The mine needs a lot of air support, he said, and it‘s going to need a lot more, especially since you won‘t let them build a road. Okay by me, he said, waving off her inarticulate protest, but if I can‘t supply said air support, they‘ll go looking for someone who can. I can‘t serve both the mine and the Park on the equipment I have. I got a chance for the big time here, Kate, and I‘m going for it. She digested this while he preflighted the 206, parked in the weeds on the other side of the hangar from the office. Sitting there in the shadow of the building, the Cessna looked a little forlorn, if not downright unloved, and seemed to perk up at being called back into service. George waved Kate over and they climbed in, Mutt jumping into the back, which had been stripped of its other four seats. She sat with her head between the two humans, ears pricked forward in anticipation. The Cessna started at once and without further ado George rolled out onto the runway and lifted into the air. Half an hour later they were touching down at the Suulutaq Mine. Kate had been to Suulutaq the previous winter, when it was the scene of a homicide involving a couple of Park rats. At that time, it had been covered by twenty feet of snow, which had almost buried the white ATCO trailer with the gold stripe around the edge of the roof. There had been a couple of other outbuildings that only just qualified as sheds, and an orange wind sock on a pole sitting at the end of which, if you looked hard, you could see the faintest simulacrum of an airstrip outlined on the surface of the snow.

This insignificant little outpost had been dwarfed first by the high, wide valley in which it squatted, and second by the Quilak Mountains, two rocky, out-flung arms of which embraced the valley and which permitted only the narrowest possible opening in a pass to the west that tumbled down a precipitous slope leading to the eastern edge of the Kanuyaq River. This remote location was accessible in winter by snow machines and in summer by four-wheeler and year-round by airplane, so long as said airplane was equipped with tundra tires. There was no road.

And there wouldn‘t be, Kate thought now, looking down as George made a slow right bank over the now almost unrecognizable location. Not if she, as chair (interim) of the Niniltna Native Association, had anything to say about it. Dan and George were both right about that, even if she‘d never say so out loud.

Last winter the camp had been virtually deserted, the lone employee on site a caretaker, whose isolation was alleviated only when his week was up and the alternate caretaker arrived for his shift. Or when someone was poaching game at the head of the valley, where the Gruening River caribou herd wintered. Now the snow had retreated to the tops of the mountains, and the mine site was a sea of mud surrounding seven prefab modular buildings and an assortment of heavy equipment ranging from what Kate supposed was the infamous John Deere grader to Caterpillar tractors in two sizes, a backhoe loader, a crane truck, and a couple of forklifts. Some were digging holes in the newly thawed ground. Others were smoothing rudimentary tracks to connect the buildings, airstrip, and drilling rigs. Some were shifting cargo stacked on pallets at the end of the runway to one of the buildings below. All were in operation.