Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  She loaded everything into the trailer, hooked it to the sled, donned bib overalls, boots, parka, and gloves.

  She stood in front of the map for a while, running the sequence of the attacks through her mind.

  So far, all the attacks had been downriver, south of Niniltna, south of the Nabesna Mine turnoff, south even of where the road left the river to go to the Roadhouse.

  First attack, a mile north of Double Eagle.

  Second, three days later, six miles downriver from the first attack, just outside Chulyin.

  Third, a little north of Red Run, six days later and twenty miles farther south, almost where the Gruening River met the Kanuyaq.

  Fourth, thirteen days later, three miles north of Red Run.

  Three of four of the attacks had been made on people coming home fat, trailers loaded with groceries, clothes, parts, fuel. Which made a case for Johnny and Van and Ruthe being a target of opportunity.

  It also opened up the possibility that someone upriver was alerting the jackals as to potential pickings, at least for the first three attacks. Kate didn’t like the thought of that, not one little bit.

  “I think they cruised us on the way out,” Johnny had said. “There were three guys on snow machines who kind of harassed us that morning. Didn’t jump us, just did circles around us and then took off when they saw a truck coming. I knew there was something off about them, but it didn’t hit me until later. They were wearing helmets, Kate.”

  “So you couldn’t see who they were.”

  “And nobody wears helmets on the river, Kate.” He’d managed a smile, even if it had looked a little worn around the edges. “Not even an old safety-first girl like you.”

  Ten minutes later she was moving down the road, Mutt on the seat in back of her, headlight illuminating the road in front of her.

  Auntie Vi was up in her net loft mending nets, bone needle whipping in and out, gear swiftly and almost miraculously made whole again. “Ha, Katya,” she said.

  “Morning, Auntie.” Before Auntie Vi could get started in Association business Kate got her oar in first. “You hear about the attacks on the river?”

  Auntie Vi gave an emphatic nod. “Sure. Everybody hear.”

  “I didn’t,” Kate said.

  Auntie Vi looked surprised. Kate, watching her closely, thought the surprise was exaggerated. “How not?” Auntie Vi said.

  “Nobody told me. Why didn’t you?”

  Auntie Vi raised her eyebrows in a faint shrug and bent back over the gear. “You not interested enough in Association business to learn how to run board, you not interested enough in Park business to need to know all that goes on.”

  “I see,” Kate said. Something very like rage rose up over her in a red wave and she fought an inner battle to keep her composure. Mutt, who read Kate better than most humans, looked longingly at the door. “Is this the way it’s going to be, Auntie? You’re going to shut me out unless I do what you want?”

  Auntie Vi didn’t answer.

  “Well, I know about them now, and I’m going downriver to see what the hell’s going on. I’m going to find out who’s pulling this shit and I’m going to kick their collective ass. It’s a darn shame I didn’t know about it before, so I could have stopped it earlier, and Grandma Riley and little Laverne Jefferson and Ken and Janice Kaltak wouldn’t have been terrorized and robbed.”

  Kate left before Auntie Vi could reply.

  Her next stop was Auntie Edna’s, a prefab home in a little ten-house subdivision at the south end of Niniltna, perched precariously on the edge of the river. This time she knocked, instead of walking in like she did at Auntie Vi’s. Auntie Edna’s face was stony when she came to the door, but then Auntie Edna’s face was always stony. “Auntie Edna,” Kate said without preamble, “you know about the attacks on the river?”

  Auntie Edna shrugged. “I guess.”

  “You should have told me.”

  Auntie Edna raised her eyebrows in elaborate surprise. “You interested?”

  Kate could feel her temper begin to rise again, and bit back her first retort. “I’m headed downriver. Do you know who they are?”

  Another shrug. “Nobody say.”

  “Well, I’m going to find them, and I’m going to beat the crap out of them when I do. And after that I’m going to feed them to Mutt. You can put that out on the Bush telegraph if you’ve a mind to.”

  She turned to leave.

  “Katya.”

