Dana Stabenow: A Fine and Bitter Snow

It was his pleasure, Kate thought perhaps his very great pleasure, to show them, at their expense, that they didn’t.

She’d never heard him go so far as to say that he was in the business of making men from boys. But he did not deny that it sometimes happened. He housed them well, he fed them very well, and he ran their asses off all over the taiga. They came home most nights to a hot shower and a soft bed, and sometimes, if it was that kind of party, a woman in that bed, on the house. He wasn’t averse to a little of that kind of entertainment himself. No loud parties, however, no boozing, and everyone behaved themselves and treated their companions like ladies or they were on the next plane out.

Usually, his clients went home with at least one trophy, and the smart ones took the meat, too. When they didn’t, he handed it out to elders in the Park, because he was a man who could see the value in getting along with one’s neighbors. Next to the Niniltna Native Association, he was probably the village of Niniltna ’s biggest taxpayer, and he paid up in full and on time.

He’d been around since the sixties. He’d started out fishing in Cordova, learned to fly, and homesteaded on the Kanuyaq. He started advertising salmon fishing parties and guided hunts in Field & Stream in 1965-tent camping, it was back then. He’d built the lodge in 1969, for cash, and from that day forward had never run empty.

He lived alone. The chef arrived with the salmon and departed with the last moose rack. So did the maids and the groundskeepers and the gardener and the boatmen. In the winter, he cooked his own meals and made his own bed, and spent the rest of the time trapping for beaver and mink and marten and curing their skins, which he took into Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage every February and sold at auction.

He didn’t have much truck with religion. He drank some, mostly hard liquor. He collected his mail regularly at the post office, and spent enough time at Bernie’s to keep up on what was going out over the Bush telegraph, and to avoid the label of hermit. He had not the knack of making friends, and so his winters were solitary. Kate had the feeling that dignity and a spotless reputation meant more to John Letourneau than anything as messy as a relationship.

She pulled up by the front of the porch, giving the motor a couple of unnecessary revs to give him warning. He was waiting at the door by the time she got to the top of the steps. “Kate,” he said.

“John,” she said in return. Mutt gave an attention-getting sneeze behind her, and she turned, to see the big yellow eyes pleading for fun. “Okay if my dog flushes some game?”

“Turn her loose.”

“Thanks. Go,” Kate said to Mutt, and Mutt was off, winging across the snow like an enormous gray arrow, head down, tail flattened, legs extended so that they looked twice their normal length.

“Be lucky to see a ptarmigan again this year,” John commented as he closed the door. “Coffee?”

“Sure.”

He got a carafe out of the kitchen, along with a plate of shortbread cookies. Conversation was restricted to “please” and “thank you” until he had finished serving her and had taken a seat across the living room, at a distance that almost but didn’t quite necessitate a shout for communication. The interior of the lodge was very masculine, sparingly but luxuriously furnished with sheepskin rugs, brown leather couch and chairs, heads of one of each of every living thing in the Park hanging from the walls. No humans that Kate could see, but then, it was a big place.

It didn’t look all that lived in to her, but it fit him. He was a tall man with a lion’s mane of white hair, carefully tended and swept back from a broad and deceptively benevolent brow. He looked like he was about to hand down stone tablets. He’d kept his figure, too, broad shoulders over a narrow waist, slim hips and long, lanky legs encased in faded stovepipe jeans, topped with a long-sleeved dark red plaid shirt over a white T-shirt. He had not yet reached an age to stoop, and his step was still swift and sure across the ground. His hands were enormous, dwarfing the large mug cradled in one palm, calloused, chapped, and scarred. His jaw protruded in a very firm chin, his lips were thin, his nose was high-bridged and thinner, and his eyes were dark and piercing. He fixed her with them now. “What can I do for you, Kate?” he said. “I’m guessing this isn’t just a social call.”

Since she liked social bullshit as little as he did, she greeted this opening with relief. “You’d guess right. It’s about Dan O’Brian.”

John had always been hard to read, his expression usually remote and unchanging, as if sometimes he wasn’t really in the room when you were talking to him.

“What about him?”

“Did you hear they’re trying to force him into early retirement?”

“No.” He drank coffee. “I hadn’t heard that.”

“The administration is looking for a change of flavor in their rangers.”

He picked up a cookie and examined it. “I can’t say I disagree with them.”

She smiled. “Come on, John,” she said, relaxing back into her chair. “You’ve got things pretty good right now. You and Demetri are the sole big-game guides licensed to operate in the Park. Between the two of you, you constitute a monopoly. Dan’s happy to keep it that way.”

He didn’t say anything.

Kate plowed on. “Plus, we know him, and he knows us. What if they start making noises about drilling in Iqaluk again?”

“Are they?

“They are in ANWR. I figure if they start punching holes there, they’ll look to start punching them other places, too, and Iqaluk is one of the few places in the state that has already supported a profitable oil field.”

“Fifty years ago.”

“Still. They can make a case that there’s more to find. What happens then? I’ll tell you. They move in all their equipment, and they either find oil or they don’t. If they don’t, it’s a temporary mess and we hope they don’t screw up the migratory herds too much, and don’t spill anything into the water that’ll screw with the salmon. If they do, it’s a permanent mess, requiring long-term remedial work. Who better to deal with either of these scenarios than the guy who’s been on the ground for the last twenty years? The guy we know, and who knows us? Who actually listens to us when we tell him we need to cut back on escapement in the Kanuyaq because too many salmon are getting past the dip netters and it’s messing with the spawning beds?”

He smiled, a slight expression, one that didn’t stick around for long. “You’re very eloquent.”

Kate dunked a cookie in her coffee. “Thanks.”

“What do you want me to do?”

She swallowed. “You host a lot of VTPs here, John, people with power, people with influence. As I recollect, the governor’s been here a time or two. So have both senators and our lone representative. Not to mention half the legislature, and past governors going back to territorial days. Call them and ask them to put in a good word for Dan.”

He didn’t say anything. He was very good at it.

Kate wanted a commitment. “It’s in your best interest to do so, John.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

She looked at him, puzzled. “Why wouldn’t it be?” She searched her mind for any Park legends involving a confrontation between the chief ranger and its biggest guiding outfit, and came up zip.

“It’s personal,” he said, dumbfounding her. He got to his feet. “That all you wanted? Because I was about to go out when you drove up.”

She set down her mug, still half-full, and her cookie, only half-eaten, and got up. “Sure. Thanks for listening. You’ll think about it?”