Dead in the Water

FIVE

"OLD aviation gas, what we used to call 80/87, was pink,"

Kate told Jack the following afternoon over greasy hamburgers and even greasier fries at the Blow-In Caf‚.

"So?"

"So the gas in that tank on Anua was green." He paused in mid-chew and looked uncomprehending. "Don't you get it? If that gas had been left over from a long time ago, it would have been pink. How long has aviation gas been green?"

Jack's face cleared and he swallowed and said, "Somebody's been using the strip regular enough to need to refuel."

Kate bestowed an approving smile on him and he sat up straighter in his chair. "And the strip was maintained, too," he remembered, "or at least there had been traffic in and out recently. Enough to keep the snow packed down, anyway. Not that there is much out here." He looked at her. "It surprised me."

"What?"

"So little snow."

"The mean winter temperature out here is thirty degrees Fahrenheit," she told him. "And I think the average snowfall is less than two feet. Plus you've got the jet stream just offshore."

Jack looked out the window at the wind blowing fog and a few flakes of snow straight down Iliuliuk Bay and shivered inwardly. "A nearly tropical climate," he agreed. "How'd you do out there, this time? Kill lots of defenseless crabs?"

"More than we should have."

"Oh, my," he said with his quick grin, "do I detect the tone of someone who has been involved in high seas skulduggery? Have you been keeping five-inchers?"

"No, just committing grand theft and malicious mischief," she replied. Her tone was glum; the imp of perverse pleasure she had taken in her first larcenous action had deserted her, and all she could think of was the crew of the Daisy Mae circling round and round, pulling buoys attached to nothing, not even line, and coming into Dutch with an empty hold and an emptier deck.

Jack sat up straight in his chair, hamburger dripping mustard and grease down his hand and into his sleeve.

"Mind telling me what the hell that means?"

Kate told him about the pot robbing. Jack was more amused than outraged, but then Jack wasn't a fisherman.

"Pretty gutsy of Gault," he observed.

"It was dumb," Kate said flatly. "There's forty thousand plus pots in the Bering Sea during any given period and hundreds of boats picking them. Not to mention the Fish and Game. It's a miracle we weren't caught. If we had been, we would have lost an entire season's fishing, and you're talking a gross anywhere between one million to two million dollars." Jack choked over his next bite of hamburger and had recourse to his Coke to wash it down. Kate, unheeding, punctuated her words with a militant french fry. "And Gault had no proof, none, that it was Johansen who robbed our string." She noticed the french fry was getting cold and crammed it into her mouth. Around it, she said indistinctly, "Dumb. If Gault hadn't married into the family, he would have been out on his ear long since."

"How long you in for this time?"

Kate shrugged. "Engine broke down again."

"That happened last week."

"I get the feeling it happened the week before and the week before that, too. Gault's not giving the engine the maintenance it needs. He's not giving the old girl any of the attention she deserves, he just drives her until she breaks, fixes it with spit and baling wire and drives her some more. One of these days she's going to break down for good. I just hope we're not out in the doughnut hole when it happens."

" 'Doughnut hole'?"

Kate gestured in the general direction of the North Pacific Ocean. "Starts around the Pribilof Islands and ends, I don't know, somewhere off the Kamchatka Peninsula. Sort of an international free-for-all area for fishermen from all over."

"Beyond the two-hundred-mile limit," he suggested.

"Way beyond," Kate agreed. "The U.S. and Russia and Korea and Taiwan and Japan have been fighting in the U.N. for years for the rights to fish there. The nations have, anyway. The fishermen just fish, most of them with drift nets that drag the sea bottom and pull up everything that gets in the way. Which the biologists figure is why the crab stocks took such a dive in the mid-eighties."

Jack examined his greasy fingers with rapt attention before beginning to clean them with his napkin, slowly, meticulously, one at a time. "Listen, Kate," he said to his left ring finger, "I don't mean to sound like some nervous granny here, and I trust you to take care of yourself or I would never have set you up in this job, but-" He looked up and caught her eye, very serious. "There are survival suits on board the Avilda, aren't there?"

She gave him a thin smile. "First thing I checked."

