Kanna was fortunate to have her epiphany about money coincide with the beginning of the harvest season. The pay was poor enough to have her resigned to sleeping on the ground for the foreseeable future and people thought a Water Tribe woman looking for work near the equator rather strange, but there was always someone willing to hire her to glean grain or pick fruit.
The harvest season wouldn't last. In a month or so there would be little honest work available and Kanna would have to live off her savings, the land, or resort to some dishonorable method of acquiring sustenance.
When she had lived at the North Pole, Kanna would have said that she would never have done anything truly wrong, no matter how desperate she was.
Kanna was not desperate yet, but she had a new understanding of her almost mother-in-law. Tuparnaaq had not taken up fishing because she had considered the customary prohibition against female fishers to be a bit silly, the way that Kanna always had. She had done it because the alternative was starving to death.
And Kanna was no longer certain she had any moral code that would take precedence over staying alive.
