As if he'd been reading her thoughts, Lamar said, "Are Joyce and Viola up at fish camp this year, Kate?"

Evidently he had been too busy to see the four aunties the day before. With perfect truth Kate said, "I haven't been up the creek yet this year, Lamar."

He raised a skeptical eyebrow. "There's still an injunction against subsistence fishing there."

Tim Sarakovikoff burst through the door and rescued Kate from dancing any further around the truth. He grabbed the first fisherman he saw and babbled out the news. The second man, at first disbelieving, asked him a question. Tim gave a violent nod. The fisherman turned to the man next to him and repeated the news. Tim spotted Kate and hustled over. "Kate! Have you heard?"

"No, what?"

Tim saw Lamar and paused, but only infinitesimally. "Denton Harvey, that prick, is sticking it to us again! He's dropping the price on reds to fifty cents a pound!"

Kate set her mug down. Across the table Lamar beamed. "Gotta love that guy."

Fortunately for his continued survival, his comment went unnoticed. "We're not even a week into fishing," Jerry Nicolo said hotly. "It's not like the market is saturated."

"Fucking farmed salmon are gonna put us all outta business," a loud voice said from across the room. "Norwegians, Scots, even the fucking Canucks are getting into it."

"No way."

"It's a fact. They got fish farms in B.C. now. I hear pretty soon the Japanese are gonna be starting some up."

"It's that fucking spill," Dewey Dineen said morosely. "Nobody wants to buy Alaskan salmon anymore."

"It's that goddam Harvey again. This time I say we shoot the bastard and use him for halibut bait!"

"Don't blame Harvey," another man said, "blame the goddam Japs. Hiroshi Limited's the major stockholder in Whitfield."

"So you want to fly to Tokyo, Dick?" someone else said. "Maybe take the matter up with Hiroshi-san personally?"

A stocky man sitting at the counter turned on his stool and surveyed the room, mug in hand. His jeans and plaid shirt weren't any different from what anyone else was wearing, but they were too clean, and the jeans might even have been ironed. "I'll beat Harvey's price a penny a pound."

His words were not greeted with loud hosannas; the drop in price had been too substantial for a penny a pound to make too much difference.

"Delivered to the dock in Cordova," he added, drained his mug and walked out.

"Who was that?" Kate said.

"Joe Durrell," Lamar said. "Independent fish buyer from Anchorage. Middleman for restaurants from Anchorage all the way down to San Diego. First buyer in when the first king hits the Kanuyaq, first buyer out when the last red goes up. He's not interested in anything else."

"Looks like he's going into wholesale," Kate said.

"He does that sometimes. Never by much, just by a cent or two, and there's always a couple of fishermen pissed off enough to sell to him instead."