Blood Will Tell (12 page)

There were a dozen ivory carvings on the table in front of her, no more.

Some were walrus tusk, white and smooth and creamy. Others were of fossil ivory, yellow and cracked with age. There was a gray whale not five inches long, a solid presence with graceful flukes. There was a seal, skin stretched taut over round belly, sleeping in the sun on the ice next to his hole. There was a polar bear stalking another seal, smooth cunning in the set of his head, blunt menace in every line of his muscular body. And there was a kayak, paddle at rest across the thwarts, a tiny seal anua fixed to the bow, a hunter in a visor and gut tunic sitting amidships, spear upraised in one taut and steady arm. It was a study in patient vigilance, a portrait of cultural history, and the finest example of the carver's art Kate had ever seen.

She raised her eyes. The man seated behind the table was thin to the point of emaciation and had bright, brown eyes surrounded by a mass of wrinkles that shifted with every change of expression. His blue plaid shirt was buttoned up to the collar and down to the cuffs and the flannel material folded in around his bones. He had a full head of hair, some of it still black, combed flat against his skull, making his cheekbones seem pointed and more prominent than they actually were, giving him a sculpted look that resembled his work. A boy with the same cheekbones and plaid shirt stood next to him. The old man said something, Kate thought in Yupik. She shook her head. "I'm sorry, uncle, I have no Yupik."

He seemed to sigh. "You like?" he said, with a nod at the table.

She nodded in return. "I like." She touched the kayak gently, as much to see if it was real as anything else. She pulled out the tiny bag that never left her pocket and produced a three-inch ivory otter, standing on his hind legs, balanced on the thick curve of his tail, head cocked, fur sleek with water, black eyes bright, whiskers quivering with curiosity.

He held his front paws just so at his breast, ready to drop down on all fours to scamper to the water's edge and plunge in. She set him on the table.

The old man took one look and said, "Wilson Oozeva."

She nodded, unsurprised. Carvers often recognized work by others. They admired the otter together, the hum of conversation swirling around them. Other shoppers paused to look and passed on. She shifted her gaze to the kayak and the hunter, touching the visor with a reverent finger.

He watched her, bright eyes curious. "What does this one have, that pleases you so much?"

She was silent for a moment. "Anua," she said. "It has anua, spirit."

She raised her eyes from the carving and said gently, "You shouldn't sell it, uncle."

He gave an almost imperceptible shrug. That shrug could mean he needed the money to eat. It could mean that he needed the money to drink. It could mean that he needed the money to buy more ivory to make more carvings, or to send his grandson to school. "I'll tell you what, uncle," she said. "I will buy it from you. But you keep it for me." She saw the instinctive rejection in his expression and improvised. "You keep this one, and make me another one."

He was silent. "You keep this one, uncle," she repeated, "and you make me another one and send it to me. Later, sometime, you could give this one to--maybe to a granddaughter?" She smiled at the boy. "Or perhaps your grandson's wife? Someone who sees in it what you see." She stretched out a hand and nudged the kayak a little closer to him, a little farther away from her. "Put it away, uncle. Please?"

His eyes lowered from her face to the kayak. "What kind of carving you want?" he said finally.

She picked up her otter and looked at it, her thumb rubbing over his water-soaked fur. "Whatever the ivory shows you," she said, and put the otter back in its bag and the bag back in her pocket. She waited while the boy removed the kayak from the table and put it in a box before going in search of a cash machine. Jane's cash card and PIN number worked right the first time. The machine spit out cash, card and receipt. Modern technology was a wonderful thing. Kate couldn't understand why some people were so afraid of it.

She left the receipt in hopes a larcenous technophile would find it and use it to further deplete Jane's bank account, and walked over to the pay phone she had passed on the way to the cash machine. She pulled the rolled-up catalogue from her hip pocket. The 800 number rang once before picking up. "Hello, Eddie Bauer? I'd like to order a few items from your latest catalogue. Sorry? Which credit card would I like to use?" She smiled. "American Express. Ready for the number?" She gave it to them, along with the expiration date, and confirmed the Dickson address they already had on file from previous orders. Thumbing through the pages of the catalogue, she proceeded to order a pair of velvet dress pants for $108, a down jacket for $250, good to twenty below, three dresses between $75 and $150 each, a pair of black suede flats and a pair of Rockport brogues.

