BREAKUP.

by Dana Stabenow.

1.

Kate surveyed the yard in front of her cabin and uttered one word.

"Breakup."

Affection for the season was lacking in the tone of her voice.

Ah yes, breakup, that halcyon season including but not necessarily limited to March and April, when all of Alaska melts into a 586,412-square-mile pile of slush. The temperature reaches the double digits and for a miracle stays there, daylight increases by five minutes and forty-four seconds every twenty-four hours, and after a winter's worth of five-hour days all you want to do is go outside and stay there for the rest of your natural life. But it's too late for the snow machine and too early for the truck, and meltoff is swelling the rivers until flooding threatens banks, bars and all downstream communities-muskrat, beaver and man. The meat cache is almost empty and the salmon aren't up the creek yet. All 2 you can do is sit and watch your yard reappear, along with a winter's worth of debris until now hidden by an artistic layer of snow, all of which used to be frozen so it didn't smell.

"The best thing about breakup," Kate said, "is that it's after winter and before summer."

Mutt wasn't paying attention. There was a flash of tail fur on the other side of the yard and the 140-pound half-husky, half-wolf was off with a crunch of brush to chase down the careless hare who had made it. Breakup for Mutt meant bigger breakfasts. Breakup for Mutt meant outside instead of inside. Breakup for Mutt meant a possible close encounter with the gray timber wolf with the roving eye who had beguiled her two springs before, then left her flat with a litter of pups. All five had been turned over to Mandy a nanosecond after weaning. One had been on the second-place team into Nome the month before.

Kate tried not to feel resentful at being abandoned. It was just that it seemed someone ought to have been present, looking on with sympathy as she plodded through the million and one tasks produced by the season's first chinook, which had blown in from the Gulf of Alaska the night before at sixty-two miles per hour and toppled the woodpile into the meat cache, so that the miniature cabin on stilts looked knock-kneed.

The chinook had also awakened the female grizzly wintering in a den on a knoll across the creek. Kate had heard her grousing at five that morning. She was hungry, no doubt, and a knock-kneed cache was probably just the ticket to fill her belly until the first salmon hit fresh water.

And speaking of water, before Kate started work on the truck she had to check on the creek out back. With the coming of the chinook the ice had broken, and the subsequent roar of runoff was clearly audible from her doorstep. The previous fall had brought record rain, and the boulders that sh.o.r.ed up her side of the creek had been loosened to the point of destabilizing the creek bank, but before she could do anything about it she'd had to go to Anchorage, and by the time she got back the creek had been frozen over.

3 Before her lumbar vertebrae could start to protest at the mere prospect of such abuse, she went to take a look, shoving her way through the underbrush that closed in around the back of the cabin to the top of the short cliff overlooking the course of the stream.

From the top of the bank at least, the situation did not look that bad.

The tumble of boulders, some of them as tall as she was, broke the current, supported the bank and excavated and maintained a small backwater just downstream within the arm of the outcropping, good for salmon tickling and skinny-dipping.

The thought of skinny-dipping called up a memory from the previous summer, one that included Jack Morgan, whose behind had suffered from sunburn that evening. He hadn't complained.

She flapped the collar of her shirt. It had to be forty degrees. A veritable heat wave. No wonder she was feeling flushed. There was a length of three-quarter-inch polypro fastened to evenly s.p.a.ced posts leading down the side of the bank, and she went down backwards, breathless not just from the exertion, light of foot and heart.

Up close she was happy to see that the situation looked even less dire.

The two boulders that formed the point of the mini-peninsula had shifted, but it looked now as if they had merely to settle in even more firmly than before. No collapsed banks, no rocks sucked into midstream.

She scaled the natural breakwater and to her delight found that the alteration had caused the backwater to increase in size and depth, just a little, just enough to increase her crawl from four overhand strokes to five, and Jack's from two to three.

Or just enough to catch her.

