“Isn’t that all right? I’ve made up my mind I’m going to show you Oogruk today. My version of Oogruk. And then Barrow if I can. I’ll do it if it costs me my job.”

“I honestly don’t know what’s the matter with you, Ross Guildenstera.”

“Yes you do.”

In the half-shelter of a single strip of raised canvas on the windy beach a pretty girl was bent over a mysterious task. A young Eskimo girl. Two small boys sat with her on the pebbled strand. They were absorbed in watching her at her task. She glanced up as the little procession came by. “Hi!” she called to them.

“Hi!” Ross called in return. “Bridie! Stop a minute, will you? Come on down here, Chris, I want you to meet somebody.”

The girl squatting on her heels on the beach was wearing modish black slacks and a tailored red shirt neatly tucked into her belt. On her small feet were white socks and stitched loafers of red leather.

She was expertly cutting up a dead seal with an ulu. The two small boys sat absorbedly watching her.

“Joan,” Ross said, “this is Mrs. Ballantyne, up from Baranof. And Christine Storm … my cousin, Joan Kungok.”

“I’m happy to meet you,” Joan said, prettily, and indicated the sharp bloody implement in her hand. “Excuse me, won’t you, for not getting up,” she said politely to the older woman.

“Well, for land’s sakes,” Bridie exclaimed, inadequately.

“How—how wonderful!” Chris said, and meant it. “I mean, imagine being able to—do you mind if I watch you a minute?”

“Of course not,” the girl said. “I’m not very good at it, I’ve just learned how, really. You ought to see my mother do it, or my grandmother, they can do in ten minutes what takes me an hour.”

The instrument in her hand was shaped like an old-fashioned meat chopper of the kind that cooks once used to mince food in a wooden bowl. Its blade was curved, her hand grasped the handle, with miraculous deftness she held the carcass with her left hand while she sliced the thick layer of blubber from the skin, it rolled down inside the skin as you would separate the meat of a melon from the rind. The seal looked mournfully up at her.

“What are you going to do with that?” Bridie demanded.

“Eat it,” Joan Kungok said, blithely. “Next winter. I don’t like it any more, but the old people and some of the grownups do.”

“I’d starve sooner,” Bridie said tactlessly.

Chris covered this with a rush of words. “Hunks of raw meat never look very appetizing. I can’t bear to look at those whole lambs hanging up by their heels in the butcher shop, with the neck sticking out. But lamb chops are delicious and this probably is too.… How do you cook it?”

Ross stood in silence. Joan Kungok went deftly on with her work. The dead seal stared up at the group, its whiskers drooping, its teeth bared in a grimace of resentment. “There are lots of ways of cooking seal meat. You can eat it fresh or salted or dried. The old people like to eat the blubber. Maybe that’s why they didn’t die of tuberculosis years and years ago, the way so many of us young people do now.”