"Got one for everybody?" She nodded. "They all in working order?"

She nodded again. "Unlike the Avilda."

"And life rafts?"

He knew how many life rafts there were from the reports on Alcala and Brown's disappearance, but she answered him patiently. "Two, mounted on the roof, one port, one starboard."

"Good. Not that I'm anxious about you or anything."

"Of course not," Kate agreed, still patient. The male instinct to protect was as irritating as it was infrequently endearing, but there was nothing to be done but wait until it had run its course. Probably had something to do with testosterone. There ought to be a test, like one of those early pregnancy tests, only this would be an early testosterone test to detect large buildups of testosterone in male children. They could tattoo the results on every male child's forehead; that way, unsuspecting females could tell at a glance how deep the waters were around this particular island of manly pride. She looked across the table measuringly. It was an idea whose time had come.

Jack, unsuspecting, mopped up the rest of his ketchup with his last remaining fry, regarded it sadly and swallowed it regretfully. "Nothing like a grease-soaked french fry to start your day off right," he observed. Tapping the notes she had given him, he said, "I'll call town and have someone start checking on Harley Gruber and Henderson Gantry."

"Five'll get you ten Gruber, Gantry and Gault are one and the same."

"No bet." He tried out one of his better leers. "Care to join me? I won't be on the phone that long."

"You find a room?" she said, surprised. "I can't believe the state is going to pay for any more three-hundred-dollar nights in the Shipwreck."

He hooked a thumb in the general direction of the harbor.

"I talked one of the processors out of a bunk. More like a little apartment, actually. Manager's on vacation. Come with?"

"Where is it?" He told her and she rose to her feet.

"I'll be down later. This might be my only chance to get to Unalaska. I'd like to see what it looks like."

Amaknak Island was connected to Unalaska Island by a five-hundred-foot bridge, the Bridge to the Other Side.

Less than a mile beyond that bridge was the village of Unalaska, a town of less traffic and more village than Dutch Harbor.

Unalaska occupied a special place in Alaskan history.

The Russians came there, centuries before, for the same reason the crab fishermen were there now, and the military during World War II, and that was because it had the best natural harbor in a thousand miles of Aleutian Islands. But the Aleuts had been there before them all, rich in culture and natural resources, earning a living from a bountiful if harsh marine environment, eventually sitting ducks for civilization in the form of the Russian Orthodox religion, the company store and the clap. Dragooned into slaughtering seals and sea otters almost to the point of extinction to supply the Asian fur trade, the Aleuts fought back, only to be quashed by superior firepower. The fur market collapsed, Alaska was sold to the United States and Russian traders gave way to New England whalers, the whalers to gold prospectors, the prospectors to the United States military. And now this latest invasion: fishermen and processors, American, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Taiwanese, literally scraping the bottom of the North Pacific Ocean to feed the world's insatiable appetite for seafood.

The road topped a little rise between two small hills and the rooftops of the village came into view. It wasn't much more than a string of buildings lined up along the water, enclosed by one gravel road that ran down the beach and a second that ran down the side of the truncated river that drained Unalaska Lake into Iliuliuk Bay.

The buildings were a colorful jumble of frame houses, trailers and World War II-vintage cottages and cabanas, one and two stories high, some old and weathered gray by wind and salt spray, some new with the unmistakable mark of Outside prefabrication stamped firmly upon them. It reminded Kate of Niniltna, both in location and construction. She saw orange fluorescent buoys offshore, probably mooring buoys for the villagers' boats. There was an old clapboard church with two cupolas, each with onion domes surmounted by the distinctive Russian Orthodox crosses with the slanted foot bar that Christ was supposed to have twisted in his agony during the Crucifixion.

The beach was a narrow strip of gray sand, and Kate, always a sucker for beaches, walked around the end of the village, through the tall grass poking up through the crusted snow, and down to the wet sand separating sod and tide. The fog swirled overhead and offshore, and although she could hear Dutch Harbor going energetically about its business less than half a mile away across the water, the noise seemed muted. The beach stretched out before her, and she began to walk. A big New England dory loomed up out of the fog and grated against the gravel. Kate caught the bow and tugged it farther up the beach. The dory's owner hopped out and nodded his thanks. Kate walked on and the fog swallowed him up again. Farther down the beach two more figures resolved from shadow to solid shape, a father instructing his young, solemn son in the art of mending nets. The needle in his gnarled hands stilled and they looked at her without speaking until she moved on.

