Dead in the Water

by Dana Stabenow

  “‘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 cool 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?”

  “Storyknifing,” Becky said.

  “Storyknifing? 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 storyknifing.”

  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 storyknifing,” 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.”