A Fine and Bitter Snow

2

Kate felt the exact moment when Jim Chopin stopped watching her walk away, and she breathed easier for it, although she would have died before admitting it. By the time she got to Dina and Ruthe’s table, the two women were out dancing on the floor, with whom, Kate couldn’t quite tell. The song was “Gimmee Three Steps,” and pretty much everyone was out there, but Dina was easy to find because of her cane, and where Dina was, Ruthe would not be far away. Dina wore a black sweatshirt and, with her white hair, looked from behind like a bald eagle. Ruthe, as usual, looked about half her age, and moved like it, too.

As Kate watched, John Letourneau danced into view. So this was where he’d been headed when she knocked on his door. He was dancing with Auntie Edna, who looked like she was having a wonderful time, until John rock-stepped back into Dina, whose cane somehow became tangled in John’s legs. John went down and took about three other dancers with him. Christie Turner tripped over the pile and spilled an entire tray of drinks all over John. Everyone got up again, all laughing, except John, who took a step toward Dina, who held her cane out at arm’s length, its rubber tip against John’s chest. He batted it away, and then suddenly Ruthe was dancing with him, jitterbugging or bebopping or swing-dancing, or whatever it was called, doing a series of what looked like complicated turns without missing a beat.

John, perforce, went along, as Auntie Edna faded quietly to the table where Auntie Balasha and Auntie Joy were quilting squares and knocking back Irish coffee. As Kate watched, Auntie Vi came in and made a beeline for the table. The four old women put their heads together and spoke earnestly and at length, with much nodding and shaking of heads. Auntie Joy got out a little notebook and a pen and started making a list.

Lynrd Skynrd got the break they were waiting for and the song faded away, punctuated by whistles and applause from the dance floor. And then, oh my, Creedence Clearwater Revival started rolling down the river and Katya let out a “YES!” loud enough to break her auntie’s eardrums and made urgent movements toward the dance floor. Dinah and Bobby were already out there, and they welcomed Kate and Katya with whoops of joy. The circle started small and grew, evolving into sort of a conga line that stamped and shimmied and boogied around the bar, between the tables, around Old Sam Dementieff, who was still grimly focused on the game, out the back door and in the front, scooping up people inbound from the parking lot in its wake. Bobby was the heart of the line, the beginning and the ending of it, rocking back and forth to the beat and frugging and shrugging and clamming and jamming and beating the band. The song wasn’t long enough for any of them, so it was a good thing when someone put five dollars into the jukebox and the Beach Boys took them all to Kokomo immediately thereafter. Bernie, in response to universal acclaim, turned up the volume, and the roof of the Roadhouse like to come off.

Katya was laughing and clapping her hands. “Clearly,” Kate told her, “you are your father’s child.”

“She got rhythm all right,” Jim said at her shoulder, and Kate became aware not only that he had taken part in the conga line but that he was directly behind her, his hands still on her waist. And maybe even a little lower than that.

She was three feet away from him in a single step. He raised an eyebrow. She didn’t like the look of it. Neither did she like the look in his eye as it rested upon her, as she couldn’t identify it. She knew all his looks and this wasn’t one of them.

She looked around for Mutt and discovered to her dismay that Mutt might have taken part in the dance, as well. She was leaning up against Chopper Jim’s manly thigh, gazing adoringly up into his face, tail thumping the floor.

Kate, revolted, said, “Mutt!”

Mutt was instantly galvanized and shot to Kate’s side. Her expression, to Kate’s severe gaze, looked distinctly sheepish. “Stop seducing my dog,” she said to Jim without thinking.

The look in his eye didn’t change; in fact, it seemed to increase when he smiled, long and slow. “Give me another target.”

“Jeeeeem!” Katya said, and held out her arms with another of her blinding smiles.

Kate looked down at her and said, “I’m saving you from yourself right now,” and marched back to Bobby and Dinah’s table.

“Thanks, Kate,” Dinah said, receiving Katya in a four-point landing.

“My pleasure,” Kate said.

Bobby fished keys out of his pocket. “Come to dinner?”

“I’d like to,” Kate said, looking around. “I wanted to talk to somebody first-hey, where’d Ruthe and Dina go?”

Dinah followed her gaze. “I don’t know; I don’t see them. They must have left. Did you see John Letourneau trip over Dina’s cane?”

Bobby threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Did I! That Dina.”

“She didn’t do it on purpose, Bobby,” Dinah said.

