Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

The girls' heads remained bent, and Kate, curious, stood on tiptoe and peered over them to see what held so much of their attention.

Sasha was drawing in the sand. "Kayak," she said firmly, and a single line, curved up at both ends, appeared over three wavy, parallel lines. "Thunderbird." A few swift strokes and there was a pair of wings attached to a fierce hooked beak next to the kayak. "Men." A series of kinetic Y's with legs marched from kayak to thunderbird, three in all, where two other male figures waited. With a single sweep of her hand, all the drawings were enclosed in a perfect circle, almost encompassing the girls' toes.

Another circle was drawn inside the first, perhaps two inches from the first one and perfectly concentric. There was grace and assurance in every stroke.

Sasha wasn't drawing with her finger, as Kate had thought at first. She bent forward to see more clearly and realized that the misshapen hand clutched a knife carved from ivory. It looked like a small scimitar, and the thing gleamed up at her in the dull light of the afternoon, smooth and shining from years of use. "Oh!" she exclaimed involuntarily. "How beautiful!"

There was a muffled communal shriek of surprise and the circle of girls exploded in every direction. Sasha would have run, too, but her bad leg folded beneath her and she lay panting in the sand. She had dropped the ivory knife and Kate reached for it.

"No!" Sasha cried.

"It's all right," Kate said quickly, kneeling next to her.

"Here." She held the knife out and Sasha snatched it out of her hands, clutching it to her breast. "It's all right,"

Kate said again in a soothing voice. "I'm not going to hurt you. My name is Kate. What's yours?"

Sasha's eyes flickered beneath heavy lids. She was whimpering a little, and lay half in, half out of the water, which was rapidly soaking into her clothes.

Kate couldn't leave her like that. "Come on," she said, holding out her hand. "Let me help you up."

The girl cringed away from her, but Kate, moving slowly, letting the girl see her every movement as it was made, put her hands under Sasha's arms and raised her to her feet. She cradled the girl's arm in a comforting hand and matched her steps to the girl's lurching ones.

She was wet through, Kate noted with dismay. "Where do you live?" she asked, pitching her rough voice to be as nonthreatening as possible.

A small voice next to her made her jump. "She should go to Auntie's house. It's about six houses down. I'll show you."

Kate looked around to see the translator, a tiny, slender girl with long, tangled brown hair and a round face looking at her soberly.

"Hello," Kate said. "I'm Kate."

"I'm Becky," the girl replied. "You're not Anglo."

"No," Kate said. "Or at least not much." Becky's smile was shy, but it was a smile. Encouraged, Kate said, "I'm sorry I scared you. I was walking down the beach and I heard you guys and I walked over to take a look. What was that Sasha was doing with the knife?"

"Story-knifing," Becky said.

"Story-knifing? What's that?"

Becky looked up at Kate, her amazement written large on her face. "Didn't you storyknife when you were little?"

Kate shook her head. "No. I've never seen anything like it. I've seen art for sale in Anchorage, hell, I've seen art hung in the museum there that was drawn a lot worse than what I saw Sasha drawing down on the beach." At Becky's inquiring look, she said, "I heard you call her by name while I was watching her draw."

"Oh."

"So tell me about story-knifing,"

Becky's brown eyes examined Kate in a way that made her feel as if she were being dissected in preparation for study beneath a microscope. "It's just a game," she said at last. "A girl's game. Auntie showed us how.

She said her mom showed her, and her mom showed her.

We draw pictures in the sand, sometimes in the snow, and tell stories to each other. Up here."

Becky climbed the stoop and opened the door without knocking. "Auntie! Sasha fell down and got all wet!"

"Oh, that girl!" A tiny woman with a face whose features were almost swallowed up by the wrinkles on it shot out of the kitchen and buzzed around them like an infuriated bee. "Sasha," she said, her voice scolding but affectionate, "you naughty girl! What a mess! And you're shivering! Get out of those wet things this instant!

Becky, take her down to the bathroom and run her a bath. There are clean towels in the linen closet. Scoot, Scoot!"

Over her shoulder Becky said, "This is Kate, Auntie.

She helped Sasha."

The bee turned to Kate. "Well, don't just stand there, you must be chilled through, come into the kitchen and have some tea."

"No, really," Kate said feebly, at the same time being swept into the old woman's irresistible wake. They went down a hallway and through a door into a large kitchen that took up half the square feet of the house and whose floor was covered in what looked like white straw. Kate stood still, ankle-deep in the stuff. "You look like you're busy, maybe I should go."

"Nonsense," the other woman said firmly, "come in this instant and sit down next to the stove. How did you find Sasha?"

Kate subsided meekly into the chair next to the oil stove. It gave out a warming, radiant heat and Kate realized how chilled she was. "Don't just sit there, take your jacket off," the older woman said. "I'm Olga Shapsnikoff, by the way."

"Kate," Kate said. "Kate Shugak."

Olga stopped short in mid-career. "Shugak? Any relation to Ekaterina Shugak?"

Kate was tempted to lie. "Yes," she said. "Ekaterina Shugak is my grandmother."

"Really." Olga busied herself with the teakettle, and her back looked somehow less than enthusiastic. Kate warmed to her.

"I attended a meeting chaired by Ekaterina at the last Raven convention," Olga said. "She certainly is a-" She hesitated, and looked over her shoulder. "She certainly is a strong, woman."

The word you're looking for is "dictatorial," Kate thought. Also tyrannical, imperial and just plain pushy.

She said nothing. Ekaterina might be all those things, but Ekaterina was her grandmother and this woman was a stranger. "Tell me about story-knifing," she said. "I've never seen a storyknife before. Is it an Aleut custom?"

After a long, thoughtful look that gave Kate the distinct impression that she had been tested and, thankfully, not found wanting, Olga smiled. "It's more of an Eskimo custom," she replied, turning back to the stove. "My grandmother was from Alakanuk."

As Olga boiled water and made tea, the rest of the girls from the circle on the beach drifted into the house one at a time, taking a seat around the large, scarred kitchen table, warming their hands around mugs of hot tea and casting shy, surreptitious glances at Kate. After a while Sasha lumbered in, dressed in clean, dry clothes, her skin flushed with the heat of her bath and her wet hair slicked back like a seal's. She sat down on the floor close to Olga's knees and took up a handful of the white straw.

"What is all this?" Kate asked, gesturing at the haystack with her mug.

"The girls and I are weaving baskets." Olga whipped a length of damp sheeting from the back of the table and displayed the beginnings of a dozen baskets that at first glance seemed to be made of cloth.

"Oh," Kate said, on a long note of discovery. "You're an Attuan basket weaver."

"Unalaskan, now," Olga said, her lips curling ever so slightly. One of the girls gave a giggle, quickly smothered.

Kate touched one of the tiny things. It was soft, even silken to the touch. The weaving was very fine, the stitches minute. None of the baskets were more than three inches in diameter. Each one had the same intricate pattern woven around its base in a different color of grass.

" 'Baskets of grass which are both strong and beautiful,'