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As hunting season came on his mind wandered. He was botching opportunities—getting upwind of elk or telling a client to call it quits thirty seconds before a pheasant burst from cover and flapped slowly, untroubled, into the sky. When a client missed his mark and pegged an antelope in the neck, the hunter berated him for being careless, knelt over its tracks and clutched at the bloody snow. Do you understand what you’ve done? he shouted. How the arrow shaft will knock against the trees, how the animal will run and run, how the wolves will trot behind it to keep it from resting? The client was red-faced, huffing. Wolves? the client said. There haven’t been wolves here for twenty years.

She was in Butte or Missoula when he discovered her money in a boot: six thousand dollars and change. He canceled his trips and stewed for two days, pacing the porch, sifting through her things, rehearsing his arguments. When she saw him, the sheaf of bills jutting from his shirt pocket, she stopped halfway to the door, her bag over her shoulder, her hair brought back. The light came across his shoulders and fell onto the yard.

It’s not right, he said.

She walked past him into the cabin. I’m helping people. I’m doing what I love. Can’t you see how good I feel afterward?

You take advantage of them. They’re grieving, and you take their money.

They
want
to pay me, she shrieked. I help them see something they desperately want to see.

It’s a grift. A con.

She came back out on the porch. No, she said. Her voice was quiet and strong. This is real. As real as anything: the valley, the river, the trees, your trout hanging in the crawlspace. I have a talent. A gift.

He snorted. A gift for hocus-pocus. For swindling widows out of their savings. He lobbed the money into the yard. The wind caught the bills and scattered them over the snow.

She hit him, once, hard across the mouth. How dare you? she cried. You, of all people, should understand. You who dream of wolves every night.

He went out alone the next evening and she tracked him through the snow. He was up on a deer platform under a blanket. He was wearing white camouflage; he’d tiger-striped his face with black paint. She crouched a hundred yards away, for four hours or more, damp and trembling in the snow behind his tree stand. She thought he must have dozed off when she heard an arrow sing
down from the platform and strike a doe she hadn’t even noticed in the chest. The doe looked around, wildly surprised, and charged off, galloping through the trees. She heard the aluminum shaft of the arrow knocking against branches, heard the deer plunge through a thicket. The hunter sat a moment, then climbed down from his perch and began to follow. She waited until he was out of sight, then followed.

She didn’t have far to go. There was so much blood she thought he must have wounded other deer, which must all have come charging down this same path, spilling out the quantities of their lives. The doe lay panting between two trees, the thin shaft of the arrow jutting from her shoulder. Blood so red it was almost black pulsed down its flank. The hunter stood over the animal and slit its throat.

Mary leapt forward from where she squatted, her legs all pins and needles, dashed across the snow in her parka and, lunging, grabbed the doe by its still-warm foreleg. With her other hand she seized the hunter’s wrist and held on. His knife was still inside the deer’s throat and as he pulled away blood spread thickly into the snow. Already the doe’s vision was surging through her body— fifty deer wading a sparkling brook, their bellies in the current, craning their necks to pull leaves from overhanging alders, light pouring around their bodies, a buck raising its antlered head like a king. A silver bead of water hung from its muzzle, caught the sun, and fell.

What?—the hunter gasped. He dropped his knife. He was pulling away, pulling from his knees with all his strength. She held on; one hand on his wrist, the other clamped around the doe’s foreleg. He dragged them across the snow and the doe left her blood as she went. Oh, he whispered. He could feel the world—the grains of snow, the stripped bunches of trees—falling away. The taste of alder leaves was in his mouth. A golden brook rushed under his body; light spilled onto him. The buck was raising its head, meeting his eyes. All the world washed in amber.

The hunter gave a last pull and was free. The vision sped away. No, he murmured. No. He rubbed his wrist where her fingers had been and shook his head as if shaking off a blow. He ran.

Mary lay in the blood-smeared snow a long time, the warmth of the doe running up her arm until finally the woods had gone cold and she was alone. She dressed the doe with his knife and quartered the carcass and ferried it home over her shoulders. Her husband was in bed. The fireplace was cold. Don’t come near me, he said. Don’t touch me. She built the fire and fell asleep on the floor.

In the months that followed she left the cabin more frequently and for longer durations, visiting homes, accident sites and funeral parlors all over central Montana. Finally she pointed the truck south and didn’t turn back. They had been married five years.

Twenty years later, in the Bitterroot Diner, he looked up at the ceiling-mounted television and there she was, being interviewed. She lived in Manhattan, had traveled the world, written two books. She was in demand all over the country. Do you commune with the dead? the interviewer asked. No, she said, I help people. I commune with the living. I give people peace.

Well, the interviewer said, turning to speak into the camera, I believe it.

The hunter bought her books at the bookstore and read them in one night. She had written poems about the valley, written them to the animals: you rampant coyote, you glorious bull. She had traveled to Sudan to touch the backbone of a fossilized stegosaur, and wrote of her frustration when she divined nothing from it. A TV network flew her to Kamchatka to embrace the huge shaggy forefoot of a mammoth as it was airlifted from the permafrost—she had better luck with that one, describing an entire herd slogging big-footed through a slushy tide, tearing at sea grass and bringing it to their mouths with their trunks. In a
handful of poems there were even vague allusions to him—a brooding, blood-soaked presence that hovered outside the margins, like storms on their way, like a killer hiding in the basement.

The hunter was fifty-eight years old. Twenty years was a long time. The valley had diminished slowly but perceptibly: roads came in, and the grizzlies left, seeking higher country. Loggers had thinned nearly every accessible stand of trees. Every spring runoff from logging roads turned the river chocolate-brown. He had given up on finding a wolf in that country although they still came to him in dreams and let him run with them, out over frozen flats under the moon. He had never been with another woman. In his cabin, bent over the table, he set aside her books, took a pencil, and wrote her a letter.

