Blood Will Tell (3 page)

For the moment, authority had given way to sorrow. She stretched out a hand, touching her fingertips to the brown, wrinkled back of Ekaterina's in an involuntary gesture of comfort that one of them recognized as an unprecedented event. "What's wrong, emaa?"

Ekaterina shifted in her chair and raised her right hand to rub her left elbow, gnarled fingers digging deep into the aching joint. Her rheumatism was acting up, Kate thought. "You know the Alaska Federation of Natives convention is next week." Kate stiffened. Ekaterina had been trying to get Kate to go to the annual AFN convention for the last three years. Kate's refusal stemmed from three things: one, it was in Anchorage, two, it was in Anchorage at the time of year Kate most loved to be home, and three, it was in Anchorage.

"The Niniltna board also will meet at that time."

Kate gave a wary nod.

"There are matters before the board," Ekaterina said.

Kate's smile was sour. Ekaterina was notoriously closemouthed on Association affairs, even to the granddaughter she hoped would succeed to her position. "Come on, emaa. If you're going to tell me any of it, you've got to tell me all of it."

Ekaterina appeared to see the sense of this. "There is a logging contract under consideration. With Pacific Northwest Paper Products."

"Another one?" Kate shrugged. "I thought the corporation had three or four deals with PNP."

"We do."

"Their checks aren't bouncing, are they?"

Ekaterina shook her head. "Those ones are even talking about putting in a new mill in south central Alaska, so that we can build our new Association offices with lumber processed from timber harvested from our own land."

"Those ones."

" Ekaterina was talking like an old one, an elder. Kate looked across the table at the worn, lined face and with a tiny shock of recognition realized that Ekaterina was in fact an elder. She gave herself a mental shake. Of course she was an elder, she was eighty years old, maybe more.

"Sounds like a good idea," she said. "The Association has always encouraged the development of local industry and local hire.

What's the problem?" Ekaterina's face was wooden, and Kate paused with her mug halfway to her mouth. "Emaa," she said. "Where for this time?

What part do they want to log?"

"Iqaluk."

Kate's mug thudded down on the table.

Iqaluk was fifty thousand acres of land that fronted the eastern shore of the Kanuyaq River and the Prince William Sound coast, with dozens of creeks draining into the Kanuyaq. It had some of the richest salmon spawning grounds in the Sound, hence the name, iqaluk, the Aleut word for salmon. It was part of the coastal rain forest extending from Cook Inlet to the Canadian border south of Ketchikan, and included commercial stands of western hemlock, Sitka spruce and Alaska cedar.

Iqaluk was one of the last unexploited old-growth forests in the state, and the subject of hot debate between the Niniltna Native Association, Raven Corporation, the state of Alaska and the federal government in the guises of the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior.

Ekaterina and the Niniltna Native Association wanted the land deeded to them as part of the tribal entity's compensation under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Passed by the U.S. Congress in 1971, signed into law by President Nixon, the settlement and in particular certain land allocations included in the settlement were still under negotiation at state and federal levels, with all concerned fighting over who got the best parts. Raven, the parent corporation for Niniltna's region, wanted the land deeded to them so they could lease it out for logging and have the profits accrue to the corporation and its shareholders. The state wanted title for the same reason and for the corporate taxes it would generate for the state, which would not be forthcoming if the land was deeded to Raven. The timber companies didn't care who got title to Iqaluk so long as it wasn't the Department of the Interior, which would turn it over to the National Park Service, whose stated intention was to declare the area a wildlife refuge, which would exclude exploitation of any kind. Declaring it a refuge would also put limits on hunting and fishing, and Iqaluk had been a subsistence hunting and fishing area for Park Natives for the last five thousand years, which brought the controversy full circle back to Ekaterina and the Niniltna Native Association, who wanted to reserve the right of the People to continue to feed their families.

Problems of land ownership in Alaska were further compounded by the suit filed against the state by mental health advocates. Prior to statehood, Alaska had been granted a million acres of federal land with the proviso that some portion of revenues generated by the land be used to fund mental health programs in the state. Naturally the state reneged on the deal, and of course the mental health advocates sued, and at present the case languished in the courts. It was a complex, convoluted issue made more complex and infinitely more convoluted by the approximately 3,946 lawyers involved, all of whom billed by the hour, and it made Kate's head hurt just to think about it. "What about Iqaluk?" she said. "I thought title to the area was still being contested by everyone involved."

