The old woman had been tidied by Bridie, she sat on a board bed that was like a shelf in the wall. It was supported by wooden blocks at either end and it stood perhaps eighteen inches above the rough littered floor. Her head as she sat on this improvised throne was thrust a little upward and her chin a little forward, and her face wore the uncertain half-smile of the sightless or nearly sightless. The young man spoke to her in the language of her people and then she nodded and smiled in genuine happiness so that you saw the toothless gums. She raised one strangely agile seamed hand in greeting. Then the hands resumed the work on which she had been engaged, she had observed the amenities, she concentrated now with the absorption of a craftsman. Her grandson, whose profession was that of flying an airplane, watched her with affection and pride. She was justifying her existence, she was proving herself still useful in a world of the young and uncaring. He knew this. Instinctively Chris and Bridie, watching her, sensed this for themselves.

“God bless her, look at the cut of her, would you then!” Bridie said. “Working, mind you.”

She was making thread for the sewing of skins. The threads would hold together forever the wolf skins, the wolverine skins, the seal skins the otter the fox. Fur parkas for the men and women and children of the Arctic. Mukluks. Hoods. Gloves. Straps and thongs that held together the dog sleds. The thread was made of moose or caribou sinew, and it was the old woman’s proud task to roll the strands so expertly together that they made the whole an unbreakable thread.

The three stood watching this aged and ageless example of a strange and gentle and fundamentally civilized people whose remote past was lost in oblivion and whose future was as illimitable only as the human spirit.

The old woman wet the long strands of fine loose sinews with the spit of her mouth, she then drew the strands slowly across her lips, another thin strand, another, moistened in her mouth. She began to roll the threads then together in the cushions of her palms, back and forth, back and forth in the flesh of her hard bony hands, the one against the other, and then she held up the long thin roll of strands that now were united as one and she rolled the thread against her high hard cheekbone, cheekbone to jaw, and back to cheekbone and down again to jawbone, inch by inch, up and down, the friction of the skin of the cheek and the skin of the hand and the oil of the skin united the sinews into a thread that would endure decades after this ancient woman had ceased to be, and her children and her grandchildren.