Dana Stabenow - Nothing Gold Can Stay

It was the same if you listened. The shrill whistle of marmot and ground squirrel, the boarish bay of the grizzly, the call of the moose bull in rut, the cry of the eagle soaring high above.

The encroachment of man was the easiest of all to sense.

Tired from the long day’s walk, he had burrowed between the roots of a giant cottonwood, blown over years before and now stripped down to the bare bark. Other, smaller creatures shared the hollow, who had smelled the smoke before he had and whose agitated rustlings had woken him.

He eeled down the bank to drink from and sluice his face in the creek, taking care to stay hidden beneath a willow branch trailing leaves in the slow-moving water. The woodsmoke could have meant any of a number of things; there were four hikers scaling Alayak Mountain to the northwest, a group of Japanese fly fishermen pulling the last trout out of the streams flowing near Outuchiwenet Mountain Lodge to the north, two park rangers putting the campsite at Nuklunek Lake into winter mothballs to the west. And there were the isolated homesteaders and miners, firing up their hearths and stoves in anticipation of shorter days, longer nights and cooler temperatures.

This was one of those. He had smelled this type of fire before, the concentrated smoke from a stove designed to burn wood slowly, giving off the maximum amount of heat to the room and letting as little of it as possible escape up the chimney. He rolled over on his back, parted the leaves with gentle fingers and squinted at the sky. Dark, or near enough. Seven o’clock, maybe seven-thirty, and he still had miles to go before he slept again. He was tired, and stiff from having slept on the ground, and wanting home, and the comforting presence of his fair lady, Elaine, Elaine-fair. He loved the old legends best, of Arthur and Camelot, and Lancelot and the Holy Grail, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Each with his quest. Elaine had told him once that Guinevere was not so noble as the knights in her life, that she was a liar and a deceiver and an adulteress. There was nothing tragic about her end, she deserved to be burned at the stake, not rescued and taken to live out her life in the comfort of a rich woman’s nunnery. He’d been angry with her, very angry. That was the first time she had run away, but she was soon back again, and sweetly forgiving.

He followed the smoke to a small clearing with a smaller cabin at the center of it. He could just make out the form of a man seated on a straight-backed chair, tilted on two legs to lean against the logs. He had a book in his lap, and once in a while the bowl of his pipe glowed. The smell of good tobacco drifted across the clearing and into the woods.

The man talked to himself. “Too early for Orion, wait another month. What’s that, the Pleiades? Yeah, the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters. What were their names again? Think, Pete, think. Electra, Maia, Taygete, Alcyone, Merope, Celaeno, Sterope.” He gave a snort of triumph. “Okay, moving east, great square of Pegasus, Andromeda and the Andromeda galaxy, the only galaxy that can be seen by the naked eye.”

Involuntarily he turned over on his back, to follow the man’s astronomical lecture. A stick cracked beneath him and a ptarmigan snoozing peacefully four feet away exploded out of the undergrowth.

The man slammed the book shut and shot to his feet. “Who’s that? Who’s out there?”

Kagati Lake, September 2

“I thought you’d be mad.”

She said nothing.

“Actually, I thought you’d be furious.”

It was the morning after. The two officers had spent the rest of yesterday, before Prince left with the body, gathering evidence, including a piece of lead Prince dug triumphantly from the log wall next to the fireplace-“How the hell did it get over there?” she wondered out loud. Liam held his peace-and what Liam was sure would prove to be a slug from a twenty-two-a pistol and an automatic. The family, holding together with amazing dignity, helped by compiling a catalogue of missing items. A jade necklace, an ivory hairpiece, a gold nugget the size of a baby’s fist if the picture of it could be believed.

Breakfast-bacon, eggs and fried potatoes-had been served promptly at eight a.m. Liam and Wy had escaped immediately afterward and walked down to the dock on the lake together, partly to allow the family some privacy, and partly because it was a relief to be away from their grief. Leonard’s grief, especially, because his was compounded by guilt. The reason there had been no rifle in the clips beneath the post office counter was that Leonard had borrowed it to take with them to fish camp. There was a shotgun in the kitchen, mounted in a rack over the door, but she hadn’t been able to get to it. “I should have put it behind the counter when I took the rifle,” he kept saying. His children gathered around in anguished sympathy. Liam checked to see that the shotgun was where it was supposed to be and then he and Wy slipped outside.

It was another clear day, colder than usual. The outside thermometer had read forty degrees when Liam got up. Birch leaves were falling like rain, golden and brittle. The peaks of Oratia and Alayak and Outuchiwenet were already capped with snow. Their southwestern faces were a collection of reds, ranging in hue from salmon to salmonberry to blood. A faint mist hung over the lake like the ghost of summer past, the warm temperature of the water rebelling against the cooler temperature of fall air.

Liam was sitting on the edge of the dock, feet dangling over the side a foot above the water. Watermarks on the pilings showed that he would have been nearly up to his knees during spring runoff. “I figured you’d want a six-inch strip of my hide before breakfast.”

She was sitting next to him, legs dangling next to his, one foot swinging slowly back and forth, sneakered toe pointed with the elegant and unconscious grace of a ballet dancer. Her head was turned away. She seemed to be looking toward the north end of the lake. All he could see of her face was the tip of her ear, revealed by the loose braid that pulled back her dark blond hair. The morning sun picked out gold and bronze and red highlights. It was very pretty, but he’d rather see her expression, have some clue as to what he was dealing with.

He sighed and faced forward. Who understood mothers?

An eagle flew high and slow straight up the center of the lake, heading for home after a summer spent fishing the rivers and streams for salmon. When winter came the eagles would have to work for a living, hunting rabbits and other small mammals, follow the ravens to a downed moose or caribou and share in the pickings, or find a Dumpster. The prospect didn’t seem to worry the eagle over Kagati Lake.

Liam watched him until he was out of sight. September meant the mosquitoes were gone. They needed their jackets, though. Everything’s a trade-off.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

She turned to face him squarely. “You’re an officer of the court, sworn to uphold the Constitution, and the judicial system, enforce their powers.”

“Yes,” he said cautiously.

“If you’d done that, you would have enforced Natalie’s writ.”

He shifted. The plank surface of the dock was hard and far from clean. It was probably messing up the seat of his uniform pants, and his two tailor-made uniforms had seen hard use over the past summer. “Yeah. Well.”

“John Barton will eat your ass if he finds out.”

“John Barton eats my ass all the time anyway.”

She smiled. “True.” She paused. “Liam?”

He stared out at the mist hovering indecisively over the surface of the lake. “Yeah?”