"They ought to have to fill out fish tickets, same as us," someone else agreed.

"And pay the raw fish tax."

"Not to mention the enhancement tax," the first man added, "to restore the creek habitat they tear up every year with those friggin' speedboats."

"It all goes back to the spill," the first man insisted stubbornly, and there wasn't a lot of disagreement.

Watching their faces, Kate saw anger and a consistent, pervasive bitterness that would never go away. The ten-million-gallon, eight-hundred-mile-long spill of Prudhoe Bay crude was nine years old, but it might as well have been yesterday. These men had been fishing Prince William Sound since they were old enough to walk the decks of their fathers' boats. They fed their families and paid their mortgages and put their kids through school with what they wrested from the jealous grasp of the Mother of Storms.

When the TransAlaska Pipeline project had first been proposed, shortly after the discovery of nine and a half billion barrels of oil and twenty-five trillion cubic feet of natural gas seven thousand feet below the surface of Prudhoe Bay, these same fishermen, who individually had more hands-on experience of Prince William Sound than any twenty tanker captains, drunk or sober, had lobbied long and hard for an overland, transCanada route, as opposed to the all-Alaska route that would culminate in Valdez and require shipping by tanker.

Supported in their efforts by economists and environmentalists alike, they were roundly defeated by a coalition of local and state businessmen frankly drooling at the prospect of opening up to development an eight-hundred-mile corridor of Alaskan wilderness. The fishermen freely prophesied disaster, and the grounding of the RPetCo Anchorage on Bligh Reef sixteen years later was a Pyrrhic victory for their viewpoint.

There is no worse triumph, Kate thought, than the one that results only in saying, "I told you so."

She leaned forward, fork momentarily suspended, the better to look at the faded T-shirt worn by a fisherman a few tables down. Don't Shoot, it read, I'm Not Denton Harvey!

She sat back in her seat. "Who's Denton Harvey?"

"Huh?" She pointed, and Lamar leaned out to look, only to turn back to her with a wide grin. "The superintendent of Whitfield Seafoods."

"Oh?" Whitfield was one of the major fish buyers and processors in Prince William Sound, but until now she hadn't known the name of its superintendent, and she would do her best to forget it at the first opportunity. She made it a point of honor to tune out fishing politics, which seemed to be dictated from Seattle and Tokyo and acquiesced to by a weak-kneed state legislature in Juneau. So long as the check for her deckhand share cleared the bank, she went home happy. "What's with the T-shirt?"

"He put the price of reds in the toilet the first week of July last yearsomething like fifty cents a pound, I think it wasand of course all the rest of the processors followed his lead."