Laid out on the deck, the halibut's snout poked into the door of the focsle and its tail bent up against the front of the galley. The ventral fins almost but not quite overlapped either side.

They crouched over it in wonder. "Sweet Jesus H. Christ on a crutch," Old Sam said prayerfully. "How big do you think, Doug?"

Doug was still mad. "I think it's just too damn bad I can't kill it twice."

"It's a downright dirty shame we don't have a scale big enough to handle the sucker," Jim said wistfully. "Betcha ten bucks she weighs five hundred pounds."

"Six, maybe," Kate said.

"Seven," Old Sam said, and spat over the side for emphasis.

"This mother's eight hundred if she's an ounce," Doug snapped. Everyone else maintained a prudent silence, broken by the scrape of a boat against the portside hull. Kate looked around in surprise, and rose at once to her feet, her face lit with pleasure. "Auntie Joy!"

"Alaqah," Auntie Joy said, her round face peering over the gunnel, "that is some fish you got there, Samuel."

"It sure as hell is, Joy-girl." The old man stood to offer her a hand. "Get your ass on up here and grab a knife, we can use the help."

The old woman laughed, and Kate couldn't help the grin that spread across her face. It was matched by identical grins on the faces of the three other women still seated in the New England dory warped alongside the Freya's starboard hull. "Hi, Auntie Vi. Hi, Auntie Edna. Auntie Balasha, I didn't know you were in the Park."

Auntie Joy took Old Sam's hand and with an agility that belied both age and rotundity climbed over the gunnel to the deck. The other three women followed. Kate made the introductions. "Doug, Jim, this is Joyce Shugak, Viola Moonin, Edna Aguilar and Balasha Shugak. My aunties." She said it proudly, if inaccurately. Only one of them was really an auntie, the other three were great-aunts and cousins, but the relationships were so convoluted, involving Kate's grandmother's sister's husband who had divorced his first wife and married again and moved to Ouzinkie, that it would have taken half an hour to unravel. Balasha was the youngest of the four of them, a mere child of seventy-six. The rest of them were in their early eighties, although Auntie Vi never got very specific about it. They were as brown as berries, as wizened as walnuts and as round and merry as Santa Claus. It raised the spirits just to breathe the same air they did.

"You on your way to fish camp, Joy-girl?" Old Sam said.

Kate remembered then, the family fish camp a mile or so up Amartuq Creek, the very creek across the mouth of which Yuri Andreev had tried to cork Joe Anahonak not half an hour before.

"Yes," Auntie Joy said, "we fly George in from Niniltna, and come from town on the morning tide." She beamed. "Fish running good, huh?"