Killing Grounds Part 1

KILLING GROUNDS.

DANA STABENOW.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

For those who persist in looking up Kate's home ground on a map, I would remind them that there is a reason we call it fiction.

However, if it will make you feel better, for the purposes of this book the coastline of Alaska has been altered to include Alaganik Bay, two hours (or so) by bowpicker southeast of Cordova.

Cordova is a real place and it does exist. s.h.i.+tting Seagull isn't a real person and doesn't. Real Cordovans are much more fun than he is.

It was a cloudless summer day. Salmon leapt free of the blue surface of the water, only to fall back with flat smacks that echoed across the bay. The fis.h.i.+ng period had opened at twelve noon exactly and the tender wouldn't be taking delivery from fishermen for hours yet, although cork lines were already bobbing with the kind of frenzied energy that promised a busy and productive period.

Fishermen were making ready to launch skiffs, but on board the tender Freya there was time to open deck chairs in the bow, time to prop feet on the gunnel, time to eat roast beef sandwiches on homemade bread, heavy on the horseradish, time to make lazy comments on the skill or lack thereof shown by the skippers of the forty-odd boats setting drift nets as close as they could get to the markers of the creeks without setting off the fish hawk.

The fish hawk in question, a twenty-eight- year-old man named Lamar Rousch, hovered around the perimeter of the action, his little rubber Zodiac looking flimsy and vulnerable and outnumbered next to the battle-scarred hulls of the fis.h.i.+ng fleet. Clad in the brown uniform of the Fish and Wildlife protection branch of the Alaska Department of Public Safety, Lamar stood rigidly erect at the controls of the Zodiac, as if by doing so his height might be mistaken for five-foot-one, instead of a mere five feet. Kate could relate. She saw him wave Joe Anahonak and the Darlene back from the markers on Amartuq Creek, the buzz of the outboard on the back of the Zodiac sounding like an irritated wasp.

Joe flashed an impudent grin, a jaunty wave, and moved maybe ten feet south of the mouth, the stubborn set of his shoulders clearly indicating his determination not to be corked. It happened, if you got careless or unlucky, a moment's distraction and another fisherman more on the ball would drop his net into the water between you and the creek markers, and you lost the advantage of being closest to the narrow funnel through which coursed hundreds of thousands of gleaming red salmon. Sleek and fat from five years of feeding off the nouris.h.i.+ng depths of the north Pacific Ocean, the salmon were frantic now to regain that section of stream bed upon which they had been sp.a.w.ned, there to lay their own eggs and die, coming at last to rest and rot upon their ancestral gravel.

Not for the first time, Kate reflected on how improvident nature was. She couldn't remember the exact numbers, but it went something like this: Of the four thousand salmon eggs hatched by a single salmon each year, only two thousand made it downstream to salt water. Of those two thousand, only one thousand made it out into the deep ocean. Of those one thousand, eight returned to Prince William Sound. Of those eight, two made it upstream to sp.a.w.n. Two survivors from a clutch of four thousand. As always, looking out across a bay filled with a great school of leaping, gleaming salmon, all of whom had returned home against unimaginable odds, she was awed by a natural design engineered with this many built-in backups, and respectful of its continued success.

The local guarantor of that continued success ran his Zodiac in between the mouth of the creek and Yuri Andreev's Terra Jean. Without expression, Yuri removed his drifter from the area of contention. Joe Anahonak tossed out a cheery greeting, which Yuri ignored with dignity, narrowly avoiding the outer buoy of a setnetter. The setnetter yelled at him from the beach, and he ignored that, too.

The setnetters were out in force, launching their nets from sh.o.r.e instead of from a boat, trusting to the tides and currents and the salmon themselves to scoop up their share of the mighty schools swarming into the bay. From the Freya the setnetters' gear looked like one long uninterrupted line of white corks interspersed with orange anchor buoys, a carefully graded string of beads against the deep blue throat of the bay.