Bobby roared again. “Given their history, who knows? And who cares anyway? It was fun to watch John Letourneau fall off his high horse. Dignity, always dignity,” he said, and started to laugh again. “Ever see Singing in the Rain, Kate? Best goddamn movie ever to come out of Hollywood.”

“About thirteen times, all at your house,” Kate said.

“We can watch it again tonight,” he said, waving an expansive arm. “After dinner. So you coming?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got to talk to Dina and Ruthe.”

“Caribou stew,” he said.

She wavered, always susceptible to an appeal to her stomach.

“Plus, you need a haircut,” Dinah said, giving her a critical look.

Kate shook her head. “I’d like to, but I really have to talk to Dina and Ruthe. It’s about Dan. Rain check?”

Dan appeared at the Roadhouse door just as Kate reached it. He saw her, opened his mouth, and then something behind her caught his eye. He smiled, then laughed out loud when Christie, in a floor-mounted launch of which Katya would have approved, landed against his midsection, her legs prewrapped around his waist, and planted a long, intense kiss on his lips. Kate stepped around them. As she passed, Christie raised her head and their eyes met.

Kate looked around to see who the claim was being staked in front of, and she saw Jim Chopin watching. She looked back at Christie, who smiled and buried her head in Dan’s shoulder.

Kate shut the door behind her with more force than necessary.

The Roadhouse was twenty-seven miles down the road from Niniltna, nine feet and three inches outside the Niniltna Native Association’s tribal jurisdiction, and therefore not subject to the dry law currently in effect. Or was it damp? Kate thought it might have changed, yet again, at the last election from dry to damp, or maybe it was from wet to damp. It seemed like every time she checked her mail in Niniltna, either the Alaska Beverage Distributors or whatever passed at the moment for the local temperance league had someone standing outside the post office with a petition.

Kate couldn’t understand it herself. The first time Niniltna passed a dry law-no liquor allowed to be owned or sold within tribal boundaries-alcohol-related crime dropped 87 percent the first month and Trooper Jim Chopin was made conspicuous by his absence, a consummation devoutly to be wished for, in Kate’s opinion. When it went to damp at the next election-no one could sell liquor, but people could have it for private consumption in their homes-the stats went back up and Jim was more in evidence. When it went to wet-liquor allowed to be sold within tribal boundaries-incidents of child abuse, spousal abuse, assault, burglary, rape, and even murder all went through the roof and Jim spent more time in the Park than he did in Tok, where his post was based.

It was evident to Kate that booze made you stupid. If she could have made alcohol disappear by wishing it so, it would have vanished off the face of the entire planet. On the other hand, Bernie was a responsible bartender, who had been known to disable snow machines to keep drunks from driving home. She’d seen him refuse service to pregnant women, and Auntie Vi kept a running tally of who was and who wasn’t to keep Bernie informed. If people have to drink, Kate thought, swinging out of Bernie’s parking lot, Bernie’s is the place I’d send them.

The last of the light had gone while she was inside. It was one of those rare clear winter evenings when it was warm enough to be outdoors, only three below by the thermometer nailed to the Roadhouse wall. The stars seemed to be in a contest to see which could shine the brightest, and Kate roared down the road, with Mutt up behind and the Pleiades overhead for company. One knee was balanced on the seat, the other leg braced on the running board, hands light on the handlebars. The wolf ruff of her parka made a frosty tunnel for her to look through, and the headlight showed a trail packed hard by truck tire, snow machine tread, and dogsled runner. The alder, birch, and spruce crowded in on either side, and once, a bull moose whose rack looked like it was about to fall off ambled onto the trail. She slowed, and he vanished into the brush opposite. She thumbed the throttle again.

Kate loved driving through the Arctic winter night. The snow, a thick, cold, unfathomable blanket swathing the horizon in every direction, reflected the light of the stars and the moon and the aurora so that it returned twicefold to cast the shadows of tree and bush in dark relief. On those nights, the Park seemed to roll out before her forever, a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new. No darkling plain here, and never mind Matthew Arnold, whom Kate had always found to be a humorless grouch anyway.

The snow machine took a sudden dip in its stride. Mutt bumped into Kate but kept her balance.

At the top of a long slope that curved right, she slowed enough to take the turnoff. This trail was barely a rut between thick stands of spruce, and it required attention and a slow speed, so slow that Mutt grew impatient and hopped off to streak ahead, her plate-sized feet skimming over the surface.

