“Addie Barnett was saying only yesterday she never saw anyone—–”

“I know, I know. Addie’s a fine girl. I’m not complaining. Only I want you to know I’m old—but not foolish.”

11

“MY FAMILY TREE,” Christine Storm, much later, explained to bewildered Outsiders, “is a forest. I don’t expect visitors to grope their way through it. I often get lost, myself.”

By the time she was twelve, she had pieced together the intricate pattern of her brief life, and that of the three adults—Czar, Thor, and Bridie—who governed it. Thor Storm never had stunted the growth of her curiosity.

One of the results of this encyclopedic plan was that, at sixteen, she knew as much (and possibly more) about Alaska’s politics, people, prospects, resources and injustices as any Seattle, San Francisco, New York or Washington absentee millionaire.

Why Why Why? she asked, at twelve. What what what? Czar Kennedy turned her off with a grandfatherly, “Because I say so, that’s why.” Sometimes she would repeat to Bridie bits and pieces of conversation remembered from Thor’s Bergsonian philosophy or Czar’s blandly material view of life.

Bridie would discount this, briskly. “Pay them no mind, child dear. They’re not talking to you. They’re talking to each other through you, like a jealous couple. In a way, you’re the wife of both of them, and I’m their widow. No, forget about that, Chris child dear, forget I said that, I was gabbing. Just forget that now. They love you and that’s all that matters, so just let the talk flow off your little shoulders like a cape, like an easy garment, warm and light, as it’s meant to be, I’m sure.”

A merry child she was at twelve, yet thoughtful; lighthearted and strangely serene, like her grandfather Thor; somewhat zany, yet worldly, like Bridie Ballantyne, her duenna, nurse, mother, all in one; canny, too, like Czar, but without his hard shrewdness.

“Real streak of Eskimo in her, too,” Baranof said, but fondly, “on her father’s side—anyway, that is, if it’s true that old Thor married an Eskimo half-breed girl up there near Barrow, years ago, and they had this son he brought down here alone to Baranof one day, calm as you please, no one knew if the girl had died or left him, or what. Nobody ever saw the mother but the baby grew up here, he married Czar’s daughter, he was Christine’s father. Yes, it does sound mixed up, I suppose, to you, but not to us old Alaska sourdoughs it doesn’t. Nothing surprises us, nothing mixes us up—cold, heat—blond, dark—rich, poor—old, young—good, bad—we take it as it comes. Maybe we’re more civilized than they are Outside.”

By the time she was twelve or thirteen nothing surprised Christine, nothing shocked her. At that age she said to Thor, “Everybody died, didn’t they?”

“Not everybody, Christine.”

“My father and my mother and my Gramma Kennedy and Gramma Ewok. That’s everybody but you and Grampa Czar and Bridie. Why?”

“I don’t know. Life here is rougher, in some ways, and harder, than in other places.”