It was the hunter's first time outside Montana.

He woke, stricken
still with the hours-old vision of ascending through rose-lit
cumulus, of houses and barns like specks deep in the snowed-in
valleys, all the scrolling country below looking December—brown
and black hills streaked with snow, flashes of iced-over lakes, the
long braids of a river gleaming at the bottom of a canyon. Above the
wing the sky had deepened to a blue so pure he knew it would bring
tears to his eyes if he looked long enough.

This article appears in the May 2001 issue.

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Now it was dark. The airplane descended over Chicago, its galaxy of
electric lights, the vast neighborhoods coming clearer as the plane
glided toward the airport—streetlights, headlights, stacks of
buildings, ice rinks, a truck turning at a stoplight, scraps of snow
atop a warehouse and winking antennae on faraway hills, finally the
long converging parallels of blue runway lights, and they were
down.

He walked into the airport, past the banks of monitors. Already he

felt as if he'd lost something, some beautiful perspective, some
lovely dream fallen away. He had come to Chicago to see his wife,
whom he had not seen in twenty years. She was there to perform
her magic for a higher-up at the state university. Even universities,
apparently, were interested in what she could do. Outside the
terminal the sky was thick and gray and hurried by wind. Snow was
coming. A woman from the university met him and escorted him to
her Jeep. He kept his gaze out the window.
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They were in the car for forty-five minutes, passing first the tall,
lighted architecture of downtown, then naked suburban oaks, heaps
of ploughed snow, gas stations, power towers, and telephone wires.
The woman said, "So you regularly attend your wife's
performances?"

"No," he said. "Never before."

She parked in the driveway of an elaborate modern mansion, with

square balconies suspended over two garages, huge triangular
windows in the façade, sleek columns, domed lights, a steep shale
roof.

Inside the front door about thirty nametags were laid out on a table.
His wife was not there yet. No one, apparently, was there yet. He
found his tag and pinned it to his sweater. A silent girl in a tuxedo
appeared and disappeared with his coat.

The granite foyer was backed with a grand staircase, which spread
wide at the bottom and tapered at the top. A woman came down.
She stopped four or five steps from the bottom and said, "Hello,
Anne" to the woman who had driven him there and "You must be
Mr. Dumas" to him. He took her hand, a pale, bony thing,
weightless, like a featherless bird.
Her husband, the university's chancellor, was just knotting his bow
tie, she said, and she laughed sadly to herself, as if bow ties were
something she disapproved of. The hunter moved to a window,
shifted aside the curtain, and peered out.

In the poor light he could see a wooden deck the length of the
house, angled and stepped, its width ever changing, with a low rail.
Beyond it, in the blue shadows, a small pond lay encircled by
hedges, with a marble birdbath at its center. Behind the pond stood
leafless trees—oaks, maples, a sycamore as white as bone. A
helicopter shuttled past, its green light winking.

"It's snowing," he said.

"Is it?" the hostess asked, with an air of concern, perhaps false. It
was impossible to tell what was sincere and what was not. The
woman who had driven him there had moved to the bar, where she
cradled a drink and stared into the carpet.

He let the curtain fall back. The chancellor came down the staircase.
Other guests fluttered in. A man in gray corduroy, with "Bruce
Maples" on his nametag, approached him. "Mr. Dumas," he said,
"your wife isn't here yet?"

"You know her?" the hunter asked. "Oh, no," Maples said, and
shook his head. "No, I don't." He spread his legs and swiveled his
hips as if stretching before a footrace. "But I've read about her."

The hunter watched as a tall, remarkably thin man stepped through

the front door. Hollows behind his jaw and beneath his eyes made
him appear ancient and skeletal—as if he were visiting from some
other, leaner world. The chancellor approached the thin man,
embraced him, and held him for a moment.

"That's President O'Brien," Maples said. "A famous man, actually, to

people who follow those sorts of things. So terrible, what happened
to his family." Maples stabbed the ice in his drink with his straw.
For the first time the hunter began to think he should not have
come.

"Have you read your wife's books?" Maples asked.

The hunter nodded.

"In her poems her husband is a hunter."

