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

the largest private residence in the UP.
     
    * * * *
     
    The lifestyle of a midwest queen was a learning process.
     
    Learning to cook.
     
    Learning to entertain.
     
    To manage a staff of housekeepers and groundskeepers.
     
    And while these were skills helpful and necessary to the requirements of her job, it was only in the second year of marriage and beyond, while most of her friends were thriving at the university in Marquette, when she became acquainted with the most important lessons of all...
     
    Like not contradicting.
     
    Not asking “Where are you going?” or “When will you be back?”
     
    Not ever serving leftovers.
     
    Not ever initiating a new topic of conversation at a dinner party where Bud’s friends were in attendance.
     
    Not ever inviting her friends to visit without first securing clearance from Bud.
     
    Not ever refusing sex.
     
    Not ever miscarrying.
     
    Or going out without first asking permission and giving Bud an accurate estimate of when she would return.
     
    Or miscarrying a second time.
     
    Or leaving the house with fresh bruises.
     
    Or calling the police at two-thirty in the morning when you’ve locked yourself in the bathroom because your husband has threatened to kill you.
     
    Or bringing Bud anything less than an ice-cold beer in his favorite pint glass.
     
    Or miscarrying a third.
     
    Or loaning money—Bud’s fucking money—to a friend on the brink of a winter eviction.
     
    Or miscarrying a fourth.
     
    Or ever acting like a cold and distant bitch.
     
    * * * *
     
    So by the time Ariana turned thirty, she had fully mastered the patterns of behavior that would not get her regularly beaten.
     
    She walked the line, did as she was told, and there were even fleeting moments when she convinced herself that she was happy.
     
    * * * *
     
    When she was thirty-three, she and Bud celebrated their fifteenth wedding anniversary six months early with a month-long trip to Fiji in the dead of the Michigan winter.
     
    There was one evening in particular when they dined on a patio beside the sea with a traditional Fijian meal, and maybe it was the good wine going to her head and the perfect kokoda (raw fish marinated in lime juice and served with fresh vegetables), but a strange question presented itself as the sun dissolved into the South Pacific in an exquisite spill of light: had Bud changed? Become a better man? He hadn’t raised his hand or voice to her in two years. Was the prospect of turning fifty mellowing him, or had she so thoroughly bent herself to his desire, that she’d merely become a manifestation of his will? Two people existing to serve the needs of the one. If the latter were the case, she tried to tell herself she would’ve preferred the beatings, but one of the tragic realizations of Ariana’s early-middle-age was that she was a coward, with neither the courage to take Bud’s abuse, nor do the truly brave thing—admit she’d made a terrible mistake.
     
    That she’d ruined a quarter of her life.
     
    And leave.
     
    * * * *
     
    On the outskirts of the village of Ontonagon, the snow intensified, beginning to frost the road. She should’ve driven her Subaru, but then the bag of meat in the bed of the truck would’ve stunk up her ride.
     
    The local radio station broke in again, recapping the top story of a hunter who’d gone missing in the Porkies. It happened every hunting season up here—some out-of-towner would head off into the hills with inadequate gear, poor respect for the harshness of the terrain, and get himself lost.
     
    Sometimes, they’d be found in time, alive.
     
    Sometimes, dead and frozen the following spring when the snow began to melt.
     
    Sometimes...never.
     
    Ray’s butcher shop was just a mile ahead.
     
    She cut off the radio, punched on the headlights.
     
    During these last five years, it was always the twenty-minute drives into Ontonagon where she reached the deepest level of misery.
     
    Bud hated Koski, ever