A young man in Air Force uniform, winter issue, came toward her, in town from the Base. Rashly, his head was without covering. Bridie glanced at him sharply. She saw the white blob in the center of his face. A newcomer, a rookie. “Heh, young man!” she called as he passed. “Young man! Your nose is frozen!”

He went on, heedless or perhaps unhearing. She turned to scuttle after him but he vanished into the Juke Box Stationery and Lunch, you heard the blare and squawk of the canned music as he opened the door and disappeared. Oh, well, Bridie thought, he’ll find out all right when it begins to hurt in a minute. Teach him.

Always, winter and summer, when she reached the busy corner of Gold and Polaris, where the Miners’ National Bank stood so solidly, she too stood solidly a moment to gaze up and down the street to the jagged sky line of the mountains at one end, to the gray water at the other, with the shining slab of the Ice Palace challenging both. She liked Baranof best in the winter. This was no unique perversity. The town had recently taken a poll. It turned out that ninety per cent of the adult population and ninety-five per cent of the school boys and girls preferred the winter months to the brief summer season.

“Just goes to prove,” Bridie said. “Pioneer spirit. Pioneers like it tough or they wouldn’t be pioneers.”

She liked to stand there at the corner and watch the gay new traffic lights go green go red like the Christmas-tree globes in the window of Hager’s Hardware Store at holiday time. Lights, snow, mountains, people, stood out sharply as though cut for a gigantic game of jigsaw.

Passing in cars or on foot her fellow townsmen were concerned a bit as they saw her waiting to be picked up by the others of the reception committee. You aim to freeze yourself into a totem, standing there?… Give you a lift, Bridie?

A young woman stepped briskly along the snow-ridged sidewalk, a three-year-old by the hand, a one-year-old in the gocart. The faces of all three blossomed out from the fur-bordered parka hoods, fresh and glowing and unexpected as tundra flowers.

Bridie peered down at the new-minted face almost hidden in the cart. “The new one? Look at the cut of him, would you, in that parky! The spit of his dad. And how is Augie?”

“It’s a girl. And my husband isn’t Augie. Lowell. I’m Mrs. Lowell Kramer.”

Bridie caught this challenge deftly, she fished a name up from the swarming depths of her memory. “Who else, of course? Who else but little Lorine, as if I didn’t mind the day you stepped off that plane—black winter—how long ago was it now?—four—all right, call it five years ago—and you scared he wouldn’t be there to meet you from the Air Base and in another way scared he would, and there he was at the airport waiting in his uniform, and off we went to the church. And a prettier wedding I never did see, though I recall the gardenia corsage he’d ordered for you from Seattle by air was just a leeee-tle bit brown around the edges. Nipped, they were.”