A few minutes later, Kate pulled into a clearing and killed the engine. The rising moon lit a peaceful woodland scene right out of Laura Ingalls Wilder. A small log cabin perched on a precipitous hillside. The foundation was made of smooth gray rocks from the Kanuyaq River, overshadowed by a large deck that projected from the first floor, looking south. The roof was peaked and frosted with two feet of snow, through which a stovepipe chimney rose. A thick spiral of smoke curled from the top. Trees crowded around the eaves as if for comfort or, perhaps, to listen in on conversations that over the years had had much to do with them.

Two large picture windows set into the walls of the second floor were bright, lit from within. A long set of wooden stairs led to the deck, at the top of which there was a door, open. Against the light streaming out into the night, Kate could see a thin, stooped figure scratching Mutt’s head. Mutt’s tail was wagging hard enough to make her butt fall off, but there were no lavish kisses exchanged. Mutt was a strict heterosexual, even across species, and, save only Kate, an all-man dog.

“Come on up, Kate,” a voice said. Kate killed the engine and climbed the stairs.

Inside, there was barely enough room to inhale, it was so crowded with furniture and stacks of papers, books, and magazines that one had to turn sideways to get from one side of the house to the other. An Earth stove radiated heat from the center of the room. An upright piano stood in another corner, piled high with sheet music. In a third corner was the kitchen, a counter with a small propane stove on it, a sink in it, and doorless cabinets above and below jammed with cans and bags. An aroma of savory stew lingered in the air, along with- Aha. A pie in a deep dish sat on the counter, perfectly browned and oozing dark red juice. A small square table was almost visible beneath an old manual typewriter, a ream of typing paper, and piles of what looked like legal documents and receipts. An enormous black cat looked out from her seat on one of the two upright wooden chairs shoved beneath the table and gave Mutt a perfunctory hiss, which Mutt regally ignored. Noblesse oblige.

Like Kate’s cabin, this one had a loft for sleeping. The fourth corner was for living. Two comfortable-looking chairs and a small couch were within easy reach of a coffee table, a tired slab of ersatz wood covered with heel marks and glass rings and an overflowing ashtray.

Every available inch of wall space was given over to bookshelves, and every shelf was full. In the hissing light of the Coleman lanterns, it could be seen that the titles were organized alphabetically by author, and separated into fiction u) and nonfiction. With difficulty, Kate restrained from diving in headfirst. She shucked out of parka and bib overalls and took a seat on the couch. Mutt leapt up gracefully beside her and sat grinning at the woman in the chair opposite.

Dana Willner was thin to the point of emaciation, with sparse white hair. pulled back into a severe knot at the nape of her neck. Her nose was large and hooked, her small, faded blue eyes narrow and fierce. She wore button-front Levi’s and a blue plaid wool shirt, the elbows worn through to the light blue thermal underwear beneath. A cigarette was tucked into the corner of her mouth, smoke curling up to form a ragged halo around her head. Her cane, a twisted affair made of diamond willow and heavily varnished, leaned against the arm of her chair. Her pale pink fuzzy footwear had eyes and ears and whiskers. “I’m liking the bunny slippers, Dina,” Kate said.

Dina raised a foot to regard it with satisfaction. “Nice, aren’t they?”

“I’ll have to get a pair for myself. Thanks, Ruthe.” She accepted a heavy white mug of coffee.

Cuthe Baumaji handed Dina a mug and settled into the other chair. “”The stew’ll be hot in about ten minutes.“

“Caribou?” Kate said hopefully.

“Moose.”

Kate smiled. Not bad for second-best. Life was good.

Ruthe was tall and slender, her hair a short mop of silky curls that had once been blond and were now a soft white gold that still clustered thickly around her face. Her skin was clear and pale, with crow’s feet around her large brown eyes and laugh lines around her wide mouth. She wore khaki slacks, a pumpkin-colored sweater over a white turtleneck, and chunky white socks. The only thing spoiling the effect was the wood slivers and pine needles adhering to the soles of the socks.

Silence was not the enemy to these two women, and Kate sipped her coffee and thought about them.

Nobody in the Park knew how old they were, but everyone knew the legend. How Dina and Ruthe had flown for the WASPs during World War II, towing targets over the Atlantic Ocean for fighter pilots to practice on. How rumor had it that one of them had been the WASP pilot instructor Paul Tibbets had tapped to fly the new Boeing bomber, to ‘ shame the male pilots afraid to fly it into climbing into the cockpit. How, after the war, Dina and Ruthe had been unwilling to give up flying and in 1946 had come to Alaska in search of jobs in the air. How in 1947 they had teamed up with Arthur Hopperman of Hopper Holidays, a travel agency out of Fairbanks that specialized in guiding hunters and fishermen to record kills in the Alaska Bush. How in 1949 they had bought out Art, acquired two de Havilland Beavers, and started flying tourists into remote lodges in the Bush, pioneering eco-tourism before it was fashionable enough to merit the hyphen. How in 1951 they had bought this cabin and the surrounding eighty acres from a homesteader heading south for the last time and had proceeded to build another ten cabins farther up the hill, along with a bathhouse, a cookhouse, a mess hall, and a greenhouse, and had started flying tourists into Niniltna and putting them up at Camp Theodore, which they had named for Theodore Roosevelt.

