Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing Read Online Free PDF
Author: Lydia Peelle
where his left leg should be, the way thenurses showed him. When that does nothing to calm the pain, he lurches out of bed and finds the heaviest book in the house. When that doesn’t work, he flings it across the room, pounds the mattress, and bites the pillow. His leg. Sometimes he has a panicky thought that they gave it to Jeanne, in a jar, like a tonsil. And that she has it up there in the house, with all his things: his old records and taxidermy videos, the suit he wore at their wedding, his .22, and his mother’s Bible. All those other things he would have said twenty years ago were essential but had proven after all not to be.
    Â 
    Ray Blevins finds a dead fawn under his tree stand, all ripped to hell, half-buried in the leaves like something is planning to return for it. He comes up to the shop for no other reason than to tell this story to Jack. Ray is one that Jack has a hard time finding any respect for. One of the big talkers who needs a dozen technological gadgets to bring down a measly spike buck, who wants to go out there on a Saturday morning with his cell phone and his GPS system, his digital estrus bleat caller and human scent killer and eight-hundred-dollar rifle, and pretend he is Daniel Boone, out on the knife-edge of danger, deep in the uncharted wilderness. But a man couldn’t get lost out there if he tried. That’s why Jack quit hunting long ago, even before he got sick—because you simply can’t get lost anymore—and where’s the excitement and danger and pleasure in that? Even if your GPS broke and your cell phone fell in the mud, if you didn’t run into another yahoo doingthe same thing ten yards down the hill then you could just follow the sound of the highway, find the gas station, and call your wife.
    â€œYou know,” Ray says, jabbing his finger at the window. “They say one of these cats will follow you. Read about a man out in Colorado got followed for twenty miles. They’re just curious, though. Worst thing you can do is run. You run, well, then, kiss it good-bye. Get your jugular torn right out. If you know one’s behind you, you just got to keep your cool, keep going on about your business.”
    Jack gives the clock a good long look, but Ray keeps going.
    â€œTen feet. Ten feet, they can pounce from a standstill. Tell that to your kid on his walk to school in the morning. Tell that to these people who think we should let this thing be.”
    â€œTell that to my ex-wife, then,” Jack says, turning away. “She seems to think we should put a cozy little wicker basket and a scratching post out for it.”
    Ray snorts. “People just don’t understand. What we have here, what we’ve got on our hands is a monster .”
    Â 
    Those who have heard it say the call of a mountain lion is like the scream of a woman, more chilling, more hopeless, than anything you will hear in your life. The scream of a woman whose child has been wrenched from her arms and who is now watching, helplessly, as the last breath is choked out of it.
    The fact that no one in Highland City has heard such a night-ripping scream is one of the many points that Jack constantly brings up in support of finding another explanation. What he does not tell anyone, not even Jeanne, is the sound that he himself heard one night, a week ago, at the moment he found a way to creep around the pain and part the curtains of a dream. Suddenly he was wide awake, heart pounding, terrified, thinking, What was that? What the hell was that?
    But what with the painkillers he was still on. And the awful nights’ sleep he’s been having. Of course there’s an explanation. It was nothing more than a terrible hallucination. And yet for the past week he has kept the television on all night, the volume turned up loud. Just for company.
    Kenny Peabody buys a number 41/2 steel bear trap with a double-pronged drag hook on an eight-foot chain and hauls a dead calf
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

Sleep Peacefully

NC Marshall

Perfect Ruin

Lauren DeStefano

The Hound of Ulster

Rosemary Sutcliff

Rocking Horse

Bonnie Bryant