Wavelets from the wakes of passing boats lapped at the shore. The fog felt coot and misty on her cheeks.

Because it obscured her vision, her ears worked overtime and she heard them long before she saw them. A group of girls squatted in a circle at the edge of the water, where the sand was wettest. Soft-footed, Kate came up behind them and paused to look over their shoulders.

One of the girls' legs was twisted beneath her at an awkward angle. Her body was bulky, her head too small for it. Her nose seemed to have no bridge, only nostrils, and she wheezed a little when she breathed through it.

She was speaking, and at first Kate thought she must be speaking in Aleut, and then realized that the girl must have a cleft palate. She wasn't the only one who couldn't understand her because the girl next to her translated.

"Gakgak," said the girl with the twisted leg. "Kayak," the girl next to her repeated. "Kayak. Thunderbird.

Men. Do the men come in the kayak or the thunderbird, Sasha?"

"Kayak," Sasha replied. "Men. Thunderbird. Men."

"What's this?" another girl asked.

"It looks like 'home,' " another girl said, puzzled.

"I guess I'm dumb, Sasha," the first girl said apologetically.

"I don't get it. Is this a new story?"

The girls' heads remained bent, and Kate, curious, stood on tiptoe and peered over them to see what held so much of their attention.

Sasha was drawing in the sand. "Kayak," she said firmly, and a single line, curved up at both ends, appeared over three wavy, parallel lines. "Thunderbird." A few swift strokes and there was a pair of wings attached to a fierce hooked beak next to the kayak. "Men." A series of kinetic Y's with legs marched from kayak to thunderbird, three in all, where two other male figures waited. With a single sweep of her hand, all the drawings were enclosed in a perfect circle, almost encompassing the girls' toes.

Another circle was drawn inside the first, perhaps two inches from the first one and perfectly concentric. There was grace and assurance in every stroke.

Sasha wasn't drawing with her finger, as Kate had thought at first. She bent forward to see more clearly and realized that the misshapen hand clutched a knife carved from ivory. It looked like a small scimitar, and the thing gleamed up at her in the dull light of the afternoon, smooth and shining from years of use. "Oh!" she exclaimed involuntarily. "How beautiful!"

There was a muffled communal shriek of surprise and the circle of girls exploded in every direction. Sasha would have run, too, but her bad leg folded beneath her and she lay panting in the sand. She had dropped the ivory knife and Kate reached for it.

"No!" Sasha cried.

"It's all right," Kate said quickly, kneeling next to her.

"Here." She held the knife out and Sasha snatched it out of her hands, clutching it to her breast. "It's all right,"

Kate said again in a soothing voice. "I'm not going to hurt you. My name is Kate. What's yours?"

Sasha's eyes flickered beneath heavy lids. She was whimpering a little, and lay half in, half out of the water, which was rapidly soaking into her clothes.

Kate couldn't leave her like that. "Come on," she said, holding out her hand. "Let me help you up."

The girl cringed away from her, but Kate, moving slowly, letting the girl see her every movement as it was made, put her hands under Sasha's arms and raised her to her feet. She cradled the girl's arm in a comforting hand and matched her steps to the girl's lurching ones.

She was wet through, Kate noted with dismay. "Where do you live?" she asked, pitching her rough voice to be as nonthreatening as possible.

A small voice next to her made her jump. "She should go to Auntie's house. It's about six houses down. I'll show you."

Kate looked around to see the translator, a tiny, slender girl with long, tangled brown hair and a round face looking at her soberly.

"Hello," Kate said. "I'm Kate."

"I'm Becky," the girl replied. "You're not Anglo."

"No," Kate said. "Or at least not much." Becky's smile was shy, but it was a smile. Encouraged, Kate said, "I'm sorry I scared you. I was walking down the beach and I heard you guys and I walked over to take a look. What was that Sasha was doing with the knife?"

