Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

The rationale given by the senior surviving Johansen, Vidar, eldest son of Nils and Almira, was that signing on to ANCSA effaced any future rights signatory Native tribes had to Alaskan lands. He wasn't willing to do that, and he wasn't alone, as several other Alaskan Native villages had refused to go along with ANCSA as well. They had all suffered for it financially, but they still had their pride.

Pride didn't fill a belly.

They'd lost their school five years before due to low enrollment. The school, the largest building in the village, sat a little apart, its roof visible over the trees. There was no smoke coming out of the chimney, and it had that forlorn, defenseless air all abandoned buildings in the Arctic do just before the roof falls in. No one was in sight, in spite of the fact that the wind was calm and her engine had to be audible to anyone indoors.

"Off," Kate said, and Mutt hopped off to allow Kate to negotiate the rudimentary trail up the bank alone.

There weren't any streets per se, just a narrow track postholed through the snow. She parked the snow machine to one side and slipped the key into the pocket of her parka, the first time she had done so since she had bought the machine.

She waited. No one appeared. No curtain moved at a window. There was no chunk of an ax, no clank of tool, only a tiny breeze teasing at a strand of her hair. If there had been a sign hanging from the front of one of the cabins, it would have been creaking. Any second now a tumbleweed would come rolling down the street.

Her thighs were sore from straddling the snowgo seat for so long and it felt good to stretch. "Hey, girl, come here," she said in a loud voice. Mutt trotted over, looking a little quizzical, and Kate said, still in a voice raised to carry, "That's my good girl. Think there's a cup of coffee in this town with my name on it?"

Still no one came to greet her, and when enough time had passed for politeness' sake she walked to the largest house in the village, the only one showing smoke from its chimney, and knocked on the door. While she waited, she noticed that the woodpile at the side of the house didn't seem near high enough for November, not with six more months of cold weather to get through.

At last, a rustle of noise, a shuffle of feet. The door opened. A rheumy eye peered out at her and a cracked voice said, "What do you want?"

"Can I come in, Vidar?" Kate said. "It's cold as hell out here, and I sure could use some coffee."

He thought about it for long enough that Kate actually considered the possibility that she might be refused entrance, and then the door swung wide. "Get your ass in here, then, and be quick about it so I don't have to stand here all goddamn day with the goddamn door open letting the goddamn winter in."

"Nice to see you, too, Vidar," Kate said, and she and Mutt quick-stepped inside.

Vidar glared down at Mutt. "Didn't say the goddamn dog could come in, too."

Mutt dropped her head a little and lifted her lip. There was no love lost between Mutt and Vidar.

Kate ignored both of them and said brightly, "I'm about froze solid. I sure could use that coffee, Vidar."

He grumbled something that probably would not measure up to the generally accepted standards of Bush hospitality and shuffled to the stove. "Siddown if you want."

The interior of the house was so cluttered with traps and magazines and tools and parts and dirty clothes and Louis L'Amour novels and caribou antlers and moose racks and bear skulls and pelts in various states of the curing process that it took a minute or two for a chair to coalesce out of the jumble. There was a table, almost invisible beneath a thicket of beaver skins hanging from the exposed trusses that formed the roof. She pulled the table out from under the beaver skins as far as there was room for it and displaced the wolf skins on the chair to a stack of four-wheeler tires. Mutt rumbled her disapproval of the wolf skins.

Kate sat down in the newly liberated chair. She did not remove her boots, as she would have as a matter of custom and courtesy in any other house in the Park, or Alaska for that matter. Mutt sat down next to her with an air, while not wishing to rush Kate through her business in any way, of nevertheless being ready to quit the premises at their earliest opportunity.

A very old woodstove, encrusted with years of soot and ash, was doing a poor job of heating the house, probably because Kate could see daylight through a crack here and there in the unfinished two-by-twelves that formed the walls. There was an old-fashioned blue tin coffeepot with a wire handle sitting on the back of the stove and from this Vidar produced two thick mugs full of liquid that put Kate persuasively in mind of Prudhoe Bay crude. It tasted like it, too, and Kate used fully a quarter of the can of evaporated milk on the table to thin it down. She didn't go light on the sugar, either, although that had mostly solidified in the cracked bowl it sat in.

Mutt wasn't offered anything. She did not take the snub in good part.

An upholstered rocking chair with stuffing leaking from various rips and tears sat at right angles to the woodstove and into this Vidar subsided, although it could be more properly said that he collapsed.

Vidar Johansen was in his nineties, the sole surviving child of the village's founders, who were the direct and indirect progenitors of anyone born there. He had his father's height, in his prime standing six feet six inches tall. He was bent with age now, with wispy gray hair that looked as if he cut it himself whenever it got in his eyes, and a beard that was mostly grizzle. He wore a plaid shirt so faded it was impossible to tell what the original color had been, and a pair of jeans whose seams looked ready to give at any moment. His feet were bundled into wool socks and homemade moccasins lined with fur gone threadbare. His cheekbones stood out in stark relief from the rest of his face, and the skin on the backs of his hands was so thin Kate imagined she could see the bone through it.

"What are you staring at?" he said belligerently, and she looked away, at the Blazo box shelves on the wall that were mostly bare, at the half-empty case of Campbell's Cream of Tomato soup that sat on the counter, at the oversize box of Ritz crackers sitting next to it. An empty trash can sat under a rough counter that supported the sink, which held a saucepan, a bowl, and a spoon crusted with red.

She looked down at her mug, and wished she hadn't used so much of Vidar's milk.

He rocked and slurped down some coffee and looked at her. She drank heroically and managed a smile. "Oh, that's great, Vidar, thanks," she said. "You're saving my life here."

He grunted. The wooden runners of his chair creaked. "What you want," he said.

Okay. "I was hoping your sons would be around."

He grunted again. The chair creaked some more. "Why?" He was avoiding her eye, but she couldn't decide if that was because he had something to hide or it was just Vidar being his usual antisocial self.

"Need to talk to them," she said. Grunt. Creak. "What about?"

"Some people were attacked and robbed on the river by some other people on snow machines."

The chair stilled and Vidar was silent for a moment. "You think it was my boys."

"Their names have been mentioned, yes."

"Somebody see 'em?"

"Not to identify them, no."

He grunted and resumed rocking. "Probably was them."

"Yeah," Kate said. Vidar had as many illusions about his sons as she or any other Park rat did.

Icarus, Daedalus, and Gus Johansen were Vidar's sons by his only wife, Juanita, a Guatemalan woman who had waited on him at the Northern Lights Denny's in Anchorage while on a supply run to town. She wanted American citizenship and at fifty-five he wanted someone to cook and clean and warm his bed. Twenty-four hours after she'd brought him breakfast for the first time they were on the road to Ahtna with a truck full of groceries and a full set of brand-new winter gear for her.