“Booga! Booga!” chanted the children. One of them even tugged at Christine’s parka.

Chris bent over the child. “What do you mean, booga?”

“Hi!” shouted an adult male voice from a distance. He came on the run up the beach with a stream of merry impish black-eyed children trailing him.

“I’m sorry. I got an A.C.S. message. I had to go out to the airport. Are the kids bothering you? I hope you didn’t give them anything. They’re not supposed to do this.”

“But they didn’t do anything,” Chris said. “They’re just children.”

Ross put a hand gently on the head of the littlest girl, now they clustered round him, they looked up at him suddenly mute. He said something to them in their own language, softly. Their faces changed, they looked thoughtful, the tallest among them, a boy of about nine, skipped down to the beach, he searched a moment among the stones, he picked up a bit and ran with it to Christine and proffered it. It was one of a million like it.

“Thank you.” This plainly was expected. “What did you say to them, Ross?”

“I said you were visitors, that the polite thing is to offer gifts to visitors, never to take gifts from them. They know that. They’ve been spoiled by the tourists throwing them pennies. As if they were little beggars.”

“But they didn’t. They were just saying something we didn’t understand. Booga, or something like that.”

His face cleared. “Beluga. Lowell Aragrook is beaching a couple of big ones. Come on. Come on, kids.”

“You’re upset about something. There was something in the A.C.S. message.”

“Look, Chris, do you think you could go to Barrow late today instead of starting tomorrow?”

Bridie addressed herself to the world in general. “He’s gone daft.”

“I mean you, too, Bridie, of course. And Thor. I wish you would. Otherwise I can’t fly you up. I just got orders, I have to pick up a bunch in Nome. You weren’t going to stay more than a night and a day in Barrow, anyway. Then I’d fly you back here—that is, if you want more time here in Oogruk.”

The two were alone in the midst of a ludicrous company. Bridie marching ahead in the splendor of velvet and fur and gloves like a parade commander. Eddying all around them the raggle-taggle sprites. Dogs had joined the little procession, or yapped from every compound as they swept by, the pale Male-mute eyes staring balefully. Racks of meat and fish were drying on the beach. There was excitement in the air, the midget entourage was swelled now by the adult figures of striding Eskimo men and waddling Eskimo women.

“Of course I’d love to have you show us around Oogruk, Ross.”

“Us?”

“Me, then. But if you can’t you can’t. I don’t see why you’re so grim about it. I’ve never seen you like this.”

He laughed then, his face clearing like a child’s. He is a little like a grown-up child, Chris told herself, suddenly. He always knows what he wants to do and then he just goes and does it. So she said this aloud. “You decide you want to do a thing. And then you do it.”