Free B000FC0U8A EBOK by Anthony Doerr

from the post office: Arcana Mundi, The Seer’s Dictionary, Paragon of Wizardry, Occult Science Among the Ancients. He opened one to a random pageand read, bring water, tie a soft fillet around your altar, burn it on fresh twigs and frankincense. . . .
    She regained her health, took on energy, no longer lay under furs dreaming all day. She was out of bed before him, brewing coffee, her nose already between pages. With a steady diet of meat and vegetables her body bloomed, her hair shone; her eyes and cheeks glowed. After supper he’d watch her read in the firelight, blackbird feathers tied all through her hair, a heron’s beak hanging between her breasts.
    In November he took a Sunday off and they cross-country skied. They came across a bull elk frozen to death in a draw, ravens shrieking at them as they skied to it. She knelt by it and put her palm on its leathered skull. Her eyes rolled back in her head. There, she moaned. I feel him.
    What do you feel? he asked, standing behind her. What is it?
    She stood, trembling. I feel his life flowing out, she said. I see where he goes, what he sees.
    But that’s impossible, he said. It’s like saying you know what I dream.
    I do, she said. You dream about wolves.
    But that elk’s been dead at least a day. It doesn’t go anywhere. It goes into the crops of those ravens.
    How could she tell him? How could she ask him to understand such a thing? How could anyone understand? The books she read never told her that.
    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. It was always clearest for her in winter. In winter, in that valley, life and death were not so different. The heart of a hibernating newt was frozen solid but she could warm and wake it in her palm. For the newt there was no line at all, no fence, no River Styx, only an area between living and dying, like a snowfield between two lakes: a place where lake denizens sometimes met each other on their way to the otherside, where there was only one state of being, neither living nor dead, where death was only a possibility and visions rose shimmering to the stars like smoke. All that was needed was a hand, the heat of a palm, the touch of fingers.
     
    That February the sun shone during the days and ice formed at night—slick sheets glazing the wheat fields, the roofs and roads. He dropped her off at the library, the chains on the tires rattling as he pulled away, heading back up the Missouri toward Fort Benton.
    Around noon Marlin Spokes, a snowplough driver the hunter knew from grade school, slid off the Sun River Bridge in his plough and dropped forty feet into the river. He was dead before they could get him out of the truck. She was reading in the library a block away and heard the plough crash into the riverbed like a thousand dropped girders. When she got to the bridge, sprinting in her jeans and T-shirt, men were already in the water—a telephone man from Helena, the jeweler, the butcher in his apron, all of them scrambling down the banks, wading in the rapids, prying the door open. She careened down the snow-covered slope beneath the bridge and splashed to them. The men lifted Marlin from the cab, stumbling as they carried him. Steam rose from their shoulders and from the crushed hood of the plow. Her hand on the jeweler’s arm, her leg against the butcher’s leg, she reached for Marlin’s ankle.
    When her finger touched Marlin’s body, her eyes rolled immediately back and a single vision leapt to her: Marlin Spokes pedaling a bicycle, a child’s seat mounted over the rear tire with a helmeted boy—Marlin’s own son—strapped into it. Spangles of light drifted over the riders as they rolled down a lane beneath giant sprawling trees. The boy reached for Marlin’s hair with one small fist. Fallen leaves turned over in their wake. In the glass of a storefront window their reflection flashed