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Tozer never tortured animals as a child.Something in him wonders if Hickey would've.Tozer knew another child when he was young. Another boy. Tozer never tortured animals, but this boy did.Tozer caught him once. He'd followed him because he was planning on beating the kid up for stealing the knife Tozer had received for his birthday. He'd caught him with the knife, and with a kitten. With the knife in the kitten's guts.He beat up the kid with special fervor that day. Tozer was known to pick on others, maybe knock them around and knock out a milk tooth or two, and since he'd grown large enough, quickly enough, for adults to comment on what a strapping young lad he was throughout his childhood, he never even had to try very hard to bully others into doing what he wanted. And he never really cared all that badly about how badly he hurt others.But, somehow, the sight of that kitten, still blind and round and so tiny that it fit as easily as a bread roll in the other kid's hand, squealing and wriggling around the pitiless intrusion of steel slicing down its belly, got to Tozer. He had nightmares about it. About the kid hunched over the kitten with his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth in concentration and a glassy, giddy look in his pale eyes as he drew Tozer's own blade through the little body until there were shiny pink guts peeking out through the split in the fuzzy gray fur.Tozer never lost how little he was able to care about hurting people, but he made especially sure never to hurt an animal from then on, and whenever he found an ingrate pulling the wings off of flies or kicking a dog out of their way he took great satisfaction in repaying them for every bit of cruelty which they'd lent out.Hickey was the one who killed Neptune. He did it quick, leading the dog out to the tundra of rocks and then slitting its throat. He had Tozer wrap a spare shirt around Neptune's muzzle so that it would not be able to bark.He never found out why the kid did it. He asked once, and the kid had wiped his nose with the back of his hand, leaving a bright streak of blood and snot along his cheek, and he'd shrugged.Frogs, the kid said, were his favorite.You could drop a frog into a pot of boiling water and the thing would leap right back out, scalded. But if you set it in a cooking pot of cool water, and only then settled the pot onto the stove, and built up the heat with patience... well, the frog would stay calm in the pot even as the temperature rose further and further, and it would stay until it was boiled right alive.The kid had died that winter. He was a weak, sniveling thing in the end, taken by illness and buried in some good Christian cemetery.Hickey was not weak. He was a survivor. The blade in Neptune's throat was an act of strength, in him, not of weakness as it had been for the kid Tozer had known; in this way Hickey was strong where Tozer was weak.It is all boiled down, out here. It is all necessity.There is a similar light in Hickey's eyes, though. He enjoys the power of killing. He likes feeling in control.It had taken so long for Tozer to see it. For so long Hickey was nothing more than a pest, really. Some disrespectful, simperingly insidious weasel of a man who thought himself far too clever, and who could never resist talking back and pressing his point. Someone too ambitious for his humble place in the pecking order. Someone whose ambition would very likely be his own downfall.Then there was the lashing.Hickey not only kept Tozer's name behind his teeth throughout the whole, humiliating ordeal, but he'd remained unbroken, in both resolve and spirit.Retrieving the Esquimaux girl had been a smart move, and he was willing to stand by the righteousness of his judgment without remorse or capitulation, even when he was rewarded with possibly the bitterest of repudiations.Should Hickey's ambition be indulged, he would make the smart choices again, for all who followed him. He would do what had to be done, for the greater good; just as he said to Goodsir.“Didn't you love him?” Tozer asks, after they have feasted on Gibson's flesh. Hickey had partaken of the meal perhaps most of all. Tozer had marveled at this in sickened fascination; Hickey had seemed able to honestly savor the taste of human meat, while it had been all that Tozer could do to chew and swallow.“So what if I did?” Hickey answers, smiling in the night-gloom of the tent they share. It is not the same sort of smile which Tozer had seen him give to Gibson now and again, not that rare, genuine expression of warmth; it is a thing he can barely see.He thinks of that answer later, when Hickey shares his cigarette with him. When he shares his bed. He thinks of it when they fuck.Cornelius Hickey is beautiful and ruthless and strong. Tozer will back him with his own strength, because he wants to survive, and Hickey knows how. But he ekes out what muted, exhausted pleasure he can find with Hickey not out of necessity. That is the only thing which is not out of necessity.Hickey holds Tozer's face in his cold white hands, his cold white face looking close into his with his shining blue eyes, large and fervent—glassy, giddy—and Tozer cannot look away until Hickey, too quickly, leaves him, and leaves him cold and alone.