"I guide hunters." He was looking out the window to where snow
was settling on the hedges.

"Does that ever bother you?"

"What?"

"Killing animals. For a living, I mean."

The hunter watched snowflakes disappear as they touched the

window. Was that what hunting meant to people? Killing animals?
He put his fingers to the glass. "No," he said. "It doesn't bother me."

The hunter met his wife in Great Falls, Montana, in the winter of
1972. That winter arrived all at once—you could watch it come. Twin
curtains of white appeared in the north, white all the way to the sky,
driving south like the end of all things. Cattle galloped the
fencelines, bawling. Trees toppled; a barn roof tumbled over the
highway. The river changed directions. The wind flung thrushes
screaming into the gorse and impaled them on the thorns in
grotesque attitudes.

She was a magician's assistant, beautiful, fifteen years old, an

orphan. It was not a new story: a glittery red dress, long legs, a
traveling magic show performing in the meeting hall at the Central
Christian Church. The hunter had been walking past with an armful
of groceries when the wind stopped him in his tracks and drove him
into the alley behind the church. He had never felt such wind; it had
him pinned. His face was pressed against a low window, and
through it he could see the show. The magician was a small man in a
dirty blue cape. Above him a sagging banner read THE GREAT
VESPUCCI. But the hunter watched only the girl; she was graceful,
young, smiling. Like a wrestler, the wind held him against the
window.

The magician was buckling the girl into a plywood coffin, which was
painted garishly with red and blue bolts of lightning. Her neck and
head stuck out at one end, her ankles and feet at the other. She
beamed; no one had ever before smiled so broadly at being locked
into a coffin. The magician started up an electric saw and brought it
noisily down through the center of the box, sawing her in half. Then
he wheeled her apart, her legs going one way, her torso another. Her
neck fell back, her smile faded, her eyes showed only white. The
lights dimmed. A child screamed. Wiggle your toes, the magician
ordered, flourishing his magic wand, and she did; her disembodied
toes wiggled in glittery high-heeled pumps. The audience squealed
with delight.

The hunter watched her pink, fine-boned face, her hanging hair, her
outstretched throat. Her eyes caught the spotlight. Was she looking
at him? Did she see his face pressed against the window, the wind
slashing at his neck, the groceries—onions, a sack of flour—tumbled
to the ground around his feet?

She was beautiful to him in a way that nothing else had ever been
beautiful. Snow blew down his collar and drifted around his boots.
After some time the magician rejoined the severed box halves,
unfastened the buckles, and fluttered his wand, and she was whole
again. She climbed out of the box and curtsied in her glittering
dress. She smiled as if it were the Resurrection itself.
Then the storm brought down a pine tree in front of the courthouse,
and the power winked out, streetlight by streetlight. Before she
could move, before the ushers could begin escorting the crowd out
with flashlights, the hunter was slinking into the hall, making for
the stage, calling for her.

He was thirty years old, twice her age. She smiled at him, leaned
over from the dais in the red glow of the emergency exit lights, and
shook her head. "Show's over," she said. In his pickup he trailed the
magician's van through the blizzard to her next show, a library
fundraiser in Butte. The next night he followed her to Missoula. He
rushed to the stage after each performance. "Just eat dinner with
me," he'd plead. "Just tell me your name." It was hunting by
persistence. She said yes in Bozeman. Her name was plain, Mary
Roberts. They had rhubarb pie in a hotel restaurant.

"I know how you do it," he said. "The feet in the box are dummies.
You hold your legs against your chest and wiggle the dummy feet
with a string."
She laughed. "Is that what you do? Follow a girl from town to town
to tell her her magic isn't real?"

"No," he said. "I hunt."

"And when you're not hunting?"

"I dream about hunting."

She laughed again. "It's not funny," he said.

"You're right," she said, and smiled. "It's not funny. I'm that way
with magic. I dream about it. Even when I'm not asleep."

He looked into his plate, thrilled. He searched for something he

might say. They ate.

"But I dream bigger dreams, you know," she said afterward, after
she had eaten two pieces of pie, carefully, with a spoon. Her voice
was quiet and serious. "I have magic inside of me. I'm not going to
get sawed in half by Tony Vespucci all my life."

