Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

It was one of those still winter days when the Cradle of the Winds lay calm and deceptively quiescent, gray sky and silver sea melding into a luminescent horizon without color or definition, a day handmade for dreaming.

Sam Shugak had shown Kate a picture of a very old map once, drawn when people thought the world was flat and square. On each edge the mapmaker had written

"Beware-Heare Bee Dragons and Diverse Monsteres of Ye Deepe." It was that kind of day, a gift of a day, a day with dragons just over the next swell, a day when she didn't wince away from the thought of her father, or worry at the task that lay before her. The sea and the sky and the throb of the engine was all there was, and she settled back and gave herself up to it.

The knots rolled by. She heard the sounds of a chart being rolled and stowed. A moment later Andy appeared, still very much on his dignity. "Have some coffee," Kate said amiably, pouring him a mug from the thermos she'd brought topside with her.

"I'm not thirsty," he said stiffly.

"Have some anyway."

He took the mug because she might have dropped it on him if he hadn't. She jerked her head. "So what's with the chart on the Shumagins?"

His face lit up. For a moment the desire to share his news with someone, anyone, warred with the awareness of who he was talking to, but eagerness won out in the end. "I was looking for Sanak and Unga."

"Why?"

"Because I was reading this book about the Aleutians, and there's a story in it about a boat race back in the thirties or thereabouts. A boat race between a hundred twenty-five-foot steamer and a kayak."

He beamed at her, blue eyes expectant beneath tousled blond hair, and dutifully she said, "A steamer and a kayak? No kidding? What happened?"

"The kayak won!" The announcement was delivered with all the air of an eyewitness to the event.

Kate expressed suitable astonishment, and he needed no further urging to disgorge the whole story. "The steamer put in at Sanak to offload cargo, see, and these four Aleut guys came up in a kayak and challenged the captain of the steamer to a race." Andy's lip curled. "He wouldn't do it until they bet him a hundred dollars they could win."

"Easy money," she observed. She thought she caught a glimpse of an island off to starboard, but a tardy wisp of fog obscured it almost as soon as she saw it, and she settled back in the chair, listening to Andy with half an ear.

"That's what he thought," Andy said, his scorn immense and magnificent. "The steamer took off, and the kayak just sat there, and everybody onshore started hooting and laughing, but the Aleuts were waiting, counting the waves for the right wave, what they called the ninth wave. When it came along, they paddled to catch it and balanced themselves on top of it, and then they rode it, all the way to Unga! Before the trip was half over, they were out of the steamer's sight!" The beam was back. "First surfers north of the fifty-three!

God, don't you just love Alaska!"

"Hitchhiking on a wave," Kate said. "I like it. Did the Starr's skipper pay up?"

Andy nodded vigorously. "Uh-huh. He was a good sport."

"Good for him. More coffee?"

"Wait a minute." Andy paused, mug outstretched.

"Did I say the steamer's name was the Starr?"

"Sure you did." The can of Carnation Evaporated Milk was empty but for a few drops. Kate sighed.

"No, I didn't," he said. "You already knew it. You already heard that story."

She looked over at his accusing expression. "About a thousand times," she admitted, a slow smile spreading across her face.

He didn't know whether to take offense or not, and as the decision hung in the balance Kate played her trump card. "I'm an Aleut myself, Andy. I think the first time my dad told me that story I was four years old."

Andy stared at her, eyes and mouth three round, astonished O's. "Gosh," he breathed. "You're an Aleut? A real live Aleut?"

Kate kept her face straight with an effort. "A real live Aleut. Now be a good guy and go get me another can of milk for my coffee, okay? And toss the empty while you're at it."

She handed the can to him. He took it automatically, his eyes still wide and fixed on her face. "Have you ever paddled a kayak?"

"Never in my life," she said, and took him by the shoulders to turn him around and give him a firm shove in the direction of the stairs.

They made Dutch that evening. The harbor was crowded with crabbers, and their turn to unload didn't come until the following morning. The crew suited up in rain gear while Harry brought the Avilda around to the processor's dock. Working both booms on the dock and with all four of the deck crew in the hold loading brailers they had the old girl emptied out in less than two hours.

Harry shinnied up the ladder to the dock, reappearing in the galley half an hour later. "How much?" Andy said, his young voice excited. "What kind of price did we get?"

The skipper made a show of consulting the fish ticket he held in one hand. "Buck-fifty."

"A dollar and fifty cents?" Andy said. "Per crab?"

"Per pound," Kate corrected him gently.

Andy's voice went up into a squeak. "Per pound? Per pound?"

He lunged for paper and pencil. His face screwed up with concentration, the tip of his tongue protruding from one corner of his mouth. After tremendous amounts of scribbling and adding and erasing and multiplying, he produced a figure and stared down at it with disbelieving eyes. "Eighty-three hundred dollars?" he said finally. His face paled, flushed and paled again beneath its tan. Again his voice went up to a squeak. "A crew share for this one trip is eighty-three hundred dollars?"

Kate smacked him on the back. "If it was easy, everybody'd be doing it. That's why they pay us the big bucks, boy."

She looked around for agreement and found it, in a mild sort of way. Seth gave a casual nod, Ned said "uhhuh" in an absentminded tone, and Harry disappeared into his stateroom.

A little deflated, Andy turned to Kate. "For crying out loud, you'd think they made eighty-three hundred bucks every day out there."

"Yes," Kate said, "you would think that, wouldn't you." She picked up the piece of paper and peered at the clumsy squiggles. She made a few doodles with the pencil and totaled them up.

"Eighty-three hundred dollars?"

She nodded, her face wearing a rueful expression he didn't understand but was too wrought up to question.

"Yup. It's eighty-three hundred dollars, all right. Each."

Laying pencil and paper aside, she rubbed her face with both hands, hard. "Eighty-three hundred dollars," she repeated in a thoughtful voice. "Not bad for eight days' work."

Jack Morgan might live after all.

In one of those impetuous changes of mind for which Aleutian weather is rightfully famed, the fog shifted and revealed a high, broken overcast and, if Kate was not mistaken, a pale, brief and wholly transitory gleam that might be sunshine. The resulting scene was somewhere between appalling and enthralling. Dutch Harbor was a sheltered piece of Iliuliuk Bay, nuzzled up against Amaknak Island behind a mile-long spit of sand and gravel and grass. Amaknak Island, four miles long and a mile wide, in turn lay snugly within two arms of the much larger Unalaska Island, eighty-seven miles long and thirty-seven miles wide and the second largest in the Aleutian Chain. Amaknak Island looked like a pelican facing northeast, Unalaska like a tomahawk with the blade facing north-northwest.

Mount Ballyhoo formed the beak of Amaknak's pelican, so named, Kate dimly remembered from some long-ago lesson in Mr. Kaufman's sixth-grade geography class, by Jack London when he'd been sealing between the Aleutians and the Kuriles at the turn of the century.

That voyage had formed the basis for local color in The Sea Wolf which Mr. Kaufman had forced down the class's collectively unwilling educational maw. All Kate could remember of the story was her conviction that though Humphrey Van Weyden might have survived Wolf Larsen, he wouldn't have lasted five minutes in the Park.