Winter Study Read online

  Winter Study

  Nevada Barr

  In bestseller Barr’s chilling 14th mystery thriller to feature National Park Service ranger Anna Pigeon (after 2005’s Hard Truth), Anna joins the team of Winter Study, a research project intended to study the wolves and moose of Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park, the setting for 1994’s A Superior Death. Complicating the study is Bob Menechinn, an untrustworthy Homeland Security officer assigned to shadow the research. Crowded into inhospitable lodgings and persecuted by unrelenting cold, Anna is far from her comfort zone as nature turns awry with a series of bizarre events. The team stumbles upon the tracks – and the mutilated victim – of a preternaturally large, unidentified beast, and local packs of wolves descend on human-populated areas, a behavior out of step with their species. The campfire legends of youth metastasize into adult fears as Anna must piece together a connection between these anomalies while guarding herself from the strangers around her. Barr’s visceral descriptions of the winter cold nicely complement the paranoia that follows the appearance of the mythic monsters at play.

  Nevada Barr

  Winter Study

  Book 14 in the Anna Pigeon series, 2008

  For Mr. Paxton.

  He dedicated his life to rescuing people.

  The most recent was me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Winter Study is real and has been ongoing for over fifty years. The value of the research is inestimable not only in the detailed work done from winter to winter but in the patterns that can only unfold when a project is maintained over periods of time which are meaningful to the natural world. There’s little space and much work to do during these weeks on the icebound Isle Royale. Had Superintendent Green not extended to me the generosity of the park and the forbearance of a good manager, I wouldn’t have been able to write this book. Thank you, Phyllis.

  And thanks to the Forest Service pilots in Ely, Minnesota, who took the time to share stories with me and who delivered me, along with food, to the island in January.

  Most especially, thanks to the Winter Study team: Rolf Peterson, John Vuceti, Beth Kolb and Donnie Glaser. They are the heart and soul of this book. They had the kindness not to throw me out in the snow when I was whining about the cold; they answered endless e-mails with questions about what a wolf smelled like and how fat a fat tick was and who ate what and whom. Had Rolf not taken the time to work through the manuscript, researchers everywhere would have been rolling their collective eyes at the errors I made. The four of them shared not simply the knowledge they had but the spirit that motivates what is good in this book.

  FOREWORD

  In July 1970, when I was a neophyte graduate student just beginning fieldwork at Isle Royale National Park, a stranger invited me to lunch at the Windigo Inn. He must have thought I knew something, or at least was poor and in need of free food. The cafeteria adjoined a house of the erstwhile Washington Club, a turn-of-the-century private organization that predated the establishment of Isle Royale as a national park. (Over a decade later, I helped burn down the house in winter, tidying up the place and helping it revert to forest.) The stranger, a balding and very tanned man dressed in a stylish recreational outfit, explained how he had traveled the world over but he believed Isle Royale was simply the finest place on Earth. I recall thinking I was lucky indeed – this man spared me the need to look any farther.

  It must be a similar impression – of splendid isolation – that brought Nevada Barr back to Isle Royale, to write an unprecedented second novel based in the same national park. I was happy to cooperate, as Nevada ’s signature blend of mystery and nature writing has a wide following. Isle Royale has always been a difficult destination, and relatively few people visit the place, even when open and accessible in summer. To the extent that it is known at all, it is primarily through the writings and imagery of others. A seasoned interpretive ranger at Mesa Verde National Park told me that all she knew of Isle Royale was contained in Nevada ’s 1994 work, A Superior Death.

  While Isle Royale has a rich, largely unappreciated history, in the modern era its wolves and moose have put it on the map. As this book goes to press, the scientific effort to document and understand their population fluctuations will be in its fiftieth year. Simultaneously, the worldwide status of the gray wolf has improved remarkably, from vilified vermin to charismatic top dog. No longer confined to wilderness areas far removed from people, wolves now claim as their own many areas of private and public lands, including heavily visited Yellowstone National Park. There are still, however, only four national parks in the United States outside of Alaska, the other two being Glacier and Voyageurs, with a resident wolf population. Providing wildlands for these wolves, as well as other large carnivores, remains a serious conservation challenge.

  Another person for whom Isle Royale was the finest place on Earth was Bob Linn, a local park naturalist who participated in the first Winter Studies of wolves and moose at Isle Royale. Bob eventually became Chief Scientist of the Service in the 1960s, presiding over the rocky marriage between science and national park management to which Nevada alludes. Bob hated controversy, but three times he had to take action to help stifle political or bureaucratic interference in the study of Isle Royale wolves. One would think these wolves would hardly have an enemy in the world, isolated as they are from any hint of competitive threat to human interests. Bob marshaled the forces of good to quell threats as they arose, whether inspired by greed, hunger for power, jealousy or just plain orneriness; afterward, he modestly declared that scientists were simply viewed as “loose cannons on the deck.” The most serious challenge was certainly when James Watt was Secretary of the Interior under President Reagan; Park Service support was withdrawn and staff was recalled in the middle of the Winter Study in 1983. However, Watt was blameless, as I concluded years later after a rare conversation that demonstrated he didn’t even know Isle Royale existed, let alone was a national park that he’d been nominally responsible for conserving. So it goes…

  Nevertheless, to this day the wolves of Isle Royale have survived, the study of them has survived and, elsewhere, the species is thriving in places where wolf recovery at one time was considered most improbable. This is ample testimony to the ability of the human mind to embrace, eventually, the true and unblemished facts about the way the world works and about the role we can play in securing our own sustainable future in it.