"Story-knifing," Becky said.

"Story-knifing? What's that?"

Becky looked up at Kate, her amazement written large on her face. "Didn't you storyknife when you were little?"

Kate shook her head. "No. I've never seen anything like it. I've seen art for sale in Anchorage, hell, I've seen art hung in the museum there that was drawn a lot worse than what I saw Sasha drawing down on the beach." At Becky's inquiring look, she said, "I heard you call her by name while I was watching her draw."

"Oh."

"So tell me about story-knifing,"

Becky's brown eyes examined Kate in a way that made her feel as if she were being dissected in preparation for study beneath a microscope. "It's just a game," she said at last. "A girl's game. Auntie showed us how.

She said her mom showed her, and her mom showed her.

We draw pictures in the sand, sometimes in the snow, and tell stories to each other. Up here."

Becky climbed the stoop and opened the door without knocking. "Auntie! Sasha fell down and got all wet!"

"Oh, that girl!" A tiny woman with a face whose features were almost swallowed up by the wrinkles on it shot out of the kitchen and buzzed around them like an infuriated bee. "Sasha," she said, her voice scolding but affectionate, "you naughty girl! What a mess! And you're shivering! Get out of those wet things this instant!

Becky, take her down to the bathroom and run her a bath. There are clean towels in the linen closet. Scoot, Scoot!"

Over her shoulder Becky said, "This is Kate, Auntie.

She helped Sasha."

The bee turned to Kate. "Well, don't just stand there, you must be chilled through, come into the kitchen and have some tea."

"No, really," Kate said feebly, at the same time being swept into the old woman's irresistible wake. They went down a hallway and through a door into a large kitchen that took up half the square feet of the house and whose floor was covered in what looked like white straw. Kate stood still, ankle-deep in the stuff. "You look like you're busy, maybe I should go."

"Nonsense," the other woman said firmly, "come in this instant and sit down next to the stove. How did you find Sasha?"

Kate subsided meekly into the chair next to the oil stove. It gave out a warming, radiant heat and Kate realized how chilled she was. "Don't just sit there, take your jacket off," the older woman said. "I'm Olga Shapsnikoff, by the way."

"Kate," Kate said. "Kate Shugak."

Olga stopped short in mid-career. "Shugak? Any relation to Ekaterina Shugak?"

Kate was tempted to lie. "Yes," she said. "Ekaterina Shugak is my grandmother."

"Really." Olga busied herself with the teakettle, and her back looked somehow less than enthusiastic. Kate warmed to her.

"I attended a meeting chaired by Ekaterina at the last Raven convention," Olga said. "She certainly is a-" She hesitated, and looked over her shoulder. "She certainly is a strong, woman."

The word you're looking for is "dictatorial," Kate thought. Also tyrannical, imperial and just plain pushy.

She said nothing. Ekaterina might be all those things, but Ekaterina was her grandmother and this woman was a stranger. "Tell me about story-knifing," she said. "I've never seen a storyknife before. Is it an Aleut custom?"

After a long, thoughtful look that gave Kate the distinct impression that she had been tested and, thankfully, not found wanting, Olga smiled. "It's more of an Eskimo custom," she replied, turning back to the stove. "My grandmother was from Alakanuk."

As Olga boiled water and made tea, the rest of the girls from the circle on the beach drifted into the house one at a time, taking a seat around the large, scarred kitchen table, warming their hands around mugs of hot tea and casting shy, surreptitious glances at Kate. After a while Sasha lumbered in, dressed in clean, dry clothes, her skin flushed with the heat of her bath and her wet hair slicked back like a seal's. She sat down on the floor close to Olga's knees and took up a handful of the white straw.

"What is all this?" Kate asked, gesturing at the haystack with her mug.

"The girls and I are weaving baskets." Olga whipped a length of damp sheeting from the back of the table and displayed the beginnings of a dozen baskets that at first glance seemed to be made of cloth.

"Oh," Kate said, on a long note of discovery. "You're an Attuan basket weaver."

"Unalaskan, now," Olga said, her lips curling ever so slightly. One of the girls gave a giggle, quickly smothered.

