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coat. "Summer," her voice echoed. "Blackberries. Trout. Dredging his flanks across river
pebbles."
"I'd have liked," she said later, back in the cabin as he built up the fire, "to crawl all the way
down there with him. Get into his arms. I'd grab him by the ears and kiss him on the eyes."
The hunter watched the fire, the flames cutting and sawing, each log a burning bridge.
Three years he had waited for this. Three years he had dreamed this girl by his fire. But
somehow it had ended up different from what he had imagined. He had thought it would
be like a hunt—like waiting hours beside a wallow with his rifle barrel on his pack to see
the huge antlered head of a bull elk loom up against the sky, to hear the whole herd behind
him inhale and then scatter down the hill. If you had your opening you shot and walked the
animal down and that was it. But this felt different. It was exactly as if he were still three
years younger, stopped outside the Central Christian Church and driven against a low
window by the wind or some other, greater force.
"Stay with me," he whispered to her, to the fire. "Stay the winter."
Bruce Maples stood beside him, jabbing the ice in his drink with his straw. "I'm in
athletics," he offered. "I run the athletic department here."
"You mentioned that."
"Did I? I don't remember. I used to coach track. Hurdles."
The hunter was watching the thin, stricken man, President O'Brien, as he stood in the
corner of the reception room. Every few minutes a couple of guests made their way to him
and took O'Brien's hands in their own.
"You probably know," the hunter told Maples, "that wolves are hurdlers. Sometimes the
people who track them will come to a snag and the prints will disappear. As if the entire
pack just leaped into a tree and vanished. Eventually they'll find the tracks again, thirty or
forty feet away. People used to think it was magic—flying wolves. But all they did was
jump. One great coordinated leap."
Maples was looking around the room. "Huh," he said. "I wouldn't know about that."
She stayed. The first time they made love, she shouted so loudly that coyotes climbed onto
the roof and howled down the chimney. He rolled off her, sweating. The coyotes coughed
and chuckled all night, like children chattering in the yard, and he had nightmares. "Last
night you had three dreams, and you dreamed you were a wolf each time," she whispered.
"You were mad with hunger and running under the moon."
Had he dreamed that? He couldn't remember. Maybe he talked in his sleep.
In December it never got warmer than fifteen below. The river froze—something he'd never
seen. On Christmas Eve he drove all the way to Helena to buy her figure skates. In the
morning they wrapped themselves head-to-toe in furs and went out to skate the river. She
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