"You're standing in for her."

"For Emaa?" The image of her grandmother rose up before her, solemn, stern, commanding. "They think I am."

"The tribe elected you to the council yet?"

"No," Kate said, "and they won't, either."

Jack detected the note of truculence in her voice and as a matter of self-preservation decided to change the subject. "Speaking of Auntie Joy"

"What about her?"

"Didn't you tell me once she's got a fish camp up Amar-tuq Creek?"

"Not according to the federal government."

"She still suing them?"

"Uh-huh."

Jack grinned. "What is it with the women in your family, you take a vow with Rabble Rousers, Inc., before you're allowed into puberty or something?"

"Emaa trained us well." Kate had meant the words to be a joke, but they were too true to be laughed off. "Amartuq where you and Johnny want to go fishing?"

He nodded. "Do you think it'll be a problem?"

Her answer was oblique. "The period opens at six a.m. The fishermen won't be delivering until ten or so. I'll give you a ride up the creek in the skiff." She raised her head to look at him, a suggestion of a smile on her face. "Be warned. She might let you fish."

He eyed her expression. "Just not with poles and lures?"

She grinned. "I've always liked that about you, Morgan, you're very quick."

"Not when it counts," he said with a cocky grin.

A smile spread across her face. "No."

He couldn't resist kissing her under that kind of provocation, and he had a good try at talking his way into her bunk, but she held out for dry land and privacy, and in the end he unrolled his sleeping pad and bag on the hatch cover and she ascended to her lonely bunk in the chart room.

It hadn't been a lonely bunk until she climbed into it with the knowledge that Jack Morgan was lying thirty feet away and one deck down.

"What the hell," Old Sam said the next morning. He was standing in the wheelhouse, coffee cup in hand, staring hard out the windows. Kate, zipping her jeans, padded forward in bare feet to look over his shoulder at the gray day outside.

It was six-thirty and the seven boats rafted with the Freya had yet to cast off. The other dozen or more boats had yet to up anchor. She reached around Old Sam and picked up the binoculars. There was a setnet out; through the glasses she could see white corks bobbing against dull green ripples close to shore. She moved around Old Sam and craned her neck. And there was one drifter, after all, a white drifter with no name lettered on the bow.

It wasn't that everyone had overslept; there were men and women on the deck of every boat within eyesight. They all seemed to be staring at the lone drifter, and from the collective set of jaw on the bay, not liking what they were seeing. Not at all.