“Do! You’ll have to speak to God. It’s the record cold. There’s nothing in the woods for them to eat so they come out looking for handouts. You can’t shoot every moose that shows its head the other side of a tree.”

“That’s right, protect the poor moose and the hell with the people of Baranof. You sound like one of those Absentee Big Boys in Seattle. Sometimes I think Alaska deserves what it gets—which sure is nothing.”

Chris’s laughter rang in the clear cold air. “Children, children! Stop fighting among yourselves. You won’t have any ammunition left for the enemy.”

Ott Decker reached past Bridie to place a doubled fist gently against Chris’s jaw—a wooing, futile, tender gesture of his kind.

“As Secretary of the Baranof Chamber of Commerce I don’t want to hear any of that enemy talk. We’re all buddies from the time their plane touches down until they take off again for Outside.”

“Who all’s coming?” Bridie interrupted, briskly. “The General, of course, but the Base will take care of him. Besides, he isn’t rightly a general any more, is he, now that he’s Vice-President and Chairman of the Board, no less, of National Fish Pack Company? Seventy-five thousand a year, I hear he’s pulling down. Place on Long Island, apartment at the Waldorf in New York. He a general now, anyway?”

“A general once is a general always,” Ott assured her. “Flesh, fowl or fish.”

Bridie jerked at her skirts and scuffled her feet impatiently in the way she had when she scented news. “Yes, but who Who else? The General well and good, he’s window dressing for the Seattle crowd. And Dave Husack must be coming or Czar Kennedy wouldn’t be down meeting the plane. I hear Dave’s gone soft in his sixties and he eats a blonde for breakfast every morning—that is, when he’s away from home and that starched wife of his.” Then, as a curious weight of silence fell upon the air, “Oh, Chris, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—I guess I must be going soft myself.”

Ott Decker’s arm slid along the back of the seat until his hand just touched Chris’s shoulder. “Chris is a blonde, all right, but she sure would stick in Dave Husack’s throat if he tried to swallow her.”

“How did I get into this?” Chris demanded, rather waspishly for her. “I live here, don’t I? And you know perfectly well who’s coming, Bridie.”

“Do I, now? I know Dave Husack’s coming, and of course Sid Kleet. Where Dave is, there’s Sid just behind, nudging him like a tugboat edging an oversized ship into harbor. Then there’s General Cass Baldwin—did you say I call him General anyway, even if he’s in the Fish Business now instead of the Fight Business?”

“Now, Bridie, we covered that once,” Chris reminded her. “What’s wrong with you this morning? I don’t mind meeting Dave Husack. All that’s over and done with.”

“Just the same, something’s afoot,” Bridie persisted, musingly. “Let’s see now. There’s Wilbur K. Distelhorst coming too—the nerve of them in Washington! Sending just an assistant instead of the top boy. There’s a fine sample of the Department of the Interior for you! I bet he’s never seen a salmon, only on a platter, or a bear except in a zoo, or a stand of timber outside a movie.”