The boy whooped. "Hey, come back here, let me try that!"

"No way," Jack said.

"But Dad"

"No," Jack said, and with firm hand sat Johnny down hard on the bow thwart. Johnny pouted.

They passed Cal Meany's drifter, his net paid out over the stern, white corks bobbing like popcorn popping as the fish hit it. He and his son were moving up and down the cork line, picking fish so fast their hands blurred in action. The skiff was already two-thirds full. Not a few fishermen were eyeing them with less than favorable expressions on their faces, and several comments were made in raised voices, "scab" being the nicest epithet hurled.

"Is that going to be trouble?" Jack said as they left the no-namer behind.

Kate nodded. "Probably."

"Should we do something?"

"Like what? Tell Meany to stop fishing? He'd tell you to fuck off. Tell the fishermen to leave Meany alone? They'd just beat the shit out of you first."

Johnny leaned around his father to see if she was kidding. Her face was calm and unsmiling. He sat back, sober and a little regretful. He was going on adolescence, and this might be the closest he'd ever come to a shooting war. He was kind of sorry to be missing it.

They passed the markers and entered the mouth of the creek, a broad stretch of water gray-blue with glacial silt, sandbanks on either side and a few sprouting midstream. Kate reduced speed and threaded a careful path upstream. No matter how many times you'd been up the Amartuq and no matter how well you thought you knew him, he was a noisy, contrary, temperamental beast who delighted in surprise ambushes that usually resulted in the loss of a kicker, if not a hull. Sandbars changed sides, deadheads lurked around every bend, boulders shifted location beneath the force of the spring runoff, until you thought you could hear a deep, mocking laugh in the rush of the water beneath the bow. Kate took her time. If they hit something, at least they'd hit it slow.

Alders and cottonwoods and the occasional scrub spruce crowded the banks. "Look!" Johnny said, pointing. A grizzly lumbered out of the brush and waded out belly-deep into the water. As they watched, he caught a gleaming salmon in his claws and sat down in midstream to eat it. His matted pelt shone golden brown in the morning sun just breaking through the overcast. He didn't bother to look around at the noise of the outboard, concentrating on brunch instead.

Around the next bend a wolverine snarled at them from beneath a clump of diamond willow. On the other side of the creek a family of otters played tag. Jack grabbed his son by the shoulders and turned him to look at a lynx crouched on the branch of a cottonwood, tufted ears cocked forward over glowing cat eyes. Two trumpeter swans paddled in a calm backwater, while high above an eagle beat his enormous wings steadily homeward.