“I don’t like her,” Dina said flatly.
Ruthe looked at her askance. “Why not?”
“Too pretty,” Dina said. “Might cut in on our action.” She cackled again.
One of Dan’s rangers had apprehended an FBI agent and a police lieutenant from the Anchorage police department. They’d been shooting at moose out of season and without a license, and while on the outside of the better part of a half gallon of Calvert’s, which had not improved their aim, as they had nearly taken out the ranger along with the moose. Since Anchorageites were the butt of most Park jokes, this incident had given rise to much merriment. The Kanuyaq caribou herd had topped 23,000 in population and was in danger of eating itself out of house and home. Since the herd migrated from its state land grazing area to its calving ground near the headwaters of the Kanuyaq in the Park, the Park Service had consulted with the state Fish and Game people and had come up with a plan to allow flying and shooting the same day, with a maximum take of five caribou per hunter, and they were even allowing each hunter to take one cow. “Beginning when?” Dina said with a gleam in her eye. She’d always been one of the best shots in the Park, and she was fond of saying that if she hadn’t been, she and Ruthe would have starved to death those first years on their mountain.
“The first week of January,” Kate said. “They want to wait until the males shed their racks, so we don’t get a bunch of trophy hunters looking for something to put over the fireplace.”
Ruthe groaned. “Forget about it. I’m not up to hunting this year.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “Let’s find some nice young hunk to bring home the bacon for us.” They all laughed, but Kate was aware that Ruthe’s recent disinclination to hunt had more to do with the sudden onset of Dina’s old age than it did with lack of interest. Over the past year, Dina had gone from being a vital woman in glowing health to an old woman with shaking hands and a shakier step. She walked only with the aid of her cane, and had to be helped from her chair, as if her back had lost all its strength. Her hands, once so strong and so capable, hands that had hauled Kate over the edge of a cliff by the scruff of her neck on more than one occasion, had deteriorated into shrunken claws. It hurt Kate to look at them, and so she didn’t.
Billy and Annie Mike had adopted a Korean baby and named him Alexei, for Annie’s grandfather. “My god,” Dina said in disgust, “the woman had seven children of her own. Wasn’t that enough?”
“Evidently not,” Ruthe said.
Dina had the grace to look slightly ashamed. “Sorry,” she said gruffly. “Never been a kid person.”
“Yeah, you never could stand having me around,” Kate said, and Ruthe laughed out loud.
Mandy and Chick were in training for the Yukon Quest. “Every day at noon, like clockwork,” Kate said, “I hear dog howls coming down the trail. I open the door and to what to my wondering eyes should appear but Chick, stopping by for cocoa and fry bread.”
Ruthe and Dina laughed. “Thinks with his stomach,” Dina said. “What I call a proper man.”
Ruthe refilled their mugs. “I saw John Letourneau putting the moves on Auntie Edna,” Kate said, stirring in evaporated milk. The quality of the silence that followed her remark made her raise her head.
At her curious look, Dina said, “Yeah, I saw that, too,” and added with a sneer, “He’s probably after her for that property she owns on Alaguaq Creek.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Ruthe said immediately. “I think Auntie Edna has more than enough charm to explain John’s interest.”
“Charm, schmarm,” Dina said. “That man never does anything without an ulterior motive.”
“That’s not true, Dina, and you know it,” Ruthe said, this time with an edge to her voice.
Kate stepped in to defuse the tension a little, although she was intensely curious as to why it had sprouted up in the first place. “He got a little tangled up in your cane, Dina, there on the dance floor.”
“He sure did, didn’t he? Can’t think how that happened.” She looked sharply at Kate. “Didn’t see you out there.”
They must have left before the conga line, Kate thought. “I don’t dance.”
“Hell you don’t. Many’s the time I’ve seen you whooping it up at a potlatch.”
“That’s a different kind of dancing.”
“And why not dance them all? Dancing’s good for what ails you. Kick up your heels and it lifts your spirits.”
“It’s good for your soul,” Ruthe said.
Kate mumbled something, but by now the two old women were on the warpath.
“How’s Johnny?” Ruthe said.
Like everyone else in the Park, Dina and Ruthe had a vital interest in the well-being of Johnny Morgan, who had come to the Park to live following his father’s death. It was natural for them to ask, as Johnny was Jack Morgan’s son, and Jack had been Kate’s lover. “He’s fine,” Kate said.
Dina fixed her with a penetrating eye. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, too.” Even if she did still wince at the mention of Jack.
Dina’s fierce eyes saw an uncomfortable amount. “Huh,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “Miss him?”
Kate took a deep breath. “Every day,” she managed to say.
“But you’re learning to live with it.”
“Yes.”
“And without him,” Ruthe said.
“Yes.” If the joy she found in sunrise over a world without Jack Morgan in it was not as strong as it had once been, it was no one’s business but her own.
“That Ethan Int-Hout still sniffing around?”
“The boy’s got the look of someone who knows his way around a bed, I’ll give him that.”
To her acute embarrassment, Kate felt herself turn a brilliant red.
“That might be none of our business, Dina,” Ruthe said.
“Oh balls! Everything in this Park is our business,” Dina said, and pointed her cigarette at Kate again. “Shit or get off the pot. It’s not like there aren’t men waiting around the block to step up if you’d look at them twice.”
“I suppose,” Kate said in a desperate bid for one-upmanship, “you would know.”
Dina only cackled again. “You bet your ass, I would, sweetie. Whether I took ‘em up on it or not.” She looked at Ruthe and her eyes softened. “You bet I would.”
Ruthe put her hand over Dina’s.
Kate stood. “Time for me to mosey on home.”
“Say hi to Johnny for us,” Ruthe said. “I like him, Kate. He values his elders.”
“He’s been up here?” Kate said, surprised.
Ruthe chuckled. “On half a dozen occasions. Seems like old times.”
“And give Ethan our love,” Dina said, and cackled as Kate climbed back into her down overalls and parka and headed out the door.
3
The two gentlemen in question were both at her cabin when she got there. Mutt knocked Johnny off the doorstep and wrestled him across the snow, growling in mock anger. Ethan stood in the doorway, watching as Kate ran the snow machine into the garage. “I’ll be in in a minute,” she called, and after a moment she heard boyish laughter and fake growls fade as the cabin door was closed.
She topped off the snow machine’s gas tank, checked the oil, looked at the treads. The ax needed sharpening, and so, too, it seemed, did the hatchet. She checked the rest of the tools hanging in neat rows from the Peg-Board while she was at it. The truck had been winterized and was parked as far out of the way as possible at the back of the garage. The woodpile was down to four cords, and although it had been a mild winter thus far, it wouldn’t hurt to haul in a few more trees from the woodlot and replenish it. She visited the outhouse-plenty of toilet paper and lime-and the Coleman lantern hanging from the planter hook on the wall was almost full of kerosene.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see Ethan, and it wasn’t that she didn’t want to spend time with Johnny. She just wasn’t used to anyone waiting for her when she got home. She kicked the snow from her boots and stepped inside.