Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

There were many who said it wouldn't last, Juanita used to being a lot closer to the Equator and all, and Vidar not necessarily the sweetest-talking man in the Park, and nearly thirty years older besides, but she stuck it out until Gus was born. She vanished out of the hospital in Ahtna the next day. Vidar didn't waste time trying to find her, he just took Gus back to Tikani, where the other two boys were being looked after by a relative. "Your ma's gone off some-wheres," he was reported to have said. "You boys'n me'll be batching it from now on."

He never spoke her name again, and there had never been money to waste on fripperies like photographs, so Gus never did know what his mother had looked like, and neither his father nor his brothers remembered or wanted to. There were no soft edges on Vidar. There weren't any on his sons, either. They'd brought women home and every time, when the romance of living in the wilderness wore off, they had in their turn been abandoned, too. There were children, no one knew how many. It looked like all of them had left with their mothers.

"So," Kate said. "The boys around?"

"Not lately."

Kate looked again at the can of milk, the cans of soup, the crackers. "When was the last time you saw them?"

He hawked and spat, missing the metal water dish on the floor by a good six inches. "Month. Maybe less. Maybe more."

"Don't they live here anymore?"

He glared at her from beneath thick, wiry eyebrows, one eye gone kind of white, the other a red-streaked brown. "Didn't say that. You asked had I seen them. Said no. Haven't. Heard their machines, though."

"So they are still living here."

He shrugged. "Far's I know. They haven't been up to the house for a while."

Kate felt a lick of anger. Vidar's house was maybe fifty feet max from the front door of the house in Tikani farthest away from his. "Anybody else seen them? That you've talked to lately?"

"Ain't talked to anyone lately," he said. "Everybody's gone."

"What?"

"Something wrong with your hearing? Said everybody's gone. Nobody left here 'cept us."

"Jesus Christ, Vidar," Kate said, her worst suspicions confirmed. "You mean you're here all by yourself?"

He grunted. The chair creaked. "Ick's new girl was the last one out. At least she stopped in to let the young uns say good-bye to their grandpa. More'n I can say for the rest of those losers the boys brought home."

"I'm sorry," Kate said. "I didn't know."

Grunt. Creak.

"Do the kids know?"

Grunt. Creak.

"You want to come back to Niniltna with me?" she said.

The chair stopped and he glared at her. "Hell no. No towns for me, not any longer'n it takes to buy a new set a spark plugs. I'm fine out here."

"What if you run out of fuel? Food? What if you get hurt and there's no one here to help? Come on, come back with me. We'll get you a room with Auntie Vi and then figure something out for the long term."

Grunt. Hawk. Spit. Creak. "Told you. Don't do towns. Like it here fine. Man can hear himself think."

"Is it because you're worried that the boys'll come back and find you gone? We can leave them a note."

"Ain't going nowhere," he said with a finality that denied opposition. "Tell the boys you was here when I see 'em again."

"Vidar…"

"You had your coffee, got yourself warmed up. Time for you and that hound to go, if you wanna get home safe."

He stared at her with his one good eye. "Like you said. Bad things happening on the river lately."

Dinah met Jim at the door, finger to her lips, and stepped back to let him enter.

Bobby was right where Jim wanted him, broadcasting on Park Air, the pirate radio station that had been changing channels one step ahead of the FCC for a dozen years now. This morning featured an interview with one Talia Macleod of Global Harvest Resources Inc. Bobby was sitting knee to knee with her in front of a microphone and appeared spellbound. Nothing loath, she was flirting hard right back, but that didn't stop either one of them from getting what they wanted said out on the air.

"Open pit mining isn't known for having the environmental friendlies," Bobby said. "Don't you need a lot of water for the extraction process? Where you gonna pull all that water from?"

"Plenty of water in local feeder streams to get the job done," Talia said, her voice a low purr.

Anyone listening would think, with some justification, that they were listening to pillow talk, Jim thought. Talia looked up and saw him, and a smile spread across her face. Behind Jim, Dinah frowned.

"Yeah, but babe," Bobby said, his voice a correspondingly caressing rumble, "those feeder streams are pretty much all of them salmon streams. You might miss the Gruening River, it being so far up the valley from the mine, but what about Keehler Creek, Jones Creek, the Stone River? They run straight down the valley. You're going to use toxic chemicals to extract the gold, which means you're going to have a lot of acid runoff. It gets into those salmon streams, the salmon are dead." He gave her a winsome smile, his caressing tone unchanging. "And so are a lot of the families who live off those salmon runs, from Ahtna to Alaganik Bay."

Talia returned a smile every bit as winning as his own. "If you'd look at our construction plans, Bobby, you'd see that we have designed a 4,700-acre drainage lake to capture all the acid runoff, protected by a dam." Her smile widened. "Two dams, in fact, just in case. Global Harvest is all about safety first."

"Earthen dams, as I understand it," Bobby said without missing a beat. "Made out of dirt. Which, as we all know, turns to mud in the rain." He chuckled. "And then there are, um, what do you call those things? Earthquakes, that's it. A whole lotta shakin' goin' on. What does that do to the stability of a dam that's going to be bigger than the Hoover Dam? Sounds like a Superfund site in the making to me."

"Why, Bobby," she said, "if I didn't know better I'd say you were against the Suulutaq Mine."

"You would?" Bobby said innocently.

They laughed together. Jim looked at Dinah, who rolled her eyes and went to admire Katya's efforts at a dangerously tilting block castle.

"No reason for you to be against it," Talia murmured, "and plenty of them for you to be for it. Didn't I mention? We're going to be bringing jobs into the Park in numbers that haven't been seen since the old days of the Kanuyaq Mine. Two thousand, maybe more, during construction, and a thousand to keep it running after, and did I also mention how long we expect to be here? Forty years, minimum. That's forty years of jobs for Park rats, Bobby, and good-paying jobs, too."

"Yeah, Talia, but what kind of jobs we talking about here? Making beds, serving slop?" Bobby's smile slipped a little. "Not something I aspire to for the kid." He looked up at Jim and said, "Chopper Jim Chopin in the house, folks. Hey, Jim."

"Hey, Bobby," Jim said, walking forward so his voice was within reach of the mike.

Bobby watched him with a sapient eye. "You look like a man with a purpose. What's up?"

"I'm looking for Howie Katelnikof. Have you seen him?"

Bobby's eyebrow quirked up. "No, can't say's I have. What's Howie up to these days?"

"Well," Jim said apologetically, "he's in a little bit of trouble, and he's got some people looking for him. Not very nice people, I'm afraid."

"Really," Bobby said, his basso dropping to profundo. "Imagine my surprise."

"Yeah," Jim said, trying not to laugh, "and these people looking for him have put up a reward for whoever finds him."

"Really?" Bobby said. "How much?"

"Hear tell it's five figures."

Bobby gave an appreciative whistle, but he frowned a little. He disliked Howie as cordially as the next person but he didn't necessarily want to get the guy killed on Park Air. "Wow, he must have really pissed someone off this time."