"Get a grip," she said, shifting inside clothes that had fit perfectly well when she put them on that morning. It was her own fault for reading Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell late into the previous night. Those d.a.m.n Cavalier poets were always headfirst in love with somebody, and none of them had the least sense of moderation. Charles II had a lot to answer for.

4 It was Jack's fault, too, for not being here, right here where she could get her hands on him.

A rueful grin spread across her face. If Jack had the least idea of her mood he'd be on the next plane.

The water at her feet was so clear it was almost invisible, crisped at the edges with a layer of frosty ice, and she bent over to scoop up a handful. It was tart and oh so cold all the way down. Smiling, she splashed a second handful over her face.

Over the rush of water came a kind of snuffling grunt. Her hand stilled in the act of scooping up more water, and very, very slowly she looked up.

Fifty feet away, standing in midstream, thick, silvered hide spiked with water, a female grizzly stared back.

Ten feet downstream of mama came the bawl of a cub.

Five more feet downstream came the answering bawl of its twin. Neither of them looked more than a day out of the den.

Involuntarily, Kate stood straight up and reached for her shotgun.

It wasn't there.

The grizzly allowed Kate just enough time to remember exactly where it was-in the gun rack above the door of the cabin-before she dropped down to all fours in the water and charged.

There was a bark and a scrambling sound from the top of the bank. "NO, Mutt!" Kate roared, a shaft of pure terror spearing through her. "STAY!"

The bear stopped abruptly in midstream and reared up on her hind legs, so immediately on the heels of Kate's command to Mutt that a bubble of hysterical laughter caught at the back of her throat. The bear's lips peeled back to reveal a gleaming set of very sharp teeth that snapped in her direction. When they came together it sounded like the bite of an axe blade sinking into wood.

All thought of laughter gone, Kate backed up a step, casting a quick glance at the bank behind her. It wasn't as tall or as steep as the bank down to the outcropping, but it was still taller than she 5 was and lined along its edge with a tangled section of alder and diamond willow, with no line to aid her ascent. Mutt barked again, and again Kate yelled, "NO! STAY!" without turning around, because she purely hated turning her back on a bear. She took another step back and began to speak in what she hoped was a soothing monotone. "It's okay, girl, it's all right, you're between me and your cubs, I can't get to them, it's all right, I mean you no harm, settle down now and I'll get out of your face, just calm down and-"

There was another roar from the grizzly and she dropped down on all four feet with a tremendous splash and charged again, water fountaining up on either side.

"Oh s.h.i.t," Kate said, and on the spot invented a technique for climbing a steep creek bank backwards that might not have been recognized by any international mountaineering organization but got her up and over the lip of the bank a split second before the bear, moving too fast now to stop, crashed headfirst into the wall of dirt with such force that a large section of it caved in on her.

It didn't improve her disposition any, but Kate wasn't hanging around to watch. On hands and knees she wriggled through the undergrowth, branches sc.r.a.ping at her face and tugging at her hair, nails broken, knuckles split and bleeding, all the while listening to the outraged roaring of the grizzly behind her. The sound provided unlimited fuel for forward motion. Kate broke through the other side of the brush and collapsed, only to be pounced upon by an anxious Mutt, who thrust a nose beneath Kate's side and flipped her like a landed halibut, sniffing her from head to toe in between bellowing threats to the grizzly. Between the growling of the infuriated grizzly, the bawling of the terrified cubs and Mutt's challenging howls, Kate's eardrums would never be the same.

"It's okay, girl," Kate said, as Mutt nosed her over for the second time. "It's all right. Calm down, now. Come on, calm down. Mutt, dammit, knock it off!"

Mutt ceased triage with a hurt look. Unhindered, Kate managed to get to her feet and stagger to the cabin to retrieve the 6 shotgun. She got back in time to listen as the grizzly proceeded to tear up an additional six feet of creek bank, which from the sound of it included the felling of a great deal of timber, before taking her frightened offspring in charge and marching them off in the opposite direction. They heard her baying defiance for a good fifteen minutes, and then it faded only as she put distance between her family and Kate's homestead.