  Kate was in no mood. “What?” The curt tone, the omission of the usual honorific, both were significant, and they both knew it.

  “That man that live with you.”

  This was so out of left field that Kate was momentarily speechless. “There’s no man—Oh. You mean Jim?”

  Auntie Edna gave a curt nod.

  “What about him?”

  “White man.”

  Kate snorted out a laugh. “Unregenerately.”

  “Not right for Association chair, Native woman, to be sleeping with white man.”

  At that Kate turned completely around and said incredulously, “Are you kidding me, Auntie? You of all people dare to lecture me on my love life?”

  In her youth, Auntie Edna had been married three times, and in between and sometimes during those marriages had enjoyed the company of many other men. She had more children than the other three aunties put together. Her romantic history probably ranked right up there with Chopper Jim’s in number and variety.

  Auntie Edna thrust out her jaw. “Don’t change subject, Katya. You sleeping with that man don’t look good. You boot him out, get you a nice Native man. That be better for everyone. Your kids be shareholders on both sides.”

  “Just for the sake of argument, Auntie, what nice Native man would you recommend?”

  At this Auntie Edna looked momentarily at a loss, and then rallied. “Them Mike boys is all good men, Annie raised them right.”

  “And they all live in Anchorage,” Kate said, and made a come-along motion with her hand. “Come on, Auntie. Serve ’em up. Who else is vying for my hand?”

  “Martin Shugak, he—”

  Kate’s rage dissipated in an instant and she burst out laughing. “Martin! Oh, Auntie!”

  “What wrong with him?” Auntie Edna said pugnaciously.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Kate rolled her eyes. “Well, first there’s the little problem of his being my cousin—”

  “Second! Second cousin!”

  “—and so our children would all be born with two heads. Not to mention he’s a drunk, so they’d all have FAS, and he’s chronically unemployed, so they’d all be hungry, and—” Kate shook her head. “I’m headed downriver, Auntie. Do you know who’s doing these attacks?” She waited, and when Auntie Edna said nothing she started down the steps.

  “Not necessary, Katya,” Auntie Edna said behind her.

  Kate paused in the act of mounting the sled, and looked at Auntie Edna with a gathering frown. She didn’t like what she heard in Auntie Edna’s voice. “Why not, Auntie? Somebody has to stop them. And,” she added with little satisfaction and less pride, “it’s almost always been me.”

  “Maybe already somebody stop them,” Auntie Edna said.

  She gave Kate another long, hard stare, and then Auntie Edna turned and went back inside, the door closing firmly behind her.

  Jim gassed up the Cessna and flew back to Suulutaq. There was a thin line of clouds on the southern horizon, the edge of a low front that had so far been held off by the high hanging in over the Park. Otherwise it was another clear, calm day, and this time he knew where he was going.

  In half an hour he was over the trailer. He continued on up the valley, all the way to the end, as far as he could get without running into a cloud filled with rocks. Here the landscape closed in, a series of pocket basins that in spring were carpeted with grasses, interspersed with rocky crags clothed in lichen and kinnikinnick. There was one exit, a high, narrow pass where rose the spring that formed the headwaters of
the Gruening River, which cricked and jigged and jagged down the other side, collecting the flows of errant streams and creeks to itself before its course smoothed out to join up with the Kanuyaq River at Red Run.

  The Gruening River had a healthy run of red salmon, which was why the origins of the fish camp on the confluence of the two rivers went back a thousand years. The smoke fish from Red Run was prized above all others, and the lucky recipients of Red Run canned smoked salmon hoarded it more jealously than they did their wives and girlfriends.

  But that was the other end of the river. At present Jim was circling cautiously over the river’s beginnings, keeping a weather eye cocked toward the south. At the first hint of the shred of a cloud he would turn and skedaddle for home. It was amazing how crowded clouds could make a pilot feel, and Jim had not accumulated 2,722 accident-free single engine hours by letting weather jog his elbow.

