“How’s that?”

“Would you like to pay government taxes if you couldn’t have a voice in the state you live in, and couldn’t vote for President of the United States? Would you like taxation without representation?”

This challenge they found disconcerting in a girl as attractive as Chris. “I’ll say I wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t stand for it. Why don’t you write your Congressman and Senator in Washington, tell ’em to get on the job, or out?”

“Don’t you know that Alaska has no Congressman or Senator in Washington! We’re a Territory. Everything we do, and everything the Territory yields, goes out. Outside. Everything goes out and nothing stays in. Gold. Copper. Timber. Fish. Millions and millions and millions a year. Outside. We’re slaves.”

“Oh, now, say!” After all, the Visitor had not come all this long distance to listen to soapbox speeches, even though delivered by a pretty girl. “What’s a girl like you bothering her head about whether you vote for President? Let him worry. I know what I’d do if I was President. I’d appoint you a Cabinet Member. Secretary of Beauty. You’d send bunches of beauty delegates over to Russia, they’d send bunches over here. No more war. The Russians keep sending over those bullet-headed fellows with eyes like mean oysters. Who loves them! Nobody.”

Perhaps, casually, an Outsider undergoing the Visitor’s Treatment might say, “Where’s your home, Miss Storm? You certainly don’t look like an Alaskan.”

They did not know that Christine Storm had been known to Alaskans since the day of her fantastic birth. She had become a legend.

“I don’t know how you think Alaskans should look. But I’m an Alaskan.”

“That right! Born right here in Baranof?”

“I was born in a caribou in a blizzard up in the Wood River country.”

Baffled, smiling uncertainly, the visitor might catch the word caribou and cling to it. “Caribou? Let’s see now, there’s a town called Caribou, I think it’s in North Dakota though. Or was it Canada I saw it? But I understood you to say you were Alaska-born.”

“I didn’t mean a town called Caribou. I meant a caribou.”

“I don’t get it. I must be dumb.”

“A caribou is a huge sort of reindeer and I was bora inside of one that my father shot when he and my mother were caught in a blizzard on a hunting trip. I wasn’t due for another three months but they say my mother was one of those dauntless girls—a kind of Alaska version of the Scott Fitzgerald type that was the fashion then. Grandpa Kennedy—her father—had sent her to Vassar, she knew Edna St. Vincent Millay. Anyway, what with the blinding blizzard and the stumbling around, and no shelter, and only the dog sled, I started ahead of time. Even if my father had had a chance to build a snow-block shelter, there wasn’t time. By some miracle he shot a caribou. He slit the caribou’s belly and gutted it and put my mother inside on the furs from the sled, it was blood-warm for a little while, and sheltered, and it kept her from freezing and me, too. And that’s where I was born.”