“That isn’t always true, Ross,” Thor argued, as though they were conversing cosily in a lamplighted sitting room. “The Bible is largely made up of tribal tales told first by word of mouth through hundreds of years. Very dramatic, too, many of them.”

“Now, Thor!” Bridie remonstrated. “That’s blasphemous.”

One of the group down from Barrow touched Ross on the shoulder. “Cap, you know how to do those dances? Yourself, I mean.”

“Yes, some of them. I used to try to do them when I was a kid. You just follow the story as the singers tell it. This means wolf, see. And this means caribou. And this—–”

He stepped forward then and in a moment he had mingled with the dancers and was indistinguishable from them as they moved and turned and gestured and postured, children and ancients and those of middle years.

The next moment, to Bridie’s horror and to her own surprise, Chris too stepped forward and joined the dancers. She kept her eyes on the dancer just in front of her, she raised her arm thus, she turned her head thus, she shifted her foot this way, that way, she too was almost indistinguishable among the shifting dancers except, perhaps, for the shining gold mass of her hair as her parka hood slipped back to her shoulders and the brilliant shafts of the midnight sun pierced the weather-beaten windows of the little Arctic village Eskimo hall.

21

ROSS GUILDENSTERN came down the beach path on the run. Nine-thirty in the morning. He had said nine. As he ran the small fry of Oogruk trailed him like the tail of a meteor.

Bridie and Chris, too, were trailed by a like following, but not disturbingly. A swarm of black-eyed brown-skinned boys and girls had somehow sprung out of the earth as the two women had turned into the beach path. They came out of huts, they emerged from behind beached boats, they were merry as sprites, they were haphazard but not ragged, they pointed at Bridie’s pillbox turban, at her high-heeled pumps, her modish coat. They were not jibing or offensive. They had seen and become accustomed to visitors who came to Oogruk on the daily planes, a strange race known as Tourists. But Bridie was something special, they sensed this as they beheld her elegance, her blue-white hair, her spirited face with the guileless dabs of rouge and the vermilion lipstick.

“Hi!” they yelled, as they ran alongside, as they ran ahead, backward, as they trailed, the smallest of them trailing. “Hi!” Like any child from California to Maine. They stared at Christine and Bridie with the embarrassing inescapable gaze of children.

As they ran they pointed and said something that sounded like “Booga.” They pointed, not at Bridie or Chris, but at something further down the beach.

“What do you suppose they mean, for heaven’s sake,” Bridie said.

“Ross could tell us.”

“Ross.” Bridie rolled the r and hissed the double s. “He said nine, it’s nine-thirty or more now, and he hasn’t showed up. There’s plenty to see, Ross or no Ross, and I don’t mean hospital clinics like Thor said, either. I didn’t come all this way up here to see hospitals, I had enough of that time I was nursing. Not that they ain’t a fine thing, with all this T.B. and worse the Eskimos have.”