A week later a Federal Express truck drove all the way to the cabin. Inside the envelope was her response on embossed stationery. The handwriting was hurried and efficient.
I will be in Chicago,
it said,
day after tomorrow. Enclosed is a plane ticket. Feel free to come. Thank you for writing.

After sherbet the chancellor rang his spoon against a glass and called his guests into the reception room. The bar had been dismantled; in its place three caskets had been set on the carpet. The caskets were mahogany, polished to a deep luster. The one in the center was larger than the two flanking it. A bit of snow that had fallen on the lids—they must have been kept outside—was melting, and drops ran onto the carpet where they left dark circles. Around the caskets cushions had been placed on the floor. A dozen candles burned on the mantel. There were the sounds of staff clearing the dining room. The hunter leaned against the entryway and watched guests drift uncomfortably into the room, some cradling coffee cups, others gulping at gin or vodka in deep tumblers. Eventually everyone settled onto the floor.

The hunter’s wife came in then, elegant in her dark suit. She knelt and motioned for O’Brien to sit beside her. His face was pinched and inscrutable. Again the hunter had the impression that he was not of this world but of a slightly leaner one.

President O’Brien, his wife said. I know this is difficult for you. Death can seem so final, like a blade dropped through your center. But the nature of death is not at all final; it is not some dark cliff off which we leap. I hope to show you it is merely a fog, something we can peer into and out of, something we can know and face and not necessarily fear. By each life taken from our collective lives we are diminished. But even in death there is much to celebrate. It is only a transition, like so many others.

She moved into the circle and unfastened the lids of the caskets. From where he sat the hunter could not see inside. His wife’s hands fluttered around her waist like birds. Think, she said. Think hard about something you would like resolved, some matter, gone now, which you wish you could take back—perhaps with your daughters, a moment, a lost feeling, a desperate wish.

The hunter lidded his eyes. He found himself thinking of his wife, of their long gulf, of dragging her and a bleeding doe through the snow. Think now, his wife was saying, of some wonderful moment, some fine and sunny minute you shared, your wife and daughters, all of you together. Her voice was lulling. Beneath his eyelids the glow of the candles made an even orange wash. He knew her hands were reaching for whatever—whoever—lay in those caskets. Somewhere inside him he felt her extend across the room.

His wife said more about beauty and loss being the same thing, about how they ordered the world, and he felt something happening—a strange warmth, a flitting presence, something dim and unsettling like a feather brushed across the back of his neck. Hands on both sides of him reached for his hands. Fingers locked around his fingers. He wondered if she was hypnotizing him, but it didn’t matter. He had nothing to fight off or snap out of. She
was inside him now; she had reached across and was poking about.

Her voice faded, and he felt himself swept up as if rising toward the ceiling. Air washed lightly in and out of his lungs; warmth pulsed in the hands that held his own. In his mind he saw a sea emerging from fog. The water was broad and flat and glittered like polished metal. He could feel dune grass moving against his shins, and wind coming over his shoulders. The sea was very bright. All around him bees shuttled over the dunes. Far out a shorebird was diving for crabs. He knew that a few hundred yards away a pair of girls were building castles in the sand; he could hear their song, soft and lilting. Their mother was with them, reclined under an umbrella, one leg bent, the other straight. She was drinking iced tea and he could taste it in his mouth, sweet and bitter with a trace of mint. Each cell in his body seemed to breathe. He became the girls, the diving bird, the shuttling bees; he was the mother of the girls and the father; he could feel himself flowing outward, richly dissolving, paddling into the world like the very first cell into the great blue sea. . . .

When he opened his eyes he saw linen curtains, women in gowns kneeling. Tears were visible on many people’s cheeks— O’Brien’s and the chancellor’s and Bruce Maples’s. His wife’s head was bowed. The hunter gently released the hands that held his and walked out into kitchen, past the sudsy sinks, the stacks of dishes. He let himself out a side door and found himself on the long wooden deck that ran the length of the house, a couple inches of snow already settled on it.

He felt drawn toward the pond, the birdbath and the hedges. He walked to the pond and stood at its rim. The snow was falling easily and slowly and the undersides of the clouds glowed yellow with reflected light from the city. Inside the house the lights were all down and only the dozen candles on the mantel showed, trembling and winking through the windows, a tiny, trapped constellation.

Before long his wife came out onto the deck and walked through the snow and came down to the pond. There were things he had been preparing to say: something about a final belief, about his faithfulness to the idea of her, an expression of gratitude for providing a reason to leave the valley, if only for a night. He wanted to tell her that although the wolves were gone, may always have been gone, they still came to him in dreams. That they could run there, fierce and unfettered, was surely enough. She would understand. She had understood long before he did.

But he was afraid to speak. He could see that speaking would be like dashing some very fragile bond to pieces, like kicking a dandelion gone to seed; the wispy, tenuous sphere of its body would scatter in the wind. So instead they stood together, the snow fluttering down from the clouds to melt into the water where their own reflected images trembled like two people trapped against the glass of a parallel world, and he reached, finally, to take her hand.

S
O
M
ANY
C
HANCES

Dorotea San Juan,
a fourteen year old in a brown cardigan. The janitor’s daughter. Walks with her head down, wears cheap sneakers, never lipstick. Picks at salads during lunch. Tacks maps to her bedroom walls. Holds her breath when she gets nervous. Years of being the janitor’s daughter teach her to blend in, look down, be nobody. Who’s that? Nobody.