“Can you look at me?” I ask, trying to lift his head.

He keeps his head locked between his legs.

“It’s gonna be okay. We’re going to find our way back.”

I know he doesn’t understand the words and even if he did, I doubt they would mean much coming from the white man who is only awake for sixty minutes a day and has been welching off his Eskimo hacks for going on a week, but I need to say them. Because for some reason, I believe them.

I lift his head with my hand.

He fights me, the muscles in his neck flexed.

He doesn’t want me to see his tears. I know nothing about the Eskimo culture, though I can only imagine the importance manhood and toughness play in a society that survives each winter in Alaska. Not to mention the Ear Pull.

I sit rubbing his back for a long minute. He sniffs. A minute later, he raises his head. His eyes are puffy, their beautiful almond shape minimized to small slivers of brown.

“It’s okay to cry,” I tell him. “I cry all the time.”

He stares at me.

I move my hand over a stick, act like it gives me a splinter, then ball my hands into my eyes.

He smiles and laughs.

Lassie wakes up and jumps on Opik’s lap. He licks the tears from Opik’s cheeks.

Opik shakes off the tears a couple minutes later, yet you can still see the anguish in his eyes. Lassie has it too. It is as though all our hopes sunk with the boat. I know mine did.

Until I remember something. I remember we have a canoe.

::::

Ingrid and I played Pictionary once. We took turns drawing and guessing. If we got the answer right in the allotted time, we both took an article of clothing off. If we got it wrong, we had to draw another clue. And since we only had sixty minutes, to both unclothe and to entangle, we were under the gun. It was fun. At first. It turns out I am a terrible drawer. Had I gone to a normal school, I’m sure I would have learned to draw like all the other kids, but with only an hour a day, it hadn’t been part of my father’s curriculum. The only thing I’d ever drawn were the lines of the stocks I’d graphed on my bedroom wall.

So, when I got a clue, for instance, that was Sneeze, my hand didn’t have the slightest idea, or the muscle memory, to move across the paper to make the shape of a nose or of a hand coming up. After thirty minutes of squiggles and arrows and Ingrid screaming at me to draw better, she ripped all her clothes off in protest and dragged me to the bedroom.