"I don't doubt it," the hunter said.

"I knew you'd believe me," she said.

But the next winter Vespucci brought her back to Great Falls and
sawed her in half in the same plywood coffin. And the winter after
that. Both times, after the performance, the hunter took her to the
Bitterroot Diner, where he watched her eat two pieces of pie. The
watching was his favorite part: a hitch in her throat as she
swallowed, the way the spoon slid cleanly out from her lips, the way
her hair fell over her ear.

Then she was eighteen, and after pie she let him drive her to his
cabin, forty miles from Great Falls, up the Missouri and then east
into the Smith River valley. She brought only a small vinyl purse.
The truck skidded and sheered as he steered it over the unploughed
roads, fishtailing in the deep snow, but she didn't seem afraid or
worried about where he might be taking her, about the possibility
that the truck might sink in a drift, that she might freeze to death in
her pea coat and glittery magician's-assistant dress. Her breath
plumed out in front of her. It was twenty degrees below zero. Soon
the roads would be snowed over, impassable until spring.
At his one-room cabin, with furs and old rifles on the walls, he
unbolted the door to the crawl space and showed her his winter
hoard: a hundred smoked trout, plucked pheasants and venison
quarters hanging frozen from hooks. "Enough for two of me," he
said. She scanned his books over the fireplace—a monograph on
grouse habits, a series of journals on upland game birds, a thick
tome titled simply Bear. "Are you tired?" he asked. "Would you like
to see something?" He gave her a snowsuit, strapped her boots into
a pair of leather snowshoes, and took her to hear the grizzly. She
wasn't bad on snowshoes, a little clumsy. They went creaking over
wind-scalloped snow in the nearly unbearable cold.

The bear denned every winter in the same hollow cedar, the top of
which had been shorn off by a storm. Black, three-fingered, and
huge, in the starlight it resembled a skeletal hand thrust up from the
ground, a ghoulish visitor scrabbling its way out of the underworld.
They knelt. Above them the stars were knife points, hard and white.
"Put your ear here," he whispered. The breath that carried his words
crystallized and blew away. They listened, face-to-face, their ears
over woodpecker holes in the trunk. She heard it after a minute,
tuning her ears in to something like a drowsy sigh, a long exhalation
of slumber. Her eyes widened. A full minute passed. She heard it
again.

"We can see him," he whispered, "but we have to be dead quiet.

Grizzlies are light hibernators. Sometimes all you do is step on twigs
outside their dens and they're up."

He began to dig at the snow. She stood back, her mouth open, eyes
wide. Bent at the waist, the hunter bailed the snow back through his
legs. He dug down three feet and then encountered a smooth, icy
crust covering a large hole in the base of the tree. Gently he
dislodged plates of ice and lifted them aside. From the hole the
smell of bear came to her, like wet dog, like wild mushrooms. The
hunter removed some leaves. Beneath was a shaggy flank, a patch of
brown fur.
"He's on his back," the hunter whispered. "This is his belly. His
forelegs must be up here somewhere." He pointed to a place higher
on the trunk.

She put one hand on his shoulder and knelt in the snow beside the
den. Her eyes were wide and unblinking. Her jaw hung open. Above
her shoulder a star separated itself from a galaxy and melted
through the sky. "I want to touch him," she said. Her voice sounded
loud and out of place in that wood, under the naked cedars.

"Hush," he whispered. He shook his head no.

"Just for a minute."

"No," he hissed. "You're crazy." He tugged at her arm. She removed

the mitten from her other hand with her teeth and reached down.
He pulled at her again but lost his footing and fell back, clutching an
empty mitten. As he watched, horrified, she turned and placed both
hands, spread-fingered, in the thick shag of the bear's chest. Then
she lowered her face, as if drinking from the snowy hollow, and
pressed her lips to the bear's chest. Her entire head was inside the
tree. She felt the soft silver tips of fur brush her cheeks. Against her
nose one huge rib flexed slightly. She heard the lungs fill and then
empty. She heard blood slug through veins.