Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

Ruthe halted and Johnny pulled up beside her. Ruthe killed her engine and Johnny did likewise, and everyone pulled their hoods back and pushed their goggles up, eyes narrowed against the brilliant sunlight. The sudden and immediate silence fell like a blow. The scene before them was like a painting, richly textured in the subtle hues of an Arctic winter day, hushed, serene, and achingly beautiful.

"Wow," Van said, and dismounted.

"Don't!" Ruthe and Johnny said simultaneously, but before they could stop her Van had stepped off the machine and almost immediately sank into the snow up to her waist. She blinked up at them, astonished.

Ruthe threw back her head and laughed, the explosive cackle frightening a ptarmigan from beneath a bush, wings as white as the snow, a blur of motion. After a moment's inner struggle, Johnny started to laugh, too.

Van couldn't help it, she joined in, followed by a quick yelp of distress. "Oh no, I can't laugh, it makes me go in deeper!"

At that Ruthe lay back on the seat of her snow machine and simply dissolved. Johnny pulled himself together and by dint of superior upper body strength, which he did not neglect to point out to both of them, managed to lever Vanessa up on her belly, like a seal, across the seat in back of him. She banged her boots together to get the snow out of her laces, and pulled herself up and back in the saddle. "That's me, ladies and gentlemen, the light relief for the day. Well, how was I to know? I've never ridden out in the backcountry before, just on roads and trails."

Ruthe grinned at her, deep laugh lines creasing her lean cheeks. "What's called throwing you in at the deep end."

Johnny and Van were accompanying Ruthe Bauman, the Park's self-styled naturalist, on an expedition to check on the Gruening River caribou herd. It wasn't much of a herd, less than two thousand strong, but it was part of the Park ecosystem, and Ruthe was the self-appointed patron saint of all Park wildlife, flora and fauna. She tolerated the presence of Dan O'Brien's Park rangers, even if they did tend to get in the way when they were least wanted. They meant well, and she was even on occasion pleased to approve of this or that action taken, but she'd watched almost forty seasons come and go from her front porch, and the rhythm of the life of the Park was as natural to her as her own. It was a byword in the Park that Ruthe could step outside the door of the cabin perched on the hillside with the southern view, look at the sky, take a sniff or two of the wind, and give anyone who asked a forecast that would be more timely and more accurate than any National Weather Service weather report. When Ruthe said to put the snow tires on the truck, Park rats put them on their trucks. When she said it was safe to take them off, they took them off. She was a handy neighbor.

Lean as a tough steak, brown eyes still clear beneath a mop of soft white gold curls, Ruthe Bauman was an ex-WASP who had towed targets for WWII fighter pilots doing target practice over the Atlantic. After the war she'd come north hoping for a job in aviation in Alaska when they weren't on offer to women Outside. She and her friend, Dina Willner, dead three years now, had joined forces with an enterprising travel agent out of Fairbanks that specialized in big game hunts. They bought him out in 1949, acquiring two de Havilland Beavers in the deal, and added air taxi services to remote sites to their business model. In the 50s they bought a cabin and eighty acres twenty-five miles south of Niniltna, added another ten cabins, and took out an ad in Alaska magazine. In that hour one of the world's first eco-resorts, Camp Teddy, was born. So was the Park's conservation movement, which came as something of a shock to the Park rats.

Ruthe and Dina had been close friends of Ekaterina Shugak and were mentors, teachers, and friends to her granddaughter. When Kate acquired Johnny, Ruthe naturally extended that relationship to include him, and he spent a great deal of time literally as well as metaphorically sitting at her feet, learning everything she cared to teach him about the Park and every creature in it.

This winter, Ruthe had been doing some public worrying over the notion that the Gruening River caribou herd might have suffered some serious depredations due to the increase in population of the resident wolf pack. Dan had organized a couple of overflights on Chugach Air, but the budget didn't really allow for an on-the-ground look, too. Ruthe volunteered. "She didn't actually volunteer," Dan told Kate, "she just told me she was going." Ruthe had asked Johnny if he wanted to go. He had in turn invited Van along.

"Sorry you came?" Johnny said, knowing the answer.

Van just laughed.

But Ruthe's attention had shifted, one hand shading her eyes as she looked up the valley. "There it is," she said, and pointed.

The sun was behind the mountains now, and the reflected light less brilliant and hurtful to the eyes. Johnny squinted and could just make out a lone trailer a long way up the valley. It was white, so it was hard to distinguish it from the surrounding countryside, but it had a gold stripe around the top, which was what he found first. "Yeah," he said, "I see it. So that's where they'll dig the Suulutaq Mine."

"That's it," she said. "Can you imagine a pit three miles wide, five miles long, and two thousand feet deep, right there?"

"How tall is two thousand feet?" Van said.

"Two hundred stories," Johnny said.

"Yeah, but what's that mean? Compare it to something."

"I don't know." Johnny thought. "You could put four Washington Monuments in it, one on top of the other."

Van had only ever seen the Washington Monument in pictures. "Oh."

Inspired, Johnny said, "Those mountains, right here at the opening of the valley? I looked on the map before we came, and those first ones are about two thousand feet high. Which means you could put them down in the mine and you wouldn't even see the tops of them."

Van digested this, looking from the mountains to the valley and back again. "Wow," she said, impressed. "That's pretty deep."

Ruthe, unheeding, pointed. "See there? All the way up the end of the valley, on the right, that edge of that mountain?"

They sort of did. "Yeah?"

"The source of the Gruening River is right there, in those hills, and there's a pass just the other side of that edge that the river follows."

"Where does it go?"

"Right into the Kanuyaq, boy. Right into the Kanuyaq."

Johnny had read the flyers that came in the mail, and the handouts that Talia Macleod had given out at the school the month before, too. So had Van. "You're thinking about the salmon runs, right?" Van said. "I thought they were going to build a lake to contain the effluent, and two dams, not just one, to hold it all in."

"Who says the dams will hold?"

"They're going to be pretty big dams, Ruthe," Van said.

"Maybe," Ruthe said. "And maybe there aren't going to be any dams. Come on, let's go say howdy."

Johnny leaned over and grabbed Ruthe's hand before it could push the start button. "I thought we were supposed to go looking for the Gruening River caribou herd."

She smiled at him kindly, or that's what he thought she meant to do. On the receiving end she looked more like a feral fox, all sharp teeth and attitude. "We'll get to them, don't worry. But we're so close, it'd be impolite not to drop in and say hello. I'm sure whoever's stuck all the way out here alone in that little trailer would be glad of some company."

The loud roar of her snow machine's engine split the sky and she was off, going fast enough to send up a faint rooster tail of snow in her wake. Johnny regarded Ruthe's profession of altruism with extreme skepticism, but he hit the start button. "Hang on, Van!" They set off in pursuit, him pushing his snowgo as hard as he dared.