Killing Grounds (18 page)

She shook her head, glad she didn't have to justify her smile to Old Sam. Impossible to explain that a trick of light on water made her think of a sculptor born on the other side of the world four hundred years before. Although if he was going to start quoting Shakespeare at her she might suspect him of taking telecourses from the University of Alaska.

She passed half a dozen bears fishing and eating and roughhousing on a sandbank, three eagles playing tag in the treetops and a couple of white-tail deer drinking out of the creek, which in her opinion paid for the gas before she even got to fish camp. To put the icing on the cake, Mutt was waiting for her when the skiff nudged ashore, and greeted Kate with a joyous bark and a generous swipe of the tongue. Kate wiped her face on the sleeve of her shirt and gave Mutt an affectionate cuff up alongside the head. "Where were you when I needed you?" she said.

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

She looked up and saw Jack at the top of the bank. "I was attacked by Jedi this afternoon."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Never mind. It's better you should not know." She gave Mutt a final pat. "But you're coming with me when I have to go back there." Mutt appeared willing.

"Kate!" Johnny's head appeared above the top of the grass. "You're back!" He catapulted down the bank and grabbed her hand. "Come on! Come see what I've been doing!"

What he'd been doing was helping the four old women pick fish out of the fish wheel, head them, gut them, fillet them so that they were split into two halves still attached at the tail and hang them to dry. The rack inside the smokehouse was full, and the little fire beneath was smoking nicely. Some of the strips were already turning a rich, dark red. Kate's mouth watered. When the process was complete, the resulting product, when eaten, would smell up the house for three days afterwards, and your jaws would ache for at least that long, but oh, the taste. There was nothing like Auntie Joy's smoke fish, nothing.

But the rule was you didn't get any if you hadn't helped the process along, and in the waning light Kate pitched in, splitting lengths of alder (like Old Sam, Auntie Joy swore by alder for smoke fish) and taking a turn feeding the fire. Fish smoking was a long process, involving days and, depending on the weather, sometimes a whole week, during which time the fire could not be allowed to go out.

By the time the sun went down they were sitting around a fireplace constructed out of smooth rocks excavated from the stream bed. It wasn't really cold enough for one, but when you have been in and out of an Alaskan creek a dozen times in one day, the warmth of an open flame is a welcome thing. There was something very social about a fire, too, Kate thought, looking at the faces seated around it. Balasha and Edna had their heads bent over a quilt, gnarled fingers deft with needle and thread. It was a forget-me-not pattern, and Kate wished she had the guts to ask for it when it was done. Forget-me-nots were her favorite flower, the first to bud in the spring, the last to lose its blossoms in the fall, a tiny, exquisite, blue-petaled work of natural art. Balasha and Edna had appli-qued a delicate forget-me-not in the center of every square; when finished, the quilt was going to be drop-dead gorgeous. "You just made a forget-me-not quilt," Kate said, remembering the quilting bee at Bernie's the previous spring. They hadn't given her that one, either.

Edna bit off a thread. "We cut out pieces for four, same time all. Then we make."

Kate tried to sound casual. "So, who is this one for?"

Edna cocked an eyebrow. "You marrying up soon, Katya?"

Kate had to shake her head, and Edna heaved a mournful sigh and shook her own in response. "Then I guess this one we make for Dinah."

"She got the last one," Kate protested. The wedding was coming up the first week of September, over the Labor Day weekend, after fishing season and before hunting season. It was going to be a fly-in affair since Bobby had friends from Metlakatla to Nome who had expressed a firm desire to witness the event. While everyone in the Park hoped that the ceremony would precede the birth of Dinah and Bobby's first child, Dinah was already the general size and shape of a Babylonian fertility goddess. Already on tap as best man and maid of honor, Kate figured she might as well add godmother to her list of wedding day duties.

But she stuck to the point. "Dinah already got a quilt, she said, trying not to pout and whining instead.

"Then we save to give to someone else." Edna pointed a needle at her. "You get married up, you get a quilt. That's the rule."

Kate grumbled something beneath her breath.

