Whisper to the Blood

FOURTEEN

The weather held, granting an ephemeral warmth outside if you were bundled up in dark clothes and standing still, but Kate was almost constantly in motion, visiting the downriver villages of the 'Burbs, in order-Double Eagle, Chulyin, Potlatch, and Red Run.

Ken Kaltak had taken to carrying his rifle with him wherever he went. He listened with a stone face as Kate pleaded for time to find the robbers, but she could see he wasn't listening to a word she said. His wife Janice, the lone schoolteacher for the Double Eagle School, which had ten students in seven grades, sent her husband outside on the pretext of getting some moose out of the cache and said bluntly, "Times are tough, Kate. Ken says he's never seen so many fish go up the river, and he's never caught less. Fish and Game gives preference to sports and subsistence fishers and by the time the drifters are allowed to put a net in the water the fish are all up the river. We've got a fish wheel and we catch enough to eat most years, but we rely on what we catch driftnetting in Alaganik to pay for groceries and fuel. We had almost a thousand dollars' worth of food on that sled." Her eyes filled up. "How are we supposed to eat this winter?"

Ken saw Kate to her snow machine, where he exchanged cautious greetings with Mutt (they'd howdied but they hadn't shook), and said, "You know who did this, Kate. Why waste time? Why don't you just head straight for Tikani?"

Kate settled onto the seat. "Can you identify any of your attackers, Ken?"

His lips tightened. He didn't answer.

"Didn't think so," Kate said. "They were wearing helmets, is what I understand."

"Yes."

"So you didn't see their faces. And you didn't recognize the machines."

"No."

She pressed the starter. "When there is evidence that points toward Tikani, I'll go there."

In Chulyin Ike Jefferson was incandescent with rage and treated Kate with something that bordered on contempt. It would have hurt her feelings if she hadn't been so shocked. "Where the hell have you been?" he said. "These guys have pretty much turned the river into a free-fire zone, and you've been where? Because it sure as hell hasn't been anywhere around here!"

"I just found out about them yesterday," she started to say.

"And where's the trooper?" He directed a pointed look over her shoulder. "Sorta conspicuous by his absence, now, ain't he?"

Ike Jefferson was another fisherman, who supplemented his summer earnings by working construction in Anchorage during the winter. A finish carpenter, he was an artist and a craftsman and was better off financially than any of the other victims, but his wife had died giving birth to Laverne and he was raising her alone. "I moved us to Anchorage in the winter because of the work," he told Kate tightly, "but whenever we can, we spend the weekend on the river. It don't happen anywhere near as often as either one of us would like. All I was doing was hauling in some fuel so the place don't freeze up while we're gone. Who pulls this kind of shit, Kate? Since when do Park rats prey on their own? This used to be a good place to live, with good neighbors that'd look out for the place while we're gone, but I might as well live in Anchorage full time and let Laverne hang out at the Dimond Center for all the peace we're getting here."

The Dimond Center mall in Anchorage was a notorious hangout for gangbangers, with APD responding to shoot-outs there half a dozen times a year. No Park rat regarded Anchorage itself as anything more than a place to get your eyes checked, your teeth fixed, to buy food, clothing, and parts, eat fried chicken at the Lucky Wishbone and pizza at the Moose's Tooth, and maybe see a movie if enough things were blown up in it. That Ike had been reduced to winters there only added insult to this newest injury in his eyes.

Laverne, a chunky little girl with a self-possession that belied her years, calmly corroborated her father's description of the attack and the perpetrators, and added the interesting detail that all the snow machines were new.

"Did you recognize what kind?" Kate said.

The girl nodded. "They were all Ski-Doos, and they were all black."

Ike's lips were pressed into a thin line. "Somebody's making money doing this," he said. "Good money. Where you headed now?"

"Red Run," she said.

He snorted. "Why bother? We both know where you shoulda gone first."

She said the same thing to him that she had to Ken Kaltak. "Did you recognize your attackers, Ike?"

