Bridie softened under this. “Why, thanks, honey. I try not to look like a bear.”

This sent Mrs. Awuna off into disproportionate cascades of laughter. Still giggling, she showed them two cubicles, side by side. In each a narrow bed, very neat; a table, a chair, a shelf, a curtained row of wall hooks. A window. The night sun was shining upon every object.

“Why, it’s just lovely!” Chris said, feeling suddenly gay.

Bridie poked her head out of her doorway, inquiringly. Mrs. Awuna ceased her giggling, an aura of managerial grandeur enveloped her. She pointed down the hall, majestically. “We have two washstands with running water, hot and cold. We have two toilets with water. We have a shower. We are as good as Juneau or Anchorage or Baranof or Fairbanks.”

“Better,” agreed Bridie as she skipped down the hall.

As they opened their bags they could hear Thor clumping about in his room overhead, almost immediately he could be heard clumping his way downstairs. “Christine! Bridie!”

“Minute!”

In the entrance hall that served as office lolled a big man who was drinking beer from a can. Beside him sat a sallow and careworn woman in an inadequate pink coat and a small-town summer hat. Six unopened cans of beer were neatly ranged on the floor beside the man’s chair.

“Come on now, Ernie,” the woman was saying. “Here I been waiting for you all day, and now when you come you’re like this.”

As Bridie and Chris joined Thor now, the man waved his drink in their direction. “Hi, folks! Come on have a couple cans of beer with me. Celebrate. I been here a year, working on this crazy radar. She’s come all the way from Nebraska, visit me, whaddyou know! Have a drink. Celebrate!”

“Thanks,” Thor said. “We’re just going across the way there to have dinner at the lunchroom. We’re hungry. We came in on the evening plane.”

“That’s what I tell him,” the woman said quickly. “If he’d just have something hot to eat he’d feel better.”

“I couldn’t feel better, if I felt better I’d be sick.” The man contemplated this witticism a moment, prepared to laugh if the others did, decided against it, took another long draught from the can, placed it carefully on the floor, empty, and picked up an unopened one. “Couldn’t eat a bite. Not a mouthful.”

Bridie looked at the woman’s haggard face. “You come on along with us, have a bite of dinner. Maybe your husband would like to take a little nap, join us later.”

Immediately the man turned from good-fellowship to belligerence. “No you don’t! You sit right here and like it, hear me! You come all this way up here to see me, you sit right here. No dinner. Who needs dinner!”

Thor opened the door, the three stood a moment on the little porch. The grim row of weather-blackened houses, the black dust of the roadway, had come alive with movement and color. Groups of Eskimo girls stepped daintily through the grinding dirt that had been churned to powder by the giant wheels of four-drive trucks and caterpillars. Their parkas were not made of the skins of Arctic animals or sea beasts, hunted by their fathers, cured by their mothers, and sewn with the enduring threads of moose or caribou sinews. Now, on their way to the Saturday-night dance they wore cotton velveteen parkas of red and blue and yellow and pink, ordered by mail from the Sears Roebuck catalogue, and brought by plane to this icebound wilderness that was a wilderness no longer.