It was in the spring following his wife’s death that Christopher Storm had gone with his friend Len Fraser on the bear-hunting trip. They were after brown Alaska bear, those monolithic creatures said to be the largest carnivorous animal on earth.

The two men, experienced hunters both, had momentarily separated. They had left their boat and gone inland. Christopher Storm must have come unexpectedly upon the monster. Perhaps, startled by the sound of humans in that wilderness, it was instinctively protecting its cubs. Alone and caught off guard, young Storm had scarcely time to raise his gun and fire. He aimed between the eyes. The monster came on, its speed was incredible. He fired again. The animal came on.

“Len!” the man called as he fled now. “Len! Len!” Christopher felt the creature upon him, he thought, This can’t happen to me. With the first movement, with a gesture that was almost playful, the mammoth paw lifted the man’s scalp and tore it off as a skin might be peeled from an orange. When Len, hearing the shots and the cries, crashed through the brush Christopher Storm was still conscious and even fairly articulate. Fraser picked him up and tried to carry him to the boat as best he could. They even managed to reach a nearby cabin just before he died. In a kind of muted scream, while he still was conscious, he begged of them, “Shoot me! Len, for God’s sake! Shoot me!”

It was after this second horror that melancholia settled like a numbing drug over Czar Kennedy’s wife. She had no interest in the infant Christine, in her husband, in her household, in the small world of Baranof. Czar took her Outside, to Tacoma. There they ministered to her with such unavailing means as science and the medical arts commanded almost a quarter of a century ago. There, briefly, she continued to live, and there she died.

Years later, when Chris, in exhibitionistic and self-conscious mood, sometimes was impelled to shock conventional society with the story of her infancy, these two gory tales of her parents’ death were met with a sort of hysterical mirth. It was too macabre, too repulsive to be borne. She told it rather well. After all, a tiny infant when they died, she never had known her mother or father. It had been Bay Husack who had, for a time at least, put a stop to that form of exhibitionism.

So there was Czar Kennedy in his roomy overstuffed house on the waterfront, and there, incredibly, was the infant Christine, watched over by the indomitable, the invincible, the omniscient Bridie Ballantyne.

Now, almost a quarter of a century later, Czar lived alone in the house except for the dour servant Gus, who cooked, cleaned, drove the car when needed, expertly and with an inexplicable air of resentment. There were times when Czar did not use his house for a week, two weeks. He had an office and a small bedroom on the top floor of the Lode Building. Baranof said he took refuge there when the cold and fishy eye of Gus became too depressing.