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It was the hunter's first time outside Montana. He woke, stricken still with the hours-old
vision of ascending through rose-lit cumulus, of houses and barns like specks deep in the
snowed-in valleys, all the scrolling country below looking December—brown and black
hills streaked with snow, flashes of iced-over lakes, the long braids of a river gleaming at
the bottom of a canyon. Above the wing the sky had deepened to a blue so pure he knew it
would bring tears to his eyes if he looked long enough.
Now it was dark. The airplane descended over Chicago, its galaxy of electric lights, the vast
neighborhoods coming clearer as the plane glided toward the airport—streetlights,
headlights, stacks of buildings, ice rinks, a truck turning at a stoplight, scraps of snow atop
a warehouse and winking antennae on faraway hills, finally the long converging parallels of
blue runway lights, and they were down.
He walked into the airport, past the banks of monitors. Already he felt as if he'd lost
something, some beautiful perspective, some lovely dream fallen away. He had come to
Chicago to see his wife, whom he had not seen in twenty years. She was there to perform
her magic for a higher-up at the state university. Even universities, apparently, were
interested in what she could do. Outside the terminal the sky was thick and gray and
hurried by wind. Snow was coming. A woman from the university met him and escorted
him to her Jeep. He kept his gaze out the window.
They were in the car for forty-five minutes, passing first the tall, lighted architecture of
downtown, then naked suburban oaks, heaps of ploughed snow, gas stations, power
towers, and telephone wires. The woman said, "So you regularly attend your wife's
performances?"
"No," he said. "Never before."
She parked in the driveway of an elaborate modern mansion, with square balconies
suspended over two garages, huge triangular windows in the façade, sleek columns, domed
lights, a steep shale roof.
Inside the front door about thirty nametags were laid out on a table. His wife was not there
yet. No one, apparently, was there yet. He found his tag and pinned it to his sweater. A
silent girl in a tuxedo appeared and disappeared with his coat.
The granite foyer was backed with a grand staircase, which spread wide at the bottom and
tapered at the top. A woman came down. She stopped four or five steps from the bottom
and said, "Hello, Anne" to the woman who had driven him there and "You must be Mr.
Dumas" to him. He took her hand, a pale, bony thing, weightless, like a featherless bird.
Her husband, the university's chancellor, was just knotting his bow tie, she said, and she
laughed sadly to herself, as if bow ties were something she disapproved of. The hunter
moved to a window, shifted aside the curtain, and peered out.
In the poor light he could see a wooden deck the length of the house, angled and stepped,
its width ever changing, with a low rail. Beyond it, in the blue shadows, a small pond lay
encircled by hedges, with a marble birdbath at its center. Behind the pond stood leafless
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