Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

The Gruening River had a healthy run of red salmon, which was why the origins of the fish camp on the confluence of the two rivers went back a thousand years. The smoke fish from Red Run was prized above all others, and the lucky recipients of Red Run canned smoked salmon hoarded it more jealously than they did their wives and girlfriends.

But that was the other end of the river. At present Jim was circling cautiously over the river's beginnings, keeping a weather eye cocked toward the south. At the first hint of the shred of a cloud he would turn and skedaddle for home. It was amazing how crowded clouds could make a pilot feel, and Jim had not accumulated 2,722 accident-free single engine hours by letting weather jog his elbow.

The head of the valley was the winter grounds of the Gruening River caribou herd. He could see some of them now, groups of five and ten far below, scraping a meal out of the snow and ice with their small, sharp hooves. The big bulls had shed their antlers two months before but there were still racks on a few of the smaller bulls and most of the cows. They looked to be in pretty good shape. Of course this was still only November. Another couple of months and all the fat they had stored up over the summer and fall in those big old jiggly butts would be almost gone.

Like most but not all of the Alaska herds, the Gruening River herd migrated annually. When spring came, usually around mid to late May, they migrated over the narrow pass and down the Gruening River to where it met the Kanuyaq, about forty miles, where they calved and fed on willow and blueberry leaves, sedge grasses, tundra flowers, and mushrooms. In September, they moved back up the mountains, feeding on shrubs and lichen and kinnikinnick.

It was a small herd, never over five thousand on its best year, as there was a very healthy wolf population in the area, and then there were the bears. So far, the three species were holding fairly stable. For now, it was a matter of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The state and the feds were less concerned about the Gruening River herd than they were about the Central Arctic herd that migrated through Prudhoe Bay, whose population had dropped precipitously in the last twenty years, or the Mulchatna herd that had increased so geometrically that they were letting hunters take five each, including cows, and one season going so far as to allow hunters to fly and shoot same day.

If the mine went in, of course, much more attention would be paid. The herd would be tagged and monitored to a fare-thee-well, as would the wolves, the bears, the eagles, geese, ducks, wolverines, foxes, marmots, porcupines, pika squirrels, voles, and mosquitoes. Jim wasn't saying the attention would be a bad thing, but it had been his experience that the more attention was paid to an ecosystem, the more alarm was raised when that ecosystem changed in even the smallest degree.

It didn't matter if the change was the natural order of things. Say the herd decreased after a die-off following a hard winter. There would always be someone to tie it to the mine. Someone, say, like Ruthe Bauman. She wouldn't necessarily be wrong, either, but it was true that wildlife in Alaska could be used by any side to bolster whatever viewpoint was held to be most politically correct or economically feasible by the group in question, corporate, legislative, environmental, Native, whoever. The oil companies in Prudhoe Bay claimed that the caribou liked the gravel pads built for the roads and structures, where the wind kept the mosquitoes off them, and that some small groups of cows and calves had wintered under some of the structures.

Even the devil could quote scripture to his purpose.

Meantime, Jim drew a series of economical circles in the sky. He didn't know what he was looking for, exactly, but his gut was telling him that Howie was out here.

Howie Katelnikof was a liar and a thief and a bully and an all-around waste of space, and he might even be a murderer, although Jim wasn't sure he was the murderer of Mac Devlin. There was no bad blood between Mac and Howie so far as Jim knew, and while Mac might hate Global Harvest and all who sailed in her, he wouldn't go out to Suulutaq with the intention of picking a fight with Howie. Howie was little more than a gofer and, as Macleod had discovered to her dismay, from the get-go had been ripping off everything that wasn't nailed down. Far more likely Howie was fencing the stuff he stole to Mac.

Which might be a thought worth pursuing, Jim thought, checking again for weather before easing into a lazy figure eight that gave him a commanding view of the upper valley. Howie, ever on the alert to make a buck, might have sold Mac a look at the trailer and its contents. Mac might have paid for it on the off chance that he'd find something to help him pressure Global Harvest, in hopes of causing enough irritation that they would at long last buy him off.

That, Jim thought, seemed much more in character for both men. Weasels once, weasels ever.

Then his attention was caught by something on the ground. Color and movement, that's what Ranger Dan counseled when looking for wildlife, and that's what Jim had been looking for when he spotted a flash of blue through a dense stand of dark green spruce tucked into one of the little pocket basins. He banked left and continued a tight spiral downward, until he was circling a hundred feet over the spot where he'd seen the color flash. The nearness of the mountains was uncomfortable to him, but the weather was still holding. He throttled back as far as he could without losing lift and stood the Cessna on its left wing for a good, long look.

There shouldn't be spruce up this high, but the little basin was south-facing and well protected, a tiny patch of microclimate the spruce had claimed for its own. They weren't very tall, almost dwarfs, and grew in such a tangled thicket, one on top of the other, each desperate to grab its own square foot of arable soil, that it was difficult to see under them.

"Well now," Jim said. Under them, as he saw now, was where all the action was. There were snow machine tracks going in and out, leading to the remnants of a large caribou slaughter, a pile of skins, another of racks, and an assortment of quarters, looking even at this distance frozen solid in the frigid November air. The hunters had taken care to do their butchering under the trees, and some of the trees had been encouraged to form a shelter by lopping off a lower layer of limbs. To one side there were a couple of dark green tents with two snow machines parked beside them, one blue, the other black. He thought he saw the shadow of a third but not distinctly enough to discern any identifying color or make.

A figure darted from a tree near the meat mound and ducked into one of the tents. They'd heard him. He climbed back to cruising altitude and resumed the lazy eight, the possessor of more facts than he'd had before he arrived.

Caribou hunting season in this game unit didn't begin until January first, over a month away.

The black snow machine was instantly recognizable as the brand-new Ski-Doo Expedition TUV, a cherry little tricked-out sled that had emptied out the Roadhouse when Howie drove up in it the first time. It retailed for just under thirteen thousand dollars, and a lot of Park rats had wondered out loud how Howie, noticeably lacking in gainful employment, could afford it.

Jim had wondered, too. Howie dealt strictly in cash, having learned well from his mentor and master, the execrable Louis Deem, that checking accounts had an uncomfortable way of revealing your transactions at the most inconvenient possible time, and that credit card companies sold your information to everyone else. Now Jim wondered if perhaps Howie had been supplementing his income by retailing commercial quantities of caribou. Gas was expensive, with the price per gallon increasing every day, especially in the Park, where it had to be hauled in by the barrel after winter shut down the road in. It made hunting, even from a four-wheeler or a snow machine, that much more expensive, too.