Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

She spent the rest of the daylight hours stopping at individual cabins scattered along the river between Tikani and Niniltna. Perhaps a dozen in all, some that had been there since the Ark, these occupied by crusty old farts and less frequently crusty old fartettes with a taste for wilderness and solitude, not necessarily in that order and not always both. Most were homes that had begun life as log cabins, and some of them were beginning to sag beneath the weight of accumulated decades, but for the most part they were snug, tight little dwellings, and certainly none of them were as threadbare as Vidar's. Other cabins had been built more recently of materials brought upriver by barge or down the road by semi and patiently ferried across the river by skiff one two-by-four at a time, their interiors lightened by Sheetrock and paint and their asphalt-shingled roofs a substantial contrast to tar-papered slabs weighted with sod.

They were similar in size, usually one room with a loft, a floor plan that reminded Kate with a pang of her cabin. The smaller the cabin, the less fuel it took to keep warm and the cheaper the winter fuel bill, and since heat rose, the sleeping loft would stay warm longer than anywhere else in the house. A tried-and-true Bush floor plan.

Everyone who lived on the river practiced subsistence in some form. They hunted for their own meat, they caught their own salmon, and most of them grew their own potatoes, turnips and carrots and cabbage, and tomatoes if they had a greenhouse, and broccoli and cauliflower if they were willing to fight off the moose.

There were so few of them because the properties they had been built on were some of the very few pieces of private property in the Park, grandfathered in when the Park had been created around them. The Park Service wasn't happy that they were there, and lost no opportunity to harass the owners on any pretext, improper land use, overstepping or ignoring hunting regulations, driving a snow machine through a designated snow-machine-free area. Every Park rat had been guilty of all of these transgressions at one time or another in their lives. The river rats were the ones who got the most attention, though, probably because they were the easiest to get to.

These citizens of the river were a varied lot, and some of them had extraordinary hobbies. Take Olaf Christiansen, a retired seiner from Cordova who had stumbled on an entire salmon-canning line in an abandoned cannery near Alaganik. He had disassembled it, brought it upriver by barge, and reassembled it in a lean-to next to his cabin, where he set it to run at one-tenth its normal speed. He was happy to show it to anyone who offered him five bucks, and they'd have a can of air to take home with them as a souvenir.

Thor Moonin, originally from Port Graham, was an ivory carver of world renown. He made his living on jewelry, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, but he was also a world-class sculptor, with the ability to render anything life-size into an exquisite miniature replica-human heads, castles, and once a miniature Yupik village, complete with dogsleds and mushers. In a shed he had a pile of walrus and mammoth tusks that was taller than he was, and he didn't mind the kids playing in there, either, although he did draw the line at dogs, because they had a tendency to mistake the tusks for bones.

Betty Cavanaugh was a retired librarian from Anchorage and a bibliophile who collected Alaskana. She had three separate sets of Captain Cook's logs in three different editions, and if Kate had been very good and had drunk all her coffee and had eaten all her bread and jam she was allowed to page through one of the precious volumes during a visit after she washed her hands.

They liked their privacy, the main reason they lived on the Kanuyaq River, but to a man and a woman they greeted Kate cordially, and without exception they tried to feed her. They did feed Mutt, whose sides tightened up like a drum. Nor were they backward in answering Kate's questions.

Yes, they knew the Johansen brothers. There wasn't anyone on the river who didn't, and not just by reputation, either. Bad actors, all three of them, couldn't think where Vidar had gone so wrong. Maybe if Juanita had stayed around, might have been a different story, but probably not, the bad was likely born into them and there was no getting it out. Surprised they hadn't wound up in jail permanently. Probably only a matter of time.

Yes, people had been moving out of Tikani, there had been a virtual exodus over the past year, year and a half, people streaming downriver like they were fleeing the bubonic plague. Sure, that could be put down to the Johansen brothers, who had no concept of private property. The older they got, the less neighborly they became, and besides, Kate surely knew they had lost their school as well as their post office. There was only a rudimentary airstrip, barely long enough to let a Super Cub take off, empty, and it had been allowed to go to hell with devil's club and alders. No reason for anyone to stay.

Old Vidar was still up there? You don't say. Well, I'll be. Ought to drop in on the old goat once in a while. He wasn't the friendliest person in the world but shouldn't ought nobody to be left completely alone year in and year out, wasn't healthy to have only your own self for company, start talking to yourself, worse, start telling yourself jokes, worse still, start laughing at them. Sure, they'd check on him, they'd set up a schedule. Somebody'd be dropping in on him once a week, or maybe every other week'd be all they could manage, but Vidar'd probably go nuts if he had visitors more often than that anyway. In the dictionary where it said hermit, there was a picture of Vidar Johansen.

Pity his boys were so useless they couldn't be trusted to look after him themselves.

Yes, they'd heard of the snow machine attacks. No, no one had tried anything like that with them. 'Course their river running days were over, and they had plenty to do to keep them safe to home. Failing that, they all had their 12-gauge, or their.30-30, or their.357.

Could they put a name to whoever was most likely to be the perpetrators of said attacks? Well now, there weren't no flies on Kate Shugak that they'd ever seen. What did she think?

Had they heard of Talia Macleod? Why, of course, the mine woman, used to be some kind of famous athlete, wasn't it? She'd written them a letter saying she'd be stopping by, and then her man had come upriver and dropped off an information packet, along with a raffle ticket, winner got an all-expenses-paid weekend in Anchorage. Geiger, wasn't it? No, Gallagher, that was it, Gallagher. Eager beaver kinda guy, boomer, seen that type too many times before. Reckoned Macleod wanted their support for the mine, and they were all looking forward to seeing what she was willing to offer in exchange.

They were genuinely shocked when Kate told them of Macleod's death, and not a few of them were more worried when she left them than when she had arrived, for which she was sorry. It was better to put them on the alert than to leave them in ignorance of the event, though, and she promised that when the killer was identified and arrested she would let them know.

She headed for Niniltna after dark with the uneasy feeling that Park rats who lived on the river were getting out the gun oil and the ammunition all the way back to the Lost Chance Creek Bridge.

She pulled up at the post at eight that evening, noting evidence of a great many tracks in the snow in front. Only Jim's snow machine remained. She turned off the engine and got off, a little weary. Mutt took this opportunity to stretch her legs and vanished in the direction of the airstrip. There was a colony of rabbits denned up in a clearing in back of George's hangar.

Kate went inside. Maggie had already left for the day. "Jim?"