That was a sign right there, all the Park rats said, and they waited grimly, rifles in hand, for Ruthe and Dina to start preaching conservation. They didn’t have to wait long, and Ruthe and Dina didn’t just preach it; they practiced it. “To leave as small a footprint as possible” was their declared and shameless intention. They grew their own food; they even had half a dozen apple trees that they actually managed to coerce into bearing fruit. They recycled paper. They had a compost heap. They avoided the use of plastic. They wouldn’t allow hunting on their property, which, since it was only eighty acres, didn’t amount to much of a statement, but then they started lobbying in Juneau and Washington, D.C., for stronger laws governing the taking offish and game, and the disposal of human waste in the Bush, and the damming of rivers and streams for power, and the use of heavy equipment in gold mining. Most damning of all, they were personal friends of Jimmy Carter, who visited Camp Theodore at least once every year, and sometimes twice.

That alone should have been enough to ostracize them, to make and keep them bunny-loving, tree-hugging outcasts, but, like everything else, it wasn’t that simple. Ruthe and Dina were too nice, too smart, too funny, too, well, just too damn authentic. Alaskans pride themselves on what makes them different from Outsiders, and, as Mac Devlin put it, “You don’t get much different than a coupla old lesbos living way the hell and gone up a mountain, selling the view to a buncha tree huggers, and making a damn good living at it, too.” “And how can you hate someone who was a WASP?” George Perry said. “They care about the land,” Ekaterina Moonin Shugak said simply, and they were in.

One of Ruthe and Dina’s first acts upon establishing Camp Teddy was to reach out to the local arm of the Alaska Native Sisterhood, of which Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was at that time president. The three strong women bonded instantly, forming a lifetime friendship, which was not lessened by Ekaterina’s death. Ruthe and Dina made serious donations to the fund that supported the fight for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1972. When Dina and Ruthe began agitating for the designation of the Park as an “International Biosphere Reserve,” Ekaterina was first in line to demonstrate her support, which all by itself would have guaranteed its success.

Not coincidentally, Ruthe and Dina had also dandled Ekaterina’s grandbaby, Kate, on their knees practically from the moment of her birth. Dina had instructed a nine-year-old Kate in the art of rappelling down a cliff face, after Ruthe had taught her how to get up it. Thanks to Ruthe and Dina, before Kate was twelve, she was on a first-name basis with every living thing in the Park, Animalia and Plan-tae, by division, class, order, family, genus, and species. Both women had taken her white-water canoeing on the Kanuyaq and saltwater kayaking on Prince William Sound. In this, they had Ekaterina’s tacit, if not overt, approval, because in those days all it took for Kate to be against something was Ekaterina to be for it. The result was a greater understanding of the ecosystems among which she lived, and an appreciation of the whole of nature itself that would last her whole life long.

So, not unnaturally, when it came time to lobby for the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, also known as d-2, Park rats were unsurprised when the Niniltna Native Association, of which the same Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was then president and chief executive officer, lined up behind it. ANILCA created ten new national parks within the state, and added to four already existing parks, one of which had Camp Teddy smack in the middle of it.

The Park was now 20 million acres in size, located between the Quilak Mountains and the Glenn Highway on the north, the Canadian border on the east, Prince William Sound in the south, and, variously, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the pipeline haul road, and the Alaska Railroad on the west. It was drained by the Kanuyaq River, which twisted and turned over 225 miles in its search for the sea, coming to it in an immense delta east of Alaganik Bay, which saw the return each year of five species of Alaskan salmon in quantities capable of supplying tables in gourmet restaurants as far away as New York City, as well as the drying racks and smokehouses as far upriver as the creek behind Kate’s cabin.