Kate touched one of the tiny things. It was soft, even silken to the touch. The weaving was very fine, the stitches minute. None of the baskets were more than three inches in diameter. Each one had the same intricate pattern woven around its base in a different color of grass.

" 'Baskets of grass which are both strong and beautiful,'

" she said softly. She looked up at Olga. "Captain Cook wrote that in his log, when he visited Unalaska in 1778."

Becky sniffed, disdain sitting oddly on her young face.

"The Unalaska baskets were very coarse."

"So I've read," Kate agreed. "The ones on Attu were supposed to be the best, weren't they?"

This time Olga sniffed, and being older and more experienced carried it off better than Becky had. It was a sound of profound disdain. "If you say so."

"I don't know anything about it really," Kate admitted, "except for what I've read about it. And I've seen the baskets in the museum in Anchorage, of course. How long does it take you to make one of these?"

"Six months," Olga said. "Maybe six years."

Kate looked at her incredulously. "It's true," Olga insisted. "It depends on how big the basket is. A basket two and a half inches high takes about forty hours. But when the old ones made shrouds, it could take years to finish just one. Would you like to try?"

"Making a shroud?"

Olga laughed. "We'll start you on a basket."

There was a shuffling around the table as each girl found her own basket. Half a dozen dark heads bent forward, identical intent expressions on each small face.

Evidently this was serious business, and Kate said as much.

"One of these little baskets can bring as much as two hundred and fifty," Olga told her.

"Dollars?"

"Dollars," Olga confirmed with a twinkle in her eye.

Kate looked at the baskets the girls were working on with a new and growing respect. "This how you girls make your spending money?" Six heads nodded without looking up, six pairs of fingers worked steadily without missing a beat. Kate turned back to Olga and found a handful of the bleached grass under her nose.

"Peel the outer layers off, like this. You see?"

"Uh-huh," Kate lied. She got the definite feeling that Olga explained things one time and one time only.

"There are inner blades, here, and outer blades, what we call seconds. Keep them separate."

One blade of grass looked pretty much like another to Kate, but she sorted hers into what she prayed were the correct piles. "Okay."

"You split it, like this, with your thumbnail."

After nearly a month at sea on a crab boat. Kate didn't have much in the way of thumbnails and her first efforts were clumsy at best.

"All right," Olga said. "This is the spoke, and this is a weaver. The spokes are the frame, and the weavers are twisted around the frame. Okay. You take a piece of grass and twist it. Here, I'll start yours for you.

Remember, you work always from the bottom up, and clockwise."

"Who taught you how to do this, Auntie?"

"My grandmother, a little. The rest I taught myself by taking some old baskets apart."

"No one else does this anymore?"

"Very few. Many of the old weavers who were left died in the flu epidemic in 1919," Olga said, "and of course none of them told anyone else how they did their weaving."

"Why not?"

"Because every weaver had her own special weaving styles, and there was jealousy between the villages.

Each one always wanted to be the best, so each one kept her ways secret from the others." Olga sighed a little. "Now they are all dead, and the weaving is almost dead, too."

"Not as long as you're alive, Auntie," Becky said, and the girls giggled.

"For which you should be glad," Olga told them, "or you wouldn't be able to buy that new Michael Jackson album. No," Olga told Kate, "dabble your fingers in the water first. The grass must be damp to work. Not too much! Only wet down as much as you are going to use at one time. You have to wrap up what you don't use, and it will mildew if you put it away damp."

After straining and sweating an hour, Kate produced her first weave, a tiny circle of clumsy stitches that nevertheless was recognizable as the beginning of a basket. "Good," Olga said. "Now keep going."

Easy for you to say, Kate thought. "You've got a lot of grass here," she said, nodding at the pile on the kitchen floor. "Looks like enough to keep you weaving until next Christmas."

Olga shook her head and extended her arms in a circle, the tips of her fingers barely touching. "From this much grass, you get this many weavers." She put her right forefinger and thumb around her left wrist.

"That's all?"

"That's all," the old woman confirmed. "That's why it's important to pick the best grass."

"And where is the best grass?"

"Away from the salt water. Grass on the beach is too thick. It gets brittle after curing."

