Kate, momentarily forgetting who she was speaking to, bristled and snapped, "Try it on, old man. Just you try it on."

She was sitting facing forward, arms folded, jaw tight, glowering at the bow of the skiff. The next thing she knew, there was a hand at her collar and another at the waistband of her jeans and a sudden sensation of weightlessness, followed by a tremendous splash.

She came up spluttering and coughing. They were still close in to shore and the water was shallow enough for her to find her feet. She sluiced off her face with one hand and glared up at the old man. "What the hell do you think you're doing!"

"Teaching you respect for your elders," he said calmly, wrapping the starter cord around the top of the kicker. It caught this time, and he throttled it back to a low roar.

"Hey!" Kate said, as the skiff began to move slowly away from her.

His voice floated back to her. "Walk it off, girl. I'll be waiting for you at Mary's."

And he left her there, waist-deep in the Gulf of Alaska, as he put-putted peacefully down the bay.

It was five miles from the Flonagon setnet site to the Balashoff setnet site, and the distance was not made any easier by the soft, wet gravel underfoot, the weight of her soaking clothes, the sight of Anne Hanagan emerging from the trees, twins in tow, in time to see her squelch off, the knowledge that only ten or twelve fishermen had to be watching from the boats anchored around the bay and, last but most definitely not least, the sting of her own conscience.

Ekaterina Ivana Shugak was thirty-three years old, and the last time she had had to be reprimanded for disrespect to her elders was twenty-five years before, when at a potlatch she had failed to yield her chair to a visiting tribal leader from Port Graham. Her grandmother had said nothing of her granddaughter's breach of manners, nothing at all, not during the potlatch, and not for seven days afterwards. The other Niniltna elders had followed her lead, even Abel, who had turned the emotional temperature way down at his homestead for the longest week of her life. She had never forgotten it.

She had never repeated her error, either.

Until today.

The recognition of her violation of etiquette, of her dereliction of duty was slow and labored in coming. It took a mile of beach just to burn off her temper. She churned up the gravel better than a four-wheeler, and it was only exhaustion that slowed her down in the end. She was a grown woman, a person with education and experience, loved by her family, valued by her colleagues and looked up to by her community, not to mention feared by her enemies; what call did Old Sam have to correct her manners? One lousy little remark, not shouted, barely spoken, whispered even, and suddenly it was time to bob for apples, full-body-immersion style. This was the goddam Gulf of Alaska, after all, where the temperature of the water never rose above forty-two degrees Fahrenheit, she could come down with hypothermia in two minutes, count 'em, two, and go into shock and die right there on the beach, if not lose consciousness while she was still in the water and drown, and wouldn't Old Sam be sorry then.