“He’s seen it. He’s seen everything in Alaska,” Christine called to them, breathlessly, as Ross made their way down to the water’s edge.

Lowell Aragrook was standing hip-deep in the water. With him were two men. The three were lashing ropes firmly around the circumference of three white incredible objects that floated in the sluggish surge of the icy waters.

Lowell Aragrook, glancing up from his task, called to him. “Hen, Ross, give us a hand.” And flung at him the end of a long thick rope. The men at work with him in the water flung another rope and another and another curling toward other strong deft hands on shore. And now the three weirdly beautiful objects that lay so dreamily on the water were secured at last and would pass through the final act that would forever end their cycle in the Arctic seas.

They lay gleaming white as ermine, the male and the female great white whales. The third was not white like its elders, its coat was pale gray, it was an infant, it still wore its baby fur. Half submerged in the shallow water they were eerie, spectral.

“Take hold here and pull,” Ross said. A dozen—twenty—thirty hands were at the ropes now. Bridie’s heels dug into the stony sands as she pulled, the Roller Polars were leaning their weight against the white monsters, Chris, in line just behind Ross, tugged with all her strength.

“Greek mythology,” she panted in Ross’s ear, “at Baranof.”

“That was a bull,” Ross replied over his shoulder.

“I know now. Moby Dick. Melville.”

Now the improbable spawn of the sea lay inert on the beach, the water just lapped the edge of the snowy skin. A final tug at the ropes and the three were beached, high and dry, the little aquatic family together in death as in life.

“Hi, Ross!”

“Hi, Lowell! Pretty good.”

Lowell Aragrook had waded ashore, he stood looking down at his Herculean catch as a sportsman would look at a satisfactory basket of trout. “I’m sorry about the little one. But it was too small to make out by itself, anyway, just yet, so perhaps it’s just as well.” He glanced casually down at his dripping mukluks; his little bow to Bridie, to Chris, was both in greeting and farewell, for now he strode briskly up the beach to the path. The crowd, too, dispersed like an audience when the show is finished. Puzzled, Chris realized that now there remained, besides herself and Bridie and Ross, only the swarm of children, the Polars, and one stout middle-aged woman in a bright red calico slip over her parka. She wore steel-rimmed spectacles which kept slipping down and which she automatically pushed back into place with the back of her wrist. As she did this the metal object in her hand glinted in the sun and Chris recognized it as an ulu somewhat larger than the one with which Joan Kungok had so deftly sliced the seal. In spite of the calico wrapper, the spectacles and the brandished ulu, Chris recognized the woman as Mrs. Aragrook, the Raffsky’s dinner guest of the night before in neat crepe dress and gold brooch.