A fine and bitter snow (4 page)

Two large picture windows set into the walls of the second floor were bright, lit from within. A long set of wooden stairs led to the deck, at the top of which there was a door, open. Against the light streaming out into the night, Kate could see a thin, stooped figure scratching Mutt's head. Mutt's tail was wagging hard enough to make her butt fall off, but there were no lavish kisses exchanged. Mutt was a strict heterosexual, even across species, and, save only Kate, an all-man dog.

"Come on up, Kate," a voice said. Kate killed the engine and climbed the stairs.

Inside, there was barely enough room to inhale, it was so crowded with furniture and stacks of papers, books, and magazines that one had to turn sideways to get from one side of the house to the other. An Earth stove radiated heat from the center of the room. An upright piano stood in another corner, piled high with sheet music. In a third corner was the kitchen, a counter with a small propane stove on it, a sink in it, and doorless cabinets above and below jammed with cans and bags. An aroma of savory stew lingered in the air, along with— Aha. A pie in a deep dish sat on the counter, perfectly browned and oozing dark red juice. A small square table was almost visible beneath an old manual typewriter, a ream of typing paper, and piles of what looked like legal documents and receipts. An enormous black cat looked out from her seat on one of the two upright wooden chairs shoved beneath the table and gave Mutt a perfunctory hiss, which Mutt regally ignored. Noblesse oblige.

Like Kate's cabin, this one had a loft for sleeping. The fourth corner was for living. Two comfortable-looking chairs and a small couch were within easy reach of a coffee table, a tired slab of ersatz wood covered with heel marks and glass rings and an overflowing ashtray.

Every available inch of wall space was given over to bookshelves, and every shelf was full. In the hissing light of the Coleman lanterns, it could be seen that the titles were organized alphabetically by author, and separated into fiction u) and nonfiction. With difficulty, Kate restrained from diving in headfirst. She shucked out of parka and bib overalls and took a seat on the couch. Mutt leapt up gracefully beside her and sat grinning at the woman in the chair opposite.

Dana Willner was thin to the point of emaciation, with sparse white hair. pulled back into a severe knot at the nape of her neck. Her nose was large and hooked, her small, faded blue eyes narrow and fierce. She wore button-front Levi's and a blue plaid wool shirt, the elbows worn through to the light blue thermal underwear beneath. A cigarette was tucked into the corner of her mouth, smoke curling up to form a ragged halo around her head. Her cane, a twisted affair made of diamond willow and heavily varnished, leaned against the arm of her chair. Her pale pink fuzzy footwear had eyes and ears and whiskers. "I'm liking the bunny slippers, Dina," Kate said.

Dina raised a foot to regard it with satisfaction. "Nice, aren't they?"

"I'll have to get a pair for myself. Thanks, Ruthe." She accepted a heavy white mug of coffee.

Cuthe Baumaji handed Dina a mug and settled into the other chair. '"The stew'll be hot in about ten minutes."

"Caribou?" Kate said hopefully.

"Moose."

Kate smiled. Not bad for second-best. Life was good.

Ruthe was tall and slender, her hair a short mop of silky curls that had once been blond and were now a soft white gold that still clustered thickly around her face. Her skin was clear and pale, with crow's feet around her large brown eyes and laugh lines around her wide mouth. She wore khaki slacks, a pumpkin-colored sweater over a white turtleneck, and chunky white socks. The only thing spoiling the effect was the wood slivers and pine needles adhering to the soles of the socks.

Silence was not the enemy to these two women, and Kate sipped her coffee and thought about them.

Nobody in the Park knew how old they were, but everyone knew the legend. How Dina and Ruthe had flown for the WASPs during World War II, towing targets over the Atlantic Ocean for fighter pilots to practice on. How rumor had it that one of them had been the WASP pilot instructor
Paul Tibbets had tapped to fly the new Boeing bomber, to ' shame the male pilots afraid to fly it into climbing into the cockpit. How, after the war, Dina and Ruthe had been unwilling to give up flying and in 1946 had come to Alaska in search of jobs in the air. How in 1947 they had teamed up with Arthur Hopperman of Hopper Holidays, a travel agency out of Fairbanks that specialized in guiding hunters and fishermen to record kills in the Alaska Bush. How in 1949 they had bought out Art, acquired two de Havilland Beavers, and started flying tourists into remote lodges in the Bush, pioneering eco-tourism before it was fashionable enough to merit the hyphen. How in 1951 they had bought this cabin and the surrounding eighty acres from a homesteader heading south for the last time and had proceeded to build another ten cabins farther up the hill, along with a bathhouse, a cookhouse, a mess hall, and a greenhouse, and had started flying tourists into Niniltna and putting them up at Camp Theodore, which they had named for Theodore Roosevelt.

