Pike finished with his gear, then stepped back onto the dock. He took ten one-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet and held out the money.

Here. Now you won't have to worry about it.

MacArthur looked embarrassed and put his hands in his pocket.

Let's just forget it. You rented it, it's yours. You're makin' me feel like a miser and I don't appreciate that.

Pike put the money away and stepped down into the skiff, keeping his weight low. He cast off the lines.

You bank the boat when you get up Chaik, use that orange tape to flag a tree so I can find ya if I have to come looking.

Pike nodded.

Anyone you want me to call, you know, if you need me to call someone?

No.

You sure?

Pike nosed away from the dock without answering and set off for deeper water, holding his bad arm close.

The light rain became fat drops, then a low foggy mist. Pike zipped his parka. A family of seals watched him pass from their perch on a promontory of rocks. Humpback whales spouted further out in the channel, one great tail tipping into the sky as a whale sounded, Pike's only thought to wonder at the perfect quiet that waited in the waters below.

Pike rubbed his bad shoulder. He had been shot twice high in the back almost eight months ago. The bullets shattered his shoulder blade, spraying bone fragments like shrapnel through his left lung and the surrounding muscles and nerves. Pike had almost died, but didn't, and had come north to heal. He worked king crab boats out of Dutch Harbor and fishing boats out of Petersburg. He long-lined for black cod and halibut, and if the crews on the boats he worked saw the scars that laced his chest and back, no one asked of their nature. That was Alaska, too.

Pike steered north for four hours at a steady six knots until he reached a circular bay with two small islands at its mouth. Pike checked his chart, then double-checked his position on a handheld GPS. This was the place, all right. Chaik Bay.

The pounding chop of the channel gave way to water as flat as glass, undisturbed except for the head of a single white seal. The bottom rose as Pike eased toward shore, and soon the first of the carcasses appeared; dead salmon as long as a man's arm drifted with the current as they washed out of the creek, their bodies mottled and broken with the effort to spawn. Hundreds of seagulls picked through the fish that had washed onto shore; scores of bald eagles perched in the treetops, a single eagle at the peak of each tree, watching the gulls with envious eyes. The smell of rotten fish grew sharp.