EMBED - Spanish example page - The Hunter's wife - Flipbook - Página 7
scanned his books over the fireplace—a monograph on grouse habits, a series of journals
on upland game birds, a thick tome titled simply Bear. "Are you tired?" he asked. "Would
you like to see something?" He gave her a snowsuit, strapped her boots into a pair of
leather snowshoes, and took her to hear the grizzly. She wasn't bad on snowshoes, a little
clumsy. They went creaking over wind-scalloped snow in the nearly unbearable cold.
The bear denned every winter in the same hollow cedar, the top of which had been shorn
off by a storm. Black, three-fingered, and huge, in the starlight it resembled a skeletal hand
thrust up from the ground, a ghoulish visitor scrabbling its way out of the underworld.
They knelt. Above them the stars were knife points, hard and white. "Put your ear here," he
whispered. The breath that carried his words crystallized and blew away. They listened,
face-to-face, their ears over woodpecker holes in the trunk. She heard it after a minute,
tuning her ears in to something like a drowsy sigh, a long exhalation of slumber. Her eyes
widened. A full minute passed. She heard it again.
"We can see him," he whispered, "but we have to be dead quiet. Grizzlies are light
hibernators. Sometimes all you do is step on twigs outside their dens and they're up."
He began to dig at the snow. She stood back, her mouth open, eyes wide. Bent at the waist,
the hunter bailed the snow back through his legs. He dug down three feet and then
encountered a smooth, icy crust covering a large hole in the base of the tree. Gently he
dislodged plates of ice and lifted them aside. From the hole the smell of bear came to her,
like wet dog, like wild mushrooms. The hunter removed some leaves. Beneath was a shaggy
flank, a patch of brown fur.
"He's on his back," the hunter whispered. "This is his belly. His forelegs must be up here
somewhere." He pointed to a place higher on the trunk.
She put one hand on his shoulder and knelt in the snow beside the den. Her eyes were wide
and unblinking. Her jaw hung open. Above her shoulder a star separated itself from a
galaxy and melted through the sky. "I want to touch him," she said. Her voice sounded loud
and out of place in that wood, under the naked cedars.
"Hush," he whispered. He shook his head no.
"Just for a minute."
"No," he hissed. "You're crazy." He tugged at her arm. She removed the mitten from her
other hand with her teeth and reached down. He pulled at her again but lost his footing
and fell back, clutching an empty mitten. As he watched, horrified, she turned and placed
both hands, spread-fingered, in the thick shag of the bear's chest. Then she lowered her
face, as if drinking from the snowy hollow, and pressed her lips to the bear's chest. Her
entire head was inside the tree. She felt the soft silver tips of fur brush her cheeks. Against
her nose one huge rib flexed slightly. She heard the lungs fill and then empty. She heard
blood slug through veins.
"Want to know what he dreams?" she asked. Her voice echoed up through the tree and
poured from the shorn ends of its hollowed branches. The hunter took his knife from his
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