He let loose with a string of profanity and stamped off toward the outhouse. " 'Bye, Kate," Laverne said, and went back in the cabin.

Dismissed, Kate pressed the starter, negotiated the steep trail over bank to river, idled for a few moments to give Mutt time to catch up and hop on, and headed south.

She got to Red Run that evening and spent the night in her sleeping bag on the floor of the school gym, courtesy of the new teacher who lived alone in a little cabin out back and who was so hungry for company three months into the school year that she insisted Kate join her for dinner and Notting Hill on DVD afterward. They both agreed they liked Hugh Grant's friends more than they liked Hugh Grant, and Kate went to sleep that night thinking Red Run School would be lucky if Alice Crawford lasted out the year.

Kate was at the Rileys' home at first light, a small, snug house that Art had built himself from the ground up over the past thirty years. It had begun life as a one-room log cabin, added on to as the children came, and then when Art's father died of lung cancer he built a mother-in-law apartment on the side facing the river. It had its own kitchen where she could make agutaq and fry bread for the granddaughter, the child of Art and Christine's eldest son, an Alaska National Guardsman stationed in Anchorage who was presently serving in Iraq. The mother had vanished shortly after the child's birth and the child had never lived with anyone else.

They welcomed Kate and invited her to share their breakfast. Art was a trapper who ran lines up a couple of creeks in the Quilak foothills, one of them in the Suulutaq Valley. "Best wolf run I've ever had, and last year the best prices I've ever got," he said. "Seems all the Hollywood types are trimming their coats with wolf nowadays, and where they go everybody follows. 'Course the mine'll put paid to all that."

"Doesn't have to," Kate said. "Not if we watch them."

He shook his head. "Don't kid yourself, Kate. It'll change everything."

"Only if we let it," she said, but she was put forcibly in mind of Mandy's certainty on the same subject. "About that attack, Art, she said. "I was wondering if you'd remembered anything else about them. For starters, do you have any idea who it was?"

"No," he said, "no idea."

His tone was oddly tranquil. The five of them were at the kitchen table surrounded by the remnants of bacon and eggs and fried potatoes and toast, the granddaughter absorbed in constructing a house from her potatoes. "You told Jim Chopin you thought the Johansen brothers were the people he ought to talk to."

"Did I?" He shook his head, and produced a sheepish grin. "Probably a hangover from them corking me last summer. The Johansen brothers are a waste of space, true, but I didn't have any reason to suspect them more than anybody else. Still don't."

She stared at him, puzzled.

The Riley kitchen was a warm, crowded, and friendly place, with a woodstove for heat and a propane stove for cooking. The table was homemade beetle kill spruce and big enough to seat eight comfortably, covered with a tacked-down sheet of blue-checked oilcloth. The cupboards were homemade beetle kill, too, like the table a little clunky but sanded and polished to a smooth finish that had been darkened by years of cooking oil and wood smoke. Faded linoleum covered the floor and the walls were a pale yellow, chipped and peeling, on which faded patches showed signs of photographs added and moved around over the years. Dishes were stacked in a wide porcelain farmer's sink that was rather the worse for wear. Underneath the table were two dogs of indeterminate breeding, still and wary but unafraid of Mutt, who was sitting next to Kate, her ears up as if she were listening to and understanding the conversation. She looked up at Kate, yellow eyes meeting hazel, and one ear went back inquisitively. Kate put a hand on her ruff, and looked back at the table.

Grandma Riley looked like one of the aunties, round, brown and wrinkled, a woman of spirit and substance. Like the aunties, she had time served in the Park, and was a repository of knowledge about all the rats who lived therein going back generations, extending to fourth cousins five times removed who now lived in Bowling Green, Kentucky. When a Park rat wanted to draw a family tree, Grandma Riley was everyone's first stop. She'd been failing lately, which was why the extended stay in the elder health care facility in Ahtna, and Kate had the feeling that this might be her last trip south.

