Everyone agreed: Snag was one of the best fly fishermen on the peninsula.
Bets sighed, dropped her chin onto her fists and said, “It’s like watching the ballet. Only better.” She drew a long cigarette out of a red leather case, lit it with a matching red lighter, and said she’d never seen a girl—or a boy, for that matter—make a fly dance like that. “It seems the fish have forgotten their hunger and are rising just to join in on the dancing.” She studied Snag late into the day, kept studying her, even after Snag fastened her favorite fly back onto her vest, flipped the last Dolly Varden into the pail, then pulled the camera from her backpack and took the very picture of Bets she now held in her hand. Bets sat on a big rock, legs crossed at the ankles, pushing her dark sunglasses back on her head, biggest, clearest smile Snag had ever seen. That picture had been taken a week and two days before Glenn returned home from Fairbanks and fell elbows over asshole in love with Bets too.
The woman threw back her head and screamed in a foreign language, then, dragging the dog, ran into the bathroom. She locked the door. Kache pressed his ear against it and asked her to come out but she didn’t answer.
Downstairs on the hall tree hung his old green down parka with the Mt Alyeska ski badge his mother had sewn on the collar. He yanked it on over his lighter jacket.
Outside. Fresh air. Breathe. The moonlight now reflected in a wide lane across the glassy bay, like some yellow brick road beckoning him to follow it. Instead he headed through the stale snow and fresh mud of the meadow toward the trail. He walked fast, puffs of steam marking his breaths like the puffs that sometimes rose from the volcanoes down across Cook Inlet.
He could erupt any moment.
He could do his own screaming.
Who the hell do you think you are? This is MY house. MY clothes. MY mother’s shirt.
How long had she been here, eating, bathing, sleeping, breathing in his memories? And who else? How many others had made his home their own?
At the biggest bend the trail opened to the left, and there, five paces away, the plunge of the canyon. He didn’t go another step. He shivered—partly from the cold, partly from childhood fears.
In the quiet, a hawk owl called its ki ki ki and the canyon answered Kache’s ranting with questions of its own.
YOUR home?
Have you given a rat’s ass about one inch of this land or one log of that house?
Has it occurred to you? That strange woman may be the only reason YOUR home is still standing?
Kache shook his head hard enough to shake his thoughts loose. The canyon obviously didn’t speak to him like that. To prove it, he did what they’d all done a thousand times, whenever they’d arrived at that spot on the trail:
Across the dark, vast crevice he yelled, “HELLO?”
And the canyon answered as it always had, “Hello …? Hello …? Hello …?”
The front door closing, his footsteps clunk clunking down the porch stairs. She peeled back the curtain to see him cross the meadow. Where was he going? She turned on the bathroom light and stared at her reflection in the medicine cabinet. Her hair was disheveled from climbing under the bed, so she pulled out the elastic band and brushed. Leo lay down at her feet.
Nadia touched her fingertips to her lips. “Hello,” she said to the mirror. Her voice shook. All of her shook. Her throat seared from the screaming. But she did not scream now. She imagined her reflection was Kachemak and she kept her eyes from looking away. It was one thing to talk to plants and animals and quite another thing to have a conversation with a human—with a man.
“I am frightened.” No. “I am fine. Fine. I go now.”
She raised her chin, put her hand to her hair.
“Thank you for letting me stay.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Stay away from me or I kill you.” She placed her fists on her hips. “Son of bitch. Damn you to hell, son of bitch.”
But Kachemak’s mother was Elizabeth. Kind, smart Elizabeth. And this was her Kache. “I apologize. Your mother is not bitch. Your mother is very good. Your grandmother is very good.” She touched her throat. “Kache? Please? You are still good person also?”
The sun pulled itself up over the mountains to the east, casting salmon-tinged light on the range and all across the bay, even reaching through the large living-room windows. Kache sat sipping dandelion root tea with the woman Nadia, she in his mother’s red-and-white-checked chair, he on the old futon. Neither had slept. Only the fire crackling in the woodstove broke the silence between them. She burned coal and wood, which filled the tarnished and dented copper bins next to the stove. She must have collected the coal on the beach the way his family had done. It smelled like home.
The fire popped and they both jumped. “Bozhe moi!” Her hand went to her mouth, her eyes still downward. “Sorry.”
Wait—that language, her accent—Russian?
An Old Believer?
In junior high Kache wrote a Social Studies report on the Old Believer villages. The religious sect had descended from a band of immigrants who’d broken off from the Russian Orthodox church during the Great Schism of the seventeenth century, and later, during the revolution, fled Russian persecution, immigrated to China, then Brazil, then Oregon, before this particular group feared society encroaching, influencing their children. They moved to the Kenai Peninsula in the early nineteen-sixties, beyond the end of the railroad line, past Caboose, then still called Herring Town, and staked their claim to hundreds of acres beyond the Winkels’ own vast acreage.
At first everyone pitied the Old Believers. A child died in a fire and a woman was badly scarred trying to save her daughter. “They’ll never make it through another winter,” locals predicted about the small group of long-bearded men and scarf-headed women. But then a baby girl was born, and the Believers saw the tiny new life as an encouragement from God. In the spring they began to fish and cut timber. They built wood houses, painted them bright colors—blue and green and orange, and more Believers came from Oregon. They built a domed church. Eventually they too divided over religious differences and the strictest of the group ventured deeper into the woods. But both groups lived separated from the rest of the world, exempt from laws other than their own rituals, unchanged since the seventeenth century, which they believed were from God. Back in the Seventies, Kache’s dad said they ignored a lot of the fishing laws, and when the fishermen had a slow year, they often blamed the Old Believers.
“They’re lowly.” Kache recalled Freida—his mom’s bridge partner—spitting the words across the kitchen table one night. His parents adamantly objected.
But his mom had her own concerns. “I just