To instruct Jane in the art of authentic malice, Kate gave Jane's dress size as sixteen and her shoe size at four and a half, and was pleased to hear that all items were in stock and would be shipped in seven to ten days. She thought about requesting Fedex next-day air instead, and came to the reluctant decision that tomorrow was too soon for packages to be arriving on Jane's doorstep, thereby alerting her to the shopping spree being undertaken on her unknowing behalf. Kate had other purchases to make.

She hung up and went back downstairs to complete her transaction with the old man. When she gave her name and address to the boy to ship the new carving to, the old man gave her a sharp look. "Ekaterina Shugak is your grandmother?" She nodded. The pen paused, the boy looking from the old man to Kate and back again. After a moment the old man grunted, giving Kate no clue as to whether he saw the relationship as good or bad, and the boy finished writing down the address. "Thank you, uncle," she said, inclining her head in his direction.

Ten steps from his table, a voice at her elbow said, "What makes you so sure he won't put the kayak back out the minute you leave the room?"

The speaker was a woman almost as old and almost as wrinkled as the old man but not nearly as frail and who barely came up to Kate's shoulder in height. A grin broke out across Kate's face. "Olga!"

The two women embraced. "Hello, Kate."

"It's so good to see you," Kate said. She stepped back and looked around. "Okay. Where is it?"

Olga played it cool. "Where is what?"

"Where is your table? Baskets, right? Attu baskets? Where are they? I want to see."

"You're awful pushy for such a young one," Olga grumbled, but she led Kate through the throng, growing in size and volume with every passing moment as the crafts fair drew in customers from all over Anchorage and the state, Native and non-Native alike. With every convention the reputation of the quality of the goods available for sale grew. By the afternoon, when most of the bush folks had arrived in Anchorage and with all the local hardcore crafts shoppers out in force, you'd be lucky to get across the room in under an hour.

This morning they made it in ten minutes, Kate getting momentarily sidetracked by a pair of fur-lined moccasins and a beaded hair band that would be perfect for fastening off her braid. Olga's table was presided over by three young girls sitting in a row, perched on chairs like little birds on a branch, hands clasped in their laps, round faces solemn. "Hello, Becky," Kate said.

The girl in the middle was very much on her dignity with the responsibility of her position. "Hello, Kate Shugak," she said, very composed, and spoiled the effect by elbowing her friends. "You guys remember I told you about Kate Shugak? This is her. Kate, this is Jeannie, and this is Norma." "Hello," Kate said. The two girls smiled shyly and ducked their heads and said hello back in voices so soft she could barely hear them.

"Where's Sasha?" she asked Olga.

"She stayed home." Olga smiled. "So many stories to tell here, she might go right out of her head." Kate smiled, thinking of the squat little figure hunched over her knife stories in the sand of the beach at Unalaska. "You can tell her all the stories you hear when you get back."

"Those are my orders," Olga said. "What are you doing here? I've never seen you at an AFN convention before, I thought this time of year you were holed up on the homestead, dug in for the winter."

"I wish," Kate said beneath her breath. "I came with my grandmother."

"Oh?" Olga raised her eyebrows and gave Kate a long, speculative look.

"She asked me to," Kate said, and even in her own ears the words sounded touchy and defensive.

"Umm," Olga replied, which ambiguous sound could have stood for anything from approval to amusement. Kate was relieved when all Olga said was, "I haven't seen Ekaterina yet." Kate's mouth twisted up at one corner.

"She's probably still upstairs working the room."

Olga shouted with laughter. "Ay, that woman, she never stops. Well, what do you think?" She waved her hand at the table. "How did we do?"

The baskets were many and tiny, some no more than an inch high and an inch in circumference. All were exquisite, woven of tiny strands of grass, each with a painstaking design worked out in the same grass dyed blue and red and yellow and green, each with a tight-fitting lid with a tiny knob. "Rye grass?" Kate inquired, one eyebrow up.