The river was navigable by boat in summer and by snow machine in winter. The coast was almost impenetrable everywhere else, defended by a lush coastal rain forest made of Sitka spruce, hemlock, alder, birch, willow, and far too much devil’s club. Behind it, the land rose into a broad valley, then a plateau, foothills, and lastly the Quilaks, mountains forming an arc of the Alaska Range. There was a grizzly bear (“Of the Kingdom Animalia” went Dina’s voice, starchy and schoolmarmy, “Ursus arctos horribilis, once known to roam much of the continent of North America, now restricted to the northern Rockies, western Canada, and, of course, Alaska”) for every ten square miles, and following a good salmon year, even more. There were moose, white-tailed deer, mountain goats, Dall sheep, wolves, coyotes, wolverines, lynx, fox both arctic and red, beaver, marmot, otters, both land and sea, mink, marten, muskrat, and snowshoe hare. There were birds from the mighty bald eagle to the tiny golden-crowned sparrow, and every winged and web-footed thing in between.

The hand of man lay lightly here. There were a few good-sized towns, Cordova on the coast, Ahtna in the interior, both with about three thousand people, and maybe thirty villages ranging in population from 4 to 403. One road, a gravel bed left over a thriving copper mine in the early days of the last century, was graded during the summer but not maintained after the first snowfall. If you wanted to get somewhere in the Park, you flew. If you didn’t fly, you took a boat. If the river was frozen over, you drove a snow machine. If you didn’t have a snow machine, you used snow-shoes. If you didn’t have snowshoes, you stayed home in front of the fire until spring and tried not to beat up on your family. There were Park rats who disappeared into the woodwork in October and were not seen again until May, when it was time to get their boats out of dry dock and back into the water, but they were few in number and so determinedly unsociable that they weren’t missed.

The Park, in fact, looked much as it had a hundred years before, even perhaps a thousand years before. That it did was at least in part due to the two old women now eating Ruthe’s legendary moose stew across from Kate this evening. Kate finished first and got up to refill her bowl. “There’s some spice in this I can’t identify,” she said, hanging over the cauldron on the back of the woodstove. She sniffed at the rising steam. “You don’t put cloves in it, do you?”

“Good heavens, no,” Ruthe said placidly, but Kate noticed she didn’t volunteer what spice it was.

“You don’t want the recipe to die with you,” she said with intent to provoke.

Dina choked and had to be thumped on the back. She mopped her streaming eyes and said, “That’s the first time I’ve heard that one, at least to Ruthe’s face.”

They finished their stew and moved on to coffee. “Like a piece of pie, Kate?” Ruthe said.

“Yes,” Kate said, practically before Ruthe finished getting the words out of her mouth.

On top of everything else, Ruthe was an incredible cook.

She’d trained all the chefs hired for Camp Teddy. No visitor ever went home hungry. The coffee was terrific, too, a special blend made up by Kaladi Brothers, an Anchorage roaster. They called it the Ex-President’s Blend. You couldn’t buy it in stores. Kate had tried. She raised her mug, just to smell this time. It was coffee like no other, and Kate, an unabashed addict, was deeply appreciative. When she lowered the mug again, a thick wedge of pie was suspended in front of her. She was grateful there was a fork. She feared for her manners had there not been.

“Oh god, that was good,” she said, using her finger to scoop up the last bit of juice. “What gives it that tangy taste on the back of the tongue? Rhubarb and what else? I’ve tried and tried at home to get that flavor, but I never quite succeed.”

Ruthe grinned. “Trade secret.”

Kate sighed, putting her heart into it. It had no effect, other than another snort of laughter from Dina and a refill of her mug from Ruthe. Kate sat back, trying to look as mournful as possible, which wasn’t easy with a bellyful of Dinner by Ruthe.

“So what was it you wanted to talk to us about, Kate?” Dina said, lighting a new cigarette from the butt of the old one, and earning a reproving look from Ruthe, which got Ruthe precisely nothing.

Ruthe tucked herself neatly into the other recliner, looking like an advertisement for Eddie Bauer on a good day, and fixed Kate with an expectant look.

“I need your help.”

“What with?”

“It seems Dan O’Brian is too green for the current administration, and he’s being encouraged to take early retirement.”

Dina and Ruthe exchanged glances. “Pay up,” Dina said.

Ruthe sighed and unwound herself to fetch a smart brown leather shoulder-strap purse, from which she extracted a twenty-dollar bill and handed it over. Resuming her seat, she said in answer to Kate’s raised eyebrow, “I bet they would hold their hand until the midterm elections. Dina said it’d be before.”

“You mean you expected this?”

Ruthe’s laugh was half in anger, half in sorrow. “After the last election, we put it on the calendar, Kate. There isn’t a conservationist worthy of the name in the present cabinet. Look at what’s happened just in the last twelve months.”