Art was the grandson of a white stampeder, a handsome, reckless fellow with a slight limp, known in Dawson City as Riley the Gimp, from New York, who had met and married a local beauty from Tok. They'd moved to the Park to work at the Kanuyaq copper mine, and had stayed on after the mine had closed in 1936, to homestead on the river and raise a family. Grandma Riley had married their son, Arthur Sr., and their children, beginning with Art Jr., had inherited their share of their grandparents' looks.

Christine Riley had been an army brat, born in Anchorage. She had met Art at the University of Alaska and he had brought her home to the river the year they graduated. She was a woman of quiet beauty, still slim and with a full head of pure white hair that was always neatly dressed in a braid wound around her head like a crown. Kate didn't think it had been cut in Christine's lifetime. She worked in the tanning shed next to the house, curing the wolf and mink and beaver and lynx skins Jim brought home, preparing them for sale at fur auctions in Anchorage.

It was, in short, an almost idyllic life for the three of them, two born to it and one who had adopted it wholeheartedly. Kate would have thought that any threat to the life they had built so painstakingly over the years would have roused them to the same incendiary level as the Kaltaks and the Jeffersons.

Instead, she was surrounded by a calm so placid it was almost grating. She looked at each of them in turn and was met by an identical bland stare. "What's going on here?" she said.

Art made an elaborate show of perplexity. "Why, nothing, Kate. We're not happy about what happened, but we know you and Jim will catch whoever did this and make it right."

Christine and Grandma Riley nodded and chorused their agreement, though Grandma Riley wouldn't look up from her mug.

"What about the grandbaby?" Kate said. "You gonna let an attack on her slide, too?"

Art's eyes hardened momentarily, and then his face smoothed out. "We'd left her with a neighbor, as it happens," he said. "We wish we could help you, Kate, but you know how it is. It all happened so fast. I wouldn't worry." He glanced at his mother, smiling. "Grandma always says, what goes around comes around." He drank coffee and grinned. "I hear you had a high old time of it at your first board meeting."

"Jesus," Kate said, "did somebody take out an ad?"

Art laughed and rose to his feet.

Kate, caught by surprise, rose, too. Since when did folks in the Bush urge winter visitors out the door? Usually they were so glad to see anybody they insisted they stay for a week.

It was almost eleven when she hit the river, Mutt on the seat and the sled attached, hiding from the windchill created by her forward motion behind the windshield.

What the hell had that been all about? It was almost as if…

The snow machine slowed abruptly as her thumb relaxed on the throttle.

It was almost as if they hadn't wanted her to find the attackers.

No, she thought, that wasn't it, not exactly.

It was as if they were recommending that she not waste her time.

And the only reason for them to think that she was wasting her time was that the attackers had already been caught. And dealt with.

Maybe already somebody stop them.

"Oh, no," Kate said.

Mutt gave an interrogatory whine.

Kate hit the throttle.

But when she stopped at the Jeffersons ' again, no trace of the fire-breathing dragon she'd left the day before remained. Ike was now smiling and affable. "No luck, Kate? That's a shame. Well, tomorrow's another day."

And when she got to the Kaltaks in Double Eagle, Ken was equally and eerily serene. He wasn't carrying his rifle anymore, either. "Well, sometimes there's just nothing to be done about a situation, Kate. I expect they were all from Anchorage. You know how those people are, no sense of private property. I'm guessing they'll get what's coming to them one day."

"Ken," she said with what she thought was pretty fair restraint, "when I was here yesterday you were breathing fire and smoke and threatening to shoot on sight. Now you're sounding like Mahatma Gandhi. What happened between then and now?"

He scratched his chin meditatively. "Maybe I got religion." He smiled, a slow stretch of his lips that was more a baring of his teeth than an expression of humor. "You know. Turn the other cheek?"

Frustrated, she took her leave, and Ken saw her out. "Hey," he said, "you still seeing Jim socially?"

She floundered for an answer. "I… I… sort of," she said. "Yeah."

