Johnny is only two years old. I keep repeating this to myself. Johnny is only two years old. Plus it's my birthday. Plus Fraser already has been through enough. Johnny is only two years old.

Me and Fraser are each sitting on one side of the bed. Fraser's got his head down, staring at the floor. I'm staring at him. Neither of us are looking at Johnny; we don't got to. We can hear him. When we can't hear him no more, that's when we'll look at him, cause that's when he'll be dead.

For my birthday, I get a dead son.

For Fraser's birthday, he got a son with some kind of weird flu. It's going around, everyone's had it. I had it, spent three days sweating in front of the fire, wrapped up in a million blankets, drinking tea that tasted like puke. Fraser got it, and it had him for more than a week. I didn't know how to make the tea that tasted like puke, so I just made chicken soup, traded my knife that I whittle with for vegetables Old Greg Snow had flash-frozen while they were fresh, traded three carvings of naked girls to Little Greg Snow for a dime bag.

Bally T'usle died from it, and so did her husband, but they were old, and I ain't old and Fraser ain't old and Johnny's the youngest of all of us.

But Johnny's got it in his chest, which me and Fraser didn't, and he's got blood on his lips, which me and Fraser didn't, and he's too little, and nobody's got any Tylenol because we didn't ever think we'd need it, because usually Fraser's home remedy stuff works just fine. Nobody's got any antibiotics either, because everybody else either died or got better and we sent the rest of it up to Tulita, where they still got it.

And Fraser and me.... we're too old and too scared to pack Johnny into a dogsled and make the ride to Tulita in a blizzard to get the medicine. We wouldn't make it there, or we wouldn't make it back, and Johnny wouldn't make it at all.

We decided it, we decided it together, that we'd just -- it ain't like we're not doing all that we can do, okay? We are doing everything we can do. But a little kid like Johnny, always too small for his age, he would not make it. He would not.

He starts coughing. I look down at my watch. I was born at 12:34 PM, Chicago time, just in time for lunch, and we're coming up on that now. Five minutes until my fiftieth birthday, and Johnny just keeps getting worse.

I know he is not going to get better. I know he is not going to ever be able to ride on the backs of the dogs again, or learn how to play hockey, or become the champion of curling, or rebuild a car with me. I don't want to think about it, I do not want to know about the death and the dying. This is what I was afraid of when me and Fraser came up here, this is what I never said to Fraser that I never wanted to happen. But I was always scared it would be Fraser who died, leaving me alone with a dozen half-wolves and a half-built cabin and half a heart.

But it's our son, it's our son, it's our son.

Fraser lifts up his head and looks at me. He's crying, just a little, but crying, and I realize I'm crying too. He says, "Ray," and his voice is all broken.

I reach out my hand to him over Johnny's little shaking body, and he takes it. Our hands rest on Johnny's little tiny stick legs. Fraser's hand is sweaty, and trembling. The skin on the back of his hand is loose, and he got aging spots, just like me. We're old, we are so old.

"Daddies."

We both turn at Johnny's hoarse little baby voice. He's coughing and hiccupping and there's nothing we can do, we don't even have any tussilago syrup left, we used it all up. All we got is some vitamins and a tube of yeast infection stuff from when Stella and Vecchio came to visit last year. And --

"Fraser," I say urgently. "We still got those vicodin from when I got that root canal."

Fraser stops talking to Johnny and looks at me and we stare at each other.

"Thirsty," says Johnny. He wants to cry, I can tell, but he don't have the energy.

I let go of Fraser's hand and get up. Fraser's smoothing back his hair, saying, "Daddy will get you some water, John. Daddy will get you a drink."

I leave the room. It's fucking cold in the other rooms -- we let the fires die down everywhere but Johnny's room, we're using all the wood to try to break his fever. It ain't gonna work.

I crush the vicodin as best as I can, crush it into tiny pieces, into almost powder with my hammer, and stir it into a glass of water.

Fraser props Johnny up when I bring the water in, in Johnny's favorite cup, the one with the alien on it, and the little sippy top. I go to help him drink it, and Fraser puts his hand over mine on the cup.

"Ben, let me do this," I say to him. He got enough in his heart already, he don't need this too.

"We will do this together, Ray," he says, and I hear what he don't say: together like we do everything else, cause we're a team, we're partners, we're buddies, always have been, always will be.

We help Johnny drink the water, and it's hard, cause his throat is swollen and his mouth hurts.

"Ew," he says. "Ew."

And Fraser and me hold him, and hold hands, until he stops breathing.