  For now, enter the white and cold world of Isle Royale and Lake Superior in winter. It is a world that Nevada Barr brings alive with descriptive power through her love of the natural world, her wide-ranging experience in national parks and her curiosity about the sometimes-abstruse ways of wildlife biologists. All this, mixed with the fears, frailties and foibles of her human subjects, makes for a chilling and absorbing account. Finally, one may be well advised to eschew cell phones, and, for the record, it is a bad idea to drink beer in the sauna.

  – ROLF PETERSON

  January 2008

  1

  The Beaver was spotless. Anna’d never seen an airplane so clean. Sitting in its heated hangar in Ely, Minnesota, it fairly gleamed from its annual check. Only the deeply scarred floorboards stood witness to the old warhorse’s hard duty. Beavers hadn’t been manufactured since 1962, and the one the pilot was loading for its weekly provision and personnel trip to Isle Royale in Lake Superior was older than Anna.

  But it had taken better care of itself, she thought, with a touch of icy realism. Suited up in brand-spanking-new, fresh-out-of-the-box, felt-lined Sorel boots, insulated socks, ski pants and parka, watching a woman half her age, with legs as long and strong as a yearling moose, move nimbly about in lightweight mukluks and an alarmingly thin winter jacket, Anna suffered a sensation neither familiar nor welcome.

&n
bsp; She felt frail, insecure, out of her element. Isle Royale in Michigan had been one of her first duty stations, but that had been years ago. And in summer. A jaunt there in the arctic temperatures of January, when the island was closed to the outside world, wasn’t her idea of the perfect winter vacation. Too many years on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi, where a Levi jacket and knee socks were sufficient for a winter wardrobe, had thinned her blood. Her current tenure as District Ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park might bring back her limited tolerance for the cold, but she’d yet to spend a winter there.

  She shifted uneasily from foot to foot, feeling the movement of her toes inside the huge boots, the way the many layers of down and fleece muffled her body and wrapped her limbs. New gear: Anna didn’t trust it. Nor did she like parties where she had to dress up. The invitation to participate in the long-running wolf/moose study on Isle Royale had come down from Rocky’s superintendent, couched in words no woman could resist: “How would you like to snowshoe over rough terrain, collecting blood-fat ticks and moose piss?”

  Being a true romantic, Anna had said she would adore it. Rocky Mountain would soon be dealing with the prey/predator issue. Not through any sudden enlightenment of the state legislature, but because the recovery of the magnificent and much-maligned animals had been rapid. Wolves were reinhabiting territories they’d been extirpated from for a century or more.

  Anna had reason to know the expected wolves were already in the park and no reason whatsoever to share the knowledge. At least not till the pups were old enough to fend for themselves. Wolf/moose management was about to top Rocky’s list of wildlife issues, and there was no better classroom for studying it than Isle Royale.

  “We’re set,” the pilot said. Anna climbed the two paw-sized steps on the Beaver’s wheel pant to get into the high cockpit, no mean feat in boots the size of snowshoes.

  “Need help with your safety belt?” The pilot was stiff and edgy, his United States Forest Service uniform so crisp that Anna, accustomed to the rumpled, sweat-stained versions she came across in the field, had, at first glance, mistaken it for a military uniform.

  “No,” she said shortly. She’d flown on search and rescues, forest fires and animal surveys, more times than she could count before the pilot graduated from high school. Annoyed at herself for being annoyed, she fumbled at her safety harness. She was as awkward a bundle as an Iowa schoolboy waiting for the bus in January.

  Pride cometh, she thought wryly as her mittened hands scrabbled on the webbing and her spiffy new balaclava interfered as she tried to bite her fingertips to pull the mittens off. Finally she sat as patiently and helplessly as the apocryphal Iowa lad and let the pilot string her shoulder harnesses through her lap belt and lock the whole mess down.

  Then she thanked him politely.

  Robin Adair, the long-legged research assistant, sprang gracefully into the left rear seat, settled herself like a pro, and the plane was pushed from the hangar.

  The Forest Service seaplane operation was on the shore of Shagawa Lake, edging the small town of Ely. In summer, the runway was open water. Now it was a lane of hard-packed snow, running north-northeast, between gaudily painted ice-fishing houses put up helter-skelter till they resembled nothing so much as a 1940s trailer park dropped from a passing cargo plane.

