EMBED - Spanish example page - The Hunter's wife - Flipbook - Página 18
Twenty years later, in the Bitterroot Diner, he looked up at the ceiling-mounted television
and there she was, being interviewed. She lived in Manhattan, had traveled the world, had
written two books. She was in demand all over the country.
"Do you commune with the dead?" the interviewer asked.
"No," she said, "I help people. I commune with the living. I give people peace."
"Well," the interviewer said, turning to speak into the camera, "I believe it."
The hunter bought her books at the bookstore and read them in one night. She had written
poems about the valley, written them to the animals: you rampant coyote, you glorious
buck. She had traveled to Sudan to touch the backbone of a fossilized stegosaur, and wrote
of her frustration when she divined nothing from it. A TV network flew her to Kamchatka
to embrace the huge, shaggy neck of a mammoth as it was air-lifted from a glacier. She'd
had better luck with that one, describing an entire herd slogging big-footed through a
slushy tide, tearing at sea grass and flaring their ears to catch the sun. In a handful of
poems there were even vague allusions to him—a brooding, blood-soaked presence that
hovered outside the margins like a storm on its way, like a killer hiding in the basement.
The hunter was fifty-eight years old. Twenty years was a long time. The valley had
diminished slowly but perceptibly: roads came in, and the grizzlies left, seeking higher
country. Loggers had thinned nearly every accessible stand of trees. Every spring runoff
from logging roads turned the river chocolate-brown, and the soil from the old forests was
being washed into the Missouri. In his cabin, bent over the table, he set aside her books,
took a pencil, and wrote her a letter.
A week later a Federal Express truck drove all the way to the cabin. Inside the envelope
was her response, on embossed stationery. The handwriting was hurried and efficient. I
will be in Chicago, it said, day after tomorrow. Enclosed is a plane ticket. Feel free to
come. Thank you for writing.
After sherbet the chancellor called his guests into the reception room. Burning candles had
been distributed around the room: on the sills, the banister, the mantel, the bookshelves.
The bar had been taken down; in its place three caskets had been set on the carpet. A bit of
snow that had fallen on the lids—they must have been kept outside—was melting, and
drops ran onto the carpet, where they left dark circles. Around the caskets cushions had
been placed on the floor. The hunter leaned against the entryway and watched guests drift
uncomfortably into the room, some cradling coffee cups, others gulping at gin or vodka in
deep tumblers. Eventually everyone settled on the floor in a circle.
The hunter's wife came in then, elegant in her dark suit. She knelt and motioned for
O'Brien to sit beside her. His face was pinched and inscrutable. Again the hunter had the
impression that he was not of this world but of a slightly leaner one.
"President O'Brien," his wife said, "I know this is difficult for you. Death can seem so final,
like a blade dropped through the neck. But the nature of death is not at all final. It is not
some dark cliff off which we leap. I hope to show you it is merely a fog, something we can
peer into and out of, something we can know and face and not necessarily fear. By each life
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