Kate, a trained detective as well as a natural snoop, feared the worst, and time proved her right. Ernie LEE was a wannabe Indian. He had migrated first west and then north, rejecting White America and all that it stood for (in his mind, broken treaties, Custer and Wounded Knee) and wholeheartedly embracing the Native American ethic and everything it represented (in his mind, sovereignty, Black Elk and Wounded Knee). He was a card-carrying member of AIM, tithed regularly to the Free Leonard Peltier Committee and was eager to explain the legal differences between being a Native American and an Alaska Nativeeven to Alaska Natives, who suffered in silence, because after all, Shitting Seagull did control access to the small boat harbor.

He got the harbormaster job because he was seven feet two inches tall, weighed 350 pounds and had hands like the shovel on a front-end loader. The mayor took one look at Ernie LEE and saw an immediate end to any unnecessary roughhousing or drunken boat driving down on the docks, which until then had contributed heavily to the repairs and maintenance of slips and pilings.

On his side, Ernie LEE took one look at Cordova and knew his odyssey was over. He settled in, not bothering to look for a place to live other than the room behind the harbormaster's office, where he slept on a cot beneath army blankets, cooked on a hot plate and read sitting on a Blazo box, his back to the wall and his feet on the windowsill. He had one pinup: Wilma Mankiller.

As far as the name went, after some tactful inquiry Kate gathered that Ernie LEE had read something somewhere about Native Americans naming their children after the first thing they saw after the child's birth. Since his mother (probably Carolina MOON or Georgia PEACH) had not had the foresight to do so, after much thought he had decided to rectify his lack. He fasted three days and three nights in a lotus position (it didn't matter that yoga wasn't a necessarily Native American practice, it was indigenous to somewhere and it was spiritual in nature and that was enough). On the fourth morning, just before sunrise, eyes firmly closed, he uncranked himselfpainfullyinto an upright position, hobbled to the door and felt his way outside. He'd been unable to keep from speculating what he would first see, and was guiltily aware of choosing names in advance of the culmination of the ceremony. Morning Star? Rising Sun? Tall Tree? White Cloud? Flying Eagle?

Breathless with anticipation, he opened his eyes. At that moment, a twenty-three-inch immature female specimen of Larus glaucescens, startled awake from her roost on the harbormaster's roof by the vibration of the opening door, launched herself from the ridgepole and unloaded right in Ernie LEE's face.

In other words, a seagull shit on him.

Now another, lesser man might have rejected Native American traditions at this point and moved on to a less stressful spiritual discipline, such as the Jesuit priesthood, but it must be said that Ernie LEE had the courage of his convictions. If a seagull shitting on him was the first thing he saw on the morning of his spiritual birth, then Shitting Seagull was the name by which he would be known from that time forward. It was a decision that gave the fishing community no little enjoyment, and the city clerk heartburn every month when she had to print out his paycheck. A prim throwback to a more Victorian era, she wouldn't say "shit" if she had a mouthful.