It took every second of that fifteen minutes for Kate to swallow her heart, control her respiration and ama.s.s sufficient authority over her muscles to still her knees. Her jeans were soaked through with snowmelt, her shirt with perspiration. Her blood thudded against her eardrums and the walls of her veins. With every in drawn breath oxygen fizzed along her pulmonary arteries. She felt ten feet tall and covered with hair.

She felt as naked and defenseless as a newborn babe. She was terrified, she was exhilarated, she was most definitely alive.

Returning to the yard, she stood the shotgun b.u.t.t down next to the cabin door, ready for action. Inside, she noticed with a sense of detachment that her hands were filthy from clawing up the creek bank. She looked up and caught sight of her image in the mirror hanging over the sink. Her waist-length, straight black hair, which had started out the day confined in its usual neat French braid, had been yanked into an untidy bush. The pupils of her almond-shaped eyes took up most of the hazel iris, and her skin, usually a warm golden brown, had paled to the point that the roped scar bisecting her throat was almost invisible.

She noticed further, with that same sense of detachment, that everything within range of her vision seemed to be outlined with a rim of light that shimmered in the crisp morning air, giving it an air of unfamiliarity. It was almost as if she were seeing everything for the first time.

The cabin was a single room twenty-five feet square, with a sleeping loft beneath a high-peaked roof. To the left of the door was the kitchen, containing a sink with an old-fashioned, long- handled water pump, an oil stove for cooking, a woodstove for 7 heat, a table and three old and mismatched but serviceable chairs. A built-in, L-shaped couch upholstered in deep blue canvas filled up the corner to the right of the door, and the rest of the wall s.p.a.ce was taken up by bookshelves crammed with books, tape deck and ca.s.sette tapes. A dusty guitar hung on one side of the door, a set of caribou antlers on the other side with a down jacket and a fur parka hanging from it. The ladder to the sleeping loft rose up from the center of the room. On nails driven into the sides of the ladder hung two beaver traps, a sliming knife with a white plastic handle in a hard plastic sheath, a couple of rings of keys, a wool m.u.f.fler and a philodendron she was in the process of killing.

Kate's heartbeat began to settle and the room once again to look like home. It seemed so amazingly unchanged from when she had left it, was it really only twenty minutes before? Strange, when she felt so, so ...

well, she didn't know quite what she felt, except that her knees were still experiencing technical difficulties and as she moved to the stove to pour herself a cup of coffee she kept tripping over objects that weren't there.

The coffee, the last in the pot and strong enough to smelt iron, booted the kick start with a satisfyingly solid jolt. Kate rinsed out the mug, scrubbed her hands, clipped her broken nails and changed into dry clothes, which gave her at least the outward semblance of normality, in spite of the little electric shocks that kept darting beneath her skin.

Back outside, she narrowed her eyes against the sun. Never had it seemed more golden in color, never the sky so blue or the trees such a dark, deep, rich green. The air sizzled with life and death and everything in between. She gulped it in, greedy for more.

Jack Morgan's face flashed in front of her, and she knew an immediate, visceral need for his presence, his mouth, his hands, his body. Her skin radiated a sudden and unexpected heat, and she pulled at the front of her plaid shirt, popping one of the b.u.t.tons in her haste, rolling up her sleeves to bare her skin to the cool, clean air. When she realized what was happening she gave a snort of laughter. Mutt, on self-appointed sentry duty, looked around, 8 ears c.o.c.ked inquiringly. "It's all right, girl," Kate said, still laughing, albeit somewhat shakily. "Breakup's making your roomie a little needy, is all."

