Czar Kennedy had a quite different plan for her. “When you’re old enough I want you to go to school Outside, Christine, the way your poor mother did. Meet people, learn the French language, travel. You won’t be marrying any lunk, and die in the wilderness smeared with dead animal blood.” On this one terrible subject he never had been controlled, or even, perhaps, quite sane.

Chris had a bad time trying to adjust her emotional life to the strange circumstance in which she spent her babyhood, her childhood, her girlhood. Three months with Grandpa Thor Storm, three months with Grandpa Czar Kennedy, and over again until she came of age. Other children had families—mother father sister brother.

“My family is grandfathers,” she announced to her teacher on the very first day of her Alaska school life. She was six.

“I know,” her teacher had said in a voice that oozed sympathy. Child psychology was not part of the curriculum. “You poor little thing, I know all about it.”

“I’m not poor,” Chris had declared. “Grampa Kennedy is the richest man in the world, and Grampa Storm is the smartest, so I’m not poor.” There came to her mind an expression her Grampa Kennedy sometimes used to emphasize a negative. “Not,” she said, triumphantly, “not by a damn sight.”

Later—not too late—Chris understood. During her college years at the University of Washington, in Seattle, she had, for the first time, an opportunity to compare the world Outside with that of the lonely far-off empire Alaska; the bastion ringed by water and mountains and distances. Outside emerged a bad second. But then, by that time her friends said, not altogether jokingly, that she was neurotic about Alaska. In love with it. “Chris thinks love and life are Alaska,” they said.

She could not explain—because she did not realize—that this strange deviation of hers was the outcome of her bizarre childhood. No two men could have regarded love and life more differently than the two who had reared her. To Czar Kennedy, the child was a hostage, the one living thing saved from the tragedy of his family life; and the Territory was to him pure plunder, rich, bountiful, inexhaustible. To Thor Storm, the gentle giant of the scholarly scientific mind, the girl was a miracle, held in trust; and Alaska a place of blinding beauty and endless promise, a possible example of hope in a frantic world, if only it could be saved from the ravishment of predatory men like Czar.

Bound together by Christine, torn apart by Alaska, the two men were friends and enemies.

3

EVERYONE WHO COULD be stirring was out taking advantage of the hour or two of winter’s lemon-colored daylight. The Gold Street office workers, the Federal Building employees, the shop clerks, skittered across the icy sidewalks for the morning coffee break at Nick’s Caribou or the Bering Coffee Shop or Gabe’s Sunny Nook Café. Merchants rearranged their windows and risked a brief bareheaded moment outdoors to survey their handiwork. Housewives, marketing at a brisk trot, stared resignedly at printed signs in the supermarket bins that read Steak, $2.29 a lb.; Milk, 65 cts. qt; Eggs, $1.23 doz.; Cauliflr, 81 cts.; Bread, 64 cts. loaf. They looked again at the money in their purses and thought longingly of summer when the milk and home-grown vegetables would be coming in by truck from Matanuska, or by short-trip bush plane instead of by the long costly air freight from Outside. Bundle-laden they trotted home and telephoned a neighbor. Eleven A.M. “Come on over for coffee. I made a coffeecake early this morning out of that recipe in the Lode. No eggs no butter no—well, sawdust mostly, I guess, but it turned out real good.”