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Park that, when pulled down, covered the better part of an entire wall of his office. It was mostly green in color, indicating twenty million acres’ worth of federal lands in the stewardship of the National Park Service. Niniltna, Ahtna, and Cordova, along with the few larger villages, were red specks within the green. Blue parcels indicated Native lands granted by ANCSA and ANILCA, most of them choice lots on or near the Kanuyaq River, the main highway for Park rats in the summer after it thawed and in the winter after it froze, not so much in the spring and the fall.
    Yellow dots, widely scattered and minuscule in size by comparison to everything else, indicated the 9.8 percent of the Park that was privately owned. Most of the dots had been homesteads, granted under the Homestead Act of 1862, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln himself, granting an applicant freehold title to a maximum of one hundred sixty acres, subject to said applicant’s improving the land while living on it for five years. Those still in possession in 1972 (“It’s amazing how many people just walked away from that much sweat equity in that much land,” Dan said) had had their parcels grandfathered in as the Park was created around them. Those who had missed the boat in 1972 jumped on the ANILCA bandwagon in 1979. Today many homesteads were still owned by descendents of the people who had built the first cabins on them. Kate was one of them, and, like her, most of them were friends of Chief Ranger Dan O’Brian’s.
    Which didn’t stop him from growling like an angry grizzly every time his eye caught sight of a yellow dot on his map. On principle, Dan hated the idea of privately owned property in the middle of a national park, and in particular his Park. In reality, he got along well enough with most of the owners to remain a lead-free zone.
    There were a very few widely scattered brown areas on the map, too, indicating areas of natural resources in which the Parks Department had with a show of great reluctance granted various exploration companies permission to look for natural resources—timber, copper, coal, and oil.
    And gold. Kate discovered that she and Dan were both looking at the bull’s-eye he had drawn around the valley that contained the Suulutaq Mine. He saw her looking, and made a great show of tracing the lines of latitude and longitude she had given him to the intersection on the map. He stared at his forefinger for a moment, brow creased. “That can’t be right.”
    “What?” Kate said.
    “Wait a minute.” He went to his desk and picked up a small rectangular device. He gave her a shamefaced grin. “GPS.”
    She was exasperated. “Why didn’t you just use that in the first place?”
    He squirmed. “I keep forgetting I have it. What were those numbers again?”
    She read them out. He tapped them in and then waited for the result. Mutt, who’d thought they were about to leave, decided all the effort of getting to her feet shouldn’t be wasted and departed for the kitchen in hopes of gustatory largesse.
    “What?” Kate said, when Dan stood staring at the tiny screen.
    He raised his eyes. “I don’t believe it.”
    “Believe what?”
    He walked across the room and after a brief moment put his forefinger on the map. Kate leaned in and squinted.
    Just above his blunt-cut fingernail was the black circle and attached squiggle that indicated Canyon Hot Springs. It was not colored yellow as private property, it was shaded green as being part of the acreage apportioned to the Park.
    “You’re kidding me,” Kate said.
    “Nope.” With a nearly grim intensity, Dan abandoned the GPS and headed for the door, Kate at his heels. He hoofed it down the hall to another room, this one filled with filing cabinets. “The records are being transferred into digital databases but it’s labor-intensive and it takes a hell of a lot of time,” he said over his shoulder. “We’re transferring the newest records first, because