In Czar Kennedy’s wife the shock and grief of the two tragedies took the form of melancholia.

“She won’t even look at the baby … A girl, and they say her eyes were dark even when she was bora … Hardly bigger than a picked chicken, and they rigged up a kind of incubator, Bridie knew how—–”

The scrawny infant was brought to the Kennedy house. It was agreed that this was the natural haven for her. Certainly Thor Storm’s womanless cabin was not the place. And Christopher Storm, the young widower, was numb with guilt and sorrow. He absented himself from Baranof for days at a time. “Off hunting,” the town said. “Or says. Off alone. Even Thor don’t know where. You’d think he’d had enough of hunting, after this. Maybe he’s looking for her spirit. After all, he’s one fourth Eskimo, they say. You know how the Eskimos go on about spirits.”

The grapevine of gossip and conjecture spread and became a canopy that enshrouded the Kennedy house. “They say Myrtle doesn’t even look at the baby … She acts as if it wasn’t even in the house, half the time.… Hardly bigger than a spider and she looks like one, they say, and now they’ve got Bridie in. Well, she used to be a nurse in Seattle, didn’t she? And here in Baranof, too, the first years.… They say Bridie keeps the baby’s room boiling hot and feeds her from a medicine dropper. That’s the second one in the family Bridie raised up. She was the one looked after Christopher Storm when Thor brought him down from up north, a baby, wrapped up in wolf skins. Nobody ever got the real story of that. They say Thor married a girl up there, her mother was Eskimo and her father was a Polish trapper and fur trader.”

But Baranof accepted all this as it had, for years, accustomed itself to the fantastic contrasts of life in Alaska. On the surface there was the life of any conventional American small town. Church on Sunday, card parties, ice cream and layer cake; school, business, club meetings for men and women. Underneath all this, and surrounding it loomed a menace greater than pioneers had ever endured in the history of this dramatic America. Here Nature was the killer, like a living murderous enemy surrounding a stockade—Nature, and Distance, and Loneliness and Cold. They were lurking always, waiting to pounce on you and destroy you. Locked in by gigantic mountains and endless tundra and glaciers and snow and strangling cold in the eight months of winter; or heat and killing clouds of mosquitoes in the brief summer, those days before the coming of the airplane and the mechanized United States Army and Air Forces, actually tainted an entire population with claustrophobia. Sudden and violent death was of less news value in those days than the announcement that a shipment of beef and allegedly fresh eggs had arrived from Seattle.

The Baranof of that time accepted the fact of Christine Storm’s incredible naissance, and her mother’s savage confinement, and the gruesome death of her father so soon to follow. The circumstance was more dramatic than usual, perhaps. But at least, the stories and facts were known. Alaskans often disappeared and never were heard of again. Simply gone. Frozen, drowned, mangled, eaten by wild creatures, no one knew. In the household of Czar Kennedy the infant Christine owed her life, perhaps, to Bridie Ballantyne.