That was a sign right there, all the Park rats said, and they waited grimly, rifles in hand, for Ruthe and Dina to start preaching conservation. They didn't have to wait long, and Ruthe and Dina didn't just preach it; they practiced it. "To leave as small a footprint as possible" was their declared and shameless intention. They grew their own food; they even had half a dozen apple trees that they actually managed to coerce into bearing fruit. They recycled paper. They had a compost heap. They avoided the use of plastic. They wouldn't allow hunting on their property, which, since it was only eighty acres, didn't amount to much of a statement, but then they started lobbying in Juneau and Washington, D.C., for stronger laws governing the taking offish and game, and the disposal of human waste in the Bush, and the damming of rivers and streams for power, and the use of heavy equipment in gold mining. Most damning of all, they were personal friends of Jimmy Carter, who visited Camp Theodore at least once every year, and sometimes twice.

That alone should have been enough to ostracize them, to make and keep them bunny-loving, tree-hugging outcasts, but, like everything else, it wasn't that simple. Ruthe and Dina were too nice, too smart, too funny, too, well, just too damn
authentic.
Alaskans pride themselves on what makes them different from Outsiders, and, as Mac Devlin put it, "You don't get much different than a coupla old lesbos living way the hell and gone up a mountain, selling the view to a buncha tree huggers, and making a damn good living at it, too." "And how can you hate someone who was a WASP?" George Perry said. "They care about the land," Ekaterina Moonin Shugak said simply, and they were in.

One of Ruthe and Dina's first acts upon establishing Camp Teddy was to reach out to the local arm of the Alaska Native Sisterhood, of which Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was at that time president. The three strong women bonded instantly, forming a lifetime friendship, which was not lessened by Ekaterina's death. Ruthe and Dina made serious donations to the fund that supported the fight for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1972. When Dina and Ruthe began agitating for the designation of the Park as an "International Biosphere Reserve," Ekaterina was first in line to demonstrate her support, which all by itself would have guaranteed its success.

Not coincidentally, Ruthe and Dina had also dandled Ekaterina's grandbaby, Kate, on their knees practically from the moment of her birth. Dina had instructed a nine-year-old Kate in the art of rappelling down a cliff face, after Ruthe had taught her how to get up it. Thanks to Ruthe and Dina, before Kate was twelve, she was on a first-name basis with every living thing in the Park, Animalia and Plan-tae, by division, class, order, family, genus, and species. Both women had taken her white-water canoeing on the Kanuyaq and saltwater kayaking on Prince William Sound. In this, they had Ekaterina's tacit, if not overt, approval, because in those days all it took for Kate to be against something was Ekaterina to be for it. The result was a greater understanding of the ecosystems among which she lived, and an appreciation of the whole of nature itself that would last her whole life long.

So, not unnaturally, when it came time to lobby for the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, also known as d-2, Park rats were unsurprised when the Niniltna Native Association, of which the same Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was then president and chief executive officer, lined up behind it. ANILCA created ten new national parks within the state, and added to four already existing parks, one of which had Camp Teddy smack in the middle of it.

The Park was now 20 million acres in size, located between the Quilak Mountains and the Glenn Highway on the north, the Canadian border on the east, Prince William Sound in the south, and, variously, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the pipeline haul road, and the Alaska Railroad on the west. It was drained by the Kanuyaq River, which twisted and turned over 225 miles in its search for the sea, coming to it in an immense delta east of Alaganik Bay, which saw the return each year of five species of Alaskan salmon in quantities capable of supplying tables in gourmet restaurants as far away as New York City, as well as the drying racks and smokehouses as far upriver as the creek behind Kate's cabin.

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 manners had there not been.

"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 grinned. "Trade secret."

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 Dinner by Ruthe.