“My, you haven’t changed a bit, Leah, not a line in your face, I’ve got a whole new set of wrinkles. Chris is dying to meet you and the girls, where are they, anyway, I thought they’d be down at the airport … Chris, here’s Mrs. Raffsky wants to say hello to you. Say hello now to Leah Raffsky.”

Christine stared, unaware that she was staring. One simply did not say hello to Mrs. Raffsky. One does not say hello to the sculptured head of Nefertiti in a museum. By some inexplicable alchemy of the centuries Leah Raffsky’s darkly luminous slanting eyes, her high cheekbones curving down to the delicately sensuous mouth, the carriage, the manner, all might have been copied complete from ancient Egyptian royalty. Untutored in the lore of royalty, ancient, Egyptian, or otherwhere, Mrs. Raffsky was totally unaware of this resemblance. Amidst the cheeses, the canned goods, the housewares, the hardware displayed in the well-stocked trading post, Mrs. Raffsky was wearing a short boxy lemon-yellow jacket with a small standing collar, it was cut with reticent elegance like a Chinese woman’s coat; fine black wool trousers and tiny black flat slippers. Her skin was somewhat warmer than ivory, her black hair was pulled back tightly in a knot at the nape of the neck.

Now she inclined her head and smiled a little in acknowledgment of the jovial introductions. Christine, to her own discomfiture, found herself babbling a bit. “Mrs. Raffsky, what a wonderful store! I didn’t dream it would be anything like this, I want to see everything, why, there’s absolutely everything here.”

This certainly explains Norman, she was thinking.

Mrs. Raffsky smiled faintly, was silent.

“Name it,” Isador Raffsky said. “We got it.”

“I’m sure,” Christine murmured. “Grampa didn’t tell me. I thought it would be wolf skins and mukluks and bacon.”

“Those we got, too.”

Christine had been trained to observe. Her years with Thor, her familiarity with the workings of a newspaper, her friendship with Addie and Paul Barnett, had taught her not only to look, but to see. Now her eye, swiftly traveling the big orderly close-packed trading post, was baffled. Modish dresses, whole hams, jewelry, bath towels, a turret lathe, ripe olives, white fox furs; potatoes, Time and Life magazines, sirloin steaks, frozen strawberries; shoes, chocolate cookies, lamps, pink plastic tables; frying pans, double boilers, mukluks, gloves, bolts and screws. Impressed but disappointed, her baffled gaze turned toward Thor. Her expression was vaguely reproachful.

“This is the new Alaska,” Thor said, as though she had asked him a question. “We knew the old one, didn’t we, Isador? It’s gone. This is your Alaska, Christine. Take over.”

“Whoever’s Alaska it is,” Bridie retorted, “they can run it but I’d like to go up to my room, if you’ve got one for us, that is.”

“Now, Bridie,” Thor chided her. “Now, Bridie.”

“You and Isador want to do reminiscing you can go off and do it on your own time, later. I get off a plane, I don’t want to have to listen to yarns about the good old dog-sled days.”