Liam shook his head again. "I've been pretty much an urban cowboy all my professional life." He paused, and added, "Or as urban as it gets in Alaska."

She nodded. "I didn't think so. It's different out here, Liam. It's different in Ualik."

"Different how?"

"Well, for starters it's a Yupik village, about six hundred people, and for the most part good people. But, like most Bush villages, the worm in its apple is booze."

"They're not dry, then?"

"They've been dry," Wy said grimly, "and they've been damp, and they've been wet, sometimes all three at once. Right now they're wet again."

"Let me guess," Liam said. "The local liquor store owner petitioned for a vote when all the families were at fish camp last August."

"The August before."

"Figures." He shook his head. "God, you'd think every village in this state would look at Barrow and see what happened there when they went dry. The first month-the first month, Wy-there was something like an eighty percent drop in alcoholrelated instances of child abuse, wife beating, and assault."

"Booze is the worm in the Bush apple," she repeated.

"Including Ualik," he said, nudging her back to the subject.

"Including Ualik," she agreed. "So I went back to the plane to repack it and wait for Jeff. You know how airstrips are practically the main streets of a lot of the older villages?" He nodded. "It's like that in Ualik, a lot of houses lined up along one side of the strip, and the town kind of meanders down to the Ualik River from there. I was walking down the strip past one of the houses. I heard this kind of whimper. I thought it was an animal. It wasn't. It was Tim."

Her face flushed with remembered fury. "He was curled up in a ball underneath the porch of his mother's house. Both of his forearms were fractured, both eyes were swollen shut, one of his front teeth was dangling by a piece of flesh, his nose had been broken, there were patches of hair missing from his scalp." She closed her eyes and shook her head. "I got him out from under the porch and strapped him into the plane, and I went looking for Jeff. Jeff told me not to get involved, that it was a village matter, and took me to find the vipso."

A VPSO was a village police and safety officer, a local citizen trained by the state troopers to deal with minor infractions and call in the troopers when necessary. It was a great idea, especially given the fierce independence of most village councils, but often did not work out so well in practice. "You find him?" Liam said.

"Oh yeah, we found him," Wy said wearily. "He was home, mending nets. Give him credit -he came and looked at the boy and agreed we should fly him into the hospital here. Then we all trooped over to the house where I found the boy. He lived with his mother, and a guy she called his uncle, although later the vipso said he was no such thing." She shuddered. "The place was a pigsty, Liam. I mean it even smelled bad-kind of sour, like someone had barfed in every room and no one had ever bothered to clean it up. They were both drunk. The "uncle" still had blood on his knuckles. The vipso wouldn't arrest him."

"Probably his brother, or his brother-inlaw."

"Probably. All I knew at the time was that the mom came roaring out of the house and down to the plane and tried to jerk the boy out of it. He was all but unconscious by then, but he woke up all right when she started yanking on one of his broken arms. He started screaming, and then his grandmother showed up."

"His mom's mom?"

She nodded. "She's great; her name is Sarah. She's this little old lady who weighs in at about eighty pounds, all of it tiger. She grabbed Tim's mom by the hair and hauled her down the strip while we loaded him back into the plane and took off."

"I'm guessing that'd be Mrs. Kapotak," Liam said.

Surprised, she said, "Why, yes, how did you-oh."

"I was listening from the living room," he admitted without shame. She might as well know from the get-go that he refused to be kept out of anything.

"I see." She was silent for a moment. "Well, we brought him back here. He was in the hospital for three weeks. Turned out he had a lot of old scars, and DFYS got involved, and when it came time for him to come out of the hospital they looked around for somewhere for him to stay." She shrugged. "I'd flown him out, I'd been visiting him. I felt, I don't know, responsible for him in a way. And Sarah, she visited when she could coerce Bob into flying her over. We got to know each other, and she suggested I keep him. She said she would have taken him, but she'd already tried that once. Lasted a week before her daughter missed her punching bag and came looking for him."

"I would have thought she'd want him in a Native home."

She looked at him. "I'm a quarter Yupik, Liam."

He looked at her, noticing again the high, flat cheekbones, the slight golden cast to her skin, the almost imperceptible tilt to her eyes. As with Moses, if you didn't look for it you'd never see it. He shook his head. "I keep forgetting. Of course you are."

"Tim's half," she said. "His father was some pilot that blew through Ualik twelve years ago." She looked at him squarely. "It can be tough, very tough to be a mixed-blood in the villages. The elders, a lot of them are okay with it, but the next generation is all for tribal rights and sovereignty and purity of the species, or whatever they call it. They can make it very, very hard on someone who's part white."

There was a ring of certainty in her voice that Liam hadn't heard before. "I know you were adopted from one of the villages, Wy," he said. "Where were you adopted from?"

She smiled. "Not from Ualik, Liam. But close enough in spirit as to make no never mind." She sighed. "Well, anyway, the long and short of it is, I brought Tim home with me." She waved a hand at the house. "I have the room-it came with the business. I have the stability DFYS wants in foster parents." She smiled. "And I like him, and for some mysterious reason, when he's not playing the role of Teenagerus horribilus he will admit I'm fairly tolerable my own self." She met Liam's eyes. "And after you, after us, I was lonely, and I was drifting, and I needed a reason to get up in the morning."

"And Tim was it," Liam said.

"And Tim is it," she said firmly. "Understand one thing, Liam. Tim is with me for good. He is my son now. I've started adoption proceedings."

If she'd expected him to run screaming into the night, Liam thought, she'd picked the wrong guy. "Okay," he said equably. "If he's yours, he's mine, too."

"Liam," she said warningly.

"What?"

She took a deep breath. "Look, I admit, the attraction is still there. But you are still married to Jenny. I'm sorry, God I'm sorry, for her, and for you, but you can't divorce her, you simply can't." She straightened in her chair. "I'm actually glad that you've raised this-this situation, so we can talk it through. I'm adopting a child, Liam. The authorities are going to look very carefully at my private life. So far in Newenham, and for all they know for my whole life, I am squeaky clean."

So long as they didn't talk to John Barton. Liam smiled at her. "There hasn't been anyone since me, has there?"

"Liam!" she said, exasperated. "That's not the point, and you know it."

Their conversation was interrupted by the phone. "Don't answer it," Liam said, but Wy fairly snatched up the receiver. "What? No lie? Great! Okay, will do."

She hung up the phone and stepped around the counter to where a marine radio sat. She switched it on and turned to Channel 15. A voice came on, a male voice, dry, academic, reading from something. "I repeat, this is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announcing a possible herring opener in the Newenham district for both seine and drift net at noon tomorrow, May fifth. Tune in to this channel tomorrow at ten a.m. for confirmation. Over and out."