Gravely, Ross agreed to this. “I’d take you around if I could. But I’ve made some plans for the day—I’ve just got this one day. There isn’t anything very terrific to see, unless you’re interested in the way Eskimos live and work. This is just an Eskimo town, you know. Everybody works like mad in the summer, getting ready for the winter. Nobody sleeps much. If you happen to see something or somebody that interests you, just stop and look at it, and speak to whoever it is. Everybody’s friendly here. They’re used to tourists. They like them.”

“Yes, everybody’s real friendly,” Mrs. Polar agreed. Worriedly she gazed around her at the bleak little Arctic village, at the woman slashing the sea monster, at the immensely vital swarm of children, at the fish racks extending like an endless arbor along the beach, at the purposeful dark-skinned men and women plodding along the beach path. “I feel real useless here,” she confessed, as though thinking aloud. “I feel like I ought to pitch in and help. I never feel like that in New York or Chicago or San Francisco. They’re real busy there, goodness knows, but it’s different.”

She looked terribly displaced and somehow touching in her pale blue coat and her earrings and her flowered hat. Bridie, urban though her garments were, had the authoritative air of the accustomed.

“Down there”—Ross pointed down the beach—“where those tents are, you can see some of the Eskimos carving ivory. You don’t have to buy any. They come from very tiny villages, they stay for the summer, selling their ivory to the tourists, and fishing for the winter supply. You can visit the hospital, I think, they’ll let you see the public rooms like the dining room and so forth. You can get a really good cup of coffee at Lena’s Lunch there down the beach.…”

Chris said, very low, “Let the poor lambs come with us, they’re lost.”

“No,” Ross said. “No.”

A strangely quiet species of panic possessed Bridie as she stepped along the rough beach path with Ross and Chris. She conducted a somewhat frantic conversation with herself. This isn’t just boy-and-girl stuff any more. He’s really in love with her, he’s ten years older than she is, well, that’s all right but she isn’t going to take him seriously if I can help it, and I can. He’s up to something, so quiet and smiling. Czar was right, I guess. It’s time Chris got away and saw something besides Alaska. Czar is wrong most of the time, to my way of thinking, but this time he’s right.

“If you’ll come back in the autumn,” Ross was saying, “that’s when it’s really good. And I’ll take you and Thor out on a polar-bear hunt. In a little Cessna, flying low, you can spot them from the air even against the ice and snow.”

“I always think it’s sort of mean and unsporting, shooting bear from a plane.”

Listen to that, would you, Bridie now fumed, silently. And her own father killed by a big brown. Aloud she said, “Chris won’t be coming up in the autumn because she’ll be in Seattle learning something besides shooting polar bears from airplanes, I hope.”