"Right," he says, brows furrowing as he angles the knife more shallowly, hoping to make a cleaner cut. "Thanks. Closest thing I've done to this is my dad trying to teach me to clean a fish, but I wasn't as skilled with a knife back then."

And he hadn't had quite as much interest in that kind of outdoorsmanship as his dad was hoping. He'd tried his best, to be sure, but it wasn't exactly a passion of his. Now, though, the idea of being able to hunt and prepare his own food seems a little more important, in the increasingly likely case that things to to shit even temporarily.

"And yeah, cities can be a lot to handle, even when you grew up in one. You kind of either love all the noise and people and activity or it drives you nuts. Sometimes both."

Often both, if he's feeling in particular ways on a given day.

"But being out in the wilderness for the first time was a big deal for me, too. The lights are so bright where I grew up, you can't see stars at night, and the buildings are so tall you can't really see the whole horizon from most places. When my birth parents took me to the coast and I looked out at the ocean in the dark - I thought I could see the whole universe."

It left an impression, even though he barely remembers anything else from when he was that young.