Don‘t go there, Jim said.

A little while later Edna Aguilar came upriver in an olive green inflatable boat with a two-horsepower Evinrude on the back that looked like a large mosquito. It sounded like one, too.

Is it just me or does she always look pissed off? Jim said.

It ain‘t just you, Old Sam said.

The proper thing would be to compliment Edna on last night‘s meal but Jim was too scared to. Both men gave perfunctory waves and prayed silently that she would go on by. They breathed more easily when she had.

Andy Martushev appeared in his canoe, paddle moving through the water at a steady beat, the sun illuminating the crystalline drops of spray over the bow when he changed sides.

Andy, Old Sam said when Andy was in earshot.

Sam, Andy said.

Want some coffee?

Got some waiting on me at the café.

And somebody a lot prettier to wait on you, Old Sam said.

Andy grinned and paddled on by. He‘s dreaming, Old Sam said.

Why? Jim said. Andy‘s all right. Laurel could do a lot worse.

I hear she and Matt Grosdidier might maybe got a thing, Old Sam said, always a step ahead of everybody else on Park gossip. Besides, Laurel‘s not about to throw herself away on a fuckup like Andy. She‘s too much her mother‘s daughter. Old Sam drank coffee. Things going okay with the girl?

Grunt.

Looking like it‘s going to last?

Jesus, Old Sam, I don‘t even talk about this stuff with Kate.

Maybe you oughta.

With what he felt was pardonable indignation, Jim said, Whose coffee am I drinking here, Dear Abby‘s?

The NNA chair knows that mine‘s a good thing for the Park. Industry, jobs, a tax base so they can start picking up where the state‘s falling off.

Jim looked at the old man, startled by a comment that seemed right out of left field. Old Sam wore an uncompromising expression. He was going to say what he had to say and Jim was going to hear it. The Park rat‘s a different story. The Park rat, she hates the mine and everything to do with it. The mine‘s invading the place that healed her when she was wounded body and soul after that job in Anchorage. It‘s a violation of the peace and the privacy she‘s taken as her birthright. This mine will change the face of the land itself, scar it so that it will never be the same again. Old Sam looked down into his mug. This ain‘t easy times for the Park rat. Just saying you should keep it in mind, is all.

His peaceful mood shattered, Jim finished his coffee and set the mug down on the dock. You remember where you guys found that body in May?

Old Sam scratched his chin and pretended to think about it. The body that was previously identified as this guy who staggered out of the woods day before yesterday?

Yeah.

Old Sam thought some more. I reckon I could find it again, was I asked. This was the purest sophistry, of course. Old Sam Dementieff had more time served in the Park than any ten other Park rats you could name. He‘d covered most of its twenty million acres on the ground, on either foot, four-wheeler, or snowmobile, not to mention cross-country skis, snowshoes, pickup, and the ever and omnipresent airplane. There wasn‘t a grizzly den or a caribou calving ground within a hundred miles that Old Sam couldn‘t have found in his sleep. He‘d walked out of at least one plane crash in the dead of winter when everyone else on board including the pilot had died, showing up in Niniltna a week later. Didn‘t look like he‘d missed a meal, Kate had said. What‘s more, he led them straight back to it, no passing Go, no collecting two hundred dollars. She‘d shaken her head. I‘m a pretty good backwoodsman, but Old Sam . . .