A baggage tractor lumbered up to the luggage window and began off-loading duffel bags, cardboard boxes fastened with hundred-mile-an-hour tape, frame packs, knapsacks, sleeping bags, fishing pole cases, tackle boxes and about fifty optimistically empty coolers. Passengers crowded around and the pile melted.

Fifteen minutes later the first of the small planes began taking off, a Cessna 206 so heavy with freight and passengers it used up most of the runway before becoming airborne. It they caught any fish at all, it was going to take them at least two trips to get everything back to Cordova.

The next small plane took off the second the Cessna was clear of the ground, this time a Super Cub on wheel floats with rifles tied to the struts and gear lashed to the floats. It, too, took an inordinate amount of pavement to get into the air. The third small plane was a TriPacer, sprightly on its tricycle gear and with its light load of one pilot, one passenger, one pole, one pack, one rifle and one cooler. A fisherman who believed in traveling light and in solitude. Kate approved.

At that point a Cessna 185 with the blue and gold seal of the Alaska state troopers embossed on the tail landed in a three-point runway paint job, and Master Sergeant James M. Chopin pulled up on the apron with a flourish. It was a new plane, and gleamed bravely even in the cloudy drizzle that was standard for Mudhole Smith. Jim emerged gleaming no less bravely, a tall, broad-shouldered, long-legged man clad in an immaculate uniform, shiny blue jacket zipped to just beneath the perfectly tied Windsor knot of his tie, hat freshly brushed and its brim pulled down just far enough to provide Jim's bright blue eyes with just the correct amount of shade. Jim was well aware of the cachet the Alaska state trooper's uniform lent the wearer, and he took care never to appear less than sartori-ally splendid, whether he was testifying in court in Anchorage, disarming a wife killer in Chitina or responding to the scene of a murder in Cordova.

"Kate," he said, giving her a formal nod, immediately spoiling the effect with a grin than reminded her of nothing so much as the expression on the snout of a great white shark on its second pass. "Where's Mutt?"

"At fish camp. Where's your helicopter?"

"In the shop. Fish camp?"

"On Amartuq Creek, with Auntie Joy and Auntie Vi."

"Right. On Walden Pond with Thoreau, Gandhi and Dr. King, learning to practice civil disobedience. Mutt ought to be good at that." It unsettled Kate when she and Jim shared the same opinion on any subject, and it was doubly unnerving when the opinion concerned her elders' perfectly legitimate actions in defense of their cultural history.

He sensed her uneasiness. His grin widened and he adjusted his hat a millimeter to the south. "Hear you found yourself another body."

"I don't exactly go around drumming up business," Kate said, irritated.