The senior senator had outlasted just about everyone else in that august body with the exception of Strom Thurmond, and so by a process of attrition had in the fullness of time procured for himself the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. It was a position uniquely qualified to throw pork in Alaska's direction and this the senior senator did with an enthusiasm unequaled since Huey Long brought home the bacon for Louisiana. It made the senior senator immensely popular with his constituents and guaranteed his reelection until such time as he chose to retire, or until he killed himself surfing in Hawaii, which was his main hobby, after politics. His tan looked great on television, too.

The archaeological dig sat ten miles west of the base, from which the sound of F-15s doing touch-and-goes was faint but audible, an intrusion of modern noise into a prehistoric ruin. Evidence had been found at Tulukaruk of human habitation going back two thousand years. The old ones had known what they were doing, Wy thought as she circled for a landing; the settlement had been built on a confluence of two rivers and three streams, all prime salmon waters. The rivers were the Snake and the Weary, the streams the Kayaktak, the Amakayak and the Aluyak, or King Salmon Stream, Humpy Stream and Dog Stream, the kinds of salmon that ran up each stream and accounted for the settlement being built there in the first place.

The runs were still plentiful enough that silver backs of salmon gleamed up through the water as the Super Cub circled overhead. They hovered in groups of three to a dozen, shoulder to shoulder, noses pointing determinedly upstream. Wy wondered why the villagers had ever left.

But left they had, some three hundred years before, according to Professor Desmond X. McLynn, Ph.D., University of Arizona 1969, archaeologist, and teacher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.