The day before, there had been no sun and that throat had been a dull, drab green. Kate washed down the last bite of roast beef with a long swallow of tepid water and, catlike, stretched her five feet to about five and a half, trying to expose as much of herself to the sun as was physically possible. Her brown skin had already taken on a darker hue, and in this idle moment she wondered if perhaps she ought to crop the bottom of her T-s.h.i.+rt after all. The sleeves were already gone, as was the collar, as well as most of the legs of her oldest pair of jeans. Too much effort on a full stomach, she decided, and closed her eyes against the glare.

She was content. Kate loved the fis.h.i.+ng industry and everything to do with it, from the first gleam of silver scales beneath clear ripples of creek water in the spring, to catering to the separate idiosyncrasies of setnetter, drifter and seiner, to the hundred physical differences of the fleet itself, wooden and fibergla.s.s hulls, Marco-made or rebuilt PT, dory to bow-picker to purse seiner. The hard work had yet to start for her, but when it did she would love that, too. It was deeply satisfying to play a part in what was essentially a rite that went back to the first time man went wading into the primordial soup whence he came, for the bounty left behind that, unlike him, had never known the incentive to grow legs and walk on dry land. Her family had been fis.h.i.+ng in the Gulf of Alaska for a thousand years. It was a tradition she cherished, and honored in the practice thereof.

Next to her the old man grinned. "Ain't this the life?"

"Ain't it though." She yawned hugely. The sun poured down over everything like warm gold. Wavelets lapped at the hull, an ephemeral zephyr dusted her cheek. A small swell raised the hull and for a moment the Freya strained against the force of the incoming tide. Kate opened one eye, but the bow and stern anchors held and she closed it again. She heard a deep sigh, and let her hand slide down from the arm of the chair. With an almost voluptuous groan, Mutt rolled over on her side, legs in the air. Scratch my belly, please. Kate smiled, her eyes still closed, and complied.

There was a faint shout somewhere off to starboard.

n.o.body moved.

There was another shout, louder this time, followed by others, growing in volume and alarm.

Mutt huffed out an annoyed breath and raised her head to look at Kate. Kate sighed heavily, opened her eyes and looked across at Old Sam, one deck chair over. Old Sam swore creatively and rose to walk to the railing, shading his face with one hand. Off the port bow he saw a bowpickerthe Tanya, he thought, narrowing his eyeswith two sweating, straining, swearing men in the bow. Most of the net was in the water and the men seemed to be playing tug-of-war with it. They pulled back on the net, the net pulled them and the boat forward, they pulled back, the net pulled them forward. Old Sam watched, amazed, as the bowpicker left a wake of tiny whirlpools, moving drunkenly but steadily southward, toward the mouth of the bay and Prince William Sound beyond.

"G.o.ddam," Old Sam said respectfully.

Kate's chair creaked and footsteps sounded on the deck behind him. "What?"

The crow's-feet at the corners of the old man's bright brown eyes deepened. "Well, either Captain Nemo needs a sh.o.r.e launch, or Doug's got himself a halibut tangled in his lead line."

Kate squinted in the light. "It's pulling them against the tide." They watched, fascinated, as even the cork line was dragged below the surface. The net jerked suddenly and the bowpicker lurched left to sc.r.a.pe its port side along the starboard side of the Angelique. Rhonda Pettingill, looking up from untangling a fifty-pound king from her gear, was too astonished at the sight to do anything but stare. When the Tanya cut the cork line of the Marie Josephine, Terry and Jerry Nicolo were more forthcoming.

"Well, s.h.i.+t," Old Sam said, and scratched behind one ear. "Why don't they just cut 'er loose?"

"Urn," Kate said.

He looked over at her. "What?"

She shoved her hands in her back pockets, one hip c.o.c.ked, as she admired the tan of one splayed knee. "The Tanya just lost a set of gear last week, didn't they? Got hung up on a deadhead off Strawberry Reef?" She let him think about it for a minute. "And you know how a.n.a.l Doug gets about losing to a fish anyway."

