EMBED - Spanish example page - The Hunter's wife - Flipbook - Página 9
held him by the hips and they glided through the blue dawn, skating up the frozen coils
and shoals, beneath the leafless alders and cottonwoods, only the bare tips of creek willows
showing above the snow. Ahead of them vast white stretches of river faded into darkness.
In a wind-polished bend they came upon a dead heron, frozen by its ankles into the ice. It
had tried to hack itself out, hammering with its beak first at the ice entombing its feet and
then at its own thin and scaly legs. When it finally died, it died upright, wings folded back,
beak parted in some final, desperate cry, legs like twin reeds rooted in the ice.
She fell to her knees beside the bird. In its eye she saw her face flatly reflected. "It's dead,"
the hunter said. "Come on. You'll freeze too."
"No," she said. She slipped off her mitten and closed the heron's beak in her fist. Almost
immediately her eyes rolled back in her head. "Oh, wow," she moaned. "I can feel her." She
stayed like that for whole minutes, the hunter standing over her, feeling the cold come up
his legs, afraid to touch her as she knelt before the bird. Her hand turned white and then
blue in the wind. Finally she stood. "We have to bury it," she said.
That night she lay stiff and would not sleep. "It was just a bird," he said, unsure of what
was bothering her but bothered by it himself. "We can't do anything for a dead bird. It was
good that we buried it, but tomorrow something will find it and dig it out."
She turned to him. Her eyes were wide. He remembered how they had looked when she put
her hands on the bear. "When I touched her," she said, "I saw where she went."
"What?"
I saw where she went when she died. She was on the shore of a lake with other herons, a
hundred others, all facing the same direction, and they were wading among stones. It was
dawn, and they watched the sun come up over the trees on the other side of the lake. I saw
it as clearly as if I were there."
He rolled onto his back and watched shadows shift across the ceiling. "Winter is getting to
you," he said. He resolved to make sure she went out every day. It was something he'd long
believed: go out every day in winter, or your mind will slip. Every winter the paper was full
of stories about ranchers' wives, snowed in and crazed with cabin fever, who had
dispatched their husbands with cleavers or awls.
Winter threw itself at the cabin. He took her out every day. He showed her a thousand
ladybugs hibernating in an orange ball hung in a riverbank hollow; a pair of dormant frogs
buried in frozen mud, their blood crystallized until spring. He pried a globe of honeybees
from its hive, slow-buzzing, stunned from the sudden exposure, tightly packed around the
queen, each bee shimmying for warmth. When he placed the globe in her hands, she
fainted, her eyes rolled back. Lying there, she saw all their dreams at once, the winter
reveries of scores of worker bees, each one fiercely vivid: bright trails through thorns to a
clutch of wild roses, honey tidily brimming a hundred combs.
With each day she learned more about what she could do. She felt a foreign and keen
sensitivity bubbling in her blood, as if a seed planted long ago were just now sprouting. The
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