The ears remained c.o.c.ked, as if to say, So what else is new? or maybe, Get in line. Kate laughed again, and then pulled herself together. There was work to do. Priority one was a truck tune-up. She'd left the supply run to Ahtna until too late to take the snow machine.

The truck was an '84 Isuzu diesel with 150,000 miles on it that still got twenty-six miles per gallon on the straight stretch of former railroad roadbed between Kate's homestead and the village of Niniltna.

She had high hopes of it going another hundred and fifty thousand, until either she or the truck died of old age. She sorted through the toolbox for a wrench, pausing when something halfway between a pig squeal and a jacka.s.s bray wafted into the clearing on a stray breeze. It wasn't the female this time. Probably the grizzly male one mountain over. Probably the father of the two cubs. She reached down to feel for the 12-gauge and found it right where she'd left it, leaning against the front b.u.mper.

By ten a.m. she had pulled the battery and put it on the trickle charger, drained the water out of the fuel filters, checked the oil, checked the coolant in the radiator, checked the tire pressure all around and investigated the possibility of porcupines in the fan belt.

Porcupines were pests d.a.m.n near as bad as bears, born troublemakers; they would go for anything rubber for the salt in it-the fan belt, the tires, once Kate had seen a porcupine chewing through the track of a Nodwell tractor.

During the tune-up she managed to acquire a metal splinter under the nail of her right forefinger that looked about a quarter of an inch long and felt as if it ran all the way up to her elbow. She startled Mutt out of her nap with a loud oath and went into the cabin to perform emergency surgery. She daubed the resulting gash with antiseptic, and tried to remember the last time she'd had a teta.n.u.s shot. Niniltna had no health clinic. Each year the public health nurse came through with an immunization card for 9 every student in Niniltna Public School, kindergarten through twelfth grade, but once you graduated, you were on your own. If Kate needed a teta.n.u.s shot, she'd have to drive to Ahtna. Convenient, if that was the right word, since she had to drive to Ahtna for supplies anyway.

The whistle of the kettle interrupted her reverie. A cup of hot cocoa sounded like heaven on earth. Unfortunately, she'd used up her last can of milk the week before, and this morning's coffee had been the end of the Starbucks Christmas blend, which she bought five pounds at a time, when she had money in December. She rummaged around for something else, surfacing eventually with an elderly box of Lemon Zinger. There was some honey left. Hallelujah. She spooned it into the thick white porcelain mug with a heavy hand. The resulting brew was tangy and sweet and scalded her insides.

It was noon and she was hungry, but she'd forgotten to get any meat out of the cache the night before. She added more honey to her tea and put Jimmy Buffett on the tape deck, forgetting how dangerous Jimmy was to listen to during breakup. Kate, too, wanted to go beyond the end, find one particular harbor, be somewhere over China, take another road, any road, especially today, preferably to a place where there were no bears.

It was an act of self-defense when she replaced Jimmy with Cyndi Lauper.

Girls just wanna have fun. Which of course brought Jack Morgan back to mind with an immediacy that set her teeth on edge. She changed Cyndi Lauper for Les Miserables, sat down on the couch and leaned back with a contented sigh. Mutt, who had overseen the operation with a critical eye, flopped down with an equally contented sigh.

Fifteen minutes later Kate jerked awake, the now cool tea sloshing over the side of the heavy white porcelain mug onto her hand and knee. Mutt was on her feet, nose to the door, a steady, rumbling growl issuing from deep in her chest.

"Oh s.h.i.t," Kate said, and got to her feet.

The .30-06 slid comfortably into her hands, and she flicked off 10 the safety and took a step back as she opened the door. "Stay," she told Mutt, whose growl had grown in volume.

There was a bear in the yard, and to add insult to injury, it wasn't the sow she'd encountered that morning, it wasn't even the boar from the next mountain over. This was an entirely new neighbor, a youngster, two, three years maybe, and small, no more than three hundred pounds and change. His brown coat was long and thick and shining from six months of doing nothing but growing it out underground.

