ALT EXAMPLE - EBOOK - THE HUNTER'S WIFE - Flipbook - Página 6
was hunting by persistence. She said yes in Bozeman. Her name was plain, Mary Roberts.
They had rhubarb pie in a hotel restaurant.
"I know how you do it," he said. "The feet in the box are dummies. You hold your legs
against your chest and wiggle the dummy feet with a string."
She laughed. "Is that what you do? Follow a girl from town to town to tell her her magic
isn't real?"
"No," he said. "I hunt."
"And when you're not hunting?"
"I dream about hunting."
She laughed again. "It's not funny," he said.
"You're right," she said, and smiled. "It's not funny. I'm that way with magic. I dream about
it. Even when I'm not asleep."
He looked into his plate, thrilled. He searched for something he might say. They ate.
"But I dream bigger dreams, you know," she said afterward, after she had eaten two pieces
of pie, carefully, with a spoon. Her voice was quiet and serious. "I have magic inside of me.
I'm not going to get sawed in half by Tony Vespucci all my life."
"I don't doubt it," the hunter said.
"I knew you'd believe me," she said.
But the next winter Vespucci brought her back to Great Falls and sawed her in half in the
same plywood coffin. And the winter after that. Both times, after the performance, the
hunter took her to the Bitterroot Diner, where he watched her eat two pieces of pie. The
watching was his favorite part: a hitch in her throat as she swallowed, the way the spoon
slid cleanly out from her lips, the way her hair fell over her ear.
Then she was eighteen, and after pie she let him drive her to his cabin, forty miles from
Great Falls, up the Missouri and then east into the Smith River valley. She brought only a
small vinyl purse. The truck skidded and sheered as he steered it over the unploughed
roads, fishtailing in the deep snow, but she didn't seem afraid or worried about where he
might be taking her, about the possibility that the truck might sink in a drift, that she
might freeze to death in her pea coat and glittery magician's-assistant dress. Her breath
plumed out in front of her. It was twenty degrees below zero. Soon the roads would be
snowed over, impassable until spring.
At his one-room cabin, with furs and old rifles on the walls, he unbolted the door to the
crawl space and showed her his winter hoard: a hundred smoked trout, plucked pheasants
and venison quarters hanging frozen from hooks. "Enough for two of me," he said. She
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