At a dinner party, or a dance, or in a college group:

“Baranof? Where’s that? Russia?”

At first Chris would wait a moment before replying because she found herself possessed by an emotion rare in her. Anger. Behind her teeth the little silent voice cautioned her to remember what Thor had said. “Just be honest and polite, the way you are here at home. If they ask questions, answer them. Remember, they don’t really know you there as everybody knows you here from the day you were born—and before.”

So she waited a moment before answering, her lips slightly parted in the small mirthless smile of social intercourse.

What language do they speak in Alaska?

Do they live in igloos?

They eat raw fish and guts and whale blubber—that right?

They get sewed up in bearskins for nine months in the winter, don’t they? How do they—well, I guess we’d better not go into that.

Mostly Eskimos up there, aren’t they? Except the Army Bases, I mean.

How did you happen to live up there, Chris? Your father Army?

Born there! Look, Chris was born up there, she says.

It was at that time, the beginning of her Seattle experience, that she had got into the habit of giving them what Bay Husack called the old caribou routine. I was born in a caribou in a blizzard up in the Wood River country. Her hearers’ faces would register incredulity.

“Quit kidding. I’d like to go to Alaska some time, all those Eskimos and stuff. I really would.”

“I’m Eskimo.”

“Yeh, and I’m an Arab chieftain.”

“My grandmother on my father’s side was one quarter Eskimo. So my father was one eighth Eskimo. That makes me one sixteenth, if I’m any good at arithmetic—which I’m not. And of course I only eat raw fish and seal oil and muktuk. I’m sewed in for the winter, too, as you see.”

She might be wearing, at the time, a strapless white faille dance dress in which she looked so appetizing that her male interrogator had to caution himself not to take a bite.

“Look, Chris, let’s start again from the beginning. Baranof, you said. If it isn’t Russia where is it?”

“It’s a town in the Territory of Alaska, and Alaska is part of the United States, though it isn’t a state. Not yet. By the way, what language do you speak here in Seattle?”

“What do you mean—what language! English, of course.”

“Oh. Well, we speak it better in Alaska, if my ear is correct.”

But she had a splendid time, for the most part. Certain things shocked her unpleasantly; most things stimulated her pleasantly. In Alaska she had been aware of the high percentage of senseless crimes and misdemeanors in a rough country, but Outside seemed no better, and with less excuse. Baranof’s solid middle class fostered an almost Puritan standard of conduct, perhaps because a society so close-knit must, in self-protection, be decorous. But here the standards of many of the young men and women of her own age startled her. She was genuinely horrified at the mild amusement and even disrespect with which her generation Outside regarded old people. They sneered openly or they were tolerant with an obvious patience which was more galling than uncontrolled impatience.