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“Well, don’t you miss seeing her?”

“Of course, I do.”

“We don’t have to give gifts or watch Christmas movies, but knowing Mama would probably be spending Christmas on her own upsets me.”

He kept walking while I talked to him, and I tried to keep up with his big steps trailing deeper into the forest.

“We can invite her to spend those days here.”

“You know Mama doesn’t like sleeping in a tent,” I pointed out.

“By then I’ll have the cabin ready. We’ll ask her later, and if she says no…I’ll think about going back to Fairbanks to spend Christmas with her.”

A wide smile spread across my face as I heard his words, and I reached for his hand to squeeze it gently. “That would be amazing.”

Just because we lived in the wild, didn’t mean we would never leave our home out here.

To be honest, that was incredibly difficult.

Even if Papa managed to live out here for years, he wouldn’t have survived if Fennec and I never went to visit him, or him never going down to Jason’s cabin to get the things he wasn’t able to find in the wild.

And no matter what his opinions on living in a society were, without one, he wouldn’t be able to live out here.

11

“Did you find some good trees to cut down?” I asked Vespyr as she walked up to the fire I had started a few minutes ago.

They’d been gone the whole day, and she seemed to have had a good time with Papa alone.

“We found a few, but Papa said it will be hard to get the wood down here without the help of a quad bike,” she explained.

I figured as much.

“I’m sure Jason will let us borrow his if we go down there to ask.”

Vespyr nodded and smiled at me, then she reached behind her back to pull a squirrel up which she had attached to her backpack.

“Look what I got.” She held it up proudly, holding the animal by its fluffy tail.

“Did you shoot it?” I asked, grinning at her.

“All by myself. With Papa’s rifle. I missed the first time, but then it jumped right onto a branch closer to me and I shot it.”

“I’m impressed, Ves. It’s not easy to shoot these little creatures,” I praised.

“Papa said he couldn’t have shot it because his aim isn’t as good as mine.”

“No doubt in that,” I laughed. “Wanna skin and gut it yourself? Remember how it works?” I asked.

“Of course, I remember. You know, I read a few books before coming here, and I learned a few things Papa hasn’t taught me yet.”

“Papa can only teach you so much. Where do you think he got his knowledge from?”

“From living in the forest for years,” she responded, and that might’ve been the truth. But before moving out here, he read books about the wilderness, and how to survive.

“Papa wasn’t born wild at heart.”

She studied me for a moment, and with a shake of her head, she disagreed with me.

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