The Singing of the Dead by Dana Stabenow Page A

untidy Dutch boy haircut, big brown eyes with laugh wrinkles fanning away from the corners, a pursed rosebud of a mouth that opened to reveal large, white, even teeth, and a double chin that went away when she raised her head to smile. She smiled a lot.
    She was dressed in a conservative brown pantsuit that looked straight out of the Eddie Bauer catalogue, and Kate was willing to bet that the lightweight T-shirt beneath the blazer was one of a dozen in the same color. All the better to disguise the wear and tear of travel. Practical. Comfortable. Conservative, except for the dancing-shaman brooch that dominated a lapel. If Kate had had a left nut, she would bet it all on the possibility that a Park artist had made the brooch and that the artist was in the audience tonight.
    The debate moderator was a plump woman with a neat cap of short blonde hair. She was also smart, articulate, and well informed on Alaskan issues. She pushed both candidates right into the deep end with a question on subsistence. Anne came down hard in favor of rural preference, Peter playing the same tune in a lower key and, as a consequence, sounding less radical and less angry.
    “The people who have been hunting and fishing these lands for the last ten thousand years ought to be the ones who have preference, especially in times of shortage,” Anne said in reply. “It is unconscionable for the state government to say to the upriver Athabascans and the downriver Yupik,‘You cannot fish the Yukon River this year because we must meet quotas for the commercial fishermen.’ ”
    Jeff Hosford walked by Kate's chair, talking into the cell phone that seemed to be permanently attached to his right ear. He looked up and saw Kate watching him. His smile was slow and insolent, and he stripped her with his eyes. It was obvious from his expression that she was now expected to leap into his arms and wrestle him to the floor. When she let her gaze drift past him as if he weren't even there, he couldn't stand it and walked over. “Ms. . . . Shugak, isn't it?”
    “Mr. Hosford.”
    “You're our campaign security?” The amused disbelief in his voice was provocative.
    “I am.”
    “A cute little thing like you?”
    “Yup.”
    “I've heard about you, you know. Everybody has. I don't . gure half of it's true.”
    “Could you step to one side, please? I need a clear view of the stage.”
    He lurked around her peripheral vision for a few more moments, and then moved on. Jerk.
    “Well, now, Anne, in times of shortages, I'd have to agree with you,” Peter said, and gave the issue an adroit twist. “But what about the Natives living in Anchorage? There's about thirty thousand of them, at the last census, and more moving in every day. They call Anchorage Alaska's largest Native village. Are you saying that because they have chosen to live in an urban environment that they have lost all rights to fish and hunt where their parents and grandparents did?”
    Peter was trying to get Anne to say that she preferred Native preference, period, for hunting and fishing priorities, which was almost certainly true but which would lose her a lot of non-Native votes in the district and probably the election, but Anne was too smart for that.
    “I am saying, Peter, that the people who live off the land should be allowed to do just that in times of shortage, and that the people who have a cultural history of subsistence hunting and fishing should also be allowed to continue to do so.”
    Thus neatly including all non-Native Bush rats in her stand on rural subsistence, too. Anne smiled primly straight into the camera recording the event for later broadcast over the statewide television channel, ARCS, and that was when Kate realized that Anne Gordaoff had plans to run for governor. Kate looked at Pete and wondered if he knew. Probably. He might even vote for her.
    Doug Gordaoff passed her, his eyes fixed on the swinging behind of a young woman in very tight jeans, who tossed