the inside joke about freedom—he would have found out soon enough—is that you’re always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another. Whatever the man was fleeing, it couldn’t have been more onerous than living outside in the middle of winter, but he clearly didn’t care. The tasks we gave each other were minor—collect firewood, scrub the cookpots—but they were crucial to our existence and utterly nonnegotiable. Doing them meant you were one of us. Not doing them meant you were on your own. The choice was yours.
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