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There were pictures of tracks of every kind-in the mud of spring and the swamp of summer, but mostly in the snow: the long stride and enormous feet of a wolf, the smaller prints of a fox, and the tiny prints of a vole.
In one picture, the hip-hopping tracks of an arctic hare vanished, just stopped altogether. “See?” Dina had said, pointing. Feathered ends of wing tips left a ghostly clue in the show on either side of the tracks.
“Wow,” Joh
“A golden eagle, from the wingspan. Aquila chrysaetos,” Dina had said, and she had made him repeat the words until he had the pronunciation correct. “Of the family Accipitridae.”
“I’ve only ever seen bald eagles,” he had said humbly, and when she’d turned the page, there was a picture of a golden eagle in flight, at about five hundred feet up, the photo shot from the window of a plane. He could see part of one strut.
“Is that a Super Cub?” he said.
Dina was impressed. “Yes.”
“Is it yours?”
She nodded. “It’s at the strip in Niniltna. How did you know it was a Cub?”
He looked back at the picture of the golden eagle. “My dad was a pilot.”
“I know. I met him. He drove a Cessna, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. A one seventy-two.”
“I remember. Lycoming conversion.”
“Yeah.”
“Sweet little plane. What happened to it?”
“My mom sold it when my dad died.”
The kitchen timer had dinged then and Ruthe had taken a sheet of cookies out of the oven, the best oatmeal cookies he’d ever eaten. She sent him home with a bagful. She was pretty, and as smart as Dina. He’d liked them both, and he was sorry there would be no more evenings spent at their cabin eating fresh-baked goodies out of the oven and looking at pictures of otters sliding down a snowbank into a creek.
The tea had steeped and melted the honey and he’d stirred all the lumps out of the cocoa. He added marsh-mallows to the cocoa and carried both mugs to the table, sitting down across from her. “How long did you know them?”
“Hmm? What?” She looked down and saw the mug. “Oh. Thanks.” She curved her hands around it, warming her fingers, which felt suddenly cold.
“So how long did you know them?”
“Ruthe and Dina?” She stared down at the surface of the tea, a golden yellow. “All my life. They were friends of my grandmother.”
He nodded, very serious, and wiped marshmallow from his mouth. “Emaa.”
“Yes.”
“And she’s dead, too.”
“Yes.”
“Is the tea all right?”
“What? Oh.” She sipped at the tea for form’s sake. “Yes, it’s fine. Thanks, Joh
“You’re welcome.”
She put up a hand to rub her forehead. “It’s hard to believe. They seemed, I don’t know, larger than life. Like they’d live forever.”
“Like Dad,” Joh
She looked at him then. “What?”
“Like Dad,” Joh
He was only fourteen and he’d been orphaned by one parent and had orphaned himself from the second as a deliberate act. He was trying so hard to act grown-up, to take matters like divorce and separation and death in his stride, to be independent and autonomous and to move on and keep moving without looking back. Kate knew the feeling.
She didn’t make the mistake of denying she’d ever hurt his father, and she didn’t try to apologize. “I know. He was kind of… indestructible, I guess.”
“Except when he died,” Joh
“Except when he died,” Kate said.
“Can you tell me now?” Joh
“I told you what happened, Joh
“All of it, this time,” Joh
She met the blue eyes fixed so determinedly on her face, saw the pleading look in them. His whole body was tensed with the need to know of his father’s last hours on earth. It wasn’t that she hadn’t meant to tell him the whole story one day, when he was older and could handle it. And she could handle telling it.
“Can you? Please, Kate?”
It seemed, after all, that she could.
She followed Joh
Kate’s first stop was the Step. She walked into Dan’s office, Mutt at her heels, to find the ranger with his feet propped on the sill of the window and his hands laced behind his head. He had a moody expression on his face. “Hey,” she said.
He dropped his feet but not his hands, until Mutt insisted on a head scratch. “Hey.”
Kate sat down opposite him. “I heard.”
“I figured.”
“You okay?”
“I been suspended.”
“What?”
He tossed her a sheet of paper with the National Park Service letterhead; it was addressed to the chief ranger and placed him on suspension indefinitely, pending the outcome of the criminal investigation into the death of Dina Willner. Kate looked up. “I thought Jim had a suspect in custody.”
“He does.”
“Then what’s this crap?”
“Any stick’ll do to beat a dog with, Kate.” He looked at Mutt. “Sorry, babe. They want to get rid of me. It’s probably enough that I stumbled into the middle of a murder. Guilt by association.”
Kate tossed the paper into the garbage can. “You’re not going to put up with this shit, are you?”
“Well,” Dan said, shifting his gaze from the window to Kate, “there’s not a whole hell of a lot I can do about it. Of course, I’m the only one on duty at this time of year, and it’ll take a while before they find someone qualified to take over. I doubt that any of the suits in Anchorage are going to want to leave the bright lights and the big city to baby-sit in the wilderness.”
“Dan.”
“Kate-”
“You may be going to put up with this, but I’m not.”
He drew a deep breath and expelled it slowly. “I went there to ask Dina and Ruthe for their help in keeping this job. You got me so fired up last time we talked that I figured you were right, that I ought to fight for it, not just sit back and let my friends carry the weight. But now I don’t know. Dina’s dead, Kate, and Ruthe might die. Two great old broads, one gone, one maybe gone. Nothing else seems all that important right now.”
Kate leaned forward. “Dina and Ruthe would be the first to tell you that the land is what’s important, Dan. Not us. The land. We’re only custodians, and temporary ones at that. We do the best we can and then we pass the job along to the next generation. I don’t think you’re ready to hand off just yet.”
He looked at her with the faint glimmer of his old smile. “You be careful there, Shugak. You’re starting to sound like your grandmother.”
She sat back. “Did you see the guy Jim brought in?”
He shook his head.
“Did you see anything yourself?”
“No.” He seemed about to say something else, then repeated firmly, “No. I didn’t see anything. It doesn’t matter, really, if I saw anything or didn’t see anything. Jim got the guy. Crazy bastard, sounds like,” he added as an afterthought.
It sounded like the truth, she thought as she made her way back down the trail from the Step. It also sounded like Dan was trying to convince himself that it was. Which was crazy. Like Dan said, Jim got the guy, had him in custody in Ahtna. Case closed.
The sky had clouded over in the night and the temperature had warmed up to ten above, and if the rising barometer at the homestead was working right, there was a storm coming in off the Gulf. She drove through Niniltna to the turnoff and then, for the second time that week, negotiated the narrow track to the little cabin perched high on the side of the mountain. The snow in the yard was packed down hard from the passage of many vehicles, wheeled and tracked, and there were a couple of snow machines already parked there. She stopped hers and climbed the stairs.