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So, not u
The Park was now 20 million acres in size, located between the Quilak Mountains and the Gle
The river was navigable by boat in summer and by snow machine in winter. The coast was almost impenetrable everywhere else, defended by a lush coastal rain forest made of Sitka spruce, hemlock, alder, birch, willow, and far too much devil’s club. Behind it, the land rose into a broad valley, then a plateau, foothills, and lastly the Quilaks, mountains forming an arc of the Alaska Range. There was a grizzly bear (“Of the Kingdom Animalia” went Dina’s voice, starchy and schoolmarmy, “Ursus arctos horribilis, once known to roam much of the continent of North America, now restricted to the northern Rockies, western Canada, and, of course, Alaska”) for every ten square miles, and following a good salmon year, even more. There were moose, white-tailed deer, mountain goats, Dall sheep, wolves, coyotes, wolverines, lynx, fox both arctic and red, beaver, marmot, otters, both land and sea, mink, marten, muskrat, and snowshoe hare. There were birds from the mighty bald eagle to the tiny golden-crowned sparrow, and every winged and web-footed thing in between.
The hand of man lay lightly here. There were a few good-sized towns, Cordova on the coast, Ahtna in the interior, both with about three thousand people, and maybe thirty villages ranging in population from 4 to 403. One road, a gravel bed left over a thriving copper mine in the early days of the last century, was graded during the summer but not maintained after the first snowfall. If you wanted to get somewhere in the Park, you flew. If you didn’t fly, you took a boat. If the river was frozen over, you drove a snow machine. If you didn’t have a snow machine, you used snow-shoes. If you didn’t have snowshoes, you stayed home in front of the fire until spring and tried not to beat up on your family. There were Park rats who disappeared into the woodwork in October and were not seen again until May, when it was time to get their boats out of dry dock and back into the water, but they were few in number and so determinedly unsociable that they weren’t missed.
The Park, in fact, looked much as it had a hundred years before, even perhaps a thousand years before. That it did was at least in part due to the two old women now eating Ruthe’s legendary moose stew across from Kate this evening. Kate finished first and got up to refill her bowl. “There’s some spice in this I can’t identify,” she said, hanging over the cauldron on the back of the woodstove. She sniffed at the rising steam. “You don’t put cloves in it, do you?”
“Good heavens, no,” Ruthe said placidly, but Kate noticed she didn’t volunteer what spice it was.
“You don’t want the recipe to die with you,” she said with intent to provoke.
Dina choked and had to be thumped on the back. She mopped her streaming eyes and said, “That’s the first time I’ve heard that one, at least to Ruthe’s face.”
They finished their stew and moved on to coffee. “Like a piece of pie, Kate?” Ruthe said.
“Yes,” Kate said, practically before Ruthe finished getting the words out of her mouth.
On top of everything else, Ruthe was an incredible cook.
She’d trained all the chefs hired for Camp Teddy. No visitor ever went home hungry. The coffee was terrific, too, a special blend made up by Kaladi Brothers, an Anchorage roaster. They called it the Ex-President’s Blend. You couldn’t buy it in stores. Kate had tried. She raised her mug, just to smell this time. It was coffee like no other, and Kate, an unabashed addict, was deeply appreciative. When she lowered the mug again, a thick wedge of pie was suspended in front of her. She was grateful there was a fork. She feared for her ma
“Oh god, that was good,” she said, using her finger to scoop up the last bit of juice. “What gives it that tangy taste on the back of the tongue? Rhubarb and what else? I’ve tried and tried at home to get that flavor, but I never quite succeed.”
Ruthe gri
Kate sighed, putting her heart into it. It had no effect, other than another snort of laughter from Dina and a refill of her mug from Ruthe. Kate sat back, trying to look as mournful as possible, which wasn’t easy with a bellyful of Di
“So what was it you wanted to talk to us about, Kate?” Dina said, lighting a new cigarette from the butt of the old one, and earning a reproving look from Ruthe, which got Ruthe precisely nothing.
Ruthe tucked herself neatly into the other recliner, looking like an advertisement for Eddie Bauer on a good day, and fixed Kate with an expectant look.
“I need your help.”
“What with?”
“It seems Dan O’Brian is too green for the current administration, and he’s being encouraged to take early retirement.”
Dina and Ruthe exchanged glances. “Pay up,” Dina said.
Ruthe sighed and unwound herself to fetch a smart brown leather shoulder-strap purse, from which she extracted a twenty-dollar bill and handed it over. Resuming her seat, she said in answer to Kate’s raised eyebrow, “I bet they would hold their hand until the midterm elections. Dina said it’d be before.”
“You mean you expected this?”
Ruthe’s laugh was half in anger, half in sorrow. “After the last election, we put it on the calendar, Kate. There isn’t a conservationist worthy of the name in the present cabinet. Look at what’s happened just in the last twelve months.”
“The Sierra Club comes out with a report that says all-terrain vehicles rip up the land,” Dina said, and snorted out smoke like a dragon breathing fire. “Something we’ve been telling them for years, but they have to do their little studies. Hell, you’ve seen it yourself, jerks blazing trails all over the Park in spite of the prohibitions against it, and the federal government, the main landowner of the Park, of the state, when it comes down to it, exercises no authority.”
“They don’t have the manpower,” Ruthe said softly.
Dina glared. “They don’t have the manpower because the government won’t allocate funds for proper oversight of the lands in their care. That doesn’t stop the ruts the ATVs leave behind from diverting entire streams. Taiga and tundra both all torn to hell, habitat irreparably damaged.” She pointed her cigarette at Kate. “I went with a Cat train up to Rampart in 1959, where that moron-what was his name? Oh, Teller, yeah. Well, Teller thought he was going to blast out a dam with a nuclear explosion. Five years ago, I flew to Fairbanks, and guess what? You can still see the track we left. From ten thousand feet up, Kate, you can still see it. Forty years ago, and it’s still there. And don’t even get me started on the snow machines.”
Kate remembered the two drunks on snow machines who had invaded her front yard two springs ago. “I know.”
“A lot of people need them for basic transport,” Ruthe said. “And for hunting trips, and supply runs.”