Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 06 - Blood Will Tell

by Blood Will Tell(lit)

  The drums beat out a rhythm, the old men chanted, the dancers' feet echoed both. Johnny fidgeted and looked up at Kate quickly to see if she'd noticed. She pretended she hadn't. He shoved his hands in his pockets and prepared to wait it out, if not with enjoyment, then at least with polite acceptance. He'd been well brought up, Kate thought approvingly.

  The song continued. As his ears grew accustomed to it, the chanting seemed to change, not in tempo but in tone, rising up, falling down, rising up again. Or maybe it had been doing that all along and he'd only just begun to hear it. The beating of the drums, which had seemed so monotonous, now took on the sound of a heartbeat, a deep, steady, reassuring throb that seemed to beat up through the soles of his shoes.

  The chanting went up above the beat, below it, swirled around it, now joyous, now mournful, sometimes a little teasing, maybe even a little mischievous. He couldn't tell where one voice ended and another began, they melded together so perfectly. The dancers moved as one, pulsing with the heartbeat of the drums.

  One toe started to tap in time with the drumbeats. His head started to nod in the same rhythm.

  Kate smiled to herself. "So what did you think?" she said when the dance ended and the dancers, back to being individuals again, smiled and bowed modestly in acceptance of the applause and left the stage.

  "Huh?" Johnny looked up at her. His head and foot stilled. "Oh. It was okay, I guess." He was silent for a moment. "I suppose only people who are dancers get to do that?"

  "Everybody's a dancer, Johnny," she said.

  "Everybody?"

  "Everybody."

  "Even you?"

  "Even me." She squeezed his shoulder. "Even you, if you want. Someday when I'm in town I'll take you to a Spirit Days, or maybe your dad'll bring you out to the homestead when there's a potlatch. You can learn."

  "You mean with everybody watching?" He was horrified. "Couldn't you teach me when we're alone sometime?"

  She shook her head. "That's not the way. Dancing is for everybody, all at the same time. We make a circle. We dance. We dance together." She could see that he didn't understand, but he'd come far enough for one day, and a ship in full sail was bearing down on them at ten o'clock.

  "Look," she said with forced cheerfulness, all the apprehension that the discoveries of the previous night had generated back in the blink of an eye. "Here comes my grandmother."

  Johnny followed her gaze. "She's old, isn't she?"

  Kate looked at her grandmother and saw the gray hair, the wrinkled skin, the slow movements of age through his eyes. Ekaterina still looked tired, too. "I guess she is."

  "How old? Fifty?"

  "More like eighty. Probably more."

  "Wow."

  Kate wanted to talk to her grandmother about what she had found in Dischner's office that morning but of course the minute Ekaterina joined them a crowd formed. "Great party last night, Ekaterina," someone said.

  "You sure do clean up nice, Shugak," someone else said, "I never would have believed it." This remark was directed to Kate, or she hoped so. At least she thought she did. For the next fifteen minutes Ekaterina accepted thanks on her appearance, her granddaughter's appearance, the disk jockey's play list, the rare roast beef, the caribou sausage, the open bar and most especially on the fresh fruit platters. The only complaint was that the party hadn't lasted long enough.

  Ekaterina rubbed her rheumatic ky elbow. "You look tired, emaa," Kate said. "You want to sit down?"

  Ekaterina shook her head. "I'll be sitting down long enough when the panel starts."

  A half hour later people began to assemble at the table on stage, and Kate accompanied her grandmother to the head of the room. More people came into the room and took seats in the audience. The chairman, he of

  "big brown mama" fame, introduced the panelists. Olga Shapsnikoff was the representative from the Aleut Corporation. Kate vaguely remembered dancing with the CIRI representative the night before. The other four were from Sealaska, Calista, Chugachmiut and the Bristol Bay Native Corporation. Ekaterina Moonin Shugak of Niniltna was introduced as the moderator and got by far the most applause.

  The chairman said, "Ladies and gentlemen, elders, friends, family and guests. The issue is subsistence."

  More people drifted in from the hall. The conversation and muted laughter didn't die but it definitely slowed. Kate was watching Ekaterina with a frown on her face. Her grandmother had dropped into her chair as if her legs were no longer capable of holding her up. Kate thought she saw the sheen of sweat on her forehead, but that could have been the heat from the lights illuminating the stage. As the chairman finished his introduction in preparation for turning the podium over to Ekaterina, Kate slipped around behind the stage and climbed up to crouch behind her grandmother. "Emaa? Are you all right?"

  "No, I'm not," said her grandmother calmly. The other panelists looked at them. "Ladies and gentlemen, elders, forgive me," she said into the microphone. "I'm a little tired this morning." She smiled. "Too much partying last night, I guess." Laughter echoed from various parts of the room at those words coming from this dignified elder. "I'm going to let my granddaughter moderate this panel."

