Though Not Dead Read Online Free PDF

have to go into town tomorrow and find Petey to give him the good news. Last she’d heard he was renting a room from Iris Meganack, as Iris’s daughter Laurel had moved in with Matt Grosdidier. Matt’s brothers, Mark, Luke, and Peter, were said to be overjoyed, as well they should have been because Laurel was one hell of a cook. Iris was known to be tight with a buck and Kate had no doubt she was alleviating her displeasure at Laurel’s moving in with someone without benefit of clergy by charging Petey rent on the order of summer rates at the Kanuyaq River Princess Lodge in Ahtna. At the very least he could now move on board the Freya and save himself some money. Since the Freya was docked in Cordova, it would also move him out of range of his parents, another good thing.
    Kate knew a huge feeling of relief, and it didn’t have anything to do with the potential for improvement in Petey’s lifestyle. Thinking of the jumbled mess of wooden pallets and coiled lines and spare engine parts and tools that was her last view of the Freya ’s focsle, her courage had almost failed her. Old Sam was a true Alaskan, he never threw anything away, he just tossed it in the focsle. He’d been doing so for sixty years, and Kate had not been looking forward to inventorying and disposing of the contents. Now she didn’t have to.
    More good news followed. “You get the books, girl,” Old Sam had written. “Keep the ones you want and farm the rest of them out to the library.” The school library served as the community library and was chronically short of both books and funds to buy books, although they had approached Vern Truax about the Suulutaq Mine’s becoming a Friend of the Library. Since Global Harvest seemed to have given Truax a blank check for local sponsorships designed to smooth the mine’s way with Park rats, the latest of which featured a ThinkPad for every student in Niniltna Public School and a satellite dish on the roof to connect them all to the Internet, Kate thought the library had a pretty good shot at an affirmative response.
    “You been eying that log of Captain Cook’s pretty near since you learned how to read,” Old Sam wrote. “I figure it’s the one thing guarantees you won’t miss me all that awful goddamn much.”
    She laughed and sniffled.
    “You okay?” Johnny said.
    She blew her nose on a paper towel. “Just Old Sam being Old Sam.”
    Reassured, he went back to his math, and she returned to the will. She was taking her time, savoring each paragraph, each sentence. It was her final communication from Old Sam and she wanted to make it last as long as possible.
    He’d owned a couple of pieces of property she hadn’t known about, a lot in Ahtna that she thought might be on First Street, another in Niniltna adjacent to the lot his cabin stood on that appeared to take in most of the riverfront between his house and Harvey and Iris Meganack’s, and a third identified only by latitude and longitude. At a rough guess, after a quick consult with the map of the Park on the wall in the living room, this last was in the Quilaks, this side of Canada somewhere between Park Headquarters and the Suulutaq Mine, which took in a lot of territory. Probably a mining claim Old Sam had staked back in the day when every second Park rat and a whole bunch of Outside boomers were claiming every loose rock that didn’t manage to get out of the way first.
    She looked at the lat and long again. The dimensions looked pretty substantial. She was fuzzy on the rules of claim staking but she had a vague recollection that mining claims were limited in size by law. The Park’s chief ranger, Dan O’Brian, would know. She’d head up to the Step tomorrow. The map on his wall was a lot bigger, too, and had better topographical detail than hers did.
    As to whether there was enough gold or whatever ore was there to pull out of the ground, economically speaking, was anybody’s guess. Odds were always against, but Old Sam hadn’t