The nature of sailing in the north, where there was no way to know how thick the ice grew, whether a ship would be able to pierce through it; never knowing if one would end up stranded and starving in the freezing cold, forced to find food where it fell. Where it fell and closed its eyes to sleep and never opened them again, to be cut into pieces and boiled in salted water and choked down by mouths desperate to live. Forced to find food, to choke down the meat of a man he’d bunked alongside, only then understanding that what happened to his own father wasn’t an act of depravity so much as
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