“The Sierra Club comes out with a report that says all-terrain vehicles rip up the land,” Dina said, and snorted out smoke like a dragon breathing fire. “Something we’ve been telling them for years, but they have to do their little studies. Hell, you’ve seen it yourself, jerks blazing trails all over the Park in spite of the prohibitions against it, and the federal government, the main landowner of the Park, of the state, when it comes down to it, exercises no authority.”

“They don’t have the manpower,” Ruthe said softly.

Dina glared. “They don’t have the manpower because the government won’t allocate funds for proper oversight of the lands in their care. That doesn’t stop the ruts the ATVs leave behind from diverting entire streams. Taiga and tundra both all torn to hell, habitat irreparably damaged.” She pointed her cigarette at Kate. “I went with a Cat train up to Rampart in 1959, where that moron-what was his name? Oh, Teller, yeah. Well, Teller thought he was going to blast out a dam with a nuclear explosion. Five years ago, I flew to Fairbanks, and guess what? You can still see the track we left. From ten thousand feet up, Kate, you can still see it. Forty years ago, and it’s still there. And don’t even get me started on the snow machines.”

Kate remembered the two drunks on snow machines who had invaded her front yard two springs ago. “I know.”

“A lot of people need them for basic transport,” Ruthe said. “And for hunting trips, and supply runs.”

“A lot of people ride them straight up mountains to see if they can get avalanches to fall on them, too,” Dina snapped. “Which I call a self-correcting problem when they succeed, not to mention a triumph for the gene pool.”

“Dina,” Ruthe said. She didn’t say, You don’t mean that, but Kate could hear it all the same.

“And what does our absentee landlord do?” Dina said. “Nothing, that’s what. And they’re going to continue doing nothing, because if they started cracking down on every charter member of the NRA, it would send up a scream you could hear on Mars.”

Kate didn’t quite know how they’d made it from snow machines to gun control, but from long experience Ruthe had an answer. “I’m a member of the NRA,” she said mildly. At Dina’s glare, she added, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

Kate laughed, and then at Dina’s glare turned the laugh into a cough.

“They want to drill for oil in ANWR,” Dina said. “They want to punch some exploratory holes in Iqaluk. Of course they want to get rid of the rangers like Dan O’Brian, the ones who’ve been here for a while, the ones who don’t just talk the talk. Never mind that Alaska is the last place in the nation, maybe even the last place on the planet, that still looks like it did in the beginning. Oh, yeah.” She snorted smoke. “You bet. It’s the rangers with practical experience on the ground who might actually have a clue as to how that would affect the wildlife who will be the first to go.”

Kate turned to Ruthe, who looked ever so faintly apologetic. “Well,” Ruthe said, her soft voice sounding the antithesis of Dina’s harsh tones, “I’m not sure we shouldn’t let them drill.”

Dina sat straight up in her chair. “What!”

“With conditions.” Ruthe’s gaze was limpid. “They can drill in ANWR, if they keep their mitts off parks and refuges in the rest of the state.”

Dina sat back, scowling ferociously at the possibility that Ruthe might have a point. “Like they’d agree to that.”

“So far, we’ve got the votes,” Ruthe said. “Unless they changed the Constitution when I wasn’t looking, which these days seems more and more possible, every president still has to go through the United States Congress. That’s a hundred senators and over four hundred representatives, each and every one with his or her own agenda and priorities. If we put this problem away for them, think how grateful they’ll be.”

“The Sierra Club and the rest of the gang will never go for it.”

“Not right away, no. Eventually…”

There was a brief, telling silence. Kate wondered if she was watching policy being made.

“What do you think, Kate?”

Kate, jolted out of her reverie, said, “What?”

“Should we trade ANWR for the rest of the park lands?”

Kate tried to avoid the issue. “I don’t live there.”

“It’s publicly owned land, Kate.”

“Upon which Alaska Natives have been subsisting for millennia.”

“And some of them are for drilling in ANWR.”

Kate tried another tack. “Is there actually any oil there?”

Ruthe shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure. There’s only been one well drilled there-by the state, I think-and they’re keeping the results secret.”

“Anybody guessing?”

“The last estimate I heard was enough to keep the nation running at full throttle for three months,” Dina said.

“Really? That’s all?”

“Some guessers say there’s more than other guessers say.”

Dina glared at her lifelong roommate. There was no way Kate was going to get in the middle of this. “About Dan O’Brian,” she said.

“Oh yes, Dan,” Ruthe said with quick sympathy, and perhaps relief. “How is he taking it?”

“He likes his job, he’s good at it, and he doesn’t want to leave the Park. He probably wouldn’t anyway-he’s in love again.”

