Shuttled back and forth from the cushioned comfort of Czar’s house to Thor’s neat little log cabin—three months with Czar, three months with Thor—even an adult might have been shredded by this split existence. That Chris survived as a whole human being—though scarred—was miraculous. Oddly, she was happier in the three-room shack at the water’s edge than in Czar’s ample house with its bouncy mattresses, its thick carpets, its plate-glass windows. Through the protective panes she could see the splendid panorama of sky and water and mountains, yet here the child never had the feeling of security, of belonging. The world looked unreal and distant, somehow, viewed through all that glass. At Thor’s cabin the mountains and the water and the land were part of her daily life, she did not view them merely; she partook of them. Together she and Thor trudged the hills, fished the waters, slogged through the tundra gathering the delicate low-growing wild flowers, picking the low-bush wild cranberries for jell. There were blueberries, too, and salmon berries. Thor held forth in terms of philosophy and economics and history. She was too young to understand it all, but much of this must have stuck in her memory and been preserved in her emotional storehouse. Years later she brought it forth, undimmed, like golden coins retrieved from a buried treasure chest. Not only Thor, but often Czar and Bridie, spoke to her in adult terms, and though she often was confused by this she thrived on their competitive affection.

At mealtime Czar, pointing with a knife or fork, would say, “Eat that lettuce, it costs a fortune, lettuce does.” Or cabbage or beans or any green growing thing. “Freighted all the way from Seattle, and that costs plenty, I can tell you.”

“Then let’s not have it any more,” Chris suggested, brightly. “I don’t like it anyway.”

“Like it or not, you’ll eat it, young lady!”

“Why do I have to?”

“Because I say so.”

Thor made a sort of game of his lessons in food values. “Nature has a wonderful way of taking care of you, if you’ll only heed her. Take salmon.”

“Ugh! The natives eat it all the time, you can smell it even when they walk past you down the street.”

“Salmon is a cold-water cold-climate fish. It’s fat. And fat is fuel that protects you from the cold. Up north, in Barrow and Oogruk and Kotzebue and all the villages, the Eskimos eat seal oil and whale blubber—don’t make a face, it isn’t that bad, with berries and so on—and that keeps them warm. Keeps them alive. People here in Baranof, though, don’t eat enough green stuff. Meat and potatoes and sweet stuff, that isn’t good enough. Remember to eat green things when you’re with—when you’re not with me.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ll make your hair curly and your cheeks pink and your eyes bright. And that means you’re healthy. There are elements in them that keep you well. Vitamins they’re called.”

As a sort of game they scoured the countryside for their own greens. “The Eskimos,” he told her, storybook fashion, “go out and hunt for green stuff as though they were hunting for meat or fish or furs. There’s sourah, that’s the yellow stuff inside the pussy willow, they call it willow meat. And there’s wild chard, and there’s a plant they call asakluk, it grows in sandy places. And lots of others. They pick them and wash them and store them for the winter in a seal poke.”