Auntie Joy chuckled. She had discovered a patch of early salmonberries, and was sitting over a pot full of them which she had flooded with water to float the trash away, picking out leaves and twigs and berry worms. Auntie Vi was sitting across from her, helping, and as they skimmed bits of twig and tin worms from the surface they gossiped in soft Aleut gutturals They paused once, looking Kate's way, and not for the first time did she regret her father's insistence that she learn English and only English as she was growing up. The most schooling; he had gotten was the short boot camp required of Castners Cutthroats, and he had always felt at a disadvantage in the English tongue, something he was determined would not be experienced by his daughter. And Abel, of course, had known of his wishes and had brought Kate up accordingly, not that he spoke anything but English all his life. Her grandmother might have rectified the situation, if she hadn't been so much like her granddaughter in character, strong-willed and stubborn, that they fought incessantly from the time Kate was a child. Kate had not been inclined to take instruction from Ekaterina. She smiled at the thought.

Johnny was practicing the fine art of net mending on a square of ragged gear. The green plastic needle swooped through the mesh, hesitated and came back up. Auntie Vi raised an eyebrow at the resultant tangle, took the needle and in a few deft moves had the section of mesh hanging evenly. Johnny sighed heavily, but he took the needle back and tried again. Not a quitter, Johnny Morgan.

Like his father. He was sitting across the fire, looking at Kate with love in his eyes. He jerked his head toward the creek. She gave a tiny nod and got to her feet. Mutt, sprawled next to her, raised her head. "Stay," she said in a low voice, and with a voluptuous sigh Mutt stretched out again.

Jack let maybe forty-five seconds pass before following her, pretending they weren't all perfectly well aware of where he was going.

They rendezvoused at the skiff. "Hi," Kate said.

"I feel like a teenager sneaking out of his parents' house," Jack said.

She laughed. "Fun, isn't it?"

"Fun, hell," Jack said, and tackled her, toppling them both into the sand.

"Oof," Kate said.

"You taste like salt water."

"Urn."

"And you smell like woodsmoke."

"Urn," she said, and that was pretty much all she was allowed to say for the next few breathless moments, except for "Ouch!" and "Never mind, do it again." Things were rapidly approaching the point of no return when they both became aware of the advancing sound of an engine. They looked up. There was still plenty of light on this Arctic summer night, and coming straight up the creek fifty feet off the deck was George Perry in 50 Papa, the grin on his face matching the grin on the face of the trooper sitting in back of him. The port window was folded down, and over the noise of the Super Cub's engine George yelled cheerfully, "I'll set her down on that RPetCo strip about a mile upstream! Take your time!" They roared past. Chopper Jim even tipped his hat.

The mood had definitely been broken. "Goddammit!" A furious Jack was on his feet, beating the sand out of his jeans and buttoning his fly with clumsy fingers. "We're out in the middle of the goddam Bush and I still can't find enough privacy to get laid! What's next, a goddam grizzly walks in on us?"

From the other side of the creek, a goddam grizzly huffed at them, a salmon hanging from his mouth, before ambling up the bank and out of sight, enormous hindquarters shifting back and forth like perambulating beanbag chairs.

Jack whipped around and looked at Kate, his expression fierce. In the next moment, they both burst out laughing.

Kate tucked in her shirt and smoothed her hair back with a shaky hand. "We'd better go see what Chopper Jim's got.'

"A fat lip, is what he's about to get," Jack muttered.

"Somebody's been killed, Jack."

His hands stilled on his fly. "What?"

"Last night. Or early morning. We found his body in the water this morning."

"In the bay?" She nodded. "A fisherman?"

She nodded again, and told him. He listened in frowning silence, and when she came to the end, said, "Why didn't you tell me before?"

She thought of the boy, Frank, and of the girl, Dani, and said, "I just wanted to forget about it for a while."

He examined her face, saw what he needed to there and nodded once. "We'd better get up to that airstrip."

Kate led the way back to the fire. "Auntie Vi? We're going to head up to the strip."

"We heard, Katya. Go careful. There is bears here."

The warning reminded Kate irresistibly of the warnings written on the margins of ancient maps: "There be dragons here." Mutt trotted ahead of her, and Kate took comfort in her presence. Unlike most dogs, Mutt did not go berserk at the sight of a bear. She was too smart and had been too well trained for that. At 140 pounds, standing well over three feet tall at the shoulder, she had backed down more than one bear, and would do so again. And it was July, after all; the bears had been eating since the first kings came up the creek in late May. A full grizzly was a happy grizzly, and less inclined to bother with anything lacking fins.

