EMBED - Spanish example page - The Hunter's wife - Flipbook - Página 13
She was kneeling on the floor, ice in her hair, lost in some kind of hypothermic torpor.
With his last dregs of energy he constructed a fire and poured a mug of hot water down her
throat. As he fell into sleep, he watched himself as from a distance, weeping and clutching
his near-frozen wife.
They had only flour and a few crackers in the cupboards. When she could speak, her voice
was quiet and far away. "I have dreamt the most amazing things," she murmured. "I have
seen the places where coyotes go when they are gone. I know where spiders go, and geese
... "
Snow fell incessantly. Night was abiding; daylight passed in a breath. The hunter was
beyond hungry. Whenever he stood up, his eyesight fled in slow, nauseating streaks of
color. He went out with lanterns to fish, shoveled down to the river ice, chopped through it
with a maul, and shivered over the hole jigging a ball of dough on a hook. Sometimes he
brought back a trout; other times they ate a squirrel, a hare, once a famished deer whose
bones he cracked and boiled, or only a few handfuls of rose hips. In the worst parts of
March he dug out cattails to peel and steam the tubers.
She hardly ate, sleeping eighteen, twenty hours a day. When she woke, it was to scribble on
notebook paper before plummeting back into sleep, clutching at the blankets as if they gave
her sustenance. There was, she was learning, strength hidden at the center of weakness,
ground at the bottom of the deepest pit. With her stomach empty and her body quieted,
without the daily demands of living, she felt she was making important discoveries. She
was only nineteen and had lost twenty pounds since marrying him. Naked, she was all rib
cage and pelvis.
He read her scribbled dreams, but they seemed to be senseless poems and gave him no
clues to her.
Snail: sleds down stones in the rain.
Owl: fixes his eyes on hare, drops as if from the moon.
Horse: rides across the plains with his brothers ...
In April the temperature rose above zero and then above twenty. He strapped an extra
battery to his pack and went to dig out the truck. Its excavation took all day. He drove it
slowly back up the slushy road in the moonlight and asked if she'd like to go to town the
next morning. To his surprise, she said yes. They heated water for baths and dressed in
clothes they hadn't worn in six months. She threaded twine through her belt loops to keep
her trousers up.
Behind the wheel his chest filled to have her with him, to be moving out into the country,
to see the sun above the trees. Spring was coming; the valley was dressing up. Look there,
he wanted to say, those geese streaming over the road. The valley lives. Even after a winter
like that.
She asked him to drop her off at the library. He bought food—a dozen frozen pizzas,
potatoes, eggs, carrots. He nearly wept at seeing bananas. In the parking lot he drank a half
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