"Well, s.h.i.+t," Old Sam said again, and sighed, his brown, seamed face settling into mournful lines. "And here I was just settling into a gentleman's life of leisure. Pull the G.o.ddam hooks, Shugak, while I yank her chain."

"Yes, boss," Kate said, grinning, and went to do as she was told.

The deck of the Freya shuddered as the last link of dripping chain rattled up. Moments later they were under way, threading a slow, careful, no-wake path through boats and cork lines and skiffs and frantically picking fishermen. Beneath the surface of the water enormous schools of salmon, their silver sides darkened to slate by the water, arrowed back and forth in ardent attempts to gain the mouth of the river.

The Tanya had reached the mouth of the bay by the time the Freya caught up with her. In the bow, Doug, a dark-haired man, all muscle and bone, worked in furious silence next to a short, rotund blond whose usually beaming face was set into equally determined lines.

A window rattled down and from the bridge Old Sam shouted, "I'll put us alongside, Kate, you swing the boom over!"

The mast rose up from the deck just aft of the focsle. Kate lowered the boom and freed the hook attached to the shackle. Both swung over the side. "Ahoy the Tanya!" she shouted, her husk of a voice carrying clearly across the water. "Doug! Jim!"

Doug looked up just in time to catch the hook as it swept by. Water boiled up from the stern as Old Sam put the Freya's engine into reverse and brought the tender to a sliding stop. Doug and Jim loaded the hook with as much cork line and net as it would hold. Kate gave the opposite end of the line a few turns around the drum and started the winch. It whined in protest at the heavy load, and the Freya listed some when the net cleared the water.

She listed some more, nearly enough to s.h.i.+p water over the starboard gunnel, when the mammoth halibut cleared the surface. The fish was flat, brown on top and white on the bottom, and had both eyes on the brown side. It flashed dark and light as it fought to be free of the net, succeeding only in tearing more holes in it. Kate was ready with the .22, but before she could raise it to her shoulder Doug had vaulted up onto the Freyas deck and s.n.a.t.c.hed the rifle out of her hand. At the expression on his face she sensibly took a step back. It was an automatic rifle and the five shots came so rapidly they sounded almost like one, followed by a long, repeating echo.

Doug held the rifle against his shoulder, finger on the trigger, as seconds ticked down. The halibut gave a last convulsive heave, ripped out another six feet of mesh and subsided. Kate said nothing. As much satisfaction as Doug had taken in finis.h.i.+ng off the monster that had finished off his gear and probably a week's worth of fis.h.i.+ng, it was as much necessity as revenge. They didn't dare bring the halibut on board before it was dead. It was big enough to kick the Freya to pieces.

Laid out on the deck, the halibut's snout poked into the door of the focsle and its tail bent up against the front of the galley. The ventral fins almost but not quite overlapped either side.

They crouched over it in wonder. "Sweet Jesus H. Christ on a crutch," Old Sam said prayerfully. "How big do you think, Doug?"

Doug was still mad. "I think it's just too d.a.m.n bad I can't kill it twice."

"It's a downright dirty shame we don't have a scale big enough to handle the sucker," Jim said wistfully. "Betcha ten bucks she weighs five hundred pounds."

"Six, maybe," Kate said.

"Seven," Old Sam said, and spat over the side for emphasis.

"This mother's eight hundred if she's an ounce," Doug snapped. Everyone else maintained a prudent silence, broken by the sc.r.a.pe of a boat against the portside hull. Kate looked around in surprise, and rose at once to her feet, her face lit with pleasure. "Auntie Joy!"

"Alaqah," Auntie Joy said, her round face peering over the gunnel, "that is some fish you got there, Samuel."

"It sure as h.e.l.l is, Joy-girl." The old man stood to offer her a hand. "Get your a.s.s on up here and grab a knife, we can use the help."

The old woman laughed, and Kate couldn't help the grin that spread across her face. It was matched by identical grins on the faces of the three other women still seated in the New England dory warped alongside the Freya's starboard hull. "Hi, Auntie Vi. Hi, Auntie Edna. Auntie Balasha, I didn't know you were in the Park."