"So you pick in the hills?"

Olga nodded, her face bent over her basket, her expression absorbed as she conjured some especially intricate design out of the rim. "You learn where the good grass grows. If you keep picking in the same place the grass gets better."

"That's why we go back to Anua every year," Becky interpolated.

Kate broke a spoke. "Anua?"

Her voice must have sounded as startled as she felt because Becky cast her a curious glance. "Sure. It's where our family comes from."

"Oh." Kate began the arduous process of threading another spoke into the weaving, running through a mental list of questions to ask. She couldn't afford the appearance of prying or she would lose all the confidence she had gained so far. She recognized the investigator in her superseding the fellow tribal member and was momentarily ashamed of herself.

But two men were missing, and probably dead and she didn't like Harry Gault so she said in a casual voice, "So if you're from Anua, why do you live in Unalaska?"

"It was the war," Becky said. "Tell her the story, Auntie."

"It was the war," Olga said. Her voice dropped into a rhythm, slipping into it so effortlessly and so seamlessly that Kate didn't notice it at once. "The Japanese soldiers came.

"Then the army came.

"The army moved all of the people from the islands.

"They put them in towns and in camps in Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound.

"It was too hot up there for the people.

"Many of the people died.

"After the war, the army brought us back.

"The people that were left wished they had died with the others.

"The houses were gone.

"The villages were gone.

"Even the ones where there had been no Japanese.

"The army said they destroyed them because they couldn't leave the villages for the Japanese to use.

"We couldn't go back.

"There weren't enough of us.

"There was nothing to go back to.

"So now we live in a few villages instead of many.

"That's all."

The room was silent but for the rustle of grass. Kate kept her head bent over her basket. When she could speak, she said, "Do you ever go back to Anua?"

"Sure," Becky said, at the same time Olga said, "No."

The girl's eyes widened. Olga said easily, "Only for the grass. In June or July, when it is ready to pick. But mostly we use Chinaman's grass, raffia, that we buy from Outside. It takes too long to pick and cure the rye grass." The old woman smiled. "And the tourists can't tell the difference."

Kate grinned. Before she could reply, Sasha said suddenly,

"Home."

They all looked at her, seated on the floor, her crippled leg again twisted awkwardly beneath her. She still had the ivory knife, and with it she traced a pattern on the old linoleum floor, the yellowed ivory of the old knife looking odd against the cracked paisley pattern. Her brown eyes were bright and alert, the most alive features in that blunted face, "Kayak. Men. Thunderbird. Men.

Horne."

"That's the same story she was telling on the beach this morning," Becky told Olga. "What does it mean?"

Olga shrugged, and leaned forward to pluck the storyknife from Sasha's now limp fingers. "I don't know. What do any of Sasha's stories mean?"

"But her stories always make sense, Auntie," Becky protested. "Somehow, they always do. You just have to figure them out."

"Thunderbird," Sasha said clearly. "Men. Kayak. Men.

Home."

"See? She knows what we're talking about."

Olga looked at Becky. "The storyknife is just a toy, Becky. It makes Sasha happy to play with it. That's all."

Becky's mouth closed and she bent back over her basket, a tinge of red creeping up into her cheeks.

"Tell me about the storyknife, Auntie," Kate suggested into the uncomfortable silence that followed. "I've never seen one before. It's beautiful."

Olga looked down at the ivory knife she held in her hands. "My grandmother gave it to me. My great-uncle made it for her when she was a little girl. It's a toy. A girl's toy. We use it to draw stories in the sand, and in the snow."

"Where did it come from? The custom, I mean?

Olga shrugged. "Some people say it used to be a real knife. That the Eskimos used it to cut snow into blocks for igloos. All I know is I got this one from my mother.

My mother got it from her mother. Other girls had them when I was a child. It was a custom." She handed the storyknife to Kate.

Kate accepted it in reverent hands. The handle was carved with the stylized likeness of a sea otter floating on his back. In spite of the wear and tear caused by at minimum four pairs of grubby little hands, each individual whisker stood out on his tiny face. He stared up at Kate, expectant. The ivory seemed to grow heavier in her hand. Kate cleared her throat. "Are they always made from ivory?"

