Good, Kate said briskly, and smiled at Demetri Totemoff, on Harvey‘s right. Without moving a muscle Demetri managed to look faintly amused. Born in the Park, married in the Park (his wife was Auntie Edna‘s daughter, Edna Jr.), raised his kids on the Park, hunter, trapper, and proprietor of an increasingly high-end hunting lodge in the southern foothills of the Quilak Mountains within sight of the Alaskan coast, he was pro-business only insofar as it didn‘t impact the wilderness experience of his clients. Of course, this particular wilderness experience included daily maid service and a four-star gourmet chef. His clients arrived in Anchorage on private jets and were whisked directly to Demetri‘s eyrie in a scrupulously clean and perfectly maintained Beaver, which landed on the lake the lodge was built on and which taxied right up to the lodge‘s dock so the clients never even got their feet wet. Demetri, in fact, had clients who never left the lodge, and he was ambivalent about the prospect of an open-pit mine that had the potential to spoil the perfect view of mountains, glaciers, and wildlife they had hitherto enjoyed. The mine wasn‘t anywhere near within eyesight of his lodge, but he had wondered out loud if once completed it could be seen en route between the lodge and Niniltna. Well, the jury was still out on that, and since Demetri was declining to comment on the logo issue, Kate‘s gaze moved to the woman sitting at Demetri‘s right, last seen at the Suulutaq Mine on the arm of Vern Truax. Thin, tense, she had thick eyebrows always pulled together in a frown over eyes that sat too close on either side of a long, bony nose, with a tip that flattened against her short, hairy upper lip in a way that bore an irresistible resemblance to the beak on a seagull. Her skin was sallow, too, which only heightened the resemblance.

For a woman who was mostly Athabascan, she was surprisingly unattractive. Kate thought how much it helped when someone she was destined to dislike anyway was physically unlovely to boot. She was still trying to work out how Ulanie Anahonak had been voted onto the NNA board. For one thing, Ulanie behaved like a dry drunk, impatient, rigid, intolerant, and pompous. Essentially as though Ulanie were the only person in the room, Kate thought. For another, she appeared to be a functioning illiterate. She never seemed to find time to read the minutes of the previous meeting that all board members received from Annie weeks before the next meeting, and she appeared incapable of sticking to the agenda, jumping some items and ignoring others. She‘d been hostile to Kate from the beginning. In that respect she reminded Kate a little of Axenia.

Ulanie wasn‘t well liked within the Niniltna Native Association. It was a mystery where her votes had come from, one Kate thought it might be worth solving one day, when she had time.

On Ulanie‘s right sat Einar Carlson, another blond, blue-eyed Aleut by way of a Swedish immigrant who had worked at the Kanuyaq Copper Mine and married into the Park. Einar fished summers and worked construction in the winters. In his forties, a confirmed bachelor, he was tall, spare, and mostly silent. He lived in a oneroom cabin across the river from Niniltna, a cabin built by his grandparents when they were first moved from their village in the Aleutian Islands by the military after the Japanese invasion in World War II. Like many Aleuts dispossessed in that war, they had never moved back, choosing instead to make a home in the Park and to raise their children there and in the fullness of time to be absorbed into the Niniltna Native Association. There were fifteen years between Kate and Einar and she didn‘t know that much about him, but in the hothouse atmosphere of the NNA board there would be no avoiding getting to know each other very well indeed.