Arts and Entertainment

Reading the North: Alaska watercolors, new Edie Kiglatuk mystery

The Best of Barbara

By Barbara Lavallee (Epicenter Press, $14.95)

The blurb: This colorful and vibrant collection of watercolors by renowned artist Barbara Lavallee includes images inspired by Alaska communities and landscapes. The book unites classic works and new images in a delightful cross-section of the artist's vision and style.

Drawing on her vivid surroundings, Lavallee paints with colors that harness a spirit. Brightness and happiness move from one page to the next in scenes of Alaska women, families and animals.

Excerpt: Native legend has it that one should never look directly at the northern lights, lest you become so entranced that you are seduced to join the dancing spirits and never return to earth. The mother and children here are visiting the spirits of those who fell under the spell of the aurora, but they are careful to shield their eyes.

I've not been catless for 40 years. From tiny, helpless kittens to arrogant toms, they know they've found a friend in Barbara — or a willing slave! I love the loose, flowing way their bodies drape around pillows and laps and the ribbons of color I can trace in their fur and the moods that shift from peaceful comradeship to haughty "cat-itude" to wild and crazy cat antics.

I had a big Maine coon cat who probably weighed close to 30 pounds. He had "cat-itude!"

I'd mostly been painting people up to that time, and this was my first cat piece. I was so insecure about this painting that I just dropped it off at the gallery without waiting for it to be seen.

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The Arctic Brotherhood: The Story of Alaska-Yukon’s Most Influential Order

By Ashley Bowman (Lynn Canal Publishing, $14.95)

The blurb: The Arctic Brotherhood, a fraternal order that emerged from the Klondike Gold Rush, established itself in 1899 in the boomtowns of Skagway, Bennett, Atlin and Dawson City and then spread into the Alaska Interior, all the way to Nome. In this captivating history by Ashley Bowman, descendant of an Arctic Brother, we learn all the quirks of this order and how its camp members influenced the Alaska home rule movement before the Brotherhood quickly faded away in the 1920s. A few A.B. halls still stand in the North, including ornate structures in Skagway and Dawson, a testament to the order and its motto: "No boundary line here."

Excerpt: The last major event of 1899 to involve the Arctic Brotherhood was the tragedy that occurred while many of the Arctic Brothers would have been celebrating Christmas. Up until that point, the organization, still in its infancy, had hardly any unfortunate occurrences. The events of Christmas day were shocking beyond just the minds of the Brotherhood. Crime had been rampant in Skagway's early gold rush days, and stories of theft and an occasional murder in the Yukon are common in any history book. Those events couldn't have prepared anyone for what was to come.

Frederick Clayson should have been simply another name in a long roster of Arctic Brothers. Like so many, he had come North in 1897. He was just another gold buyer and Arctic Brotherhood member from Skagway, but his name would soon become very important in the annals of the Yukon Territory's history.

On Christmas Eve 1899, Frederick Clayson headed south from Dawson to Skagway with Ole Olsen, a telegraph lineman, and Lynn Relfe, a Dawson bartender. After the trio left Dawson, they headed along the Yukon River to Minto, where they signed a guest book. After leaving Minto, they would never be heard from again. Along the Yukon River, the three were met by two men who robbed and brutally murdered them all. It was the first triple homicide in the Yukon territory's documented history and created a sensational stir. As M.J. Malcolm points out in his book about the event, "almost any story originating in the Yukon in the years 1896-1900 was assured wide circulation," as the territory's gold had placed it in the public eye. This event was a little more startling than most stories to come out of Northwestern Canada in those days.

It was the first real in-depth manhunt to occur in the Yukon, the past's equivalent of the incredible stories of the hunts for Albert Johnson and Michael Oros that occurred decades later in the same northern area. According to the 1909 Arctic Brotherhood book, the Northwest Mounted Police spared no expense in investigating the murders. The total cost is said to have been $250,000, not a sum to be laughed at, particularly in those days.

The investigation led authorities to George O'Brien and Thomas Graves.

O'Brien had done jail time in England for shooting another man, and though many criminals came north to start fresh, O'Brien did not escape his past. By the time of the murders in 1899, he had already done jail time in Dawson for theft. The NWMP arrested O'Brien on charges of triple homicide. In Dawson, he was later convicted, although his accomplice Graves was never heard from again.

The Bone Seeker

By M.J. McGrath (Viking, $27.95)

The blurb: Edie Kiglatuk, the fearless Arctic heroine from M.J. McGrath's "White Heat" and "The Boy in the Snow," is back and involved in another mystery.

Edie is working as a summer school teacher in the town of Kuujuaq when one of her favorite students, Martha Salliaq, goes missing. When the young woman is found dead and brutally defiled in nearby Lake Turngaluk, Edie teams up with Sergeant Derek Palliser to uncover the truth behind Martha's murder and find justice for her traditional Inuit family.

Excerpt: When Martha Salliaq failed to show up for class that Monday morning, Edie was surprised, but it was only when the dream resurfaced a little later that morning that she felt a prickle of disquiet. Traditionally minded Inuit thought dreams were visits from the spirits. She wasn't one of them, least not as a rule, but the coincidence of the dream with Martha's no-show was enough to unsettle her.

At morning recess, she caught up with Lisa Tuliq by the door to the classroom. Lisa was small and plump, with the pinched, repressed air of a kid who'd grown up watching her parents slowly dismantling themselves with alcohol. She and Martha sat next to one another in class and Edie had sometimes seen them leaving together. But Lisa had nothing to offer on Martha's whereabouts. She'd been out at her family's summer camp all weekend, and hadn't seen her friend.

"My uncle gave me a ride in this morning."

"Did Martha say anything on Friday about where she might be?"

"Not to me," Lisa said simply. She looked longingly down the corridor for a means of escape. "Can I go now?"

Edie followed the girl out into the corridor, passed through a fire door and knocked on Chip Muloon's door. The knock was a little too hard and hurt her knuckles. She'd picked up frostbite in Alaska in the spring trying to track down a bunch of people traffickers and still tended to forget how super-sensitive her fingers were. A hard rap and it was as though a wire in her body had shorted.

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Chip was at his desk flipping through some paperwork. He shot her a low, withering look.

"I guess you know it's rude to sneak out in the middle of the night without so much as a 'See ya,' right?"

"No," she said. In her culture it wasn't.

"Well it is," he said, as though that settled the matter. It was one of the things she found most difficult about him, not that he lived in another world, but his refusal to meet her somewhere on the bridge between them.

"Martha Salliaq didn't show this morning. It's not like her. I was wondering if she said anything to you?" ...

"Why would you think that?"

"Because you two talked." It was an odd question. She'd seen them chatting in the corridor a few times and once bumped into the girl coming out of his office. She had no idea what they'd talked about. She'd never asked him about it.

"Not really." His eyes fell back on his paperwork. "She's probably still at summer camp."

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"In this dream I had..."

"Oh, OK, you had a dream," he said.

Compiled by Kathleen Macknicki, Alaska Dispatch News

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