#464 The Hunter’s Wife- Anthony Doerr
This is an indescribably beautiful piece of writing. Doerr has a quality
in his writing, a quality found in very few writers (Haruki Murakami comes to
mind as perhaps the only equal) where you stop reading and it feels like you’ve
woken from a day dream. The emotional depth in this story is at once strong
enough to feel like a thick blanket keeping you warm against a blizzard and still
so fragile that by even mentioning it, it might blow away in the wind. It’s
magical, and yet grounded-in-the-earth real. Particularly strong is Doerr’s
descriptions of the natural word (a quality we saw in his story, The Deep- (#39
in this blog).
The Hunter’s Wife is a seer, one who can tap into the eyes
of dead beings, see where they go and what they feel. She lives with the Hunter
in his cabin deep in a Montana Valley.
“Both of them lived in the grips of forces they had no
control over—the November wind, the revolution of the earth.”
“When he looked out the cabin window he saw wolf tracks
crossing the river, owls hunting from trees, six feet of snow like a quilt
ready to be thrown off. She saw burrowed dreamers nestled under the roots
against the long twilight, their dreams rippling into the sky like auroras.
With love
still lodged in his heart like a splinter, he married her in the first muds of
spring.”
Being stuck in the snowed-in Valley all winter (for five
years) she was able to hone her skills by touching animals either in
hibernation or frozen by the cold. She can see their dreams. By Spring, she
gets bored with the wild, as all the animals wake and she can no longer see
their dreams.
“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.”
She is a woman living in the winter, while he lives in the
Spring and Summer. Yet, he is the one that seems frozen, solidly set in one
place at one time, never changing and never thawing. She must leave the Valley
and explore the world and share her gift. He stays behind to tend to his
hunting and dreaming of wolves.
“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.”
Read this story!
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