Free Hunting Season: A Love Story by Blake Crouch, Selena Kitt

 
    1
     
    Ariana Plano rattled along down the highway at a steady five miles under the speed-limit, alone behind the wheel of her husband’s ’57 Chevy with nothing but her thoughts and the drone of the local radio station crackling over the speakers. Specks of early November snow—first of the season—starred the windshield, the tension in her shoulders ratcheting up with every passing mile. Still, she loved this time of year in Michigan’s UP—trees stripped bare, the land gray and brown, still and waiting, as if its breath were held, for the first big storm. Ariana had been born, raised, and lived all forty of her years in this snowbelt community downwind of the Great Lake Superior, and still every time the first flakes flew, she got this tingling in the pit of her stomach like a child waking in the predawn to the realization that it was Christmas morning.
     
    The .454 big block engine grumbled under the hood.
     
    The truck was beautiful—powder blue with 22x8.5-inch Bonspeed wheels wrapped in 255/30R22 Pirelli tires.
     
    Of course, Ariana didn’t know what the hell any of that really meant. She’d just overheard her husband, Bud, going on and on and on about it with their gardener several weeks ago. Truth be told, she hated the truck, hated all the frivolity it represented. Then again, Bud was frivolity: their hundred-acre horse ranch, the 7000-square foot “Casa Bud,” his gun collection, the six vehicles—Hummer, Mustang, Defender, Corvette, her AWD Subaru, and this pimped-out antique.
     
    But in truth, she had to own up to being gobsmacked by Bud in the beginning. This flashy, big-game hunter from Dallas who’d flown up to Ontonagon County in his own Beechcraft to hunt moose in the Porcupines. Ariana’s father, a big-game sportsman himself and proprietor of the region’s premier guide service, had been the one to take Bud up into the hills, and she faulted him for making Bud fall in love with the UP.
     
    Of course, there was a modicum of blame to be laid upon her shoulders as well. She still remembered the flutter in her heart that evening Bud and Daddy had come to the shop with one of Bud’s white-tail kills for meat processing.
     
    Bud had swaggered in with an eighteen karat smile and an accent that made her knees go wobbly.
     
    Tall and lanky.
     
    Cowboy-handsome.
     
    She’d never encountered anything like him.
     
    She was eighteen, a senior in high school.
     
    Cheerleader, B-student, comfortably popular, steady girlfriend of Ray Koski—point guard for the varsity basketball team and a sweet, funny guy who everybody loved.
     
    Bud was thirty-five, already a retired oilman, and standing there smelling of whiskey and musk, radiant with the thrill of the hunt, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her future had just walked in.
     
    That was twenty-two years ago this month.
     
    November of 1989.
     
    All day, the radio had been ecstatic with reports that the Berlin Wall had fallen, and now this man from Texas was standing in her shop like a dream.
     
    A day of change for both her and the world, and despite all that happened after, she still to this day couldn’t help but rank it as the most exhilarating moment of her life.
     
    Poor Ray never had a chance.   
     
    * * * *
     
    Because Bud was a hunter and obscenely rich—mainly the latter—Ariana’s father had given the Texan his blessing to marry his daughter before she was even a high school graduate. In return, Bud had made three solemn promises—(1) he would settle down in Ontonagon County; (2) he wouldn’t sleep with Ariana before they were wed; and (3) until the day the Good Lord saw fit to call him home, Bud Plano would treat his little girl like the princess that she was.
     
    At least he’d kept one of them.
     
    * * * *
     
    Ariana graduated from high school on a cool Friday night in June and was married the following day in a small, outdoor ceremony on the shore of Superior.
     
    For her wedding gift, Bud built them