“Why do they feed them so much at the cannery? They eat all the time. Like Henry the Eighth or something. They can’t be hungry. It sort of turned my stomach. Breakfast was huge. Meat and eggs and fish—though they didn’t serve much fish. Isn’t that strange?”

“No. No, not after you’ve been all day—–”

“Oh. Yes, of course. And hot breads and fruit juice and hot and cold cereals and fried potatoes and pancakes and jam and jelly. Then at ten in the morning they ate again, they had rolling tables there at the cannery piled with cakes and sandwiches and coffee. At noon they had soup and meat and vegetables and salads and pies and cakes and puddings and relishes, but they ate again at four and then at six they had dinner all over again. Even lamb chops! Imagine, all those lamb chops, in Alaska! And at ten—you won’t believe it—they brought out platters and platters of cold meats and cheese and pickles and cakes again and pies and everything, as though they hadn’t been given a bite to eat all day. It was repulsive. It must cost thousands and thousands. Why do they eat all the time?”

“It keeps them satisfied. Temporarily.”

“But I mean, they can’t be hungry!”

“Not that kind of hunger. It satisfies another kind of hunger, or they think it does. It’s lonely there at Suewok, there’s nothing to do but work. And eat. They’re cut off from the rest of the world. They’re city people, mostly, they get restless and nervous. They don’t even have their money until they’re flown back Outside. The cannery owners have learned that people who are lonely or frustrated or resentful eat a lot, even if they’re not actually hungry. Food is a narcotic, in a way, like alcohol. And the cannery workers can’t smuggle liquor in—at least, it’s pretty hard to do. They’d have to go into Suewok itself to drink—that is, drink. And the cannery boats just don’t take them into Suewok. Did you ever notice the eyes of fat people? Really huge fat people, especially with that chuckling laugh. They laugh, laugh. And they munch all the time, meals, between meals. But their eyes look frantic. They’re like babies, having the nipple stuffed into their mouths to stop crying.”

She was to remember that cannery trip all her life, though it had the quality of unreality. She read in the stuffy little cabin. The books on the shelf beside her bunk turned out to be Bergson and Bernard Shaw and Tolstoi and Flaubert and Ibsen; a handful of rebellious post-World War II novels; The Decline of the West; The Oxford Book of English Verse. She knew that Thor had carefully placed them there; she was not interested. The first day she read a little, she even marked a passage in a page here and there, to prove to Thor that she had been reading. It turned out that this practice he considered an outrage.