Whisper To The Blood Part 17

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 att.i.tude at the Jeffersons' and the Kaltaks'.

Wait a minute, she thought. Wait just a d.a.m.n 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 b.u.mp 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 fibergla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l 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 a.s.s in here, then, and be quick about it so I don't have to stand here all G.o.dd.a.m.n day with the G.o.dd.a.m.n door open letting the G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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. n.o.body 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. "h.e.l.l 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."

FIFTEEN.

Dinah met Jim at the door, finger to her lips, and stepped back to let him enter.

Bobby was right where Jim wanted him, broadcasting on Park Air, the pirate radio station that had been changing channels one step ahead of the FCC for a dozen years now. This morning featured an interview with one Talia Macleod of Global Harvest Resources Inc. Bobby was sitting knee to knee with her in front of a microphone and appeared spellbound. Nothing loath, she was flirting hard right back, but that didn't stop either one of them from getting what they wanted said out on the air.