EMBED - Spanish example page - The Hunter's wife - Flipbook - Página 10
larger the animal, the more powerfully it could shake her. The recently dead were virtual
mines of visions, casting them off with a slow-fading strength as if cutting a long series of
tethers one by one. She pulled off her mittens and touched everything she could: bats,
salamanders, a cardinal chick tumbled from its nest, still warm. Ten hibernating garter
snakes coiled beneath a rock, eyelids sealed, tongues stilled. Each time she touched a
frozen insect, a slumbering amphibian, anything just dead, her eyes rolled back and its
visions, its heaven, went shivering through her body.
Their first winter passed like that. When he looked out the cabin window, he saw wolf
tracks crossing the river, owls hunting from the trees, six feet of snow like a quilt ready to
be thrown off. She saw burrowed dreamers nestled under roots against the long twilight,
their dreams rippling into the sky like auroras.
With love still lodged in his heart like a splinter, he married her in the first muds of spring.
Bruce Maples gasped when the hunter's wife finally arrived. She moved through the door
like a show horse, demure in the way she kept her eyes down, but assured in her step; she
brought each tapered heel down and struck it against the granite. The hunter had not seen
his wife for twenty years, and she had changed—become refined, less wild, and somehow,
to the hunter, worse for it. Her face had wrinkled around the eyes, and she moved as if
avoiding contact with anything near her, as if the hall table or the closet door might
suddenly lunge forward to snatch at her lapels. She wore no jewelry, no wedding ring, only
a plain black suit, double-breasted.
She found her nametag on the table and pinned it to her lapel. Everyone in the reception
room looked at her and then looked away. The hunter realized that she, not President
O'Brien, was the guest of honor. In a sense they were courting her. This was their way, the
chancellor's way—a silent bartender, tuxedoed coat girls, big icy drinks. Give her pie, the
hunter thought. Rhubarb pie. Show her a sleeping grizzly.
They sat for dinner at a narrow and very long table, fifteen or so high-backed chairs down
each side and one at each end. The hunter was seated several places away from his wife.
She looked over at him finally, a look of recognition, of warmth, and then looked away
again. He must have seemed old to her—he must always have seemed old to her. She did
not look at him again.
The kitchen staff, in starched whites, brought onion soup, scampi, poached salmon.
Around the hunter guests spoke in half whispers about people he did not know. He kept his
eyes on the windows and the blowing snow beyond.
The river thawed and drove huge saucers of ice toward the Missouri. The hunter felt that
old stirring, that quickening in his soul, and would rise in the wide pink dawns, grab his fly
rod, and hurry down to the river. Already trout were rising through the chill brown water
to take the first insects of spring. Soon the telephone in the cabin was ringing with calls
from clients, and his guiding season was on.
In April an occasional client wanted a mountain lion or a trip with dogs for birds, but late
spring and summer were for trout. He was out every morning before dawn, driving with a
thermos of coffee to pick up a lawyer, a widower, a politician with a penchant for wild
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