Or so she told herself, and took care to step on every piece of deadfall she could as she moved through the brush. The cracking and popping of dry wood breaking was a whistle past the graveyard. Behind her, she heard Jack doing the same thing.

The trail was faintly marked and bore signs of having been recently pruned, the white gashes of lopped limbs glowing white against the trunks of alder and spruce and cotton-wood. It was also darker in the brush, and once Jack tripped over an exposed root and staggered against her. "Sorry."

She caught his hands, which were interested in more than merely catching his balance. "Sure you are. Knock it off, Jack." He muttered something, sounding injured, and she bit back something that might have been a giggle.

He sensed it and snatched her up in his arms. The most protest she gave was a halfhearted wriggle, until she felt a tree press against her back. "No, Jack, we've got to get going." He dropped to his knees. "Oh." She swallowed. When she spoke again, her voice was breathless. "Really. They're waiting for us."

His words were muffled. "George told us to take our time." He looked up at her and grinned. "I'm just following orders."

She pushed at his shoulders. "Get up. No, dammit, I mean it." She slipped free, fastening her jeans, and sprinted out of reach when he came up off his knees and lunged at her. They romped up the trail, alternately led and pursued by a barking Mutt, both of them aware of and keenly enjoying a sense of play that had been missing from their relationship for a long time. Life was too short to be that grim, Jack reflected, and copped a quick feel before Kate darted out of reach again, laughing and warding him off. They emerged on the little gravel strip ten minutes later, out of breath, disheveled and light of heart.

The strip was within sound of the rush of water over stone, the more or less flat surface cut down to sand that sank beneath their feet. Good thing George's Super Cub was on tundra tires, Kate thought, enormous, cartoon-balloon tires dwarfed only by the acre of wingspan that made the Cub the quintessential Bush plane. It was drawn up at one end of the runway. George and Chopper Jim were standing next to it, waiting. Mutt caught sight of Chopper Jim, gave an enthusiastic yip and tore across the strip, sand flying, to greet him big-time Mutt style.

"Is there a female in the Park that doesn't go weak at the knees at the sight of that guy?" Jack said from behind her.

"Not a one," Kate said cheerfully, and walked down the strip.

Jack, who had been expecting her answer to be, "One. Me," followed, disconcerted. What he was feeling was written plainly on his face, and she took care to keep her head turned away from him so he couldn't read her expression, which would call for retaliation big-time Jack style.

"Where's the Cessna?" she asked Jim as they walked up

to the plane. He shrugged. "I wasn't familiar with this strip, and there wasn't a beach around here long or flat enough to take her. And you know how the state frowns on employees dinging its property. I met George dropping off fish at the airport, so"

Alaska pilots never wrecked planes, Kate remembered. They dented them, they dinged them, she'd even heard one pilot say he had pranged one, but they never, ever wrecked them. It was the difference between pilot error and calculated risk, another had told her. And of course no one ever admitted to pilot error, either.

"Besides," he added, "it's after legal twilight."

Hadn't stopped George, but then the pilot could fly in and out of most Bush strips blindfolded. "How'd you know where we were?" She looked at George.

George Perry was a tall thin man with a long thin face in perpetual need of a shave, wearing his habitual oil-stained overalls. "You weren't on the Freya. We flew over and asked Mary. Old Sam was there, and he pointed up the creek, so we figured you were at fish camp."

"And there you were, and in all your splendor, too," Chopper Jim observed. He might have ideas about Kate himself, but he was never needy enough to be jealous of another man's good fortune.

Or at least that was the attitude he was trying to project. Jack read something else in the gaze regarding him steadily from beneath the brim of the trooper hat, something perhaps only another man interested in Kate Shugak would see. "Up yours, Chopin," he suggested amiably.

Jim eyed Jack's six feet four with a speculative glance that took in the other man's ruffled hair and misbuttoned shirt and traveled on to the T-shirt that bore signs of being hastily stuffed back into the waistband of Kate's jeans. He reminded himself he was in uniform, and sent Jack a bland smile.