In bad years, such as last year, they could barely feed themselves, something that heated up talks for rural preference for subsistence every year in Juneau.
Wy raised her face to the sun and drew in a breath of pure enjoyment. There was something for everyone in Bristol Bay. You could fish salmon, sport or commercial or subsistence, you could hunt caribou or moose or bear, you could run a trapline in winter, you could pick blueberries and salmonberries in summer, you could beachcomb for glass floats and walrus tusks-you could, if you chose, simply sit on your butt and admire the scenery. Most of the people who lived in the Bay could not afford that luxury, but thousands of tourists could and did, willingly. If they pulled in a fifty-pound king while they were at it, or took down a caribou with a double shovel rack, so much the better. They'd go home and tell their friends, who would fill Wy's planes next summer.
“Ms. Chouinard!”
Professor Desmond X. McLynn was not in the business of admiring views. Professor Desmond X. McLynn reserved his regard for artifacts of a pre-Columbian nature, preferably in a precarious state of ossified preservation, which left more room for speculation and the positing of new theories, properly attributed to himself, on the course of anthropological and social development ofHomo sapiensin this godforsaken corner of the world. “I'm coming,” she called, and turned to pile a case of Velveeta on a case of Spam. She shuddered a little as she did so, but then she didn't have to eat it, just carry it. She thought of her lawyer, Harold Abood, J.D., and her legal bill the size of which was beginning to resemble interest on the nation's long-term debt, and lugged the boxes to the campsite. Twenty feet away, a ground squirrel chittered at her angrily. There was a whoosh of wings and a bald eagle swooped down and the squirrel was airborne. Wy paused, watching as the eagle gained altitude, heading for a high bluff inland, crowned by a stand of dead white spruce, bark peeled down to a white, hard surface. Squinting, she made out the mess of twigs and sticks crammed into the fork of a branch, and imagined that she saw three heads peering over the side, hungry eyes watching lunch approach, curved beaks open in anticipation.
“Ms. Chouinard!”
She sighed to herself and plodded forward again. McLynn was wearing a displeased expression beneath a sheepskin-lined leather cap with the flaps hanging down over his ears. They bounced and brushed his shoulders when he talked, and together with the hanging pouches beneath his eyes made him look like an irritable bloodhound. “Where is Mr. Nelson?” he said severely.
“I don't know,” she said, determined to maintain her cheerfulness. “I haven't been back here since I picked you up on Friday.” She looked around. The sun glinted off the corrugated roofs of the Air Force base, ten miles away west-southeast. It was the nearest settlement, if Don Nelson had decided he needed company over the weekend and set out on foot. The journey would have been soggy in places, but if you had boots on, it wouldn't be bad. Maybe three hours to get there, four if you were slow.
Don Nelson wasn't slow. A thin, energetic young man with pale hair shaved into a vee in back, a long, inquisitive nose and bright, inquiring eyes, he was McLynn's gofer. He cooked, he cleaned, he washed clothes, he stood watch over the dig on those days McLynn was torn unwillingly from the site of this future American Ardèche. He'd been digging the last time Wy saw him, covered in mud and still young enough to enjoy it. He'd grinned up at her from one of the enclosed ditches, skin streaked with dirt and sweat, showing off his developing pecs in a tank top. “Dig, dig, dig with a shovel and a pick.”
She had laughed, but McLynn had heard him. “What do you mean, a shovel? I told you, no shovels, no tools at this level except for a trowel and a brush!”
Nelson smothered his grin. “Just a joke, Professor McLynn.”
“Not a funny one,” McLynn had said.
Nelson had winked at her as she was turning away, and she had been conscious of his eyes on her as she walked to the plane. It made her feel good, even if she did catch herself wishing Liam Campbell had been there to see that other men were still attracted to her. But he hadn't been there, and except for fleeting glimpses as he was coming into the grocery store and she was going rapidly out the other door, she hadn't seen him in months. Which was what she wanted.
She'd heard rumors that he'd rented a boat to live on while he waited for a house to come open. Good luck, she thought; housing everywhere in rural Alaska was tight, and especially so in Newenham, where commercial fishermen made enough money to have homes both here and Outside, and could afford to let them sit empty over the winter. Most building supplies had to be barged in, putting the price of new housing out of most people's reach and putting existing housing at a premium that did the same, no matter how old or run-down it was. Her house had come with the air taxi business she had bought; a good thing, since she had acquired a twelve-year-old son immediately afterward.
“Well, then, where is he?” McLynn demanded, bringing her back to the present.
“I said I don't know,” Wy said, a little less patiently. Good money or not, it wasn't her job to keep track of McLynn's employees. “I don't know where Mr. Nelson went. Maybe he walked over to the base and hitched a ride into town.”
Chinook Air Force Base was set midway between the Snake and the Igushik Rivers. It was a broad, flat, relatively dry acreage, with access to a large bed of gravel deposited over a geologic period of time at the mouth of one of the Igushik's tributaries, perfect for base fill for runways. Chinook had two, one running northeast-southwest to take year-round advantage of the prevailing winds, and a second, northwest-southeast, to put the contractor's kids through college. Why they hadn't just run a second alongside the first was beyond Wy. Probably made too much sense for government.
Like most Alaskans, and in the Bush it was almost unanimous, the only thing lower than Wy's opinion of the federal government was her opinion of the state government. Although, if she forced herself to be fair, most of the airmen who made their way to town were, on the whole, fairly decent guys, if unrelentingly horny. Most of them were very young and a long way from home, and Newenham didn't provide much relief. The town had a base population of two thousand, the majority of which was male, and most of its female members were snapped up the day after they graduated from high school, if not before. There was one woman with seven children and no job whose rent, it was generally acknowledged, was paid by frequent contributions from the military. Other than that, and spite dates-when local couples broke up, the girls had something to prove and the occasional airman benefitted thereby-opportunities for romance in Newenham were pretty slim. So far as Wy knew, Nelson hadn't hooked up with any of the local girls, so why would he bother going into town? She glanced at Professor McLynn's red and irritated face, and thought he might be risking his job as well.
She shrugged it off. Hope springs eternal in the red-blooded American male. Maybe he had just gone to the base. Maybe he was going to enlist, to get away from McLynn. She carried the boxes into the camp tent and set them down on the table with a thump, then stretched, unconsciously seeking out three-point positions for both feet and settling for just a moment into a modified horse stance. As always, it felt as if her spine were hanging suspended in space, with no weight pulling it down and no muscles pulling it up.
The table was a folding one, four feet long, metal legs, forty bucks at Costco. It held a two-burner Coleman stove, a dingy blue plastic tub full of unwashed camp dishes, a drainer full of clean ones, and a white plastic jug full of water with a filter attached. Beneath the table, boxes of food were piled in haphazard fashion, partial holes torn in their tops to extract one can of peas or one box of macaroni and cheese at a time.