Auntie Joy took Old Sam's hand and with an agility that belied both age and rotundity climbed over the gunnel to the deck. The other three women followed. Kate made the introductions. "Doug, Jim, this is Joyce Shugak, Viola Moonin, Edna Aguilar and Balasha Shugak. My aunties." She said it proudly, if inaccurately. Only one of them was really an auntie, the other three were great-aunts and cousins, but the relations.h.i.+ps were so convoluted, involving Kate's grandmother's sister's husband who had divorced his first wife and married again and moved to Ouzinkie, that it would have taken half an hour to unravel. Balasha was the youngest of the four of them, a mere child of seventy-six. The rest of them were in their early eighties, although Auntie Vi never got very specific about it. They were as brown as berries, as wizened as walnuts and as round and merry as Santa Claus. It raised the spirits just to breathe the same air they did.

"You on your way to fish camp, Joy-girl?" Old Sam said.

Kate remembered then, the family fish camp a mile or so up Amartuq Creek, the very creek across the mouth of which Yuri Andreev had tried to cork Joe Anahonak not half an hour before.

"Yes," Auntie Joy said, "we fly George in from Niniltna, and come from town on the morning tide." She beamed. "Fish running good, huh?"

"Real good," Old Sam said.

As if to corroborate his judgment, they heard a whoop off to port. Pete Petersen on the Monica had just hauled in what looked like a seventy-five-pound king, which was selling delivered to the cannery for three dollars a pound.

Kate looked at Old Sam. "We're going to need this deck pretty soon."

Old Sam nodded. "Get the knives."

Kate went to the focsle. A storage area formed where the bow came to a point, the focsle served as food locker, parts store, tool crib and junk drawer. It was black as pitch inside, and Kate held the door open with one hand while she fumbled with the other for the flashlight hanging from a nail on the bulkhead to the right. The focsle was so crammed that the flashlight didn't help much; she sc.r.a.ped her s.h.i.+n on a crate of eggs, caught her toe on a small cardboard box full of dusty bra.s.s doork.n.o.bs and snagged her braid on a bundle of halibut hooks before she found the sliming knives.

They were broad, sharp blades with white plastic handles, and when she brought them out on deck they got down to the almost mutually exclusive jobs of butchering out the halibut and salvaging Doug and Jim's gear. The four old women pitched in next to them, each producing her own personal knife in a gesture that reminded Kate irresistibly of the rumble between the Sharks and the Jets. The aunties' knives had long, slender, wickedly sharp blades with handles carved variously of wood, bone and antler, with which they outbutchered even Old Sam, who had only been doing this for a living for sixty years.

To everyone's surprise and to Jim's ebullient relief, the gear was in better shape than it had looked with the halibut caught in it. Doug said nothing as his brown, callused hands measured the gaping holes that would have to be mended before they could fish again. It wasn't like there was a net loft up on the nearest beach, either. Kate remembered that his wife, Loralee, had had a baby six months before, a Christmas baby named Eddie, a chuckling, fair-haired child with enormous blue eyes like his mother's and a jaw squared with a lick of his father's stubborn.

Doug must have felt the weight of her gaze and looked up, eyes narrowing on her face. Kate, who had a lively sense of self-preservation, refrained from offering sympathy. Doug would have taken it for pity and as a matter of pride refused any offer of further help, and if Kate knew her aunties, an offer of help was forthcoming.

Next to her Auntie Vi spoke. "You got needles and twine?"

Doug's gaze moved from the young woman to the older one. "What?"

Patiently, Auntie Vi repeated, "You got needles? You got twine?" He said nothing and even more patiently she said, "To mend your gear?" She gestured at the other women. "My sisters and me, you got needles and twine, we help mend." She waited.

He looked from her face to the faces of the other three. They were impa.s.sive. He looked back at her. "Well, sure," he said slowly. "I've got needles, and twine, too."

