ALT EXAMPLE - EBOOK - THE HUNTER'S WIFE - Flipbook - Página 17
had become lonely for him. Everything, it seemed, was out of his hands—his truck, his
wife, the course of his own life.
As hunting season came on, his mind wandered. He was botching kills—getting upwind of
elk, or telling a client to unload and call it quits thirty seconds before a pheasant burst from
cover. When a client missed his mark and pegged an antelope in the neck, the hunter
berated him for being careless, knelt over its tracks, and clutched at the bloody snow. "Do
you understand what you've done?" he shouted. "How the arrow shaft will knock against
the trees, how the animal will run and run, how the wolves will trot behind it to keep it
from resting?"
The client was red-faced, huffing. "Wolves don't hunt here," the client said. "There haven't
been wolves here for twenty years."
She was in Butte or Missoula when he discovered her money in a boot: six thousand dollars
and change. He canceled his trips and stewed for two days, pacing the porch, sifting
through her things, rehearsing his arguments. When she saw him, the sheaf of bills jutting
from his shirt pocket, she stopped halfway to the door, her bag over her shoulder, her hair
pulled back.
"It's not right," he said.
She walked past him into the cabin. "I'm helping people. I'm doing what I love. Can't you
see how good I feel afterward?"
"You take advantage of them. They're grieving, and you take their money."
"They want to pay me," she shrieked. "I help them see something they desperately want to
see."
"It's a grift. A con."
She came back out on the porch. "No," she said. Her voice was quiet and strong. "This is
real. As real as anything: the valley, the river, your trout hanging in the crawl space. I have
a talent. A gift."
He snorted. "A gift for hocus-pocus. For swindling widows out of their savings." He lobbed
the money into the yard. The wind caught the bills and scattered them over the snow.
She hit him, once, hard across the mouth. "How dare you?" she cried. "You, of all people,
should understand. You who dreams of wolves every night."
In the months that followed, she left the cabin more frequently and for longer durations,
visiting homes, accident sites, and funeral parlors all over central Montana. Finally she
pointed the truck south and didn't turn back. They had been married five years.
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