"It is."

"But?" Kate said.

"But that lawyer tells the board that it looks as if the court is making a decision soon. That lawyer says he thinks the federal government will get it."

"Could be worse," Kate said. "Could be the state government."

Ekaterina nodded. "Whatever is decided, the board needs to make some decisions. If we get the land, we need to be ready."

"Decisions? What are you talking about, what decisions? I thought the board supported leaving Iqaluk alone, keeping it for traditional purposes, hunting and fishing and like that."

"I support that," Ekaterina said.

"You support it?" Kate frowned. Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was the board of the Niniltna Native Association, its oldest member, chair and conscience. "What about what the board supports? What's going on?"

"There are five members on the Niniltna board."

A feeling of apprehension grew in Kate's breast. "You, Billy Mike, Enakenty Barnes, Sarah Kompkoff and Harvey Meganack. You've got a four-to-one majority. Don't you?"

There was a dirge-like quality to Ekaterina's answer. "Sarah Kompkoff is dead."

"What? Sarah? Emaa, are you sure?"

Ekaterina's nod was heavy.

Sarah Kompkoff was Kate's second cousin, or third cousin by marriage, or maybe both, she couldn't remember at the moment. They hadn't been close but Kate remembered her vividly, a short, compact woman with a quick lip and a quicker laugh, a first-rate cook and the first villager to sign on with the rural sobriety movement. She'd trained in and then taught substance abuse workshops at the school, and she had been the community health representative for the tribal association. "She couldn't have been more than fifty."

"Fifty-two," Ekaterina said.

"What happened?" Kate asked, afraid of the answer. Sarah had been sober for six years. The last thing Kate wanted to hear was that she'd fallen off the wagon. "Was there an accident?"

"No."

"What then?" "They said she died of botulism."

"Oh, no," Kate said, surprised and appalled and, yes, a little relieved.

"From her salmon?"

"Yes."

"Oh no. Did she make up her usual warehouse full of cases this year?"

"Yes."

"Damn," Kate said. "If she made a bad batch, we'd better track it down.

You know how she gives it out to the whole town of Ahtna, not to mention anybody else who happens to be driving by her house."

"Dawn and Terra and Rose are already asking around."

"Good." Sarah's three daughters were reliable people. "Emaa. Even with Sarah dead, you still have a majority on the board." Enakenty Barnes was a first cousin, and unlike Kate, where Ekaterina led Enakenty followed.

Billy Mike was Ekaterina's hand-picked successor as tribal chief, and had been in Ekaterina's pocket since before ANCSA. Harvey Meganack, on the other hand, wasn't a cousin that she knew of. He was a commercial fisherman and a professional hunting guide who sat on the state board of Fish and Game, and was so pro-development he was almost gubernatorial material. He openly supported developing Iqaluk, and a significant number of shareholders backed his stand, in particular some of the fishermen still suffering the effects of the RPetco Anchorage spill.

Ekaterina had backed Harvey's election to the Niniltna board as a sop to the pro development forces within the Association, and because she thought she had him boxed in by the four traditional board votes. "It's still three to one," Kate said, relaxing.

"Perhaps," Ekaterina said.

Something in her voice made Kate sit up again. "Enakenty? It sure as hell can't be Billy, emaa." Ekaterina had the knack of saying more without saying a word elevated to a fine art, and Kate, openly incredulous, said," "But I thought Billy Mike held more for the old ways."

"So did I."

"You mean he's changed?"

Her grandmother made no move except to lower her eyes. "I don't know."

"But you are worried." Kate waited. Ekaterina didn't answer. "Emaa. I won't run for Sarah's seat." Ekaterina was silent some more. Kate set her teeth and groped around for her self-control, which seemed almost always to scuttle under the bed when Ekaterina walked in the door. "What reason do you have to suspect that Billy has changed his mind about Iqaluk?"

Ekaterina practiced looking impassive.

