That Dan O’Brian had managed, sometimes single-handedly, to maintain healthy populations of every species of wildlife from the parka squirrel below ground to the bald eagle above, and had managed to do it while maintaining the good opinion of park rats Native and nonnative, sourdough and cheechako, subsistence hunter and big-game hunter, subsistence fisher and sports fisher and commercial fisher alike, and that he had managed to do it without being shot, or hardly ever shot at, was a remarkable achievement. If some wet-behind-the-ears, fresh-out-of-college kid wired through his belly button to the current administration took over, the Park would begin to deteriorate, and the population of the wildlife would only be the beginning. Mac Devlin would roll out his D-9 and start flattening mountains and damming rivers with the debris in his search for new veins of gold. Dick Nickel would start chartering sports fishers by the 737 into the village airstrip. John Letourneau would start bringing in European big-game hunters by the 747, if he didn’t already. Dan O’Brian was just a finger in the dike, but he had it stuck in a pretty vital hole.

Besides, if he left, she’d miss him.

She stopped in Niniltna to talk to Auntie Vi, who listened in bright-eyed silence, her head cocked to one side like a bird’s. “I’ll start calling,” she said, and displayed a cell phone with pride. It was lime green and transparent.

Kate recoiled, as if someone had offered her a diamond-back rattlesnake. “Uh, great, Auntie. I’m going to talk to Billy now. And I might go to Anchorage.”

“You know somebody there?”

“I can get to know them.”

Auntie Vi grinned, and the evil in that grin kept Kate warm all the way to the Niniltna Native Association offices. Billy looked up when she walked into his office. “Ah, and here I was just inches from a clean getaway,” he said.

Kate was known in the Park and, indeed, across the state of Alaska for many things. One of them wasn’t finesse. “You hear about Dan O’Brian?”