“You don’t know that.”
“I’ll get a fire going,” he said. “And we’ll sleep next to it.”
“What about dinner?” I said. “Should we draw straws to see who gets eaten?”
But Walker was rooting around in his duffel bags again, only to stand back up triumphant with not one buttwoheadlamps. He held one out to me. “Go check the pantry,” he said. “There’s probably a can of beans in there somewhere.”
“You broughttwoheadlamps?”
“You’re welcome.”
Indeed, there was a can of beans. A whole shelf of cans of beans, in fact. But that was it, food-wise. Anything else—and I meananything, from toothpaste to bags of chips to tealight candles—would get eaten by mice.
And so that’s how we passed our first evening together in seven years: heating canned beans in a cast-iron pan over an open flame in a massive stone fireplace that Walker’s grandpa had apparently built himself.
I was still cold, though.
Even buried under twenty layers of Walker’s clothes and crouched as close as I could get to the hearth.
“We’re not going to die,” Walker said again. “This won’t be the best night of our lives. But we won’t freeze.”
“Or starve,” I added, toasting him with a forkful of beans.
Walker toasted me back. Then he added, “So that’s two things we can cross off the list.”
“List of what?”
“Ways to die before morning.”
“What about bears?” I asked.
“Bears?”
“Didn’t you see the sign on the highway? Bear activity is high.”
“That’s left over from last summer. All the bears are still hibernating.”
“Allof them?” I said. “You don’t think there could be one renegade bear that woke up early?”
“That’s not how bears work. They have a seasonal circadian rhythm.”
“What are you, a bear-ologist?”
“Bears hibernate until April at the earliest.” He paused a second, then added: “Everybody knows that.”
“Idon’t know that.”
“That’s on you.”
“All I know is what the sign said.”
“No self-respecting bear is going to go prancing around in a snowstorm.”
But I refused to be placated. “You don’t know that. What about climate change? What about ducks who don’t know to fly south in winter?”
“What about them?”
“I’m saying you can’t tell wild animals what to do.”
