Chris interrupted his boatbuilding.

“But what are you going to do with it? You’ve got boats as good as that. You’re just wasting your energies.”

“I thought I wouldn’t fish this year—with the tender, I mean, and crew. You’re earning money, I don’t need much myself—just the few dollars for food and tackle and my little jaunts around the Territory.”

“That’s what I mean. You could come with me to California. Or perhaps Honolulu. We’d fly, it only takes a minute.”

“Everything only takes a minute. Now. What’s the hurry? Where’s everybody going in such a rush?”

He talks like an old man, Chris thought. A tired old man. “We wouldn’t have to rush. We could stay away for a month. Until the middle of May. Until the ice goes out. Just sit in the sun on a beach.”

“You’re not a girl for sitting in the sun on a beach.”

“I can try it, can’t I? So can you. I’d like, just once, to stand treat. Darling Grampa Thor, you’ve paid my way all my life, until these last two years. You and Grampa Czar.”

“You run along, dear child. Or take him.”

“You’re already sorry you said that, aren’t you? What are you going to do while I’m gone?”

“I could take this new little skiff, and some grub, and just skirt along the shore, very easy, pretend I’m Steller just discovering Alaska, and looking for new greens and birds and creatures.”

She could not say, But you look too thin and almost feeble, you’re too old for that sort of thing now. Alone.

Bridie, in her new spring tweed topcoat for which the Baranof temperature was still far too low (“Nothing shows up a fur coat like that spring sun after a tough winter’s wear. Ratty.”) came occasionally to argue with Thor as he went about his boatbuilding task there by the waterside so near his one-room cabin. She had peered into the cabin before she came down to join him as he hammered, sawed, sandpapered, calked, painted. Everything inside the cabin was neat, orderly, shining. His saucepan, kettle and frying pan scoured, his floor scrubbed, his bedspread straight, his books ranged on the shelves but stacked too, now, in floor corners, his few clothes hanging behind a faded gingham curtain.

“You’re a regular old maid,” she announced as a charming opening gambit. “I don’t know how you ever got along with the Eskimos, slapdash the way they are.… Oh, there I go again, I always forget. Excuse it, Thor, please.”

“Sometimes I think it’s a great waste of time, being neat in your habits. So many things more worth doing than keeping your shoes in a row, toes all pointed one way. But I was brought up to do that in those days that seem so far away in another world.”

“You’re in this world now, Thor Storm, and I’m here to ask you why you don’t plan a holiday for yourself. With Chris, or with Chris and me, or alone or whatever. You could go to the Old Country where your folks are, man like you a prince or a duke or whatever it was you were then. Imagine their faces when they see you, like the prodigal son in the Bible.”