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disappoint him. We’d had such a hard time the past few weeks, and seeing him happy again, looking so relaxed and healthy, made me happy as well. I wanted to bottle that look, thatfeel, and take it back home with us. I wiggled my fingers inside my mittens. “Okay,” I said, “another half hour or so?”
    He nodded appreciatively and then skied toward me to offer a huge hug. “Thank you, honey.”
    We started off up the road together, but David soon pulled out in front. I followed behind in his fresh tracks. His long arms reached out gracefully, his legs moving powerfully between each stride. The snow crunched against our skis, but other than that there was virtually no sound. The mountains were quieted by the snow, blanketed by a cover of powdery white layers. The sun dropped slowly behind the western mountains; I started to shiver, even as I skied faster to try to create more heat.
    Suddenly, David stopped in his tracks ahead of me. “Shhh,” he said.
    I tried to look for what he’d seen that made him stop so abruptly. The trees were empty. A trail of rabbit tracks took off from the left of us. The setting sun cast long, spooky shadows on the deep ravines and gullies; there was nothing moving as far as I could tell.
    David pointed to the grove of aspen trees to our right. “There. Do you see it?”
    I strained my eyes, my toes numb from cold, my nose stinging from exposure. “See what?” I asked, wishing more than anything that I could turn around and ski as fast as I could home to the safety and warmth of my parents’ home.
    â€œSee?” he said. “Right there.” His glove pointed to three o’clock. I squinted harder.
    There it was, camouflaged perfectly in its perch, a great horned owl staring out at us, with the biggest golden eyes I’d ever seen on a bird. Its eyebrows were slanted narrowly at us, its head cocked, mottled brown wings tucked to its side.
    â€œShhh,” David said. He clicked himself out of his skis and slowly, tenderly, took baby steps toward the owl. The owl fluttered its wings, turning its head abruptly to keep its eyes on David, preparing for its escape. Its prominent ear tufts seemed calculating and alert.
    David took another step, then another, his weight placed so tenderly he barely made a sound in the snow. He was within a couple of feet of the bird. I’d never seen anything like it. The bird startled me with a deep hooting sound: Hoo-h-hoo-hoo-hoo . The sound echoed through the canyon. I caught myself gasping out loud.
    From somewhere deep in the tree grove, a loud raspy screech returned the call, the owl’s young crying for its mother. The owl looked again at David and then lifted off, its beautiful wings spanning nearly sixty inches. It soared so fast, so precisely, I lost sight of it almost immediately. It was one of the many times David took me to the extremes of his world: places of profound beauty and magic, with little miracles that came along only when I gave up any sense of control. David caught the look of ecstatic gratitude on my face and smiled.
    There would be other adventures we shared that would not end so magically. David’s insistence at hiking “off-trail” in the Columbia Gorge left him covered in poison oak boils, big red oozing sores that took weeks to heal. Somehow, Sophie and I escaped the allergic reaction to the same poisonous plants.
    In Hawaii, again “off-map” at David’s insistence, we circled a weedy, scrappy patch of the island for three hours, until I was so tired and pissed off we didn’t speak for two days.
    On another day, after a long mountain bike ride, we bolted from the hot confines of his truck to take a dip in the Columbia River. We came back to find his truck, our bikes, and my luggage stolen. He’d left the keys in the ignition.
    At the time, I reasoned that David had more than his share of bad luck because he lived larger than most