"I've got a spare case in the focsle," Old Sam put in, and looked at Kate. Kate, nursing her sc.r.a.ped s.h.i.+n, sighed heavily and went back to the focsle.

Auntie Vi gave a decisive nod. "Good. We fix."

"I don't know," Doug began, and Auntie Vi said, patience gone, "Freya not going nowhere. We hang the cork line from the bow, one end from Tanya, other end our dory, use Samuel's skiff to mend from, work toward middle." Doug opened his mouth and she beat him to it. "We reef the net to cork line as we mend."

Doug still looked doubtful, but Jim slapped him on the back. "Sure, it'll work. There's no chop or swell, and with all of us working we'll get it done in no time. Maybe even before the period's over." He knew, and Doug knew it, too, that this was an offer they couldn't refuse. The four old women between them had more net-mending experience than the rest of the fleet combined.

Doug was a proud man, with an innate disinclination for accepting handouts and an even stronger dislike for being beholden to anyone. Kate, watching him, saw him bite back that pride and bow his head to necessity and, perhaps, to the generosity of age and experience as well. With their years on the river, the four aunties had probably torn up their share of gear. They knew what it was like to watch impotently as the year's catch pa.s.sed them by, and they knew, too, what a hungry winter was like. "Thanks, Viola. IThanks."

She shrugged. "We helping each others. You help us sometime."

And that was that. In less time than it took to tell it, they had the gear draped over the bow of the Freya, Auntie Edna and Auntie Balasha mending toward the center from the dory, Doug and Jim mending toward the center from the Tanya, and Auntie Vi and Auntie Joy darting back and forth in the Freya-, plastic needles flas.h.i.+ng in the sun, talking and laughing nonstop.

It isn't easy, mending a wet net, but they did it. The task was made easier by the fact that the gear was fifteen mesh, or fifteen feet deep from cork line to lead line, for fis.h.i.+ng the shallower waters near sh.o.r.e. Still, it was fifty feet long, and mending a net on water was a tricky business at best, swell or no swell, and it was two hours before the eight of them manhandled the mended net back to the Tanya s deck and Doug and Joe rewound it on the reel in the bow.

"Hold it," Jim said as Doug prepared to cast off, and vaulted the gunnel to the Freya s deck. He slipped and almost fell in the gurry and blood left from the halibut that Kate and Old Sam had been butchering out as the others mended the Tanya's gear. Before she could nip out of the way he had scooped Auntie Vi up in his arms, bent her over backwards and thoroughly kissed her. He pulled back and grinned down at her. "Thanks, Viola. I'd propose but I'm already married. Want to shack up instead?"

Auntie Vi flushed deep red and scolded him in Aleut, with a couple of extra words Kate recognized as being Athabascan and profanity thrown in for good measure. The other three aunties were rocking with laughter, and Jim, grinning widely, lumped down to his own boat.

Even Doug was smiling. "Thanks, aunties," he called as they pulled away. "I owe you one. h.e.l.l, I owe you ten!"

"We'll save you some steaks!" Kate called, and the two men waved once before getting back to the serious business of fis.h.i.+ng salmon for a living.

They watched the Tanya find a spot to set their gear and turned their own attention to the halibut. It had white flesh but its blood was as red as any salmon's, and a considerable amount of it was spread across the Freya's deck, mixed in with seawater that had kept it fluid.

Kate had always been interested in the stomachs of everything her family shot and ate. The stomach contents of game were stories in themselves. She remembered a Sitka doe once that had had a belly full of seaweed dotted with blueberries and a couple of pop-tops. Halibut were especially fun to excavate since they spent their lives vacuuming up the floor of the ocean. This monster's most recent meal had consisted of a Dungeness crab, two pollock, about a hundred tiger shrimp, a can of cat food with holes punched in it, a small piece of coral and one dark brown rubber hip boot, a little the worse for wear.

"Tell me there's not a foot inside that boot," Old Sam commanded. Unenthusiastically Kate investigated. The boot was empty. Everyone relaxed. They all knew halibut were bottom feeders, and they all knew what sank to the bottom of the ocean when it fell overboard, and they all knew that halibut liked their food ripe. It didn't stop them from eating halibut, or crab either, for that matter, but a foot in the hip boot might have given them indigestion afterwards.

