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TOUCHING BOTTOM / John Hildebrand THE WOMAN I'VE BEEN SEEING lately won't eat wild meat. Her ex-husband had been a hunter, and perhaps he'd been brutal in other ways or simply a bad cook, but his memory has tainted all wild game for her. This seemed a shame the first time I invited her for a duck dinner and she pushed aside the main course to concentrate on the acorn squash, brussel sprouts, and wild rice. She's a big-boned woman with a rope of wheat-colored hair down her back and vulnerable blue eyes. She's thinking, she says, of becoming a vegetarian. I have noticed how often friends emerge from divorce only to immerse themselves in some new obsession. They drink too much or run marathons or give themselves over to a breathless fundamentalism. My friend and I pursue separate diets but share the same hunger. Obviously, she hasn't learned from her mistakes because I'm allowed to stay over on the nights before I go duckhunting. 4:30 in the morning. After batting the alarm clock off the nightstand, there is the heavy weight of inertia to deal with. Lately, I cannot so much as get out of bed without screening a private newsreel of the past that always ends with why I am sleeping in a strange bed. Also, there is this cat lodged between my legs. Pulling myself from the warm covers, I dress quietly in the dark. The woman sighs, rolls over on her belly and pretends to sleep. Outside the bedroom window, the streetlight illuminates a trapezoid of bare elms and sidewalk. The cat cries by the door. Boots in hand, I pick up my canvas coat and guncase in the hallway and slip out the door before the cat can make its getaway. The highway flows through the October darkness, steeply banked with stubblefields and woodlots. Farmyards sail past in the circle of their arclights. Fiddling with the radio, I dial through storms of static and settle finally upon a distant country station. "Heartaches Til Dawn" is the name of the show, and a plaintive, hillbilly voice solicits my phone-in requests. At the Fox Coulee landing, duckhunters are already gathering in the pre-dawn gloom. Most of the pickup trucks have Minnesota plates, the hunters having crossed the state line to hunt the The Missouri Review ยท 17 riverbottoms with its byzantine sloughs and tangled beaver canals. Waiting their turn at the boat launch, they hunch in heated cabs or stand outside playing flashlights over the swirling current. Every so often, someone asks what time it's getting to be. Spotting Richard's blue stationwagon, I slide in beside his retriever, a black Labrador with grinning white teeth and minstrelshow eyes. Richard passes me a cup of coffee from his Thermos and a gooey breakfast roll and then proceeds to outline the situation. Heavy fall rains have raised the river too high to wade, so we'll need to beg a lift across the channel. Richard steps outside and hails a party of Minnesotans cozying into their camoflauged jon boat with its mesh blind and big Evinrude. Through the windshield, I watch him gesturing as he re-outlines the situation. The men in the boat have thick, blank faces and apparently no necks. They look at Richard and then follow his outstretched arm to the car where the dog and I are waiting. In a single motion, they shake their heads and roar down the river. The woods on the far shore have begun to take shape in the silvery half-light when we finally convice a coon trapper to ferry us across the channel. He's been waiting for sunrise to legally make his sets along the riverbank and now decides there's sufficient daylight. We clamber aboard, the black Lab riding masthead on the bow, my boots resting against a tangle of traps and chains on the bottom of the boat. As the trapper ferries us across the misting, slightly stygian river, no one mentions how we are going to get back. Ashore, we set off through the woods singlefile, the terrain presenting itself as...

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