It had all been a very long time ago, but it was a memory Kate treasured, a memory inextricably entwined with the sorry shadow warped into the slip before her. Once the Marisol had been catered to, fussed over, no copper paint too good for her hull, no deckhand too young or too small to help scrub down her decks after a fall hunt. She leaned forward to rest her forehead against the flaking bow. "That's okay," she whispered. "You were high boat for a long time, and back when it counted, too."

The blistered wood felt warm to the touch.

"Damn shame, isn't it," a voice said behind her, and Kate jumped a foot in the air. Mutt cocked a quizzical eye, and Kate felt her cheeks getting hot.

"Hold still a minute, you got some paint on your face," he said, and raised a hand to swipe at her cheek.

She suffered the attention because her back was to the Marisol, but as soon as she could she stepped out of reach. He inspected his fingers and raised his hand. There were flecks of black paint on them.

"Thanks, Gull," she said gruffly. "How are you?"

"Fine, Kate, just fine," he said. He waved a proprietary hand at the boat harbor, rather in the manner of a medieval baron presenting his domain while retaining all rights and authority thereto, including scutage and droit du seigneur.

Kate understood. She could look, but she couldn't touch.

Shitting Seagull had been born Ernest Lee Weustenfeld in Nooseneck, Rhode Island, fifty years before. So far as she knew, she was the only person in Alaska who knew this. But was it her fault that while she was paying Old Sam's slip rent one morning Shitting Seagull had seen a forty-foot pleasure cruiser trying to sneak into transient parking and had hotfooted it down the ramp to chase them off, leaving her alone in his office with nothing to read but the detritus on his desk, which just happened to include a letter from his sister in East Matunuck? A sister who called him Ernie LEE (the emphasis seemed natural to Kate) and, signing herself "Your sis, Sissy LU," wanted to know when he was abandoning the Alaskan wilderness and returning to the bosom of his family, and oh, by the way, that useless bastard Kenny JOE had left her again, this time for that bleached bitch Leona ANN (it seemed that everyone in rural Rhode Island had two first names, a custom Kate thought had been rightfully restricted to south of the Mason-Dixon Line) and she was short for the rent, could Ernie LEE oblige? Just while she got on her feet, of course, and little Ernie LEE and little Martha RAYE sent oodles of love and wanted to know when their Uncle Ernie LEE was coming to visit? And not to forget the Eskimo yo-yos he'd promised them.

Ernie LEE didn't go by his given name in Cordova, however. Upon further investigation, Kate concluded that it was probably all Hawkeye's fault. On a shelf in the harbormaster's office sat the collected works of James Fenimore Cooper, as well as everything ever written by M. Scott Momaday, Dee Brown, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, David Seals, Thomas King, Tony Hillerman and Barbara Kingsolver. There was a two-foot-high stack of back issues of Indian Country Today piled in one corner. A folder of photocopied microfiche articles on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act spilled off the filing cabinet.