Olga shook her head. "Raffia. Cheaper, and the tourists don't know the difference." She rummaged behind the table and produced a drum and a stick. "And we're making these now, too." She tapped out a brisk tattoo, grinning, and Kate stretched out a hand. It was a round of translucent skin eighteen inches across, stretched tautly on a circular wooden frame two inches wide. "Go ahead," Olga said, extending the beating stick.

"Try it."

Before she could there was a tap on her shoulder. She turned. "Cindy," she said, surprised and pleased. The older woman, short and solid without an ounce of fat on her, gave her a hard hug, pleasure at the meeting sitting easily on her broad, flat face. "Olga, this is Cindy Sovalik from Ichelik, I met her on the North Slope this spring. Cindy, this is Olga-- " "Hello, Cindy," Olga said coolly.

"Olga," Cindy said, just as coolly.

"Oh," Kate said. "You two already know each other."

"Are you on the sovereignty panel this afternoon?" Olga said, not to Kate, but not quite looking Cindy straight in the face, either.

Cindy gave a curt nod. "Of course."

"I will see you there, then," Olga said.

It wasn't quite a clang of broadswords coming together but it was close enough for Kate. "Maybe we could visit later, Olga?" she said with a big, all-inclusive smile. "Where are you staying?"

"At the Sheraton," Olga said, still curt.

"Good, so is emaa, I'll call you there, see you later." Kate turned and shepherded Cindy off in another direction, any direction. "What are you doing here, Cindy?" she said brightly. "Are you selling your kuspuks?"

Cindy led her back through the crowd, so jammed in now that it was a slow, steady process of "excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me" all the way across the room. Eventually they arrived at a table presided over by a grizzled woman with an unsmiling face who grunted when Cindy introduced her and returned immediately to the cuff to which she was sewing a strip of beaver fur.

"How do you know that one?" Cindy jerked her head in the direction from which they had come.

"I met her in Unalaska last year."

Cindy's expression didn't change. "She sits on the board of her corporation."

"And you sit on your tribal council, I believe." Cindy stared at her, eyes fierce, and Kate said in a moderate voice, "Cindy, you both want the same things. You just go about getting them in different ways."

"We do not want the same things," Cindy said. "She is for ANCSA and the regional corporations. All she cares about is making money and paying yearly dividends to the shareholders. I say we should scrap ANCSA and go back to the old ways. I say we should make the state give us control over our own courts and our own schools and our own fish and our own game." She paused, and for a moment Kate thought she might spit in disgust. "The only thing ANCSA did for us was turn us into gussuks."

Gussuk was a Native Alaskan term for white people, roughly equivalent to honky or nigger. Kate was saddened but unsurprised by the vitriol she heard in the old woman's voice, by the divisions it indicated existed within the Alaska Native community. Through her mind flashed Ekaterina's face when she was telling Kate of the internal strife within their own regional corporation. She wondered how much Cindy's view of ANCSA had been colored by the time she spent working in the Prudhoe Bay oil field.

Many of the divisions between Alaska Natives came from differences in lifestyle; rural versus urban, northeastern versus south-central. A tribal council existed on a local level, usually as the steering committee of the local Native association, usually centered on a town or village. A Native corporation existed on a regional level and acted as the umbrella organization for the various Native communities within its geographical area. ANCSA, or the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of

1971, had provided for the formation of twelve regional corporations by geographical area and a thirteenth to represent those Natives living outside Alaska, to distribute nearly $1 billion and select and distribute forty-four million acres of Alaskan land among the Native peoples. During the last thirty-odd years, some of the regional corporations had flourished beneath the guidance of strong and fiscally talented boards. Some of them had not. Consequently, some of the shareholders of some regional corporations were happy with the status quo. And some were not.

Ekaterina, Kate realized now with a shock of recognition, must have to deal with conflict like this every working day, over issues like Iqaluk and a thousand others of which Kate had no knowledge. She was embarrassed not to have appreciated this before, and a little ashamed to feel relieved to be isolated from it, away off on her homestead. Not ashamed enough to run for either vacant board seat, however. The very thought was enough to stiffen her spine. At thirty-three, she had some idea of what she was and was not capable of. When she loved, she loved.