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 Plantae, 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 snowshoes. 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 sea son 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.
A Fine and Bitter Snow Page 4