The Singing of the Dead by Dana Stabenow

the Quilak Mountains, south was Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska, west was the TransAlaska Pipeline and the Alaska Railroad. Its biggest river was the Kanuyaq, two hundred and fifty miles of twist and turn, broad and shallow and filled with sandbars to the south, narrow and deep and boulder-filled to the north, with a thousand creeks and streams draining into it. It's biggest mountain was Angqaq Peak, known to mountain climbers the world over as the Big Bump, eighteen thousand feet and change of rock and ice, attendant peaks of twelve and fourteen and sixteen thousand feet forming an entourage.
    For every mountain there was a glacier, thick tongues of millennial ice receding reluctantly to reveal a wide, high plateau that sloped into rolling foothills and a long, curving valley that drained into the Kanuyaq. The Kanuyaq was the Park's well and its breadbasket. It was also the Park's major highway, navigable by boat in summer and by dogsled and snow machine in winter.
    One road led into the Park, maintained, barely, by a single grader stationed at Ahtna, the town that marked the junction between the Kanuyaq River Highway and the spur of gravel leading to Niniltna. The grader took a week to scrape the road one way into Niniltna, spent the weekend at Bernie's Roadhouse, and then took a week to scrape back to Ahtna. The road stood up under this assault, as it had been first laid down as a railroad grade a hundred years before, engineered to get the copper out of the Kanuyaq Copper Mine and down to the port of Cordova. When copper prices fell in the thirties, the mine closed and they pulled up the tracks of the Kanuyaq River & Northern Railroad. Park residents followed behind, digging out the ties for use as needed in shack foundations, raised-bed gardens, creek bridges. Bernie had scavenged the last of them, back when he built the Roadhouse in the early '70s, to hold up the bar. The railroad roadbed was still flat, more or less, and still driveable, more or less, or it was in summer. In winter it wasn't plowed, and the Park lay inviolate behind twelve-foot drifts of impassable snow. The most important traffic over it was the fuel truck, and the most important trip it made was the last delivery before Labor Day.
    Boats, snow machines, and dogsleds were all very well, but the preferred method of transportation was always and ever air. Everyone with a homestead had their own airstrip, and for those with lesser acreage there was the forty-eight-hundred-foot strip that ran right through downtown Niniltna, which served as the base of operations for George Perry's semi-irregular air taxi service. When George wasn't beating the water at Rocky River, or trysting with the latest girlfriend at his hunting lodge south of Denali.
    Kate shut down on all thought of George's lodge and focused on the stage. It was cool in the cavernous room but with this many people it wouldn't stay that way for long. The smells of dried salmon and fresh moose and curing hide and wood smoke saturated the air. She knew many of the people there by sight; others were new to her. Nobody looked like they were carrying, other than those who had knives strapped to their belts, although with Alaska's new concealed-carry permit, available to anyone who trundled themselves down to the local police station to take the class, someone in this crowd could have a rocket launcher stuffed into their boot and she'd never know it.
    There was constant motion. In a crowd this big, there were always people on their feet, moving to a new seat, to the water fountain, to the bathroom, outside for a smoke or a drink or a toke. But on the whole, attention was focused on the stage, and on the debate. It surprised her. She had thought that rural Alaska had given up on politics years ago. Of course, Anne Gordaoff was one of their own. She was probably related to more people in the Park than Kate was.
    Anne Gordaoff was forty-six years old, a chunky woman with short brown hair in an