EMBED - Spanish example page - The Hunter's wife - Flipbook - Página 14
gallon of milk. When he picked her up at the library, she had applied for a library card and
borrowed twenty books. They stopped at the Bitterroot for hamburgers and rhubarb pie.
She ate three pieces. He watched her eat, the spoon sliding out of her mouth. This was
better. This was more like his dreams.
"Well, Mary," he said, "I think we made it."
"I love pie," she said.
As soon as the line was repaired, the phone began to ring. He took his fishing clients down
the river. She sat on the porch, reading, reading.
Soon her sudden and ravenous appetite for books could not be met by the Great Falls
Public Library. She wanted other books—essays about sorcery, primers on magic-working
and conjury that had to be mail-ordered from New Hampshire, New Orleans, even Italy.
Once a week the hunter drove to town to collect a parcel of books from the post
office: Arcana Mundi, The Seer's Dictionary, Paragon of Wizardry, Occult Science Among
the Ancients. He opened one to a random page and read "Bring water, tie a soft fillet
around your altar, burn it on fresh twigs and frankincense ..."
She regained her health, took on energy, no longer lay under furs dreaming all day. She
was out of bed before he was, brewing coffee, her nose already between pages. With a
steady diet of meat and vegetables her body bloomed, her hair shone, her eyes and cheeks
glowed. How beautiful she seemed to him in those few hours he was home. After supper he
would watch her read in the firelight, blackbird feathers tied all through her hair, a heron's
beak hanging between her breasts.
In November he took a Sunday off and they cross-country skied. They came across a bull
elk frozen to death in a draw. Ravens shrieked at them as they skied to it. She knelt and put
her palm on the leathered skull. "There," she moaned. "I feel him."
"What do you feel?" he asked, standing behind her. "What is it?"
She stood, trembling. "I feel his life flowing out," she said. "I see where he goes, what he
sees."
"But that's impossible," he said. "It's like saying you know what I dream."
"I do," she said. "You dream about wolves."
"But that elk's been dead at least a day. It doesn't go anywhere. It goes into the crops of
those ravens."
How could she tell him? How could she ask him to understand such a thing? How could
anyone understand? More clearly than ever she could see that there was a fine line between
dreams and wakefulness, between living and dying, a line so tenuous it sometimes didn't
exist. It was always clearest for her in winter. In winter, in that valley, life and death were
not so different. The heart of a hibernating newt was frozen solid, but she could warm and
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