“How about that! Speaking of igloos—how about that! That’s the Ice Palace. We call it.”

2

THAT WAS THE ICE PALACE. Its real name was the Kennedy Building, but no one called it that. The Ice Palace. They loved it, they bragged about it Czar Kennedy had built it as he had built most of the town’s show places. On the corner of Gold and Polaris was the Miners’ National Bank, Czar Kennedy, President; just across the street the Kennedy Block housed the town’s largest motion-picture theater; a drugstore dispensed everything from tuna sandwiches to television sets; a hardware store; a supermarket. Solidly situated halfway down the street stood the three-story printing plant and editorial offices of the Baranof Daily Lode. Czar Kennedy, President and Publisher, the masthead read.

When he had built the Ice Palace the citizens of Baranof thought this a sheer bravura gesture. Fourteen stories high, with the wilderness stretching away thousands of miles in all directions. His detractors said it would have been cheaper for him to rent himself out as a flagpole sitter, if height was what he wanted for attention. They were wrong. The Ice Palace was a paying concern from the day it opened, as was every Czar Kennedy enterprise. It was Alaska’s first apartment house. People fought to live in it. Townsmen, dwelling in their frame houses and wrestling with the regional problems of heating, lighting, plumbing, water, were madly envious of Ice Palace tenants. There never was a vacancy unless a tenant accommodatingly died, rashly built a new house, or left permanently for Outside.

Circling in by plane from Barrow or Kotzebue or Nome up north; or from Juneau, Anchorage, or Fairbanks south, you could spot the Ice Palace before the town itself came into focus. Almost at the water’s edge, built of pressed glass composition blocks, it gave back the icy mountains as good as they sent, glitter for glitter—or almost as good. Time, though brief, and ruthless Arctic weather, already had smirched the walls with a patina of grit and pocked it with ice pits. Yet sometimes, when the refraction was just right, the structure took on an unearthly blue like the aquamarine tint of the vast Morgenstern glacier that lay, a giant jewel, just outside Baranof.

As though further to emphasize the incongruity of a sizable skyscraper in that tableau of snow, tundra, sea, glacier and forest, there nestled at the actual base of the edifice a weather-beaten log cabin that seemed somehow more unreal than the shining shaft soaring above it.

“I bet that Czar guy didn’t build the log shanty, anyway.”

Ott Decker rose happily to this. “He did, though. More than fifty years ago, and he lived in it in the old gold-rush days with his partner Thor Storm. Pardner then, that is. There’s lots of log cabins scattered around town.”

“You mean people living in them?”

“Glad to. There’s a housing shortage in Baranof, just like every place else. That cabin is the daddy of them all, though.”