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got another fare.” He fired up the engine, made a U-turn, and roared off.
    Kate headed up to the Step in a gloomy frame of mind. There, the double-wide trailers and modular buildings that formed Park Headquarters huddled together on a long, narrow plateau against the nearly vertical wall that was the western face of one of the more intransigent of the Quilak Mountains. A dirt strip ran a couple of thousand feet before disappearing into the tall grass and the encroaching alders, which were turning an autumnal gold. An unfamiliar helicopter was parked to one side, bright shiny new. Kate instantly began to think of ways to finagle a ride out of the Parks Service. George Perry, a fixed-wing man all the way, would disapprove, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Jim had left the helicopter that had given rise to his other nickname, Chopper Jim, in Tok when he’d made the move into the Park.
    Dan was in his office, filling out forms. “If we can’t do it in heptaplicate, the federal government don’t do it at all,” he said. He tossed the paperwork aside, gave Mutt an affectionate cuff when she trotted forward for the attention that was her due, and leaned back in his chair, linking his hands behind his head. “How the hell are you, Shugak?”
    A burly man with bright blue eyes in a red face beneath reddish orange hair cut in a flattop, Dan O’Brian had joined the Parks Service fresh out of college. He had served time at various parks across the nation before arriving in Alaska and in the Park, where he had thus far resisted every subsequent effort at transfer, promotion, or retirement. A confirmed bachelor, a raging heterosexual whose record for seduction was second only to Chopper Jim’s, Dan was a man of such highly developed interpersonal skills that he was the only ranger in the entire state of Alaska who had never been shot at, even while evicting squatters off Park lands, arresting bear poachers, and enforcing fishing regulations. “Ranger Dan isn’t an asshole,” Old Sam had once famously opined from the bar of the Roadhouse, “his job is.”
    Even this fleeting memory of the quintessential Alaskan old fart was enough to give her pause. “Fine,” she said, recovering. “I’m fine.”
    He rocked a little, looking at her, saying nothing.
    “Yeah, okay, I’ve been better,” she said. “Did you know he was eighty-nine?”
    “That all? I’d have figured a hundred and three, easy.”
    She had to smile. “New helo out there, I see.”
    He nodded. “AStar B3. The Lama burned too much fuel. This one’s got more power, more payload, and a hundred-forty-knot cruising speed with a full load.”
    “Do you even know what any of that means?”
    He laughed. “No. But it sounds good.”
    “Why didn’t you ever learn to fly, Dan?”
    He shrugged. “I never have a problem scoring a ride wherever I want to go.” He grinned. “It’s good to be king. How about you?”
    She reflected. “Have you ever noticed how when somebody gets their pilot’s license, they stop being whatever else they were the second before? Like if someone asks them what they do, from that moment on they say, ‘Oh, I’m a pilot. And, you know, a nuclear physicist.’ ”
    “What, Kate Shugak afraid she’s going to lose her identity at five thousand feet?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just scared of heights.”
    He laughed again. “Yeah, right.”
    “Who’d you get checked out on it?”
    “The new helo? Nobody, yet, but one of George’s new hires has an instructor’s rating. When things slow down this winter at the mine, I’ll send Ernie down to Niniltna to get qualified. What can I do for you today, Kate?”
    “I’m Old Sam’s executor. He’s got a piece of property listed in his will only by lat and long. Near as I can figure from the map I’ve got at home, it’s somewhere between here and Yakutat.”
    “That covers a few miles,” he said.
    “You’re telling me.”
    He got up and went to the map of the