For the moment, let‘s focus on the logo. It‘s the kind of thing I was hoping we‘d get from the contest, a single clean image that feels familiar and universal and is beautiful in its own right.

Second, Auntie Joy said. She had loathed all the prospective logos they had received, a very un–Auntie Joy reaction.

This was the second meeting of the Niniltna Association board of directors following the January shareholders meeting and the successful vote to increase the board‘s size from five to nine. Alas for Kate‘s hopes, all members of the board were present, and when she looked around the circular table in the upstairs room at board HQ in Niniltna, she still didn‘t know what new kind of dynamic she had been the proximate cause of producing for this quarterly meeting, or for the future of the association. On the whole, she had to admit things were going a lot more smoothly than she had anticipated. Which only made her spider sense tingle in anticipation of disasters yet to unfold.

On her right sat Auntie Joy. One of the four aunties and the only one on the board, Joyce Shugak was in her eighties, a subsistence fisher on a creek that emptied into Alaganik Bay, where all the other Park rats fished commercial. Married young, widowed young, and childless, she regarded everyone in the Park as one of her own, be they Native or white, squareheads or roundeyes. Aided by a spiritual nearsightedness that allowed her to see only the good in them no matter how badly they behaved, she beamed out upon the world with an impartial benignity and a cheerfulness viewed by more crotchety beings as interminable. On one hand, she was every Park rat‘s grandma. On the other, it was sometimes hard to credit that she was actually of this world.

Next to Auntie Joy sat Marlene Colberg, one of the newly named board members. Marlene, midfifties, was a commercial fisherman, with a set net site on Alaganik Bay next to Mary Balashoff‘s that she had inherited from her father. Her siblings had wanted nothing to do with it, decamping from the Park and some of them from the state as soon as they were old enough, so she fished it alone. She was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and weighed over two hundred pounds, none of it fat, a heritage from her Norwegian father, so she was certainly up to the physical challenge. There wasn‘t that much to be seen of her Aleut mother in her features. Her blond hair was cut shorter than Old Sam‘s, her eyes were deep blue, and her mouth a straight, firm line over a square and equally firm chin. Her hands, large-knuckled and scarred from a life spent picking fish and mending and hauling gear, were folded on the table in front of her. They looked unaccustomed to inaction. Her expression betrayed a little impatience, as if she had better things to do than waste five minutes talking about something as unimportant as a company logo. Kate remembered that Marlene had protested her nomination to the board, and had only acceded to it when overwhelmed by support from other shareholders. She was the least interested in governing of the new bunch, and probably the best of them.