Ruthe gave Dina a smug look. “We noticed.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes indeed. We were at the Roadhouse the night they met.”

Dina blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it rise into the air. “It was one of the better seductions I have witnessed,” she admitted. “I do so enjoy seeing a thing well done.”

“What do you mean?” Kate said.

Dina stabbed the air with her cigarette, emphasizing her points. “Dan walked into the room, and that girl zeroed in on him like a heat-seeking missile. Target acquired, and- three, two, one-impact!”

Kate looked at Ruthe, who was laughing in spite of herself. “It was kind of like that,” she admitted. “Poor Dan didn’t stand a chance.”

“Poor Dan isn’t exactly yelling for help,” Kate said. “And about Dan. What’s the point of him just holding down a cabin when he’s so much more useful at riding herd on Park rats shooting out of season and yo-yos flying in from Anchorage to shoot at everything that moves? He doesn’t want to resign, but you know that if they’re that determined, they’ll find a way to force him out.”

“What do you want us to do?”

Kate met Dina’s fierce eyes and smiled. “I want you ‘to do that voodoo that you do so well.” Make some calls. Call in some favors. Twist some arms if you have to. Get whoever is in charge down there to lay off Dan.“

Ruthe met Dina’s eyes, a smile in her own, and for a fleeting moment, the two old women looked eerily similar.

“Of course, if we do this for you,” Dina said, “you’ll owe us.”

Kate took a careful breath. “I kind of thought the whole Park would owe you.”

Dina stared down her eagle beak. “You thought wrong.”

“Yeah.” Kate sighed. “Okay. I’ll owe you.”

Dina cackled, then lit another cigarette.

Ruthe poured another round of coffee, this time with a shot glass of the framboise Dina made from their raspberry patch every fall. To be polite, Kate touched her lips to the glass and set it down again. They spent the next hour exchanging Park gossip. Dandy Mike had actually been dating the same woman for more than a month. The high school varsity basketball team, under Bernie’s able coaching, was fourteen and three for the season, and Bernie was greatly torqued about the three. Anastasia Totemoff had died of ovarian cancer. “At least it was quick,” Dina said, shifting in her chair, an expression of pain crossing her face. “Two weeks and she was gone.”

“How is Demetri?” Ruthe said quickly.

“He’s maintaining, but…” Kate shook her head.

“I don’t know what Demetri’s going to do with all those kids,” Ruthe said.

“Raise them,” Kate said. “I think there’s only one left at home anyway.”

Dina snorted cigarette smoke.

“Who’s this Christie Turner?” Kate said. “Dan says she’s been here since October. Today’s the first time I’ve seen her.”

“I hear,” Dina said, bright eyes snapping maliciously, “that she’s a professional gal out of Las Vegas.”

“Oh, come on,” Ruthe said. “Every woman who comes into the Park who looks halfway decent and who doesn’t jump into bed with the first six guys who ask her is always branded as selling it to someone else. Honest to god.” She cast up her eyes in disgust. “I’d say she’d worked her way up the AlCan waiting tables. She’s pretty good.”

“I don’t like her,” Dina said flatly.

Ruthe looked at her askance. “Why not?”

“Too pretty,” Dina said. “Might cut in on our action.” She cackled again.

One of Dan’s rangers had apprehended an FBI agent and a police lieutenant from the Anchorage police department. They’d been shooting at moose out of season and without a license, and while on the outside of the better part of a half gallon of Calvert’s, which had not improved their aim, as they had nearly taken out the ranger along with the moose. Since Anchorageites were the butt of most Park jokes, this incident had given rise to much merriment. The Kanuyaq caribou herd had topped 23,000 in population and was in danger of eating itself out of house and home. Since the herd migrated from its state land grazing area to its calving ground near the headwaters of the Kanuyaq in the Park, the Park Service had consulted with the state Fish and Game people and had come up with a plan to allow flying and shooting the same day, with a maximum take of five caribou per hunter, and they were even allowing each hunter to take one cow. “Beginning when?” Dina said with a gleam in her eye. She’d always been one of the best shots in the Park, and she was fond of saying that if she hadn’t been, she and Ruthe would have starved to death those first years on their mountain.

“The first week of January,” Kate said. “They want to wait until the males shed their racks, so we don’t get a bunch of trophy hunters looking for something to put over the fireplace.”

