EMBED - Spanish example page - The Hunter's wife - Flipbook - Página 12
and digging the frozen earth under the foundation. He unbolted what was left of the door
and swung it free.
Elk arrows were all he had, aluminum shafts tipped with broadheads. He squatted in the
dark entrance—their only exit—with his bow at full draw and an arrow nocked. Above him
he could hear his wife's feet pad quietly over the floorboards. A coyote made a coughing
sound. Others shifted and panted. Maybe there were ten. He began to fire arrows steadily
into the dark. He heard some bite into the foundation blocks at the back of the crawl space,
others sink into flesh. He spent his whole quiver: a dozen arrows. The yelps of speared
coyotes went up. A few charged him, and he lashed at them with his knife. He felt teeth go
to the bone of his arm, felt hot breath on his cheeks. He lashed with his knife at ribs, tails,
skulls. His muscles screamed. The coyotes were in a frenzy. Blood bloomed from his wrist,
his thigh.
She heard the otherworldly screams of wounded coyotes come up through the floorboards,
his grunts and curses as he fought. It sounded as if an exit had been tunneled all the way
from hell to open under their house, and what was now pouring out was the worst violence
that place could send up. She knelt in front of the fireplace and felt the souls of coyotes as
they came through the boards on their way skyward.
He was blood-soaked and hungry, and his thigh had been badly bitten, but he worked all
day digging out the truck. If he did not get food, they would starve, and he tried to hold the
thought of the truck in his mind. He lugged slate and tree bark to wedge under the tires,
excavated a mountain of snow from the truck bed. Finally, after dark, he got the engine
turned over and ramped the truck up onto the frozen, wind-crusted snow. For a brief,
wonderful moment he had it careening over the icy crust, starlight washing through the
windows, tires spinning, pistons churning, what looked to be the road unspooling in the
headlights. Then he crashed through. Slowly, painfully, he began digging it out again.
It was hopeless. He would get it up, and then it would break through a few miles later.
Hardly anywhere was the sheet of ice atop the snow thick enough to support the truck's
weight. For twenty hours he dug and then revved and slid the truck over eight-foot drifts.
Three more times it crashed through and sank to the windows. Finally he left it. He was ten
miles from home, thirty miles from town.
He made a weak and smoky fire with cut boughs and lay beside it and tried to sleep, but he
couldn't. The heat from the fire melted snow, and trickles ran slowly toward him but froze
solid before they reached him. The stars twisting in their constellations above had never
seemed farther or colder. In a state that was neither fully sleep nor fully waking, he
watched wolves lope around his fire, just outside the reaches of light, slavering and lean.
He thought for the first time that he might die if he did not get warmer. He managed to
kneel and turn and crawl for home. Around him he could feel the wolves, smell blood on
them, hear their nailed feet scrape across the ice.
He traveled all that night and all the next day, near catatonia, sometimes on his feet, more
often on his elbows and knees. At times he thought he was a wolf, and at times he thought
he was dead. When he finally made it to the cabin, there were no tracks on the porch, no
sign that she had gone out. The crawl-space door was still flung open, and shreds of the
siding and the doorframe lay scattered about.
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