He had managed to b.u.mp into the cache, with the result that it was now on the verge of total collapse, so that the frozen meat inside had shifted enough to force open the door. Half a dozen packages littered the ground beneath, and a seventh was at present being finished off with a single gulp, two layers of butcher paper over two layers of Saran wrap and all. He lifted his lip in their direction and attacked another package.

Kneeing Mutt, who had expressed a sincere wish to rid the homestead of its uninvited guest and all his kin, back inside, Kate jacked a round into the .30-06's chamber. "Get out of here!" she yelled. "Go on! Git, you big pest, before I turn you into a rug!" Mutt raised her voice in agreement, sounding considerably more threatening.

The bear stood up on his hind legs and waved his claws, snarling. His mom had taught him that much before she booted him out, and it worked pretty well on other mammals and most humans. Kate shot a round into the ground in front of him. The bear let out a shriek of fear and dropped forward on all four legs, in the process b.u.mping once more into the cache.

"Oh h.e.l.l," Kate said.

The much-abused knock-kneed leg folded like a pleat in an accordion and the other three legs couldn't stand the strain and the cache began a graceful tilt forward, during which the rest of the meat store fell out and rained down on the grizzly's head-a roast, a package of ptarmigan b.r.e.a.s.t.s, another roast, a package of mooseburger, five pounds of caribou ribs. The bewildered grizzly 11 gave a bellow of consternation and bolted like lightning into the east.

A bear in high gear is a sight to evoke awe and admiration, and Kate would undoubtedly have experienced both those emotions but for one thing. The open door of the garage was in the bear's way. His right shoulder clipped it in pa.s.sing and it ripped easily from its hinges, whirled merrily around on one corner and flopped down with a squishy splat as the grizzly, barely checking, crashed through a stand of alders and was gone.

Kate looked from the garage door lying flat on the ground to the cache crumpled up on the opposite side of the yard and sat down hard on the doorstep, the rifle clutched in her hands, waiting for her heart rate to drop below 200.

"Breakup" she said.

12.

One bear encounter per life was one too many. Two in the s.p.a.ce of eight hours seemed, at the very least, excessive.

Still, any number of bears in one's life was preferable to what waited for her on the kitchen table, a task she'd been putting off for three months, a task she could no longer delay.

That evening she took a deep breath, got out her self-control and marched over to the kitchen table, where the booklet ent.i.tled "Instructions for Form 1040" waited for her with a superior smirk on its government-issue face.

An hour later she felt as she always did on this day at this time of the year, frustrated and angry and convinced she was destined to spend the rest of her life in a federal prison in Illinois run by Ida Lupino.

"Income," as usual, was proving to be a problem.

13 On page 15 of the booklet the IRS had provided a helpful guide to just what kind of income must be reported. Earned income was easy; her brief but intense employment with RPetCo at Prudhoe Bay the previous year had pulled in $17,500 in fees and expenses. That went on line , no problem there. There was the mushroom money from last June as well, but it had been paid in cash and Kate decided what the IRS didn't know wouldn't hurt them, or her, either.

She tried to remember where the $17,500 was now. A big chunk of it had gone for Axenia's cla.s.ses at UAA, although now that Axenia was married her husband would be taking over his wife's bills. She didn't approve of Axenia's choice of husband but at least he'd gotten rich at the government trough and would relieve her of the burden of Axenia's school fees. Or so Kate sincerely hoped.

Too much of it had gone for that d.a.m.n dress-up outfit for that party in Anchorage last winter. The outfit was hanging in Jack's closet in town, encased in plastic, and if she had anything to say about it, never to be worn again. She still begrudged every dime.

Of course, once she'd put it on, Jack Morgan's chief object in life became a determination to get her out of it as quickly as possible, not necessarily the worst finale to a forced march through Nordstrom's. She smiled to herself, and then made an effort and pulled her wayward imagination back to the subject at hand. Most of what was left of the Slope income had financed Emaa's potlatch. The rest was in the one-pound Darigold b.u.t.ter can on the table in front of her.

