The listener would appear somewhat hurt. “Who you trying to kid?”

“But I’m not. It’s true. Ask anybody.”

“Now let me get this. There was a caribou handy, and he shot it and slit it and gutted it, you said, and then your mother—–”

“My mother died. I don’t know why I didn’t, but I didn’t.”

“Now look here, Miss Storm, I may be what you Alaskans call a—what’s that word?—uh—che—–”

“Cheechako. We here in Alaska pronounce it cheechawker, it comes from a word in the Chinook language, it means—–”

“I know what it means. Same as tenderfoot in the West But I don’t buy that story of yours, Miss Storm, cheechawker or no cheechawker.”

But then, even the girl’s appearance had a tinge of incredibility. Her eyes were black, her hair golden. Baffled by the unusual combination, strangers assumed that the yellow hair was tinted. The eyes were long, narrow, and ever so slightly pinched at the outer corners. The skin warmly golden, but this, too, was complicated by a faintly pink touch on the rather high cheekbones like the flush on the cheek of a good English peach espaliered against a sunny brick wall in, say, Kent. Most people considered her quite a beauty, but the cynical said, not with that jaw line, you could break your knuckles against that, and your heart, too. A lot have. Heart, I mean. Ott Decker, and they say that son of Dave Husack in Seattle, and practically every young guy in the Territory. But a lot of them think she’s too bossy and independent. I’ll say this for her; anybody who knows her will say she isn’t stuck up. I guess Bridie Ballantyne saw to that And Thor Storm. Maybe Czar Kennedy, but I’ve got a hunch he isn’t as democratic as he pretends. But Bridie! She’d get my vote for President.

Bridie Ballantyne, in her own way, and within a more limited geographical area, was perhaps as well known as Chris. In Bridie as guide and hostess the tourist was treated to an exhibition of local pride unexcelled since Chauvin himself. Though no one knew her exact age it was roughly estimated at between sixty-five and seventy. She lied about it or ignored it.

In a region of almost fanatic joiners Bridie Ballantyne was a member in good standing of practically every group banded together in gregarious Baranof. With five hundred or even a thousand miles between you and the next town, Baranof—and all Alaska—had to manufacture its own fun. A lonely people in a far-off wilderness long before the airplane began to weave its gossamer web from the Atlantic, from the Pacific, across land and water to the Arctic, they had perforce contrived their own social life as pioneers have since the wandering tribes of Israel.

Bridie was President of the Pole Star Chapter of Women of the Moose; luck-struck player in the Ice Palace Canasta Club; Charter Member of the Far North Poker Poke; the Pioneers of Alaska, the Sourdoughs, the Daughters of the Midnight Sun, the Eaglets Eyrie, the Chamber of Commerce, the Hostess Dinner Club, the North Stars, the Garden Club, the Optimists, the Art Guild, the Music Circle (she couldn’t carry the simplest tune), the Dinner Speakers. She appeared weekly on the local television program. She knew the town from the spanking new airport at one end to the primeval tundra at the other; from the latest rookie’s frightened bride arriving at Kinkaid Air Force Base to the most desiccated sourdough in his leaky log cabin in the weeds at the edge of town. She belonged to the Baranof City Council and there was talk of her running for Territorial Congresswoman against Shaw Gavin, a hard-core politican of twenty-five years’ standing and a minion of the Big Boys in Seattle and Washington.