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HER BEAR HUSBAND f course I’ve been in the woods before.” Lucia glanced around the visitor center to reassure herself that she looked just like everyone else there, then glared back across the counter at the skeptical park ranger. Until encountering him, she’d felt impervious in her new acquisitions: stiff hiking boots with heavy Vibram soles; cargo pants of a slippery, fast-drying fabric that made soft whispering noises as she walked; a rain jacket with a thin fleece lining. In preparation for her excursion, she’d also bought a 20-ounce sleeping bag that would bob atop an unwieldy pack, itself stuffed with a tiny tent – two-and-a-half pounds – a couple of changes of socks and underwear, and foil packets of freeze-dried dinners, their desiccated contents so devoid of texture and smell as to be guaranteed not to attract bears. Alone in the house she’d sublet for her temporary teaching job at a Montana college, she’d spent hours researching every item, checking off each against a long list of things various guidebooks insisted were essential. Then she’d gone looking for them. Her new town’s business district comprised a scant four blocks. An espresso shop, windows hung hopefully with cheap, root-bound houseplants. Molvar’s Ladies Fashions, chipped mannequins draped in generously cut pantsuits. A newsstand, the daily headlines indecipherable: “Biggest One-Year Drop in Board Feet in Decades.” “HeapLeach Boom Goes Bust.” “Coyote Depredations on Rise.” The last featuring a photo of a man in a cowboy hat, gesturing angrily toward the mangled body
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Fern by BJ Burton © 2008 of a sheep at his booted feet, the blood a scarlet shock in the dun-hued scene. A couple of pawnshops, and a bar – no, two – in each block, most of them along the railroad tracks that divided the town. The Mint, The Stockman, The Gandy Dancer. Red’s. Al’s. Burr Lively’s. And, not one, but three stores offering both hunting and camping gear – heavy
on the former, windows a forest of camouflage clothing, including a saucy leafpatterned bikini dangling from the antlers of a mounted elk head. But, from looks of the little plastic kayaks leaning against the doorframe, to the tents set up along the sidewalk in front of the stores, plenty of the latter, too. She would no more have set foot inside one of those
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