Again he was disappointed. Mary shook her head. "Shugaks," she repeated, and heaved herself to her feet. An amiable giant of a woman, she stood six feet, one inch in her stocking feet and had startlingly blue eyes at odds with her brown face and black hair. Back when such things were not done, her father, a handsome Aleut from Tatitlek, had run off with the beautiful daughter of a Norwegian seiner. Speaking of Shakespeare, Kate thought. The seiner, a proud and bigoted man, had washed his hands of the affair and returned to his Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, also known as Little Norway, righteously to declare himself to be without issue from that day forward.

It had been a happy marriage, so far as Kate could remember the tale, made all the more so by the fact that the union had scandalized the Tatitlekers as badly as it had the Ballardians, which allowed the couple to live in happy obscurity on a homestead outside of Copper Center, unhampered by advice from either family. They'd had five children, four boys and one girl, all of whom had blue eyes like their mother and black hair like their father and all of whom grew to a minimum of six feet in height. The boys went off to school, moved Outside and never came back. Mary had stayed, and by default had inherited the family setnet site.

She had been fishing it for thirty years. The Amartuq fish camp had been abandoned by federal decree for almost the same amount of time, and until the aunties had gone back up the creek a generation of Park children, including Kate, had learned to pick fish from Mary's skiff, to mend nets at Mary's knee, to fillet salmon and to tend the fire that burned beneath the drying racks after they had been filleted. Park parents had come to regard the Balashoff setnet site as on-the-job training for those offspring unlucky enough not to be chosen as deckhands.

Mary had also had a longtime summer romance going with Old Sam. Kate remembered this interesting fact just in time for Mary to save her from further speculation by saying, "Come on, honey. Let's get you into some dry clothes before you catch cold."

Kate, shivering now in spite of the tea, followed her inside, and emerged a few minutes later dressed in a worn Aran sweater that hung to her knees and a pair of jeans rolled up twice at the ankles and cinched at the waist by a frayed length of half-inch polypro and a thick pair of wool socks. She sat on the porch with her back to the wall, and at that moment the sun broke through the clouds and bathed the bay in a warm, golden light. It was nine-thirty, and with the sun came a small breeze that rippled the surface of the bay, rocking the boats gently at anchor.