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Show 184 words in their predawn light. Hunt understood that he should not pursue the image. Leah turned and walked from the room. Her words looped back: "My eldest son is in a bus in a snowstorm with thirty marginal people. And my husband is retrieving his lost body on the rug!" Once Leah had left for work, Hunt went to his studio to check the marten. His studio smelled of urine and minor defecation. But the marten was sitting up in the cat carrier; she was looking out at him. "At one point in the night," Hunt announced, "I hoped you might not be here this morning. But of course -- my life being my life - I regretted it." The marten cocked her head. Hunt left and returned with a large cardboard liquor box, ventillated by his automatic drill. "Temporary housing," Hunt said. And he gently transferred the marten and his blue sweater to the more flimsy home. What will happen if she bites me and I get rabies?, he thought. He cleaned the cat carrrier, picked one of the marten's stools apart with a palette knife looking for what-he-couldn't-say, Then he scrubbed it all down with Ajax. "This could be a pain in the ass," Hunt said. He told her that he was acting very much against his present principles. But then he went to the kitchen for a half-pound of nicely diced calf's liver. He fed his guest; she took the food greedily. "You're a pretty thing," Hunt said. The marten lay down, full or weakened by food. "I think I'm crazy," Hunt said, "to be doing this." He painted. He worked on the painting of the man on fire. It was eerie, one of those paintings that was clearly its own authority, a shape which Hunt |