In the doorway of his vast store stood Isador Raffsky, trapper, fur trader, merchant. He had come from his native Poland at seventeen. He knew every infinitesimal Eskimo village in the Arctic. He had mushed a dog sled hundreds—thousands of miles. He had frozen and hungered, he had battled the blinding blizzards, he had slept in Eskimo huts and gratefully eaten rotted meat. His credit was sound from Point Barrow to New York. As he stood now in the doorway of his huge store, a grizzled, compact, ruddy little man welcoming his guests, he looked like a thousand other compact shrewd and friendly men standing at the doors of their shops in Fargo, North Dakota, and Houston, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio, and Appleton, Wisconsin.

He made a little bow now, it resembled in a warmer way the courtly inclination that his son Norman had made at the airport.

“Thor, my boy!” He, not Thor the older man, became the patriarch, Thor, the young David. “Mrs. Ballantyne! After all these years you are here.”

For the two men this seemed to be an occasion of importance. Thor spoke with serious formality. “Christine, this is my old friend Isador Raffsky.… My granddaughter Christine Storm, I’ve brought her up here at last.”

Isador Raffsky clasped his hands behind his back, he stood looking at Christine as one would survey critically a painting in a gallery. Chris was not embarrassed, she was rather drawn to this little man, she had, through the years, been surveyed thus by numberless grizzled Alaska contemporaries of Czar and Thor. She thought, Now he’s going to say he knew my father and mother and my grandfathers and grandmothers, and I’ll say, oh, did you, Mr. Raffsky, and then he’ll go off into a long do about one time when.

Isador began to shake his head now, in agreement with his inner findings. “The Norwegian and the New Englander and the Westerner and the Eskimo. They’re all there, mixed together. What a country! What a country!”

Bridie had had enough of this drama. “Now, Isador, this isn’t the Fourth of July. I want Chris to meet Mrs. Raffsky.” She raised her voice to reach a woman who was standing behind the counter in a corner across the store. “Leah, you being high and mighty with me! I haven’t seen you in—what is it now—anyway five years.” She was crossing the store to the counter, talking as she went. “I guess you’ve been by-passing us for Seattle.”

Mrs. Isador Raffsky was wrapping a hunk of Cheddar cheese, two cans of mushroom cream soup, a pound of hamburger and a cellophane sack of hard candies. An Eskimo woman in a red calico baglike garment over her long fur parka picked up the paper sack. An infant was pouched on her back, inside the parka. A boy of two or three walked at her side, another child was palpably on the way. Mrs. Raffsky manipulated the cash register, nodded to the woman with as much manner as she now displayed in greeting Bridie. Strangely silent, like her son Norman. Bridie, always articulate, seemed more voluble than ever, in contrast.