  The head of the valley was the winter grounds of the Gruening River caribou herd. He could see some of them now, groups of five and ten far below, scraping a meal out of the snow and ice with their small, sharp hooves. The big bulls had shed their antlers two months before but there were still racks on a few of the smaller bulls and most of the cows. They looked to be in pretty good shape. Of course this was still only November. Another couple of months and all the fat they had stored up over the summer and fall in those big old jiggly butts would be almost gone.

  Like most but not all of the Alaska herds, the Gruening River herd migrated annually. When spring came, usually around mid to late May, they migrated over the narrow pass and down the Gruening River to where it met the Kanuyaq, about forty miles, where they calved and fed on willow and blueberry leaves, sedge grasses, tundra flowers, and mushrooms. In September, they moved back up the mountains, feeding on shrubs and lichen and kinnikinnick.

  It was a small herd, never over five thousand on its best year, as there was a very healthy wolf population in the area, and then there were the bears. So far, the three species were holding fairly stable. For now, it was a matter of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The state and the feds were less concerned about the Gruening River herd than they were about the Central Arctic herd that migrated through Prudhoe Bay, whose population had dropped precipitously in the last twenty years, or the Mulchatna herd that had increased so geometrically that they were letting hunters take five each, including cows, and one season going so far as to allow hunters to fly and shoot same day.

  If the mine went in, of course, much more attention would be paid. The herd would be tagged and monitored to a fare-thee-well, as would the wolves, the bears, the eagles, geese, ducks, wolverines, foxes, marmots, porcupines, pika squirrels, voles, and mosquitoes. Jim wasn’t saying the attention would be a bad thing, but it had been his experience that the more attention was paid to an ecosystem, the more alarm was raised when that ecosystem changed in even the smallest degree.

  It didn’t matter if the change was the natural order of things. Say the herd decreased after a die-off following a hard winter. There would always be someone to tie it to the mine. Someone, say, like Ruthe Bauman. She wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, either, but it was true that wildlife in Alaska could be used by any side to bolster whatever viewpoint was held to be most politically correct or economically feasible by the group in question, corporate, legislative, environmental, Native, whoever. The oil companies in Prudhoe Bay claimed that the caribou liked the gravel pads built for the roads and structures, where the wind kept the mosquitoes off them, and that some small groups of cows and calves had wintered under some of the structures.

  Even the devil could quote scripture to his purpose.

  Meantime, Jim drew a series of economical circles in the sky. He didn’t know what he was looking for, exactly, but his gut was telling him that Howie was out here.

  Howie Katelnikof was a liar and a thief and a bully and an all-around waste of space, and he might even be a murderer, although Jim wasn’t sure he was the murderer of Mac Devlin. There was no bad blood between Mac and Howie so far as Jim knew, and while Mac might hate Global Harvest and all who sailed in her, he wouldn’t go out to Suulutaq with the intention of picking a fight with Howie. Howie was little more than a gofer and, as Macleod had discovered to her dismay, from the get-go had been ripping off everything that wasn’t nailed down. Far more likely Howie was fencing the stuff he stole to Mac.

  Which might be a thought worth pursuing, Jim thought, checking again for weather before easing into a lazy figure eight that gave him a commanding view of the upper valley. Howie, ever on the alert to make a buck, might have sold Mac a look at the trailer and its contents. Mac might have paid for it on the off chance that he’d find something to help him pressure Global Harvest, in hopes of causing enough irritation that they would at long last buy him off.

  That, Jim thought, seemed much more in character for both men. Weasels once, weasels ever.

  Then his attention was caught by something on the ground. Color and movement, that’s what Ranger Dan counseled when looking for wildlife, and that’s what Jim had been looking for when he spotted a flash of blue through a dense stand of dark green spruce tucked into one of the little pocket basins. He banked left and continued a tight spiral downward, until he was circling a hundred feet over the spot where he’d seen the color flash. The nearness of the mountains was uncomfortable to him, but the weather was still holding. He throttled back as far as he could without losing lift and stood the Cessna on its left wing for a good, long look.

