"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.