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Somewhere very far away, or perhaps quite close, a songbird gave forth with three pure descending notes. Kate’s laugh was half sob. “Oh, Emaa,” she whispered, leaning her head on her knees, “these white boys are going to be the death of me. Where have all the Aleut boys gone, long time passing?”
Unbidden, the memory of those few moments in that bunk in Bering in July flashed into her head, and Jim Chopin’s muffled curse rang in her ears. And later, the gentleness of his hands and lips and the-she could only call it the kindness in his eyes, the comfort of his arms just before he flew back to the Park.
“No,” she said, jumping to her feet. Mutt, ears tuned to the rustle of a ptarmigan beneath a spruce tree thirty feet east, leapt up and barked an inquiry.
“No, no, no” Kate said, and marched back to the cabin.
4
Jim Chopin had been an Alaskan state trooper for almost twenty years, most of it posted in Tok, a town of twelve hundred, which sat on pretty much the northern limit of the Park and sixty-odd miles short of the Canadian border. The Tok trooper post, consisting of one sergeant and two corporals, constituted the sum of state law enforcement for the entire Park, a vast area occupied by less than fourteen thousand people-Park rats and Park rangers, hunters and trappers and fishermen, homesteaders, a few farmers, pilots, miners. They were elders and babies, housewives and career women, doctors, lawyers, and thirty-four Indian chiefs. They were white and Athabascan and Aleut and Tlin-git and Eyak. They were Latino and Russian and Japanese and Korean. There was even one lone Frenchman from Toulouse, who had emigrated twenty years before and now had a cushy job pushing the grader down the road for the state, stationed at the road-maintenance facility at the Nabesna turnoff, from which he lay ardent siege to every woman with car trouble who drove or didn’t drive by. His optimism was much admired, although even the cynical had to admit his success ratio was amazingly high. “Of course his standards aren’t,” Bernie pointed out, and sage heads nodded around the bar.
Jim, an immigrant from San Jose, California, liked two things about the Park right away: Pretty much everyone knew everyone else, and the air was clear every day. Later, when he passed his check rides, he liked flying even more, so much so that after getting his license for fixed wing, he went on ahead and got it for rotor, as well. Responding to a cry for help a hundred miles away and getting there in under an hour while never, ever, being stuck in traffic added considerably to the bottom line of his “Closed Cases” column.
He liked the people, good people, mostly, although obstinate, opinionated, determined, capable, and, above all, independent, with the highest per capita ratio of Libertarians in the state. Of course, this was a state where the Democratic party had feared that Jimmy Carter was going to come in third in the 1980 election.
He liked the sheer beauty of the place, the mountains, the rivers, the valleys. He liked that he could fly hundreds of miles in every direction with only an occasional roof, painted dark green to blend in with the treetops, to remind him that he was still on the same continent he’d been born on.
He liked the job. He knew he was good at it. He was the first call for the village elder with a knifing on his hands, the first call for the mayor of the town with the sniffing problem at the high school, the first call for the Fish and Game trooper who had caught someone fishing behind the markers. He knew where all the dope growers lived and where all the dealers they sold to drank, and who took the black bear out of season and sold the parts on the black market to what Asian dealers, and what guides were likely to violate the wanton-waste law by taking the rack and leaving the meat. He was all the law many of the Park rats would ever see in their lives, and for some of them, the only government representative. In his time, he had helped kids fill out Social Security forms, flown the public health nurse into villages where the entire student body of the local school had been stricken with chicken pox, backed up a tribal policeman in way over his head in a hostage situation involving a drunk, the drunk’s best friend, the drunk’s wife, a pint of Everclear, and a.357. Most of the time, he was able to talk the situation into the clear. A few times, he’d had to pull his weapon. So far, he had never had to fire it, managing to restrain himself under the grossest possible provocation, such as someone shooting at him first.
He was on call twenty-four/seven and the ringing of the phone sounded to his ear like a bugler sounding a charge. He was the cavalry riding to the rescue of any Park rat who was under attack, and he didn’t care how politically incorrect the analogy was.
The phone rang constantly that morning in his office as he fielded calls from an irate father whose daughter had run off with her high school sweetheart, a distraught grandmother whose grandson had been beating her, a village elder reporting a shipment of 102 cases of vodka and whiskey into a dry village, a big game guide wanting to know what the summons was for and how the hell he was supposed to get to Ahtna for a courtroom appearance with his plane broken down. The next call was from a young man who had failed at fishing in Alaganik and who now wanted to go to the University of Alaska Interior in Ahtna to learn how to work a computer but didn’t know how to fill out the form. Jim ascertained that the eloping daughter was of legal age, dispatched one corporal to take the grandmother’s statement, dispatched another to intercept and confiscate the shipment of alcohol, hung up on the big game guide, and walked the fisherman through the application form.
The next call was from his boss in Anchorage. “Hey, Jim, how’s it hanging?”
Jim sat back and put his feet up on his desk, there to admire the immaculate shine on his black leather boots. “About six inches from the floor,” he replied.
A scoffing laugh. “Yeah, you wish.”
“No, you do.”
There followed the traditional exchange of insults and exaggerations so dear to the hearts of the male of the species, particularly those who were longtime friends and allies in the war on crime. Finally, his boss said, “We’ve been doing some thinking down here, Jim.”
Uh-oh. “Thinking about what?”
“About your workload.”
“What about it?”
A genial chuckle. “It’s kind of heavy, isn’t it?”
“So what else is new?”
“Well, we were thinking of lightening it up a little.”
Jim took his feet off the desk and sat up to look at the map of the Park tacked to the wall behind his desk. “Define ‘lightening up.” “
Another chuckle. “Breaking a chunk off your post’s area of jurisdiction, for starters.”
“What chunk?”
“The southern half. From, say, Niniltna south.”
Fully half of his command. Which wouldn’t do his career a hell of a lot of good. But then, he wasn’t bucking for promotion anyway. He had no ambition to retire in Tal-keetna.
On the other hand, he and his people were getting the job done. “What brought this on?”
A sigh. “You know we’ve got these bean counters ru
The Outside auditors the state had brought in. “I’ve heard.”
The chuckle was not quite as genial this time. “Yeah. They’ve seen the amount of reports you file, the case load. They’re thinking you’re overworked, and that it’s going to cause problems down the road.”
“Why not just assign me another corporal?”
“I suggested that.”
“And?”
“They also looked at the response times. Hell, Jim, they’ve got a point. That’s the hell of a lot of territory you people cover. Some of that territory is a long way from where you’re sitting.”