  "What! Emaa!"

  "You all know my granddaughter, I think, Kate Shugak. She fishes subsistence, she has fished commercial and she guides sports fishermen, so I'm sure you'll agree there is none better qualified to speak to this issue."

  Kate's whisper was panicked. "No! Emaa! Olga can do it! Emaa!"

  Ekaterina put one hand over the microphone. "I'm going to go back to the hotel for a nap. Come to the hotel for lunch, and you can tell me how the panel went. Thank you, Katya."

  The next thing Kate knew she was standing at the podium, blinking in the glare of the stage lights. Ekaterina's broad back disappeared out through the double doors at the back of the room. Her grandmother couldn't be all that tired or she couldn't have moved that fast, Kate thought. The crowd waited, expectant, and she dredged up a smile. Her heart was beating uncomfortably high up in her throat. She looked down at the podium and there was a list, thank God, of the speakers and their order. "Ah, ladies and gentlemen, elders, friends, family and guests, as the chairman said, the issue is subsistence. Our first speaker is Olga Shapsnikoff, from Unalaska, representing the Aleut Corporation."

  Olga stood and Kate walked around her to the moderator's seat. "Is Ekaterina all right?" Olga whispered.

  "Just tired," Kate whispered back. And determined to thrust her granddaughter into the convention spotlight, she thought, fuming. Damn emaa, and damn her determination to drag Kate into tribal affairs.

  On the plus side, Kate's resentment was more than enough to march her back to the moderator's chair without falling flat on her face.

  As Olga spoke, Kate's eyes became accustomed to the light. Mutt had flopped down next to the stage. Kate looked for Johnny. He grinned up at her from the front row of the Raven's seat section, next to the boy his own age who had been on stage with the Kodiak Island Dancers. They were taking turns scribbling on a pad of paper. Tic-tac-toe, it looked like, and without a Nintendo, too. Wonders never ceased.

  She brought her attention back to the podium, wondering what in the hell she was going to say when it came the moderator's turn to sum up what had gone before. She saw Axenia in the crowd, in her eyes an easily read resentment at Kate's presence on the dais. Lew Mathisen had a proprietary hand on her elbow, Harvey Meganack stood nearby, and across the aisle Billy Mike and his family took up two entire rows. Dandy was the only Mike standing, at the back of the room, his arm around a young and nubile dancer in traditional dress who was giggling at whatever he was whispering in her ear. Cindy Sovalik sent Kate a regal nod from the Arctic Slope Regional section. She thought she saw Martha Barnes standing in the back, but it was so far away she couldn't be sure.

  Few of the speakers were professional orators but all were Alaska Natives and as such vitally interested in the issue of preference for rural subsistence hunting and fishing, as was their audi
ence. Olga spoke concisely for five minutes and concluded by saying flatly, "There will be no compromise on rural subsistence," and the crowd broke into spontaneous applause, long enough for her to sit down and for the CIRI man--what was his name? Kate had forgotten the list of panelists on the podium--to take her place.

  The CIRI man, an Aleut from Seldovia, said, also flatly, "The federal government is doing a far better job of protecting Native subsistence than the state government is," and this time the applause was accompanied by yells of approval. He condemned the Isaac Walton League's efforts on behalf of urban and Outside sports fishermen to more yells of approval, and called for the Alaska legislature to pass a constitutional amendment for rural preference in hunting and fishing.

  The representative of Chugachmiut, an Eyak from Cordova and a Baptist seminarian who had graduated with a distinction in oratory, said that subsistence was not a part time occupation, it had to be lived. How were the people along the Yukon River supposed to feed their children if they couldn't fish for salmon or hunt for caribou except at the pleasure of the state? "The governor says the state will fly in fish from other areas." He snorted. "So people who have been self-sufficient for ten thousand years turn into welfare recipients." He looked around the room.

  "What kind of sense does that make?"

  "None!" came the reply.

  The Sealaska representative, a Tsimshian from Metlakatla, called subsistence the most basic ingredient of the Native community and condemned state inaction on the issue. The Calista representative, a genial Yupik from Akulurak, grinned and promised not to be as long-winded as some of the politicians who'd been there the day before.

  He sobered, to warn of oil company interest in sinking exploratory wells in Norton Sound, and of the threat this posed to marine life in the Bering Sea. "We don't already have enough problems with the giant trawlers from Korea and Taiwan and Russia and Poland and, yes, the United States," he asked, "all of them ripping up the bottom of the North Pacific Ocean and causing the Yukon-Kuskokwim River chum stocks to crash?"

