Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing Read Online Free PDF

for bait up the hillside behind the filling station and when word gets out about it, all hell breaks loose. “We need to take action,” men start saying. “For the safety of our women and children. Before something happens that we all regret.” Some Rotarians get together and invest in night-vision goggles and go out every midnight with an arsenal and don’t come home until sunrise. Jack shakes his head and wonders how soon before someone gets himself shot. Whatever that thing might turn out to be, he thinks, why not just leave it the hell in peace? Every third customer who comes in asks if Jack will mount the cat for him if he bags it. And Jack, weary, counters with the oldest joke in the book: “Sure, Bud. Two for one and we’ll do your ex-wife too.”
    They slap him on the back, sending a tide of pain down his spine. “Good one, Jack!” they all say.
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    One morning Ronnie grabs a pencil from Jack’s workbench, draws something on the back of an envelope, and thrusts it in front of Jack. He’s breathing through his nose, his glasses slipped down, his flabby face trembling. “I seen it,” he says. “Out on the road last night. I seen it! Scared the shit out of me. Nearly wrecked.”
    Jack squints at the picture: a primitive cave painting, a child’s crayon drawing. “You saw a water buffalo?”
    Ronnie stares at him. He hits the paper with the end of the pencil. “The cougar . Last night, around eleven. I was leaving Sullivan’s. I caught it in my high beams, coming around that bend. It was there on the shoulder. Then it just disappeared into the trees. I pulled over but it was long gone.”
    â€œYou don’t say.”
    Jack considers the drawing again. It reminds him of the first couple of mounts Ronnie has attempted himself, a coon and a pintail duck: graceless, stiff, hastily and sloppily done. You have to lose yourself in the work, Jack has always believed. At some point in the process, even for a few minutes—and it sounds like a bunch of hocus-pocus—you have to let the animal lead you. After all, it’s not clay or paint or iron you’re working with. What you’re working with has, up until recently, been a living, breathing thing, for years has been blinking, snorting, sleeping, grazing, scanning the horizon.You have to respect that. You have to get in touch with that, if you want to come close to reproducing it.
    â€œBelieve it now?” Ronnie says, striking the paper with the pencil.
    â€œI’ll believe it when I see it,” Jack says, feeling suddenly depressed. He’s ready to go home, lie down on the couch, turn the television on, fry up a pork chop. To hell with his new diet.
    â€œThat bitch is mine,” Ronnie says, as if Jack has suggested otherwise. “That son of a bitch is all mine .”
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    Up on the ridge under Ray Blevins’s tree stand, the dead fawn’s flesh is stripped away by coyote, then fox, then possum, their eyes glinting as they visit it in the night, tiny teeth tearing. The ants come too. Whatever killed it does not come back. Soon all that is left is the rib cage, looming on the hilltop like an empty basket.
    One chilly December afternoon, the smell of snow in the air, Tanya comes to the shop to pick up Ronnie, whose truck isn’t running again. Pulling up the drive, she sees Jeanne in the yard, fussing around with her birdfeeders, squat and round in her big down parka, her glasses on a string around her neck. What is it with old people and birds? Tanya wonders. She thinks of her grandmother, the device she has with the microphone outside so she can sit in her living room and listen to the birds while she watches her soaps on television. If I ever end up like that, she thinks, climbing out of the carand skirting a puddle in the driveway. Stuck rotting away inside while the world goes on outside. Well, somebody just shoot me.
    When Tanya comes in,