That night, when the thundersnow came down onto the warm respiring ground, billowing and melting, and the lightning darted pink into the holler, we sat in the circle of chairs and Dice told us a story. “A lesson for all the children,” he said. “A lesson from the Arctic that’s on its way out.” The lines of our attention set him at the center of a radiating star. He told the story of the Fram, the Norwegian ship that purposefully trapped itself in the Arctic ice, so that the explorers could float over the pole where no one had gone before. The ship took three years to work its way free, and the explorers ate their dogs, killed each other’s favorite dogs out of mercy.

He said, “I’ve been there on that ice, it cracks like gunshots, it opens up into deep blue slits. Once the snow gave way beneath my friend, and he fell hundreds of feet into the shadows.” We were perfectly quiet. “We had a whole search crew, they tried to grab him. But his shirt was so old they tore it right off him. They ended up with scraps in their hands.” I felt a shiver of unease. Queen had used the same words to talk about Gemini. Tore it right off. Scraps in their hands. Had Dice heard us? I tried to catch Queen’s eye. “The ice clenched him so tight, by the time I pulled him up, both his arms were broken.” Dice whistled softly and I could feel the Arctic air, air that had never been breathed. He said, “The ice weighs down on itself as it gathers, and deep down, you can find a thousand years of ice and air no longer than your arm.”

* * *

After Dice’s story Queen came with me to check once more on the little lambs, and on the bereft ewe.

“Dice tried to get me to slaughter a lamb and I couldn’t do it,” I said.

She nodded. “Remember that you have to make an authentic effort.”

“Do you think,” I said, “that he overheard us talking this morning? When you told me about Gemini? When you told me about how they tore his shirt off?” I tried to remember. “When you told me you wish there were kids around?”

She smiled. “What good does it do, Harmony,” she said, “to talk about it now?”

“I was nervous,” I said.

“You talk too much,” she said. This hurt me. She talked, too. She looked at me carefully, assessing. “Oh, Harmony,” she said.

I said, “Was it hard, the first time you slaughtered?”

“No,” she said. “But it wasn’t here. I was on drugs and they told me to kill the guy I was traveling with. So I tried to kill him. I thought he’d been transformed into a deer. I killed the deer.”