continued a tight spiral downward, until he was circling a
hundred feet over the spot where he'd seen the color flash. The nearness of the
mountains was uncomfortable to him, but the weather was still holding. He
throttled back as far as he could without losing lift and stood the Cessna on
its left wing for a good, long look.

There shouldn't be spruce up this high, but the little basin was
south-facing and well protected, a tiny patch of microclimate the spruce had
claimed for its own. They weren't very tall, almost dwarfs, and grew in such a
tangled thicket, one on top of the other, each desperate to grab its own square
foot of arable soil, that it was difficult to see under them.

"Well now," Jim said. Under them, as he saw now, was where all the
action was. There were snow machine tracks going in and out, leading to the
remnants of a large caribou slaughter, a pile of skins, another of racks, and
an assortment of quarters, looking even at this distance frozen solid in the
frigid November air. The hunters had taken care to do their butchering under
the trees, and some of the trees had been encouraged to form a shelter by
lopping off a lower layer of limbs. To one side there were a couple of dark
green tents with two snow machines parked beside them, one blue, the other
black. He thought he saw the shadow of a third but not distinctly enough to
discern any identifying color or make.

A figure darted from a tree near the meat mound and ducked into one of the
tents. They'd heard him. He climbed back to cruising altitude and resumed the
lazy eight, the possessor of more facts than he'd had before he arrived.

Caribou hunting season in this game unit didn't begin until January first,
over a month away.

The black snow machine was instantly recognizable as the brand-new Ski-Doo
Expedition TUV, a cherry little tricked-out sled that had emptied out the
Roadhouse when Howie drove up in it the first time. It retailed for just under
thirteen thousand dollars, and a lot of Park rats had wondered out loud how
Howie, noticeably lacking in gainful employment, could afford it.

Jim had wondered, too. Howie dealt strictly in cash, having learned well
from his mentor and master, the execrable Louis Deem, that checking accounts
had an uncomfortable way of revealing your transactions at the most
inconvenient possible time, and that credit card companies sold your
information to everyone else. Now Jim wondered if perhaps Howie had been
supplementing his income by retailing commercial quantities of caribou. Gas was
expensive, with the price per gallon increasing every day, especially in the
Park, where it had to be hauled in by the barrel after winter shut down the road
in. It made hunting, even from a four-wheeler or a snow machine, that much more
expensive, too.