  Kate was of the opinion that mounting a couple of ten inch cannons on the foredeck of a Coast Guard cutter and sending it out to blow the trawlers out of the water would be one place to start solving that particular problem, but she knew better than to say so here. This crowd was upset enough to take her seriously. The man from Akulurak closed by saying, "The oil companies promise us they'll take every precaution to see that no harm comes to the environment from oil spills, but they don't want to talk about how they hired a known drunk to run the RPetco Anchorage onto Bligh Reef. We can't trust the oil companies to take care of us. We have to take care of ourselves."

  The representative of the Bristol Bay Native Corporation, another Yupik, this time from Manokotak, took a scholarly approach, defined the various federal, state, local, sports and commercial fishing, environmental and animal rights groups' pressures on Native subsistence, and recommended that the Secretary of the Interior, also known as Alaska's landlord, be encouraged to seek out traditional tribal knowledge in game management.

  She waited for the applause to die down and added, peering over the tops of her half glasses, "They don't make microscopes big enough to find the state of Alaska's support of the subsistence lifestyle." Her tone was so measured and her words so evenly spoken that it took a moment for their import to sink in. When they did, there was a roar of approval and more applause. Again, she waited for it to die down. "When one word from a state biologist fresh from some Outside college is enough to cancel out a thousand years of traditional Native knowledge, it is time for a change." For a third time applause swelled. Without haste, the Yupik from Manokotak collected her papers together and returned to her seat.

  All the panelists had spoken. It was Kate's turn. Olga nudged her to get up. She sat where she was, petrified with fear. She had nothing to report, no speech to give, and anything after the lady from Manokotak would be anticlimactic. I can't do this, emaa, she thought.

  The audience was waiting for her, all of them, hundreds of them, silent, expectant, even eager. She knew a sudden, queer feeling of standing on the edge of a yawning chasm, the vacuum that had been left by Ekaterina's absence beginning to suck her over the edge.

  Olga nudged her again and somehow Kate found herself at the podium, blinking at the lights. People were stirring in their seats and conversation was building again at the back of the room. She gripped the sides of the podium and stood on tiptoe to speak into the microphone.

  Her voice squeaked on the first try and she had to clear her throat and start again. There was a spark of malicious enjoyment in Axenia's eyes;

  Kate never saw it. The conversation got louder, and the only thing that kept her in place was the thought that, however Ekaterina had maneuvered her appearance here today, she couldn't let her grandmother down. She opened her mouth, and to her surprise, words came out.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, elders, family, friends and guests. The issue is subsistence." She paused. Some people looked her way. A lot more were engrossed in conversation. There was laughter and whispering. The wail of a hungry baby cut off abruptly. Her grip on the fake wood of the podium was sweaty and her hands slipped.

  And then it came to her. A story. She'd been told stories all her life.

  She would tell one now, to people who lived by stories, to people who lived on through them, to people who died and returned in stories to live again.

  "I shot a moose in my front yard this year."

  She let the statement lie there and gather attention.

  "Not fifty feet from my front door."

  A lot of men shook their heads, as if they couldn't believe the luck of some undeserving people. There were a few faint, frankly skeptical grins.

  "I dropped him from my front door with a single shot from a thirty-ought-six."

  The details began to add up into either a true story or a good one. More people began to listen.

  "In any other fall, on any other year, I wouldn't have been able to.

  "Not because I can't shoot," and she grinned at the skeptics, "because you know I can."

  They grinned back.

  "No." She let the grin fade. "I got to shoot that bull because for the first year in six, I drew a permit."

  She let that sink in, and was gratified when the room became still except for a few rustles from the back where a couple of kids scuffled for possession of an Eskimo yo-yo. One's mother confiscated the yo-yo and they quieted.

  "I got to shoot that bull because for the first year in ten, the feds declared a moose hunt would be permitted in the Park's game management unit."

  There was a collective growl of acknowledgement.

  Kate felt that growl somewhere way down deep inside, and whatever was there rose up in response.

  "The hunt only lasted seven days.

  "There were only ten permits issued.

  "I got my moose."

  She gripped the podium firmly and said into the microphone, "Nobody else in the Park got their moose.

  "Just me.

  "I got my moose.

  "I got enough moose to last me the winter.

  "I got enough moose to share with my family.

  "I got enough moose to share with my friends. "Nobody else in the Park got a moose.

  "Hunters from Anchorage, they got their moose.

  "Hunters from Anchorage with helicopters and four wheelers, they got their moose.

  "But nobody else in the Park got a moose.

  "Just me."

  The crowd was silent. Kate let her next words drop one at a time, into the waiting pool of silence.

  "You know what? "You know what I was thinking when I shot that moose?