“Why? Because we’re dying anyway?”
“Does it matter to you?” I say. “If a wolf gets you or we freeze?”
“Yeah, it fucking matters. I’ve got a baby girl, I want to go home.”
“OK,” I say. “Of course you do.”
“You fucking have kids?” Henrick says. He’s gotten angry. I don’t say anything. Not for me to say.
“Well I fucking do, and I want to get home,” he says. “You don’t know, you don’t have kids, you don’t know shit.” Tlingit and Bengt and the others stare at Henrick and me.
“I didn’t say I didn’t,” I say. “I have a son. I don’t see him, OK?” Henrick looks at me. He’s still angry.
“And it doesn't matter to you, if we get back? Why don't you let the next wolf eat you?”
I look at him, I nod to show he’s right, and I don’t want to fight. I go back to shaving the point. I shrug.
“Somebody’s got to look after you babies,” I say.
He looks at me sharp, shrugs, finally, still mad. ‘
We try to let the fire soak into us, stomachs empty, wolves watching us, maybe, sniffing out their next, maybe, who gives a fuck. Fuck them.
“How old?” Tlingit says. He's looking at Henrick. Henrick looks at him, finally.
“She’s two.”
Tlingit nods.
“She cute?”
Henrick laughs, much as somebody can in what he’s in. He nods.
“Yeah, she’s my angel.”
That’s what everybody says about their little girls. But I’ve heard enough guys say that I know it’s true, I see it, looking at him anyway, freezing to death, inch by inch, terrified, thinking of his baby girl. It’s true, she is his angel, I know. He’d die for her.
I look at Henrick.
“She have a good laugh?” I say. “Your girl?”
Henrick smiles. He isn’t angry at me, so much, now.
“She's got a fucking hilarious laugh,” he says. “Your boy?”
“Fucking hilarious,” I say. “First time he peed standing up he thought it was the funniest thing in the fucking world. Laughed his little butt off. Made us proud.”
Henrick laughs, the others too. Tlingit looks at Knox.
“You have family?” he asks Knox.
“I got three,” Knox says, and I see his eyes light, and then, like Henrick, he looks like a stone just got heavier, thinking about them, worrying he may not get home, by the odds. I put the spear I’ve sharpened into the fire, turn it.
“I’ve been trying, with my wife,” Ojeira says. “When I’m down-shift.”
“That’s hard work there,” Bengt says. Ojeira laughs.
“I’ll take that over this,” he says.
“Maybe you have one in the works then,” Tlingit says.
Ojeira doesn’t seem to have thought of it. His eyes brighten, then go empty, like Knox’s did, and Henrick’s.
“I tell her I hate her three times a week,” he says. The others laugh. He’s smiling, then he looks sorry he said it, and he sits there, thinking of her, more kindly than he sounded, it looks like. Bengt shakes his head.
“I got an ex-girlfriend who thinks I’m an asshole,” he says. “And that I should marry her.”
The guys laugh at that, again, little grunt laughs.
Tlingit looks at me, like he’s waiting for me to say something. I look at my boots, then at the point I’m turning in the fire. It gets quiet again, wind gusting.
“Your boy with his mom?” Tlingit asks. He never asked me about my boy before, or my wife. Because I know how to have people not ask me things.
“He does,” I say. “He’s better off.” I guess I say it in that way that sounds so sorry for itself , or just so sorry, nobody wants to say anything more after that. It gets quiet again, everybody carving, making shucking and squeaking sounds in the cold. I start cutting a point on another stick.
“You see though?” Henrick says. “That’s why you’re alive. Your son.”
I don’t say anything at first. I nod, looking at the point I’m carving.
“I’m alive because I’m lucky,” I say.
I should have died in the plane, I think. Maybe I did, it’s just taking some extra hours to conclude the business. We all fall quiet again. Henrick looks at the fire.
