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Author's note: Warning

Don't worry, this book is not educational. We're going to visit the most rollicking bar scene the world has ever known, Anchorage Alaska in the 1970s. I misspent many years in that milieu, so you may take the descriptions of Alaska as gospel, otherwise keep your tongue firmly in cheek.

However, while we're still sober, I would appreciate your considering some very serious aspects of sociology, biology, and anthropology.

On the western shore of Nelson Island in the Bering Sea nestles the village of Tununak. Tununak is a rich village by Eskimo standards. Not only do they have the ocean for an endless supply of fish and seals, but there's a herd of musk oxen on the island for year-around meat. Birds by the hundreds of thousands migrate to the island to nest, supplying eggs and another source of meat. The tundra provides a seasonal supply of berries, and they have a fresh water stream.

The result of this opulence is that the people of Tununak have never had to travel. A nominal three hundred inhabitants have occupied the island for countless generations. They have developed what is called The Kuskokwim Syndrome. Many babies are born with no strength to their hips and spend their lives either doing a duck-walk with their knees fully bent, or walk on their knees, wearing seal skin pads like carpet layers wear.

Less favored villages along the rivers are forced to change locations several times during the year in their quest for food, and in so doing, meet and mix with other villages. The Kuskokwim Syndrome is unknown outside of Nelson Island.

In Herman Wouk's priceless epic, Winds of War, he describes a China Clipper loaded with officers and diplomats that was airborne over the South Pacific when Pearl Harbor was attacked. They landed at a nameless atoll to let the dust settle. Natives of the island greeted them and maidens latched onto each of the men from the airplane. Each took her man to a hut, and there did her best to become pregnant.
On top of the world, arctic explorers have been shocked by the willingness of Eskimos to share their wives and daughters. The explorers looked down on the practice as primitive and made unfavorable moral judgments, which didn't preclude their cooperation.

Hawaiians are proud of their ancestors' ability to navigate canoes between islands and the modern, politically correct version, is that these were trading expeditions. However, each island has the same resources: coconuts, fish, and shells, and there was no manufacturing. Reading the older histories will confirm that the voyages were raids, the spoils being women and children.

What these so-called “primitive” cultures knew was that any small band of isolated people will quickly inbreed, weaken, and ultimately die out. Their survival depends on additions to the gene pool.

In our freely mixing society we needn't worry about inbreeding and can afford to make moral issues of promiscuity. Small, isolated groups don't have that luxury. Therefore, regardless of your reaction to the moral implications, please note that additions to the gene pool are a practical necessity.