Whisper to the Blood by Dana Stabenow Read Free Book Online Page A

not at all amiably, at
Harvey
, whose grinding of teeth was audible.
    "But—" Kate was beginning to feel like she was lost in the
middle of a Joseph Heller novel.
    "It's done, girl," Old Sam said, and slid a piece of paper down
the table. "Let's get on with it. I've got other things to do today."
    The piece of paper proved to be the agenda for the meeting, embossed with
the Niniltna Native Association logo.
    The Association logo had been the subject of a great deal of controversy
when the Association was first formed over thirty years before. One group of
shareholders had held out for art, another for commerce, a third for culture, a
fourth for history, and a fifth for the artist of their choice, usually a near
relation. The divergent opinion resulted in a verbal fight at the first
shareholders meeting that very nearly ended in a riot which, legend had it,
Emaa quelled by sheer force of personality. The resulting logo, designed by
committee, was a jumbled ball of black silhouette images, a leaping salmon, a
browsing moose, a Sitka spruce, a jagged mountain with what might have been a
tiny mine entrance halfway up it, a dogsled with the musher snapping his whip
over the dogs' heads, a dancer with a drum, a seiner with its nets out, a gold
pan. That many images were, of necessity if there were to be anything written
on the rest of the page, minuscule, and as such difficult to identify. At first
glance the whole thing looked like a Rorschach inkblot. This had of course
pleased no one, but Ekaterina Shugak, Kate's grandmother and the first board
chair, had been impatient to move on to more important topics and had pushed it
through.
    Kate said the first thing that came into her head. "God, that's
ugly"
    Old Sam gave out with a stentorian guffaw. Auntie Joy's radiance dimmed a
trifle. Harvey and Demetri said nothing. Belatedly, Kate realized that all four
of them would have had their own opinions on the NNA logo long before Kate was
old enough to vote as a shareholder. She looked around, casting about
desperately for a less incendiary topic.
    The Niniltna Native Association headquarters was a modest, rectangular
building two stories high. It had asphalt shingles, vinyl siding, vinyl
windows, and an arctic entryway, and was painted brown with white trim. It sat
on the side of a hill in back of the village, next to the state trooper's post
on the road to the airstrip.
    The board met in a corner room upstairs, with windows in two walls, large
sliders equipped with screens. Through them could be seen the washed-out blue
sky and the thin sunlight of an arctic fall day, with the gathering edge of an
ominous bank of dark cloud. Snow was late this year, and the temperature was
dropping fast, putting pipes at risk of freezing all over the Park.
    The room held a table, and like almost every project involving shareholder
funds, it was made from spruce bark beetle kill harvested from Association
lands. The blight had swept through spruce forests across southeastern and
southcentral
Alaska
over the last ten years the way the bubonic plague had swept over the world in
1350. Sensibly, the board had reasoned that if the spruce trees were going to
fall over dead anyway, they might as well put them to good use. There were
spruce bark beetle kill countertops, cupboards, floors, paneling, sleigh beds,
rocking chairs, and farmhouse tables in every public and private building in
the Park.
    This table had been made by Demetri to Ekaterina's specific instructions,
round in shape, because Ekaterina didn't think there ought to be a head to a
table where sat equals, and modest in size, because Ekaterina disapproved of
large governing boards. Privately, Kate thought it was because Emaa knew that
smaller groups were more easily manipulated.
    The table was sanded and polished to a satin gloss, although the individual
boards did have a tendency to bow occasionally. Annie Mike had been in the room
once when one of the boards, imperfectly dried, had split open