"Oh. I just wondered."

"Why?"

He gave a vague shrug. "Hear tell he was getting all friendly with the mine woman in the Club Bar in Cordova a couple days back. Probably nothing. I expect they'll have a lot to do with each other once the mine gets going."

He smiled again. There was just the merest hint of pity about it, and it ruffled Kate's feathers. She made a brusque farewell and left

That smile was before her eyes as she headed out on the river.

She thought about that smile for at least a mile, about what it might mean, along with the reception she had received at the Rileys' and the change in attitude at the Jeffersons' and the Kaltaks'.

Wait a minute, she thought. Wait just a damn minute here.

That remark about Jim and her. It had been more than the usual Park rat interest in the affairs of their fellows. It had been designed to distract her from the attacks.

And it had worked, too.

Distract her from what, though?

She thought about it for another mile, and then she turned around and headed south again, running slow and close to the west bank, seeing many sets of tracks. She followed it as far as Red Run before she turned again and headed north, this time hugging the east bank. Again, many sets of tracks, could be hunters, trappers, ice fishermen, kids out joyriding, people visiting village to village. Nothing that looked out of the ordinary or intrinsically suspicious. She did find a large section of snow in a willow thicket that looked beaten down, as if a lot of snow machines had rendezvoused there, or as if a few had been there more than once. There was an empty bottle of Yukon Jack frozen into the snow under a tree. Not your usual Park tipple, for one thing it was too expensive, but Kate took it anyway. "Anything?" she said to Mutt.

Mutt had been trotting back and forth, nose to the snow. She looked at Kate and sneezed.

When they got back out on the river Kate looked up and saw a line of dark, encroaching cloud. "That's why it felt warmer," she said, unzipping the throat of her parka just a little.

Mutt gave a soft whine and touched a cold nose to Kate's cheek.

She pointed the machine north and opened up the throttle, Pausing only to gas up in Niniltna. People waved and called from their seats in pickups and on snow machines and four-wheelers. She waved but didn't stop to talk, just kept going north as fast as she could push it without blowing a track. She was airborne more than once where a crack had caused a bump in the ice and blowing snow had built up a hummock. Mutt found it very exhilarating, on occasion leaping from the back of the snow machine before she was thrown and galloping alongside with her tongue lolling out of her mouth, waiting for Kate to slow down so she could jump back on.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon, the sun getting low on the southeastern horizon, when she came to a tiny cluster of buildings perched between the Kanuyaq and a narrow, high-banked creek. Overgrown with brush and trees, the half-dozen houses were little more than tumbledown shacks, originally built of logs and over the years patched with whatever was handy-tar paper, pink fiberglass insulation, plywood, shingles fashioned from Blazo boxes, now and then a sheet of Tyvek. Some of it had been applied with duct tape. Someone in the village must have scored a pile of corrugated tin because it was on every roof, although it was stained and aging.

About twenty miles short of the halfway point between Ahtna and Niniltna, Tikani was a forlorn place, unkempt, unloved, a line in the Bush drawn decades before that had since blown away on the wind. It supported thirty souls in its peak years, most of them named Johansen for the Norwegian stampeder who settled there in 1906 with his Gwitchin bride. Isolated, insular, and xenophobic in the extreme, Tikani was the product of years of inbreeding and the blood feuds that result when close families fight over too small a piece of what is to begin with a very small pie. They had been too proud and too stubborn to sign on to ANCSA, relying instead on the ownership of their homes and on property being grandfathered in around them when Jimmy Carter signed the d-2 lands bill in 1980. As a result, the unincorporated village sat on the original hundred and sixty acres their great-grandfather had proved up on under the Homestead Act, and no more. They weren't one of the 220 recognized tribes of Alaska, and they received no federal funding as a group over and above what was funneled through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service. Refusing to sign off on ANCSA meant they hadn't shared in the billion dollars and the forty-four million acres that had been distributed by the federal government in the ANCSA settlement.

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.

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."