“Like me.”

“Like you, my child. Soon there won’t be an actual Eskimo left—that is, an Eskimo with no Caucasian strain. Long ago the Russian and the Scandinavian and the English explorers and hunters and whalers took the Eskimo women. Then the American gold hunters. And now the new rush of construction workers, the technicians, the flyers, the lonely men in the army bases, isolated. The whole modern crew. It ought to make a pretty good specimen of American. It has, through the years. You know—the mixture as before. When the railroads were first strung across the country a lot of the Irish immigrant section hands married Indian girls or Mexican girls, or had them. Now take young Ross Guildenstern you spoke of. He’ll probably marry a girl who isn’t a breed at all.”

“Oh?”

“Their children will be one fourth Eskimo. Their children’s children one eighth. First thing you know, we’ll have an Eskimo strain President of the United States.”

“Grampa Czar says mongrels. When he’s mad at me. Not often.”

“Tough stuff, mongrels. Usually nimble in the mind and on the feet. Look at all those dark-skinned black-haired brown-eyed Englishmen of Cornwall. Even after five hundred years, when the Spanish Armada was wrecked off the English coast.”

Sometimes he was wrong, sometimes he was right. But she learned.

Chris was stuffed with Alaska lore like a Strasbourg goose with grain. They traveled by plane—single-, twin-, and four-engine planes. They traveled by dog sled. They even used trains once or twice. The rest of the world traveled hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of miles by automobile, but Alaska had few roads other than those built by the Army. The thousands of automobiles in Alaska were a symbol, a fetish.

“It doesn’t matter so much—yet,” Thor explained to Chris. “People here don’t have time to ride around and around, just to be going nowhere, as they do Outside. It takes all the scrambling we can do to crowd the day’s work into the day, men and women. You know that, Christine. Work. Food. Keeping warm. Getting from place to place somehow, if you have to. The dog pack to feed if you’re traveling by dog sled. Just living is a kind of triumph from day to day.”

Up north where the ice blocks were stacked mountain high in July on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. Down south where the mosquitoes tortured you in jungle heat. A sourdough’s log cabin in the wilderness with its gun and fishing rod and radio. Crab-meat salad, charcoal-broiled steaks and an orchestra in the Bubble Room of the Baranof Hotel in Juneau; and dinner prepared by a French cook at the Governor’s Mansion.

“Why did they build a white colonial with columns as a Governor’s house in Alaska?” Chris asked. “It’s so un-native.”

“Nobody knows. A stab at elegance, I suppose.”

Juneau, the capital, and Anchorage were different.” They’re Alaska luxury towns,” Thor explained. “Tourists visit them and think they’ve seen Alaska.”

“I like them. I’m having a lovely time. Juneau must look like a little Swiss town—of course I’ve never seen one, but I’ve seen the movies. A valley, and little narrow winding streets, and kind of quainty.”