  There shouldn’t be spruce up this high, but the little basin was south-facing and well protected, a tiny patch of microclimate the spruce had claimed for its own. They weren’t very tall, almost dwarfs, and grew in such a tangled thicket, one on top of the other, each desperate to grab its own square foot of arable soil, that it was difficult to see under them.

  “Well now,” Jim said. Under them, as he saw now, was where all the action was. There were snow machine tracks going in and out, leading to the remnants of a large caribou slaughter, a pile of skins, another of racks, and an assortment of quarters, looking even at this distance frozen solid in the frigid November air. The hunters had taken care to do their butchering under the trees, and some of the trees had been encouraged to form a shelter by lopping off a lower layer of limbs. To one side there were a couple of dark green tents with two snow machines parked beside them, one blue, the other black. He thought he saw the shadow of a third, but not distinctly enough to discern any identifying color or make.

  A figure darted from a tree near the meat mound and ducked into one of the tents. They’d heard him. He climbed back to cruising altitude and resumed the lazy eight, the possessor of more facts than he’d had before he arrived.

  Caribou hunting season in this game unit didn’t begin until January first, over a month away.

  The black snow machine was instantly recognizable as the brand-new Ski-Doo Expedition TUV, a cherry little tricked-out sled that had emptied out the Roadhouse when Howie drove up in it the first time. It retailed for just under thirteen thousand dollars, and a lot of Park rats had wondered out loud how Howie, noticeably lacking in gainful employment, could afford it.

  Jim had wondered, too. Howie dealt strictly in cash, having learned well from his mentor and master, the execrable Louis Deem, that checking accounts had an uncomfortable way of revealing your transactions at the most inconvenient possible time, and that credit card companies sold your information to everyone else. Now Jim wondered if perhaps Howie had been supplementing his income by retailing commercial quantities of caribou. Gas was expensive, with the price per gallon increasing every day, especially in the Park, where it had to be hauled in by the barrel after winter shut down the road in. It made hunting, even from a four-wheeler or a snow machine, that much more expensive, too.

  He peered below again. Three snowgos meant three people. All three, displaying a prudence beyond what their current activity would suggest, remained inside the tents.

  He decided that he�
�d tested the limits of aeronautical safety enough for one day. He put the Cessna’s nose on three-one-five and let the ground fall away from him as he flew down the broad plateau of the valley.

  He had a little time to think over what he should do next. It was vital to lay hands on Howie Katelnikof as soon as possible, but there was nowhere flat or long enough for him to sit down that was near enough to the camp for him to get to them before they took off, which they would do because they’d hear him land and because they had ground transportation and he didn’t.

  The trailer and its rudimentary airstrip sat in the middle of a very wide valley that he estimated was a minimum of four to six miles across. If he put her down there and waited, they’d just go around him. Aerial bombardment was pretty much all that a Cessna in the air could do to stop a snow machine on the ground, and Jim was fresh out of grenades.

  The mouth of the valley widened to a slope that fell gradually down to the east bank of the Kanuyaq River, the southwest-facing hill well treed but nowhere impassable by snow machine. If he set down in one place, top or bottom, they’d simply go another way. They would have recognized the white Cessna with the gold stripes and the gold seal on the fuselage, so they would be doubly wary coming out.

  There was no point, he decided, in trying to apprehend them from the air. Now that they knew he was looking for them, they’d probably leave the kill to the ravens and the wolves and the rest of the Park’s carnivores. He couldn’t swear it was Howie he saw running for the tent, and while he had recognized Howie’s Ski-Doo, Howie could always ditch it and say it had been stolen. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  No. He had to think up some way to make Howie come to him.

  Movement a thousand feet below caught the corner of his eye and he banked the Cessna a little to see George Perry’s Cub take off from next to the GHRI trailer. Had he dropped someone off? Someone like Talia Macleod, perhaps? He changed channels. “Piper Super Cub at Suulutaq, that you, George?”