Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

It was, in short, an almost idyllic life for the three of them, two born to it and one who had adopted it wholeheartedly. Kate would have thought that any threat to the life they had built so painstakingly over the years would have roused them to the same incendiary level as the Kaltaks and the Jeffersons.

Instead, she was surrounded by a calm so placid it was almost grating. She looked at each of them in turn and was met by an identical bland stare. "What's going on here?" she said.

Art made an elaborate show of perplexity. "Why, nothing, Kate. We're not happy about what happened, but we know you and Jim will catch whoever did this and make it right."

Christine and Grandma Riley nodded and chorused their agreement, though Grandma Riley wouldn't look up from her mug.

"What about the grandbaby?" Kate said. "You gonna let an attack on her slide, too?"

Art's eyes hardened momentarily, and then his face smoothed out. "We'd left her with a neighbor, as it happens," he said. "We wish we could help you, Kate, but you know how it is. It all happened so fast. I wouldn't worry." He glanced at his mother, smiling. "Grandma always says, what goes around comes around." He drank coffee and grinned. "I hear you had a high old time of it at your first board meeting."

"Jesus," Kate said, "did somebody take out an ad?"

Art laughed and rose to his feet.

Kate, caught by surprise, rose, too. Since when did folks in the Bush urge winter visitors out the door? Usually they were so glad to see anybody they insisted they stay for a week.

It was almost eleven when she hit the river, Mutt on the seat and the sled attached, hiding from the windchill created by her forward motion behind the windshield.

What the hell had that been all about? It was almost as if…

The snow machine slowed abruptly as her thumb relaxed on the throttle.

It was almost as if they hadn't wanted her to find the attackers.

No, she thought, that wasn't it, not exactly.

It was as if they were recommending that she not waste her time.

And the only reason for them to think that she was wasting her time was that the attackers had already been caught. And dealt with.

Maybe already somebody stop them.

"Oh, no," Kate said.

Mutt gave an interrogatory whine.

Kate hit the throttle.

But when she stopped at the Jeffersons ' again, no trace of the fire-breathing dragon she'd left the day before remained. Ike was now smiling and affable. "No luck, Kate? That's a shame. Well, tomorrow's another day."

And when she got to the Kaltaks in Double Eagle, Ken was equally and eerily serene. He wasn't carrying his rifle anymore, either. "Well, sometimes there's just nothing to be done about a situation, Kate. I expect they were all from Anchorage. You know how those people are, no sense of private property. I'm guessing they'll get what's coming to them one day."

"Ken," she said with what she thought was pretty fair restraint, "when I was here yesterday you were breathing fire and smoke and threatening to shoot on sight. Now you're sounding like Mahatma Gandhi. What happened between then and now?"

He scratched his chin meditatively. "Maybe I got religion." He smiled, a slow stretch of his lips that was more a baring of his teeth than an expression of humor. "You know. Turn the other cheek?"

Frustrated, she took her leave, and Ken saw her out. "Hey," he said, "you still seeing Jim socially?"

She floundered for an answer. "I… I… sort of," she said. "Yeah."

"Oh. I just wondered."

"Why?"

He gave a vague shrug. "Hear tell he was getting all friendly with the mine woman in the Club Bar in Cordova a couple days back. Probably nothing. I expect they'll have a lot to do with each other once the mine gets going."

He smiled again. There was just the merest hint of pity about it, and it ruffled Kate's feathers. She made a brusque farewell and left

That smile was before her eyes as she headed out on the river.

She thought about that smile for at least a mile, about what it might mean, along with the reception she had received at the Rileys' and the change in attitude at the Jeffersons' and the Kaltaks'.

Wait a minute, she thought. Wait just a damn minute here.

That remark about Jim and her. It had been more than the usual Park rat interest in the affairs of their fellows. It had been designed to distract her from the attacks.

And it had worked, too.

Distract her from what, though?

She thought about it for another mile, and then she turned around and headed south again, running slow and close to the west bank, seeing many sets of tracks. She followed it as far as Red Run before she turned again and headed north, this time hugging the east bank. Again, many sets of tracks, could be hunters, trappers, ice fishermen, kids out joyriding, people visiting village to village. Nothing that looked out of the ordinary or intrinsically suspicious. She did find a large section of snow in a willow thicket that looked beaten down, as if a lot of snow machines had rendezvoused there, or as if a few had been there more than once. There was an empty bottle of Yukon Jack frozen into the snow under a tree. Not your usual Park tipple, for one thing it was too expensive, but Kate took it anyway. "Anything?" she said to Mutt.

Mutt had been trotting back and forth, nose to the snow. She looked at Kate and sneezed.

When they got back out on the river Kate looked up and saw a line of dark, encroaching cloud. "That's why it felt warmer," she said, unzipping the throat of her parka just a little.

Mutt gave a soft whine and touched a cold nose to Kate's cheek.

She pointed the machine north and opened up the throttle, Pausing only to gas up in Niniltna. People waved and called from their seats in pickups and on snow machines and four-wheelers. She waved but didn't stop to talk, just kept going north as fast as she could push it without blowing a track. She was airborne more than once where a crack had caused a bump in the ice and blowing snow had built up a hummock. Mutt found it very exhilarating, on occasion leaping from the back of the snow machine before she was thrown and galloping alongside with her tongue lolling out of her mouth, waiting for Kate to slow down so she could jump back on.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon, the sun getting low on the southeastern horizon, when she came to a tiny cluster of buildings perched between the Kanuyaq and a narrow, high-banked creek. Overgrown with brush and trees, the half-dozen houses were little more than tumbledown shacks, originally built of logs and over the years patched with whatever was handy-tar paper, pink fiberglass insulation, plywood, shingles fashioned from Blazo boxes, now and then a sheet of Tyvek. Some of it had been applied with duct tape. Someone in the village must have scored a pile of corrugated tin because it was on every roof, although it was stained and aging.

About twenty miles short of the halfway point between Ahtna and Niniltna, Tikani was a forlorn place, unkempt, unloved, a line in the Bush drawn decades before that had since blown away on the wind. It supported thirty souls in its peak years, most of them named Johansen for the Norwegian stampeder who settled there in 1906 with his Gwitchin bride. Isolated, insular, and xenophobic in the extreme, Tikani was the product of years of inbreeding and the blood feuds that result when close families fight over too small a piece of what is to begin with a very small pie. They had been too proud and too stubborn to sign on to ANCSA, relying instead on the ownership of their homes and on property being grandfathered in around them when Jimmy Carter signed the d-2 lands bill in 1980. As a result, the unincorporated village sat on the original hundred and sixty acres their great-grandfather had proved up on under the Homestead Act, and no more. They weren't one of the 220 recognized tribes of Alaska, and they received no federal funding as a group over and above what was funneled through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service. Refusing to sign off on ANCSA meant they hadn't shared in the billion dollars and the forty-four million acres that had been distributed by the federal government in the ANCSA settlement.