He was not what she expected. Miss Waldron had seen movies of hunters— Tarzan and King Kong—and they wore jodhpurs and white pith helmets and were always clean-shaven and had clefts in their chins. Willoughby Lowe had a square head, small red lips like a woman’s, a thick beard that covered most of his face, and only one ear. The other had been blown off while he was shooting crocodiles in South America.

I’m lucky, he said. The guide lost a leg. I just passed out and learned to say, Eh? He cocked his head at Miss Waldron and looked at her curiously, as though she’d just said something important he’d missed.

His face seemed older than his body. She noticed fine lines carving their way into his cheeks, across his forehead, and stamping rings around his eyes. She could see where his skin would crease if he chose to smile.

The more Miss Waldron looked at Willoughby Lowe, the more she began to think of meat—round steak, T-bones, filet mignon—red, cool, thick flesh marbled over onto itself. His shoulders were hulking and his back was curved with muscle— thick slabs on either side of his spine like a well-toned side of beef.

He pushed up his sleeve to show them a tattoo of a spiral he’d received as an initiation rite from a tribe in Papua New Guinea. She could see the veins in his arm popped and sprouting like rivers of blue, coursing and connecting just below his skin. She closed her eyes for a moment and thought of running her fingers along those veins, reading them like Braille, and imagined the experience would be like singing.

Later, she discovered that underneath his clothes he was covered with hair. It coursed down his neck, across his chest, and onto his shoulders, fanned over his back, swirled onto his legs, and concentrated in a thick dark forest between his thighs. The only place he was hairless was on his behind.

Like a baboon, Willoughby said.

The hair frightened her at first. She did not know where to put her hands. It was coarse and curled and smelled slightly earthy, like a pile of fallen leaves. He bristled as he pressed against her, and the difference between their bodies made Miss Waldron feel suddenly tiny and weak, like a hairless newborn. She dug her fingers into his fur and clung to him.

Everything changed when he started to sweat. A glistening sheen came over his body and he began to glow. He buried his face in her neck, and the hair softened and flattened out until it felt like feathers, as if she were being stroked with tiny silken brushes. She was covered with a slick wetness. Her hands slid from his neck, from his shoulders, from his back, from everything she tried to hold on to.