Ruthe groaned. “Forget about it. I’m not up to hunting this year.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “Let’s find some nice young hunk to bring home the bacon for us.” They all laughed, but Kate was aware that Ruthe’s recent disinclination to hunt had more to do with the sudden onset of Dina’s old age than it did with lack of interest. Over the past year, Dina had gone from being a vital woman in glowing health to an old woman with shaking hands and a shakier step. She walked only with the aid of her cane, and had to be helped from her chair, as if her back had lost all its strength. Her hands, once so strong and so capable, hands that had hauled Kate over the edge of a cliff by the scruff of her neck on more than one occasion, had deteriorated into shrunken claws. It hurt Kate to look at them, and so she didn’t.

Billy and Annie Mike had adopted a Korean baby and named him Alexei, for Annie’s grandfather. “My god,” Dina said in disgust, “the woman had seven children of her own. Wasn’t that enough?”

“Evidently not,” Ruthe said.

Dina had the grace to look slightly ashamed. “Sorry,” she said gruffly. “Never been a kid person.”

“Yeah, you never could stand having me around,” Kate said, and Ruthe laughed out loud.

Mandy and Chick were in training for the Yukon Quest. “Every day at noon, like clockwork,” Kate said, “I hear dog howls coming down the trail. I open the door and to what to my wondering eyes should appear but Chick, stopping by for cocoa and fry bread.”

Ruthe and Dina laughed. “Thinks with his stomach,” Dina said. “What I call a proper man.”

Ruthe refilled their mugs. “I saw John Letourneau putting the moves on Auntie Edna,” Kate said, stirring in evaporated milk. The quality of the silence that followed her remark made her raise her head.

At her curious look, Dina said, “Yeah, I saw that, too,” and added with a sneer, “He’s probably after her for that property she owns on Alaguaq Creek.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Ruthe said immediately. “I think Auntie Edna has more than enough charm to explain John’s interest.”

“Charm, schmarm,” Dina said. “That man never does anything without an ulterior motive.”

“That’s not true, Dina, and you know it,” Ruthe said, this time with an edge to her voice.

Kate stepped in to defuse the tension a little, although she was intensely curious as to why it had sprouted up in the first place. “He got a little tangled up in your cane, Dina, there on the dance floor.”

“He sure did, didn’t he? Can’t think how that happened.” She looked sharply at Kate. “Didn’t see you out there.”

They must have left before the conga line, Kate thought. “I don’t dance.”

“Hell you don’t. Many’s the time I’ve seen you whooping it up at a potlatch.”

“That’s a different kind of dancing.”

“And why not dance them all? Dancing’s good for what ails you. Kick up your heels and it lifts your spirits.”

“It’s good for your soul,” Ruthe said.

Kate mumbled something, but by now the two old women were on the warpath.

“How’s Johnny?” Ruthe said.

Like everyone else in the Park, Dina and Ruthe had a vital interest in the well-being of Johnny Morgan, who had come to the Park to live following his father’s death. It was natural for them to ask, as Johnny was Jack Morgan’s son, and Jack had been Kate’s lover. “He’s fine,” Kate said.

Dina fixed her with a penetrating eye. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, too.” Even if she did still wince at the mention of Jack.

Dina’s fierce eyes saw an uncomfortable amount. “Huh,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “Miss him?”

Kate took a deep breath. “Every day,” she managed to say.

“But you’re learning to live with it.”

“Yes.”

“And without him,” Ruthe said.

“Yes.” If the joy she found in sunrise over a world without Jack Morgan in it was not as strong as it had once been, it was no one’s business but her own.

“That Ethan Int-Hout still sniffing around?”

“The boy’s got the look of someone who knows his way around a bed, I’ll give him that.”

To her acute embarrassment, Kate felt herself turn a brilliant red.

“That might be none of our business, Dina,” Ruthe said.

“Oh balls! Everything in this Park is our business,” Dina said, and pointed her cigarette at Kate again. “Shit or get off the pot. It’s not like there aren’t men waiting around the block to step up if you’d look at them twice.”

“I suppose,” Kate said in a desperate bid for one-upmanship, “you would know.”

Dina only cackled again. “You bet your ass, I would, sweetie. Whether I took ‘em up on it or not.” She looked at Ruthe and her eyes softened. “You bet I would.”

Ruthe put her hand over Dina’s.

Kate stood. “Time for me to mosey on home.”

“Say hi to Johnny for us,” Ruthe said. “I like him, Kate. He values his elders.”

“He’s been up here?” Kate said, surprised.

Ruthe chuckled. “On half a dozen occasions. Seems like old times.”

“And give Ethan our love,” Dina said, and cackled as Kate climbed back into her down overalls and parka and headed out the door.