Free The Singing of the Dead by Dana Stabenow Page A

two, something George, full-time Bush pilot, part-time A&P mechanic, and sole proprietor of an air taxi, appreciated in full.
    The plane steadied into level flight once more. They were fifteen minutes out of Niniltna, another fifteen minutes to go. It was a clear day, the sun high in the sky, and the Quilak Mountains loomed at their back like a bridge between earth and heaven, with the right of way reserved only for a worthy few. Beneath them the Kanuyaq River doubled and tripled back on itself as the foothills flattened reluctantly into a broad plateau. Here and there a roof showed beneath the branches of trees that had been encouraged to grow closely to the eaves, the better to protect the owner's privacy. A skiff was pulled up on a sandbar, the aluminum hull dull in the waning light. A black bear and three cubs took fright at the sound of their engine, and Kate's last sight of them had the sow frantically pushing one cub up the lone spruce tree in the middle of a meadow.
    She had bought Jack two of the jackets she had forced him to model, because the one he usually wore for court was a disgrace, one of the pockets hanging by one corner and soft-boiled egg stains down the front, and because she rarely had the opportunity to buy him gifts. She had followed him into the dressing room to make sure he didn't leave them behind. There had been a close encounter in that dressing room that should have got them arrested, and would have if that clerk waiting on them hadn't . . .
    Ahtna was a small town of two thousand, built where the northern reaches of the Kanuyaq River met the Kanuyaq River Highway, which connected the Glenn Highway with Valdez. It was one of the first communities of any size in Alaska, after Fairbanks and Nome, started by one of the smarter stampeders who had seen early on that while the miners themselves made little or no money, the businesses who sold miners their supplies made out like bandits. “Mining the miners,” they called it. Some of the miner miners were bandits, come to that, Kate thought, reminded of certain members of her own family tree, one of whom had been hung for a horse thief back in 1899. Not that Emaa had ever admitted to it, but Kate had done some research for a paper on local history for a school project, and the story of the hanging had been on the front page what was then the weekly Ahtna Tribune. It had been one of the more well-attended public events in Ahtna's early days, according to the reporter, who quoted the newly sworn territorial sheriff in every paragraph.
    Now, with her experience as a law enforcement professional, she thought of the article with a more informed perspective. New lawman on the job out to make a name for himself, establish his authority, send out a warning to the other nogoodniks in his jurisdiction not to shit in his nest. Poor Zebulon Shugak didn't stand a chance. But he had certainly given rise to a great deal of merriment among the student population of Kate's generation of Niniltna High, which had added not inconsiderably to her own status as well.
    And then there had been the bonus of embarrassing her grandmother. Johnny Morgan, she thought, was an amateur compared to Kate Shugak in her prime.
    Evidently the sheriff's plan had worked; Ahtna had grown to become a thriving little hub town, and had been the first to embrace flight by building an airstrip out of gravel mined from an oxbow a mile up the river and hauling in tanks to be filled with fuel which was sold at rates just this side of extortion. Ahtna was the Park's banking hub, its marketing hub, its educational hub, with one of the University of Alaska's few remaining regional branches, and its bureaucratic hub, with federal offices for the departments of the Forest Service, Housing & Urban Development, the Air National Guard, and everything in between, including, naturally, the National Parks Service. Raven, the Native regional corporation, was doing a brisk business in erecting HUD-backed