Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

"Now? In October?"

"They did leave it a little late, which might have something to do with why the Cat broke a tread on a slope and rolled over. Maybe, I don't know. The Cat used to belong to Mac Devlin-I could see where the Nabesna Mine logo had been on the side before it got painted over-and it didn't look real well cared for. At any rate, it killed the driver. Messy. The driver? The son. Yeah, just the one kid. Bad news all the way around."

Most of the news featured Talia Macleod's arrival in the Park, the community's reaction to her, and what the mine was going to mean in the long run.

"More work for me," Jim said, "is all I see."

"Why?" Johnny said.

Jim helped himself to more stew. "They'll mostly be hiring young men, and when you put young men together with a lot of money, trouble comes."

"You mean like drugs?"

"Drugs, booze, women, bigger and better and more dangerous toys, and people who will be selling all of the above." Jim gave his head a gloomy shake. "Not to mention all the hucksters hanging around the fringe offering the newly rich wonderful investment opportunities, most of them scams. I've heard about some of the stuff the Slopers have been sucked into, apple and pistachio farms in Arizona, oil wells in Colorado, real estate deals in Seattle. All of them fail, everybody takes a bath, and the losers start looking for somebody to blame, which always ends well. It won't be pretty."

"But there'll be jobs," Johnny said tentatively. "Macleod says there will be as many as two thousand jobs during construction, and a thousand after, when the mine is operating. A thousand steady jobs, Jim, where there were zero before. That's gotta be good. Doesn't it?"

"Sure," Jim said, reaching for more bread. "But there's a price for everything, Johnny."

"I was thinking…" Johnny looked at Kate and hesitated, but she wasn't listening. "Macleod said there were certain professions that would be especially attractive to Global Harvest, like engineers and geologists."

"And?"

"I graduate in two years. I figured I might check out the degree programs at UA, see if any of them fit."

"I thought you were interested in biology, in wildlife management."

Johnny grimaced. "I've been talking to Dan O'Brien, and he says those kinds of jobs are almost always government. He says they're hard to come by, and that they don't pay very well, and you don't get to pick where you work."

"Do you have to make a lot of money?" Jim said.

Johnny looked uncertain. "I thought that was what everybody wanted."

"Do what you love," Jim said. "The money will come."

Johnny was unconvinced, but he let the subject slide for now.

He looked over at Kate. She'd finished and now sat frowning at her empty bowl.

"Something wrong with the stew?" Jim said.

"What?" She came to herself with a start. "No. No, it was great." She saw his eyebrow go up and said with forced warmth, "It was terrific. You can make that again any old time."

"What, then?"

Kate's spoon clattered into her bowl. "She didn't say hi to Annie."

Jim exchanged a glance with Johnny. "Who didn't?"

"Talia Macleod. When Harvey brought her into the board meeting. She glad-handed everyone on the board, called us all by name, knew something personal about each and every one of us. But she didn't even say hi to Annie."

"She's hired a caretaker for the mine site," Johnny said.

"Who?" Jim said.

Johnny looked at Kate with some caution. "Howie Katelnikof." Jim paused in the act of running his finger around the edge of his bowl. "You're kidding," he and Kate said at the same time. "That's what I said," Johnny said.

"Who the hell told her that putting Howie on the payroll was a good idea?" Jim said. "Didn't she ask around first, get some names?"

Kate got up and headed for her coat and boots. "Where you going?" Jim said.

"To see Mandy," Kate said.

Mandy Baker's place was down the road toward Niniltna, at the end of a rutted track a little narrower than a pickup. It was a rambling, ramshackle collection of buildings that had once housed a wilderness lodge whose original owner had bankrupted himself in a failed attempt to attract big game hunters, most of whom were already clients of Demetri Totemoff's. The lodge was threatened on all sides by a dense forest of willow, black and white spruce, black cottonwood, and white paper birch, which had been allowed to grow unhindered save for half a dozen trails the width of a dogsled. The trees on the south side closest to the house had been trimmed to stumps and were used as posts to restrain Mandy's dogs from heading to Nome on their own. When Kate pulled up in the clearing, they set up a collective howl that could have been heard from the moon.

Kate winced and put her fingers in her ears. Mutt trotted out into the middle of the pack, sat down, raised her nose, and gave one loud, minatory bark, showing a little teeth while she was at it. There was an instantaneous silence, and Mutt stared around her with narrowed yellow eyes, just to make sure the point had been taken. It had.

"Man, I wish they'd do that for me," said a voice from the door, and Kate looked up to see Mandy standing in it.

"Why do you mush dogs if their howling drives you crazy?" Kate said, threading her way through the pack.

"Why do you think I took up mushing?" Mandy said. "They don't howl when they're hitched up and running."

"There's a problem with that reasoning but I'm just going to let it go," Kate said. She paused on the doorstep. "You doing some late culling? Doesn't seem to be quite the teeming mass of caninity that it usually is."

"Caninity?" Mandy said.

"Caninity," Kate said. "If Shakespeare can make up words so can I."

"Coffee?" Mandy said, standing back and holding the door wide.

"Sure." Kate shed parka and boots and went inside.

The door opened into a large room that served Mandy as kitchen, dining room, living room, and harness shed. There was an enormous old-fashioned woodstove in one corner with a fireplace in the corner opposite, and a higgledy-piggledy jumble of tables, chairs, couches, refrigerator-freezers, sinks, counters, and cupboards in between. On this dark, cold October night the room glowed with the muted light of half a dozen Coleman lanterns, hissing gently from hooks screwed into overhead beams. Mandy preferred them to electric light and had never installed a generator. Pots and pans, traps and ganglines hung from more hooks, making the entire area a hazard to navigation.

Mandy was a tall, rangy woman with a face full of good, strong bones, hair cut a la Prince Valiant, and a latent twinkle in her gray eyes. The scion of a wealthy Bostonian family, she had abandoned crinoline petticoats and charity balls for down parkas and dog mushing as soon as she was of legal age. This had distressed her proper, conservative family no end, although her parents had come around after an eventful visit to the Park three years before. Since then, relations had been cordial, punctuated frequently by care packages featuring L.L.Bean, a telling switch from the usual Neiman Marcus.

"Chick around?" Kate said, accepting a steaming mug and adding a generous helping of canned milk.

She looked up in time to see the twinkle vanish. "Not lately."

Kate groaned. "Not again."

Mandy sat opposite and added three spoonfuls of sugar to her own mug. "To tell the truth, I don't know. I suppose it's possible he's not on a bender. All I know is he went to Anchorage last week to visit his mom, and I haven't heard from him since."

Chick was Chick Noyukpuk, Mandy's lover and mushing mentor. He was also a chronic alcoholic. A short, rotund little man with a cheerful disposition when sober, when drunk he turned maudlin and suicidal. Mandy had bought her first dogs from him. Then he had had his own kennel. Then he had been a world champion distance musher in his own right, earning the nickname the Billiken Bullet, much beloved of sports reporters for his evenhanded way with a bar tab. Now, he worked for Mandy, overseeing the breeding and training of the teams and as a tactical advisor on the trail, with the result that Mandy had been finishing in the money since her third Iditarod.