“There you go!” Bridie exclaimed. “Start pulling again, you’ll tear her apart, mark my words.”

Mildly Thor said, “I think I’ll go talk to that Dew Line lad for a few minutes. They must have briefed him but perhaps it didn’t take.” He turned to glance at the soldier from Tennessee. “The backs of their necks look so young,” he said. “It always upsets me a little.” He was off down the hazardous aisle.

Bridie began to fidget, she tucked her blanket tighter, she took her compact from her bag, surveyed herself critically in its mirror, poked at her hair, sniffed very audibly, and, leaning back, shut her eyes.

Ross grinned. “I’m going, Mrs. Ballantyne. But everything’s under control, really. The co-pilot’s up front.”

Bridie’s eyes flashed open a second, closed again. “If he was as good as you are he’d be pilot. Nobody ever sold me a substitute. Look at those peaks, we just missed that one, this narrow valley.”

“Watch for the sea,” he said. “About another hour.” He looked at Chris, his face was serious and intense out of all proportion to the lightness of his words. “The Guildenstern tour tomorrow. See Oogruk with a Native. The Strange Customs and Habits. Fishing Through the Ice. Weird Dances.”

“Not if you’re going to be like that,” Chris said.

“I won’t.” He was off, he shut the cockpit door, disappeared.

The interior of the plane was colder now, you lifted your feet from the floor and wrapped the blanket around them, you turned up your coat collar and tucked the little pillow into your neck if you were seated beside the window. The cold seemed to cut through the closed door, the windows, the floor boards. “Might as well be flying in a sieve,” Bridie said.

Gerda Lindstrom was entertaining the night-club entertainers.

… and the word Eskimo means Man Who Eats Sea Animals, they say.… Oh, yes, they still go whaling in skin boats but things have changed, nowadays sometimes they just step into a little bush plane, set it down on an ice floe, harpoon a whale and fly back the same day.… No, we don’t fly over the North Pole.… Well, say, there’s a town a little ways outside of Anchorage, Irma and I went out there in the bus when we were playing Anchorage it’s called North Pole, that’s the name of the town, I bet we must have sent a hundred post cards we bought there with North Pole on them, to our friends back east.…

Christine touched Bridie’s arm. “Bridie, I think we’re beginning to come down. My ears.”

Gerda Lindstrom ceased being the hostess. Her voice took on the tone of stewardess authority.

“Fasten your seat belts, please, we will be in Oogruk in about ten minutes. Fasten your seat belts please.”

19

THERE WERE a few young Eskimo loungers down at the airstrip waiting to see the plane from Baranof come in, just as, perhaps sixty years earlier, the boy Zebedee Kennedy had hung around the railway station in the little Massachusetts town of his birth, to see Number Eleven go through on its way to or from the great world outside. Oogruk did not boast an airport building. There was only the strip. You stepped off the plane into another century. The little one-street Eskimo village squatted on the shores of Bering Strait. Oogruk never had seen a train. Oogruk boasted one automobile only. Oogruk traveled by dog sled or by airplane. The centuries met and mingled in Oogruk.