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Jim sat back and propped his feet on the windowsill this time, looking at the map of the Park. Niniltna was at its heart, when Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was still alive in more ways than one. Ahtna and Cordova were bigger, but Niniltna had the strong native association, with its solid leadership, and some legendary figures as shareholders. One in particular.
It also had a 4,800-foot airstrip, long enough to land a jet on-a small one anyway. Always supposing any pilot worthy of the name would put anything other than a Here down on gravel. “Just as a matter of curiosity,” Jim said, “have we got enough funding to create a new post?”
“Yeah, right.”
A brief silence as Jim surveyed the map again. “Gene,” he said, “are you satisfied with my work?”
A snort this time. “If I wasn’t, you would have heard so before now.”
“So if I come up with another way to set what passes for the bean counters’ minds at ease, you’d listen to it?”
“Hell yes. What is it?”
“Give me a couple of days?” He waited.
“Yeah,” Gene said finally. “Okay.”
“One more thing.”
“What?”
“You know Dan O’Brian?”
A brief pause. Jim could hear the Rolodex between his boss’s ears clicking. “Dan O’Brian. Right. Chief ranger your area. What about him?”
“He mouthed off about drilling for oil in ANWR. They’re trying to force him into retirement.”
“So? Should have kept his mouth shut.”
“Agreed, but otherwise he’s a good man. We work well together. I’d hate to have to break in some newbie. Can you call somebody, make some noise?”
“I can call several.”
“I owe you.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see after the next time we talk.”
“Gotcha,” Jim said, gri
It was as clear and calm this morning as it had been the night before, the big high pressure system hanging over interior Alaska strong enough to keep it that way for the next three to four days. He had done preflight and refueled the Cessna with the shield on its side the night before. All he had to do was roll her out, and he was in the air five minutes later. He was on the ground in Niniltna in less than an hour, taxiing up to the hangar that served as headquarters for George Perry’s two-plane air taxi service. George was there, pulling the backseat from his Super Cub and loading the back with mailbags. “Thank God for the U.S. Postal Service,” he said in greeting.
A U.S. Postal Service mail contract had been the savior of more than one Bush air taxi ru
George gri
“Oh.” The only Christmas presents Jim sent were to his parents, usually something out of a catalog. In return, he got a card accompanied by a baseball cap with the logo of whatever sports team his father was currently following, and a box of his mother’s homemade fudge. The fudge, he ate immediately. The cap usually went to the first kid he saw in the next village he flew into. The card lasted longer than either of them.
“What’s up?” George said. “Somebody get uppity enough to require the personal attention of the law?”
Jim gave a noncommittal grunt. George had heard that grunt before, and he changed the subject. “See you at Bernie’s later?”
“I don’t know. Depends on if I have to make a run.”
“Try.” George gri
“Ah. It’s Middle Finger time.”
“You got it.”
“George?”
“What?”
“Tell me about weather in the Park.”
George cocked a quizzical eyebrow.
“Pilot to pilot,” Jim said.
George’s take was that it was typical Interior weather-a lot of cold, clear days in the winter and a lot of hot, clear days in the summer, if you didn’t count the blizzards and the forest fires, respectively. “We’re in between the Alaska Range and the Chugach Range,” George told him, “with the Quilaks at our backs, and we’re far enough away from all of them to keep us CAVU more often than not. So what’s all this about?”
“Something in the wind,” Jim said. “I’ll let you know.”
“Will it be good for the air taxi business?”
“Yes. In fact, start figuring out how much you’d charge to haul prisoners to Ahtna, Tok, or Anchorage. And try to keep it below highway robbery.”
“Wilco.” George, not the most curious of men, tossed the seats in on top of the mail and cut the conversation short. “Gotta go. Got three passengers waiting on a ride into the Park, and it ain’t so often this time of year I got a full load coming back from a mail run.”
George took off and Jim walked around the hangar and down the road. His destination wasn’t far, but then, nothing in Niniltna was far from anything else. A block in that direction was the school, a block in the other the river, and in between was the airstrip and the mostly handmade homes of the town. The Niniltna Native Association building, prefabricated, vinyl-sided, and tin-roofed, stood on its own ground a little farther out and a little higher up, looking like a benevolent uncle with a fat belly, kicking back in the winter sunshine.
Ekaterina Moonin Shugak had ruled her kingdom from there. In her titular place was now Billy Mike, the association’s new president and tribal chief. But through a long and profitable acquaintance with the Park and all its residents, Jim knew where the real power lay.
He went to see Auntie Vi.
Auntie Vi lived in a big house that used to be filled with children and was now filled with guests who paid far too much for a bed, a bathroom down the hall, and an unvarying breakfast of cocoa and fry bread. It was good cocoa, Hershey’s, homemade, and superb fry bread, and Jim was lucky to be early enough to be offered some of both. He sat down next to a man in a nattily stitched denim pantsuit. The man took one look at Jim’s uniform and ate the rest of his meal with as much of the back of his head toward Jim as possible, and then sidled out at his earliest opportunity.
“A uniform does have a way of clearing out a room,” he said ruefully to Auntie Vi.
She laughed as she finished clearing the table. “This way, I didn’t have to serve him seconds. Ay, those bums, they eat me out of house and home if they have the chance.”
Just then, her other guests came in, a couple of state surveyors, who conversed in numbers, scribbling lines and formulae on a sheet of paper held between them. Jim wasn’t sure they’d even registered his existence. They left, too, after stuffing themselves and their pockets with fry bread, which immediately showed up in grease stains on the out-sides of their jackets. Jim noticed Auntie Vi made no objection, and he reflected on the state’s propensity not to dicker on a set price for Bush accommodation. Auntie Vi’s favorite customer, the state of Alaska.
Auntie Vi was about four feet tall and weighed maybe eighty pounds with her false eyelashes on. She was one of Ekaterina’s contemporaries and therefore had to be in her late seventies, if not her early eighties, but the years sat lightly upon her shoulders. She had her share of wrinkles around the eyes and mouth and the backs of her hands, but her spine was still straight, her step light, her hair as thick as a girl’s, although she had allowed the temples to go gray, giving her an elegant look that could only have benefited from a crown perched thereon. She had a wide smile filled with improbably square teeth, a pug nose, and bright brown button eyes that were naturally inquisitive.
She finished clearing the table and bustled the dishes into the kitchen, leaving him to enjoy the last piece of fry bread and the dregs of his now-lukewarm cocoa in solitary splendor. It was a rectangular room, big enough to hold a table that seated twelve, along with twelve chairs and a sideboard with a hutch on top of it. Flowery prints decorated the walls, which were covered with some tiny floral-print wallpaper in a delicate yellow. There were ruffles on the sheer white curtains hanging at the windows, and tatted tablecloths covered the surface of the table and sideboard and the backs of all twelve chairs. It was a very feminine room, but not so feminine that he felt uncomfortable in it.