A Grave Denied

“Oh,” Joh

“Maybe what?”

“Well, maybe I could read it?”

She laughed and cuffed his shoulder. “Sure. I’ll even give you an English/geology dictionary to help you in the translation.”

At that moment the entire face of Grant Glacier seemed to shudder and shift. A second later an immense boom! rocked them back and a piece of ice the size of Gibraltar came crashing down to shatter into a million shards all over the entrance of the ice cave. A splinter whizzed by Kate’s face, and to her everlasting shame she yelped and ducked out of the way.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” McClanahan said.

Steady employment was more the exception than the norm in the Alaskan Bush. Most Park rats lived a subsistence lifestyle, eating what they caught or killed, fishing in summer for money to buy food and fuel. Some trapped, but the competition was stiff and the wildlife not as populous as it used to be, and Dan O’Brian was a fierce enforcer of quotas. A few lucky guys had signed early on to oil spill response training, funded directly by the partial settlement coming out of the RPetCo oil spill in 1989, which made them members of a permanent on-call team, for which they drew a stipend that wasn’t much but was better than nothing. George Perry ran Chugach Air Taxi Service out of the Park, and Demetri Totemoff led hunts for moose and caribou and deer in the fall and bear in the spring, and any help they needed was strictly seasonal. There were a few fur trappers left, and even fewer gold miners.

But by far and away the most jobs were generated by the government, state and federal, and the support services thereof. Auntie Vi started a bed-and-breakfast out of her home in Niniltna because of the need for temporary housing for the fish hawks who came and went with the salmon, and when word got around was inundated with rangers, sports fishermen, hunters, poachers, and the occasional pair of lovers who couldn’t find any privacy in Anchorage. To Auntie Vi’s ill-concealed horror, the word seemed to have spread to the tourists. She tried to discourage them by doubling her rates, but they only went home and told all their friends about this quaint little Eskimo woman who ran a B &B out in the middle of Alaska and who made great fry bread. Kate didn’t know if Auntie Vi was more disgusted at being called an Eskimo, being called quaint, or having to hire two maids to help out, which put her on the wrong side of the Social Security Administration but which also made for two more jobs for the Park.

The previous year the pressure on her kitchen had been so great that Auntie Vi had coerced the Niniltna Native Association into fronting the money for a little cafe on River Street, not that the street was identified as such by anything so unParklike as a street sign. Laurel Meganack was the chief cook and bottle washer, and her menus ran heavily to hamburgers and French fries, but her fountain Cokes were good and, well, there wasn’t really anywhere else to eat out in Niniltna since Bernie refused to get into the selling of any food that didn’t come already shrink-wrapped. That first winter the high school kids took to hanging out there, so they left it open year-round. The fact that Laurel was Niniltna Native Association board member Harvey Meganack’s niece probably had a lot to do with her getting hired in the first place, but it didn’t hurt that she was an extremely nubile twenty-three, had a glimmer of big-city sophistication from having gone to high school in Cordova (a vast metropolis of some two thousand people), and was an Association shareholder herself. Art Totemoff was hired as kitchen help, and so there were two more full-time jobs that hadn’t been there before. There was also a receptionist/secretary position at the Association headquarters, generally filled by a descendent of whoever was the current tribal chief.

But the best full-time, year-round job in Niniltna was that of postmaster. It had more pay and better benefits than any other job within a hundred miles, and the competition for it was fierce. There were families still living in the Park who weren’t speaking because a son of one had beat out the daughter of another for the position, and there were always dark mutterings of nepotism and influence whenever it went to one person over the other.

Bo

The post office was a brand-new building prefabricated at a shop in Anchorage and freighted in on a flatbed the summer before, yet another new addition to the scenery to which Kate had to accustom herself. It was small, brown-sided, and roofed with what might have been corrugated metal but was probably some kind of plastic. It had two windows in front, a small loading dock in back, and a handicapped-accessible ramp leading to the door. The ramp was probably great for wheelchairs but it was going to be one hell of a slippery slide for feet come winter.

Inside, the building was divided by a counter and mailboxes. Kate heard the faint thuds of mail being slid into mailboxes. “Bo

Bo

In addition to the painted scarves, Bo

The aroma of sandalwood incense drifted into the room. “I’m sorry, Kate,” Bo

Kate turned and saw Bo