Kate still wasn't sure if her grandmother had had legal t.i.tle to the Niniltna house on the river, but whether she did or not Martha Barnes and her children lived there now, and possession was nine- tenths of the law. She decided the IRS didn't need to know about that, either.

Ekaterina's possessions had been distributed among family and friends at the potlatch. So far as Kate knew, Ekaterina had never had a bank account. For that matter, Kate didn't think her grandmother had ever applied for a Social Security number. She'd never 14 had to pay for much; no family member or friend ever came to her house not bearing gifts. Kate had found seven hundred dollars in small bills and change in the b.u.t.ter can the twin of Kate's sitting on Emaa's kitchen table, a moose hindquarter hanging out back, a chest freezer stuffed with salmon in the round, ptarmigan b.r.e.a.s.t.s frozen a dozen per Ziploc bag and enough caribou to keep the entire village in stew for a week in the upright freezer next to it. The pantry had yielded up ten cases of salmon, plain and smoked and kippered, case lots of canned goods and pilot bread, a case of homemade nagoonberry jelly, another of strawberry jam, a fifty- pound sack of potatoes, a fifty-pound sack of onions and two fifty- pound sacks of flour. In the closet hung flowered house dresses, worn Levi's and half a dozen kuspuks, richly embroidered and trimmed with fur, all gifts from loving and/or grateful family, friends, tribal members and shareholders. Money and food both had gone to the potlatch, the kuspuks to female relatives of the right size, and now Kate was wondering if she'd inherited all of it and if she had, if she was supposed to pay taxes on it.

She decided the IRS would never know.

Farm income, now. Would that mean the potatoes Mandy grew and sacked and traded with Kate for salmon to feed Mandy's dogs? Or would that be farm income for Mandy and barter income for her? But it wasn't income if it was an even trade, was it? Kate consulted the booklet. Bartering income was defined as "fair market value of goods or services you received in return for your services."

What the h.e.l.l was that supposed to mean? Salmon weren't services.

Potatoes weren't services, either. They were probably goods, though. How much did potatoes cost nowadays? She had no idea. She never bought potatoes, she either grew them herself or traded with Mandy for them.

She wondered if there was some way the IRS could find out about that.

She wondered how Mandy had filled out her IRS form, if she had included Kate's salmon as income from barter.

The vision of the federal prison in Illinois faded, to be replaced by one of a chain gang in Mississippi, bossed by Strother Martin.

15 She made herself another cup of tea and dosed it liberally with the last of the honey. She sat back down at the table and drew a pad and pencil to her and started making out a grocery list, paperwork that was more her speed, but then Kate had always had a tendency to think with her stomach. Coffee, flour, b.u.t.ter, salt, seasonings, milk, canned goods, she was out of everything.

Breakup. If she could just go to sleep at the end of February and wake up on Memorial Day, the truck running and the cupboards full-and taxes filed-life would be so much easier.

She dawdled over the list until the sun had gone down and it was time to light the lamps. She drew out the task as long as she could, checking the fuel, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the wicks, polishing the chimneys until they shone like crystal. When she was finished, the interior of the cabin was filled with a warm and welcoming golden glow. She stood admiring it for a while, and her thoughts wandered to her next-door neighbor. She wondered if Mandy's parents had arrived on schedule. She wondered if Mr.

and Mrs. Baker had tax problems. Probably not. They probably had a fleet of tax attorneys on retainer. Them that has, gets.

The distant whine of a jet engine broke the silence. Probably an F-14 on maneuvers from Elmendorf or Eielson. Even on a remote site in the Alaskan bush, you couldn't get away from the sonuvab.i.t.c.hin' feds. The reminder drove her back to the kitchen table, before they parachuted an IRS auditor down into her front yard.