Kate took a deep breath and counted to ten. In Aleut, whose harsh gutturals were more satisfying. "So. The Niniltna board meets next week, at the same time as the AFN convention. The subject of Iqaluk is bound to come up. One, maybe two members of the board want Iqaluk opened for development, two don't. The fifth is dead. That about cover it?"

Ekaterina hesitated a moment too long. "Emaa?"

The old woman said firmly, "That's all."

The two words were the same two words used to end every story and legend Ekaterina recited daily to an ever increasing horde of grand-and great-grandchildren jostling for position in her lap. Kate remembered Olga Shapsnikoff using the same words in Unalaska, and she wondered if the elders in Toksook Bay and Arctic Village ended their stories the same way.

She also wondered what Ekaterina knew that she wasn't telling her. She went to bed wondering.

The ladder squeaked beneath her feet the next morning as she slipped from the loft and went outside to the outhouse. The coals in the wood stove were buried in gray ash and still red hot beneath. Kate fed it bits of kindling until it reached out hungrily for a real meal of logs.

She turned up the oil stove and put the kettle on for coffee. Her grandmother was a still lump of blankets on the couch. Kate brushed her teeth and sluiced her face with water from the kitchen pump, skin tingling from its icy touch. She pumped up more to drink and it burned clean and cold all the way down. When she leaned over to place the glass in the drainer, she caught sight of her reflection in the tiny, rectangular mirror hanging crookedly on the wall next to the window. The sun wouldn't be up for another hour and her slanting image was shadowed in the somber half-light of the single lantern she had lit and turned down low.

Her skin was dark from a month of picking mushrooms at Chistona, and another month of gill netting reds on the flats at the mouth of the Kanuyaq, and still another month of picking blueberries and cranberries and raspberries in the Teglliqs. It had been a long, hot summer with record high temperatures; every hour of every day was burned into her skin, turning its natural light golden cast a deep and abiding amber.

The black of her hair was unchanged, a shining fall straight to her waist. She bound it back in a loose French braid, fingers moving quickly, mechanically. Hazel eyes stared out at her from beneath straight black brows, the expression in them reserved, restrained, waiting.

For what?

Giving her head an impatient shake, she took the down jacket from the caribou rack hanging on the wall next to the door and slipped noiselessly from the cabin into the stillness of the morning. Mutt padded forward to thrust a cold nose into her hand and she knotted her fingers in the thick, comfortingly familiar gray ruff.

Twenty feet behind the cabin was the bank of the creek, in which water ran clear and cold and deep. Beyond the far bank the land fell away to the east in a long, wide valley, to rise again in the distant foothills and peaks of the Quilak Mountains. Angqaq loomed largest of all, rearing up against the dawn like a wild horse with a stiff white mane, the biggest and strongest and most headstrong of the herd. Kate grinned a little at the thought. More than one impertinent climber had been bucked off the Big Bump. She raised a hand in salute. As usual, Angqaq ignored her with aloof indifference, but she had stood once on his summit and they both remembered the occasion, whether he would admit to it or not.

There was a large boulder on the near bank, the top worn smooth from years of use by Shugak backsides. Kate sat down. Mutt sat next to her and leaned up against her legs, a warm, heavy presence. They watched the horizon, waiting.

At first it was no more than a luminous outlining of the distant peaks, a deceptively soft suggestion of what was to come. For a while it remained so, the light snared in the spurs and crags of rock and ice as it gathered in strength and presence. When the peaks could no longer contain the flood the light welled up and spilled through the gaps, glimmering trickles that swelled into gleaming streams and gleaming streams into bright rivers, the sun in spate. The bowl of the valley was filled to its ragged brim with a torrent of light that splashed down the Kanuyaq and up every feeder creek and spill stream. Engulfed in the backwash, the shallow canyon at Kate's feet was too narrow to contain it all and it splashed off the banks and fountained up to catch at the tips of an eagle's wings, soaring high overhead.

Her heart ached with the beauty of it. She didn't want to leave, the Park, the homestead, her home, her place in the universe. Her grandmother had said she would not take Kate from the place that gave her strength, in truth had not asked her to come. She didn't have to.