"No. Some are made from bone or wood."

"It's a beautiful thing, Auntie," Kate said, handing it back. "And valuable. It should be in a museum."

"And would a museum take it out and play with it?"

Olga demanded, and gave a snort. "Its spirit would die, locked up in a place where it was never touched. Here the girls play with it, and it tells them stories."

Which made it something more than just a toy, Kate thought. She looked down at the rapidly shredding beginning of her basket, and said ruefully, "I don't seem to be doing very well at this, Auntie. I guess I'm just a cultural illiterate."

"Nonsense," Olga said briskly. "It takes practice, like anything else. You will take some grass with you when you leave, so you can work at it on your own."

Wonderful, Kate thought, but said meekly, "Thank you, Auntie."

"And now more tea? And some alodiks?"

"Alodiks?" Kate said.

The old woman looked at her reprovingly. "You have no Aleut?"

Kate shook her head.

"Because your grandmother wanted you to?" Olga guessed shrewdly, and laughed, a loud, cackling laugh, at Kate's expression. Kate was relieved when Olga turned to the stove, and even more relieved when alodiks proved to be nothing more than fried bread.

A few minutes later Olga put a plateful of the stuff in the middle of the table, puffed up and golden brown.

Everyone around the table made a concerted grab, not excepting Kate.

"There were killer whales in the bay this morning, Auntie," one of the girls said around a mouthful of fried bread.

"Ahhhhh," Olga said. "Killer whales in the bay." The smile faded from her face and she shook her head gravely.

"What does it mean?"

"Killer whales in the bay?"

"Yes. Do you know what it means?"

"I know only what everyone knows." Olga worked her next few stitches without speaking. The girls ceased their giggling and whispering, and as the silence gathered and grew, Kate had the feeling of a curtain about to go up.

When she spoke again, Olga's voice fell again into a kind of singsong, with a full-stop pause at the end of each sentence. It was subtle but clear. It wasn't as if Olga banged a drum on the downbeat at the end of every line, but Becky and her sister began nodding their heads slightly to the beat. Kate had noticed a similar kind of cadence to Olga's story of the Aleuts' exile and repatriation during and after World War II, and now consciously scanned the old woman's words for rhythm. She found it, and repetition, and internal rhymes, and alliteration.

Without moving, the girls seemed to draw tighter together in their circle, intent, absorbed, almost hypnotized, acolytes hanging on the words of their priestess.

"When killer whales come to a bay with a village,"

Olga chanted, "they come hungry for someone's spirit.

"When the killer whales come

"To a bay with a village

"Someone is going to die.

"When the killer whales come

"To a bay with a village

"The people know.

"When the killer whales come

"To a bay with a village

"It won't be long.

"Maybe one month.

"Maybe two.

"When the killer whales come

"Someone dies in that bay.

"When the killer whales come.

"That's all.'"

As she spoke the last words, Olga looked straight at Kate. She held her gaze for a long moment, before her eyes dropped to the scar on Kate's throat. The skin there began to itch beneath that intent gaze. Kate held perfectly still. "That was a beautiful story, Auntie," she said. "You're a poet."

Olga laughed, a loud robust laugh, and the priestess was gone and her acolytes, too, on the gust of merriment.

"It's just an old legend," she said, dropping back into prose. "I'm a good Christian missionary's daughter, myself. I don't believe any of that stuff."

Kate burst out laughing, and the girls joined in again.

As she rose to leave, Kate hesitated, not wanting to trespass but the memory of those graceful, swooping sand drawings haunting her. "About Sasha."

Olga's face was expressionless. "What about her?"

"Has she seen a doctor? There might be-"

"There is nothing," Olga said flatly. "Her mother drank too much."

"Where does Sasha live?" Kate asked Becky outside.

"With family, parents, what?" She was determined to do something, anything. Anyone who could draw like Sasha was not, could not be entirely beyond help, fetal alcohol syndrome baby or not.

She turned her head to find Becky looking at her with surprise. "What?"

Becky jerked a thumb over her shoulder, at the house behind them. "Sasha lives right here, Kate, Auntie is Sasha's mom."