They pitched the guts over the side and began carving the carca.s.s into cookable chunks. The halibut cheeks alone would be enough for an evening meal for the six of them. When they finally got the spine out the resulting fillets were immense.

So was the heart. "Jesus," Old Sam said. "Look at that, will ya."

He handed it to Kate. She needed both hands to hold it.

The dark red lump of grainy flesh pumped once against her palms. In one leap she was at the railing, where she dumped the still-beating heart down on the gunnel and backed away. Old Sam cackled with laughter, and the four old women giggled. A tinge of color darkened Kate's face. She should have tossed the d.a.m.n thing over the side and be d.a.m.ned to it.

Mutt came to her rescue. She stood two feet from the rail, neck stretched to its farthest limit, the stiff hairs on her ruff raised, lips curled back from her teeth, nostrils flaring. She looked at Kate, eyes wide, and didn't find any help there. She turned back to the halibut heart, extended her neck another inch and sniffed once at the jerking flesh. Her lip curled even farther and she backed up a step, uttering a low "woof deep in her throat. That sound had been known to stop a brown bear in its tracks; unintimidated, the halibut heart kept on beating without pause. A rumbling growl and Mutt backed away on stiff legs, yellow eyes never leaving the palpitating lump of red flesh, and retreated to the bow, where she stayed until they got back to Cordova the next morning.

Kate felt like joining her. Cut out from its chest, separated from its body which even now was being boned and sliced into steaks behind her, the organ beat on relentlessly, heaving up and down on the black-painted surface of the gunnel. "How long's it keep doing that?" she said.

Old Sam shrugged. "I seen 'em beat for hours after getting cut out of a body. Just ain't ready to give up, I guess." He grinned at her. "Bothering you, girl?"

Kate drew herself erect and lied like a trooper. "Of course not."

Old Sam laughed, and the d.a.m.n halibut heart kept beating while she hauled buckets of water up over the side to wash down the deck. It kept beating as she wrapped and stowed the halibut fillets in the walk-in freezer next to the engine room below aft, and it was still beating when Old Sam moved them back to their original anchorage just in time to meet the first laden bowpicker as she waddled up, hold spilling a mound of fish from gunnel to gunnel.

"Okay, girl, get them hatch covers off," Sam bawled from the bridge. "Time to hunt and gather."

They were lucky in (hot the fish were running so well, encouraging the fishermen to off-load full holds into the Freya and go back for more. If the fis.h.i.+ng had been slow, the holds of the smaller boats would not have been filled by the end of the period, and they would have hauled their own fish back to the canneries in Cordova, where they would have earned a penny extra a pound, a penny Old Sam regarded as by rights belonging to him. Since Kate was earning a deck boss share, she felt kind of proprietary about it herself.

The hatch covers, long boards twelve feet in length, came off to reveal the square mouth of the Freya's hold. With a revulsion Kate didn't understand herself she moved the still-beating halibut heart to the stern, out of the way and, truth be told, out of her sight.

She would have thrown it overboard if Old Sam hadn't been watching her every move with a gleeful eye. Old Sam would have thrown it overboard if he hadn't taken a perverse delight in how much it bothered her. Between the two of them, the halibut heart was destined to thump up and down on the gunnel until the end of the season.

She laughed at herself, at the both of them, until a hail from an approaching boat reminded her to get to work before Old Sam had even more cause to flex his testosterone, and she trotted forward again to catch the line tossed her by Tim Sarakovikoff. He skippered a trim little bowpicker called the Esther, named for his mother, who would be proud when she heard her namesake had been first in the period to come alongside.

Maybe an inch taller than Kate, with broad shoulders and arms roped with muscle, Tim was flushed with pleasure and triumph and had fish scales caught in his eyebrows. "Am I first up?"

"I don't see any other fish in our hold," Kate said.