EMBED - Spanish example page - The Hunter's wife - Flipbook - Página 4
trees—oaks, maples, a sycamore as white as bone. A helicopter shuttled past, its green light
winking.
"It's snowing," he said.
"Is it?" the hostess asked, with an air of concern, perhaps false. It was impossible to tell
what was sincere and what was not. The woman who had driven him there had moved to
the bar, where she cradled a drink and stared into the carpet.
He let the curtain fall back. The chancellor came down the staircase. Other guests fluttered
in. A man in gray corduroy, with "Bruce Maples" on his nametag, approached him. "Mr.
Dumas," he said, "your wife isn't here yet?"
"You know her?" the hunter asked. "Oh, no," Maples said, and shook his head. "No, I
don't." He spread his legs and swiveled his hips as if stretching before a footrace. "But I've
read about her."
The hunter watched as a tall, remarkably thin man stepped through the front door.
Hollows behind his jaw and beneath his eyes made him appear ancient and skeletal—as if
he were visiting from some other, leaner world. The chancellor approached the thin man,
embraced him, and held him for a moment.
"That's President O'Brien," Maples said. "A famous man, actually, to people who follow
those sorts of things. So terrible, what happened to his family." Maples stabbed the ice in
his drink with his straw.
For the first time the hunter began to think he should not have come.
"Have you read your wife's books?" Maples asked.
The hunter nodded.
"In her poems her husband is a hunter."
"I guide hunters." He was looking out the window to where snow was settling on the
hedges.
"Does that ever bother you?"
"What?"
"Killing animals. For a living, I mean."
The hunter watched snowflakes disappear as they touched the window. Was that what
hunting meant to people? Killing animals? He put his fingers to the glass. "No," he said. "It
doesn't bother me."
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