The bewildered grandmother was shocked into protest. “But you fed her just an hour ago. And you’ve got another bottle right there in the bag.”

“One half canned milk, one half water,” the mother would repeat, smiling up at the hostess.

“Cold?” doubtfully.

“Cold.”

The olive-skinned young mother thought this old lady, her husband’s mother, must be a strange one. A bottle of food for the baby, free—and not take it! She had her people’s respect for the old, but throughout her childhood in the tiny Eskimo village where she used to live she had learned that nurses and doctors and dentists and formulas and sometimes even housing and food all were provided by a beneficent thing called the Alaska Native Service. And she knew, too, that for centuries and centuries before this day the fathers brothers sons and husbands of her people had wrested a bitter living from the snowy wastes, from the icy seas, often at the cost of their lives. Whale. Seal. Caribou. Fish. Bear. Owl. Loon. Squirrel. Ptarmigan. Walrus. Anything. Anything was food that could be eaten and digested. To refuse offered food was not only bad manners, it was madness. When her own lunch came round on the cardboard tray—good thick cheese-and-meat sandwiches wrapped in wax paper; with deviled eggs and olives, carrot sticks, cake, hot coffee, a feast and free, she ate every crumb, she drank every drop, happily. She was horrified to see that her mother-in-law left more than half her food on the tray. She would have liked to eat that, too, but good manners forbade. Finished, the young woman thumbed the pages of a women’s magazine, eying the toothsome pictured recipes as she smoked a post-lunch cigarette.

Every pilot of every plane, whether single-, twin-, or four-engine, seemed to know Thor Storm. This rather surprised Chris. The plane stewardesses knew him, too—those pioneer girls weaving across the continent in the modern covered wagon.

“Hi, Mr. Storm!” they chirped. “You haven’t traveled with us since last January. I was beginning to think you’d gone to the dogs.” An old Arctic travel joke.

Chris began to feel more stable in the air than on the ground. She had had her first flying lessons, though she never had flown solo. Not old enough, they said. Besides, Czar Kennedy had forbidden it.

“I didn’t know you had so many buddies in the air.” Chris said. “You never told me. You seem to know every pilot between Seattle and Barrow.”

“I like talking to them. They know more about Alaska than the Secretary of the Interior ever will. I don’t mean they just know geography and topography and weather. Everybody who sets foot in Alaska sets foot in the air, at one time or another. These boys see them all.”

“They certainly see you, Grampa Thor.”

“You sitting beside me isn’t exactly a handicap,” he said, fondly.

After the plane was up and running clear each pilot undoubtedly did seem to follow a routine pattern. He would emerge from the cockpit and stroll casually up the aisle toward the old man and the young girl. Quite formally, abandoning momentarily the Hi! that served for ordinary encounters, the young man in uniform would say with careful courtesy, “It’s good to see you, Mr. Storm. Glad to have you aboard.” His gaze on the girl.