It was Labor Day, and everyone was in town for the parade and the salmon bake at the gym and the farmer‘s market and craft fair at the school. Unless he‘d managed to finagle a way out of it Chopper Jim would be leading the parade in his white Blazer, and the Grosdidier boys would be bringing up the rear in their fire-engineyellow Silverado with the mobile pharmacy in the back. In between Miss Niniltna would be holding court on the back of a flatbed draped with the school colors of blue and gold, the Kanuyaq Kings varsity and junior varsity teams would be dribbling in formation behind her, and the Suulutaq Mine would be swaggering behind them and tossing candy like they worked for Hershey‘s. Every kid in Niniltna with a bike or a trike would be dressed in last year‘s Halloween costumes and part of the parade only when they weren‘t scrabbling for their share of the candy.

He was sorry to miss the fry bread and smoked fish at the gym, but he figured everyone felt that way, especially Chopper Jim and Dan O‘Brian, which considerably improved his chances for a nice, quiet, successful hunt.

Yes, he had been there a few hours, and he expected to be there a few hours more, but he was in no hurry, and he was a man who enjoyed his own company. His thoughts ranged freely across the years and the Park and all of the people in it. He thought of people who had gone, like Emaa, and of people who should have been gone a lot sooner, like Louis Deem, and of people still around, like Kate. He was a mite concerned about Kate. She had a habit of rescuing people, which was all right in moderation, but not so much when you went into it wholesale. It was particularly aggravating when it substituted a greenhorn for an experienced deckhand just about the time the first salmon hit fresh water.

Although he had to admit that Petey Jeppsen and Phyllis Lestinkof had not been completely worthless on the Freyathis past summer. They were both clumsy and ignorant, of course, practically couldn‘t tell a humpy from a dog at the start of the season, but they‘d shouldered in and worked hard. Neither one had taken their first paycheck to the bars uptown when they delivered in Cordova, and when they got seasick they remembered to puke to leeward. Further, when Kate had joined them for the silver season in August, neither Petey nor Phyllis had complained at being bumped down to second and third on deck. Petey‘d had no problem taking orders from Kate, either. Sometimes the male of the species could get a little uppity when placed in an inferior position to the female, especially on the deck of a fishing boat in Prince William Sound.

He heard the brush rustling before he saw it moving. He pulled the Winchester tight into his shoulder, finger on the trigger.