A fine and bitter snow (5 page)

"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."

"A lot of people ride them straight up mountains to see if they can get avalanches to fall on them, too," Dina snapped. "Which I call a self-correcting problem when they succeed, not to mention a triumph for the gene pool."

"Dina," Ruthe said. She didn't say, You don't mean that, but Kate could hear it all the same.

"And what does our absentee landlord do?" Dina said. "Nothing, that's what. And they're going to continue doing nothing, because if they started cracking down on every charter member of the NRA, it would send up a scream you could hear on Mars."

Kate didn't quite know how they'd made it from snow machines to gun control, but from long experience Ruthe had an answer. "I'm a member of the NRA," she said mildly. At Dina's glare, she added, "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

Kate laughed, and then at Dina's glare turned the laugh into a cough.

"They want to drill for oil in ANWR," Dina said. "They want to punch some exploratory holes in Iqaluk. Of course they want to get rid of the rangers like Dan O'Brian, the ones who've been here for a while, the ones who don't just talk the talk. Never mind that Alaska is the last place in the nation, maybe even the last place on the planet, that still looks like it did in the beginning. Oh, yeah." She snorted smoke. "You bet. It's the rangers with practical experience on the ground who might actually have a clue as to how that would affect the wildlife who will be the first to go."

Kate turned to Ruthe, who looked ever so faintly apologetic. "Well," Ruthe said, her soft voice sounding the antithesis of Dina's harsh tones, "I'm not sure we shouldn't let them drill."

Dina sat straight up in her chair. "What!"

"With conditions." Ruthe's gaze was limpid. "They can drill in ANWR, if they keep their mitts off parks and refuges in the rest of the state."

Dina sat back, scowling ferociously at the possibility that Ruthe might have a point. "Like they'd agree to that."

"So far, we've got the votes," Ruthe said. "Unless they changed the Constitution when I wasn't looking, which these days seems more and more possible, every president still has to go through the United States Congress. That's a hundred senators and over four hundred representatives, each and every one with his or her own agenda and priorities. If we put this problem away for them, think how grateful they'll be."

"The Sierra Club and the rest of the gang will never go for it."

"Not right away, no. Eventually ..."

There was a brief, telling silence. Kate wondered if she was watching policy being made.

"What do you think, Kate?"

Kate, jolted out of her reverie, said, "What?"

"Should we trade ANWR for the rest of the park lands?"

Kate tried to avoid the issue. "I don't live there."

"It's publicly owned land, Kate."

"Upon which Alaska Natives have been subsisting for millennia."

"And some of them are for drilling in ANWR."

Kate tried another tack. "Is there actually any oil there?"

Ruthe shrugged. "Nobody knows for sure. There's only been one well drilled there—by the state, I think—and they're keeping the results secret."

"Anybody guessing?"

"The last estimate I heard was enough to keep the nation running at full throttle for three months," Dina said.

"Really? That's all?"

"Some guessers say there's more than other guessers say."

Dina glared at her lifelong roommate. There was no way Kate was going to get in the middle of this. "About Dan O'Brian," she said.

"Oh yes, Dan," Ruthe said with quick sympathy, and perhaps relief. "How is he taking it?"

"He likes his job, he's good at it, and he doesn't want to leave the Park. He probably wouldn't anyway—he's in love again."

Ruthe gave Dina a smug look. "We noticed."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yes indeed. We were at the Roadhouse the night they met."

Dina blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it rise into the air. "It was one of the better seductions I have witnessed," she admitted. "I do so enjoy seeing a thing well done."

"What do you mean?" Kate said.

Dina stabbed the air with her cigarette, emphasizing her points. "Dan walked into the room, and that girl zeroed in on him like a heat-seeking missile. Target acquired, and— three, two, one—impact!"

Kate looked at Ruthe, who was laughing in spite of herself. "It was kind of like that," she admitted. "Poor Dan didn't stand a chance."

"Poor Dan isn't exactly yelling for help," Kate said. "And about Dan. What's the point of him just holding down a cabin when he's so much more useful at riding herd on Park rats shooting out of season and yo-yos flying in from Anchorage to shoot at everything that moves? He doesn't want to resign, but you know that if they're that determined, they'll find a way to force him out."

"What do you want us to do?"

Kate met Dina's fierce eyes and smiled. "I want you 'to do that voodoo that you do so well.' Make some calls. Call in some favors. Twist some arms if you have to. Get whoever is in charge down there to lay off Dan."

Ruthe met Dina's eyes, a smile in her own, and for a fleeting moment, the two old women looked eerily similar.

"Of course, if we do this for you," Dina said, "you'll owe us."

Kate took a careful breath. "I kind of thought the whole Park would owe you."

Dina stared down her eagle beak. "You thought wrong."

"Yeah." Kate sighed. "Okay. I'll owe you."

Dina cackled, then lit another cigarette.

Ruthe poured another round of coffee, this time with a shot glass of the framboise Dina made from their raspberry patch every fall. To be polite, Kate touched her lips to the glass and set it down again. They spent the next hour exchanging Park gossip. Dandy Mike had actually been dating the same woman for more than a month. The high school varsity basketball team, under Bernie's able coaching, was fourteen and three for the season, and Bernie was greatly torqued about the three. Anastasia Totemoff had died of ovarian cancer. "At least it was quick," Dina said, shifting in her chair, an expression of pain crossing her face. "Two weeks and she was gone."

"How is Demetri?" Ruthe said quickly.

"He's maintaining, but ..." Kate shook her head.

"I don't know what Demetri's going to do with all those kids," Ruthe said.

"Raise them," Kate said. "I think there's only one left at home anyway."

Dina snorted cigarette smoke.

"Who's this Christie Turner?" Kate said. "Dan says she's been here since October. Today's the first time I've seen her."

"I hear," Dina said, bright eyes snapping maliciously, "that she's a professional gal out of Las Vegas."

"Oh, come on," Ruthe said. "Every woman who comes into the Park who looks halfway decent and who doesn't jump into bed with the first six guys who ask her is always branded as selling it to someone else. Honest to god." She cast up her eyes in disgust. "I'd say she'd worked her way up the AlCan waiting tables. She's pretty good."

"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.