ALT EXAMPLE - EBOOK - THE HUNTER'S WIFE - Flipbook - Página 11
cutthroat. He came home stinking of fish guts and woke her with eager stories—native
trout leaping fifteen-foot cataracts, a stubborn rainbow wedged under a snag.
By June she was bored and lonely. She wandered through the forest, but never very far.
The summer woods were dense and busy, not like the quiet graveyard feel of winter.
Nothing slept for very long; everything was emerging from cocoons, winging about,
buzzing, multiplying, having litters, gaining weight. Bear cubs splashed in the river. Chicks
screamed for worms. She longed for the stillness of winter, the long slumber, the bare sky,
the bone-on-bone sound of bull elk knocking their antlers against trees.
In September the big-game hunters came. Each client wanted something different: elk,
antelope, a bull moose, a doe. They wanted to see grizzlies, track a wolverine, shoot
sandhill cranes. They wanted the heads of seven-by-seven royal bulls for their dens. Every
few days he came home smelling of blood, with stories of stupid clients, of the Texan who
sat, wheezing, too out of shape to get to the top of a hill for his shot. A bloodthirsty New
Yorker claimed he wanted only to photograph black bears; then he pulled a pistol from his
boot and fired wildly at two cubs and their mother. Nightly she scrubbed blood out of the
hunter's coveralls, watched it fade from rust to red to rose in a basin filled with river water.
She began to sleep, taking long afternoon naps, three hours or more. Sleep, she learned,
was a skill like any other, like getting sawed in half and reassembled, or like divining
visions from a dead robin. She taught herself to sleep despite heat, despite noise. Insects
flung themselves at the screens, hornets sped down the chimney, the sun angled hot and
urgent through the southern windows; still she slept. When he came home each autumn
night, exhausted, forearms stained with blood, she was hours into sleep. Outside, the wind
was already stripping leaves from the cottonwoods—too soon, he thought. He'd take her
sleeping hand. Both of them lived in the grip of forces they had no control over—the
October wind, the revolutions of the earth.
That winter was the worst he could remember: from Thanksgiving on they were snowed in,
the truck buried under six-foot drifts. The phone line went down in December and stayed
down until April. January began with a chinook followed by a terrible freeze. The next
morning a three-inch crust of ice covered the snow. On the ranches to the south cattle
crashed through and bled to death kicking their way out. Deer punched through with their
tiny hooves and suffocated in the deep snow beneath. Trails of blood veined the hills.
In the mornings he would find coyote tracks written in the snow around the door to the
crawl space, two inches of hardwood between them and all his winter hoard hanging frozen
beneath the floorboards. He reinforced the door with baking sheets, nailing them up
against the wood and over the hinges. Twice he woke to the sound of claws scrabbling
against the metal and charged outside to shout the coyotes away.
Everywhere he looked something was dying: an elk keeling over, an emaciated doe
clattering onto ice like a drunken skeleton. The radio reported huge cattle losses on the
southern ranches. Each night he dreamt of wolves, of running with them, soaring over
fences and tearing into the steaming carcasses of cattle.
In February he woke to coyotes under the cabin. He grabbed his bow and knife and dashed
out into the snow barefoot, his feet going numb. They had gone in under the door, chewing
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