“What do you have to do to be happy in Alaska?” the somewhat apprehensive bride had asked.

“They say you have to be able to read a book,” Czar had answered. “I’m too busy to read. But that’s what they say.”

With the years the original four-room house had burgeoned into eight rooms, the bridal furniture had been twice replaced as Czar’s interests widened and his income kept pace. Now the overstuffed chairs and couches were self-descriptive, the thick brown carpets silenced the footfall, the brick-red draperies and the mammoth lamps were a background for the household’s unique treasure, a Steinway grand piano, for years the only grand piano in Baranof. Now it was a commonplace object, you saw one in every night club along the Strip, with a Negro tenor or a basso posed in its curve, singing Celeste Aïda or Ol’ Man River; or a cocoa-skinned stripper writhing atop it as she shed her garments scrap by scrap, to the cynical applause of the lonely lads from Kinkaid or Morgenstern Air Bases.

Myrtle Kennedy adored her handsome and successful husband and hated Alaska to the day she died. She blamed this savage country for the tragedies in her life, as well she might. Certainly her daughter, the one child of her marriage, met her sordid end because of it, and her son-in-law his hideous death. Her mental and emotional equipment were not strong enough to meet this double horror. It was not only the shock of the tragedies. Her conventional belief in the fundamental decencies of life was outraged by the very crudeness of the circumstance. Perhaps she sensed that there was something almost comic in the macabre form of this double calamity.

“I always tried to have everything nice for her,” she whimpered, “and it wasn’t easy, let me tell you, in this crazy wilderness. Her dresses, and trips Outside, and piano lessons—that’s why we got the baby grand—and she could have married to Tacoma or Seattle or even San Francisco. But no, she had to marry Thor Storm’s son, and what is he, anyway! Nobody knows, rightly. I never wrote the truth to Tacoma about the way she died, I was ashamed to. Or about him, either. Wild animals. Moose and bears. They wouldn’t believe it. I heard it was in the newspapers, but I never looked. I couldn’t. I don’t believe it yet. Nobody would believe it. Only Alaska.”

Alaska not only believed this gruesome double horror, it accepted it almost matter-of-factly. Alaska was familiar with death in violent and bizarre forms. Alaska accepted almost any human manifestation as probable and even normal. When, for example, the premature infant persisted in living. It was fantastic, it was incredible; but it was true. Baranof said that it had been Thor Storm and Bridie Ballantyne who had kept alive the faint spark in the tiny and seemingly bloodless bundle of gristle that was Christine Storm. Thor, they said in Baranof, had used some kind of hocus-pocus he’d learned up north when he used to live right there studying the Eskimos in their huts. It had been Thor who had gone up to fetch his grief-stricken son and the newborn infant, and they say one of the native women was nursing her at the breast, along with one of her own. And in Baranof, they said, there was Bridie, she certainly knew what to do, wasn’t she a nurse, and came to Baranof from the Seattle hospital?—or anyway, said she did.