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coffee standing up, allowing herself no time to brood over it, after which she washed the dishes and pattered briskly down the steps into the yard.
    She wasn’t on Alaganik Bay on a fishing boat or a tender for the second summer in a row. It might be a trend. Her bank balance was healthy, which also might be a trend. No one had tried to burn down her house or drop a jet engine through the roof of it, lately. Last night she’d finished up the paperwork and sent out the bills for her last two PI jobs—an employee background check and a lost husband, both of which had proved a lot more complicated and a lot more productive of revenue than first estimated. No one else had come knocking on her door to clear up a personal or professional mystery, and the State of Alaska and the federal government had been remarkably reticent since she’d neatened up that little matter of international gunrunning the previous January. Although both their checks had cleared the bank just fine.
    She was faintly astonished to realize she was free to do whatever the hell she wanted. She stood in the middle of the clearing in front of her house, reveling in the clear, cool Park air, and thought about taking the summer off. A novel idea. She wasn’t quite sure what that would entail.
    The sun was well up in the sky by now, turning the Quilaks from their early-morning luminescent ghostliness into a solid dark blue fastness. If they did not quite lower, they definitely loomed, imposing, intimidating, impenetrable.
    Although not quite. Old Sam had left her property deep in that fastness, a homestead he had staked as a young man. Canyon Hot Springs, a steep, narrow valley at the very edge of the border between Alaska and Canada, which included the remnants of the cabin Old Sam had built, and a hot springs that bubbled up out of the ground. He’d left her a few other surprises as well, farther up the canyon.
    It was a heart-stoppingly beautiful place but difficult to access, a sweaty, bushwhacking journey on foot in the summer and a bewildering maze of dogleg turns by snowmobile in winter. She wondered how far the sun penetrated that narrow valley at this time of year. How long would it take, and how much effort, to get up there and see for herself?
    Her gaze dropped to the nearer prospect.
    She had inherited this homestead upon the death of her parents, which homestead had been grandfathered in when the twenty-million-acre national park had been created around it by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980. The Park, about the size of Oregon, encompassed the land up to and including most of the Quilak Mountains on the east, to the Glenn Highway in the north, in places to the Alaska Railroad on the west, and to Prince William Sound on the south. Kate’s homestead was a little west of dead center, on Zoya Creek—named by her father for her mother—which fed into the Kanuyaq River. Kanuyaq was Aleut for “copper,” which had been discovered in large quantity at the beginning of the previous century in the foothills of the Quilaks. Copper was the foundation of the Park’s modern age, bringing in a railway from Cordova to the mine, the roadbed of which now served as the main access to the Park. Or it did when it was bladed by a state grader, which was twice a year, once in the spring and again in the fall.
    Although that might be about to change. Kate scowled at a bald eagle sitting on a scrag, who, as usual, scowled back. Pissed off was any eagle’s de facto demeanor. Probably why they felt like kin.
    Two years before, discovery of another massive ore deposit, gold this time, had considerably livened up life in Niniltna, the Park’s biggest village, as well as increased traffic on the road. Another unwelcome result was an increased clamor from industry—specifically Global Harvest Resource, Inc., the high bidders on the Suulutaq Mine leases—for the road to be improved. Another result was Park rats rising up in a body to say,