  In an attempt to quell what was verging on internal whining, Anna focused on the beauty of the boreal forest as the Beaver left the ice and banked, turning east toward Michigan. The day was painfully bright and clear as it can only be in the north, where every particle of moisture is frozen from the air and the sun moves low in the south, feigning evening even at noon. Crystalline amber light honed the edges of the world till shadows of pines, long on the shores of snow-covered lakes, were as sharp and black as fangs drawn by children. Even from an altitude of twenty-two hundred feet and climbing, every track across the dazzle of white showed blue.

  Static rattled in Anna’s headphones, and then the pilot’s voice: “Have you been to Isle Royale before?”

  “Once.” Anna had the scar to prove it, a six-inch weal of shiny flesh across her abdomen. It still ached occasionally.

  When it was cold.

  “Did you work there?”

  Altitude was making the man downright chatty. Anna preferred him in his martinet mode but dragged herself from the vista of black pine and white lakes to make conversation.

  “Ten or fifteen years ago, I was a ranger in Windigo. Boat patrol.”

  “Wow!” the pilot said. Before Anna could bask in his awe, he finished his thought: “I was in seventh grade then.”

  So much for impressing the natives.

  “Did you ferry the Homeland Security guys out?” she asked, to change the subject.

  The “Homeland Security guys” had been sent by Washington to evaluate Winter Study. For fifty years, Isle Royale had been a lab for Michigan Tech, in cooperation with the National Park Service. The park provided money and physical support. In return, the wolf researchers added to the glamour of Isle Royale. Visitors followed the rise and fall in the pack populations as avidly as soap opera devotees. A sizable percentage of the world’s knowledge of wolves had been produced by the study.

  To remain viable, the ISRO wolf/moose study had two requirements: fifty thousand dollars a year – peanuts as far as research money went – and that ISRO be closed to tourism from October to May, when the wolves mated and denned.

  Homeland Security had put forth a resolution to beef up security in all border parks. To that end, they were exploring the possibility of opening the park year-round, to better protect the border from terrorists. If the wolf/moose study – running for over half a century – could be said to be effectively mined out as far as relevant data was concerned, Homeland Security was going to shut it down. ISRO would be opened to cross-country skiers and winter campers. Rock Harbor resort, on the east end, would be revamped for year-round usage, and a smaller hotel built on the east end in Windigo.

  The wolf researchers – Anna, NPS seasonals and Homeland Security, in the persons of rented experts from American University – would share a bunkhouse for six weeks. Anna was surprised some enterprising young reality-TV-show producer hadn’t offered big money to film it.

  The mike woke up, and the seventh-grader flying the plane said: “It was a man and a woman – Homeland Security – the guy was somebody Ridley Murray recommended. They were weathered in in Ely for nearly a week. Hung around the hangar all day, being mad because we wouldn’t move the ceiling up. Clouds were right down on the deck.”

  “I can’t believe the park would do this to Rolf.” It was Robin from the backseat, her voice-activated mike crackling with more anger than static.

  “Rolf Peterson retired,” the pilot said.

  “The study is Rolf.” Robin again. From Robin’s fierceness, Anna guessed she, like a lot of other young outdoors people, was in love with the charismatic wolf researcher. Not sexual love but romantic love, in the sense that they wanted to grow up to be him, or at least have his life. To a woman Robin’s age – twenty-two or-three, at a guess – retirement could look a lot like desertion. Or death.

  “Ridley wanted this guy,” the pilot said doggedly.

  “Ridley Murray was Rolf’s student.” Robin’s voice came back on its bed of cracklings. “Lesser of evils: Ridley didn’t want any guy.”

  The mike was live for another moment as if an unspoken thought prolonged its activation, then, noiselessly but unmistakably, it went dead again. Fleetingly Anna wondered what differentiated that quiet open line of communication and the quiet but utterly different isolation that followed. Maybe it was the difference between silence and deafness; some sense deeper than the stirrup and hammer that tells one she is alone.

  Embracing the solitude, she watched the frozen miles pass beneath the Beaver’s wings and thought of Paul. It wasn’t only the Mississippi heat that had thinned her blood. Paul Davidson was the source of the living heat in her life. After her first husband, Zack, h
ad died, Anna had, without even knowing she’d done so, chosen a chill and lonely place to stow her heart, a limbo where it continued to beat, like the heart of a frog frozen in winter mud, to thaw to new life come spring. Paul had been her spring.

  There was no warmth like the warmth of Paul’s arms around her, no sleep like the sleep she enjoyed when she had her head on his shoulder. He made her feel safe, and, until she’d known him, she’d not realized she felt any other way. Love lent her a dangerous and delicious fragility.

  They’d been married four months. They’d been together ten days of it.

  Sitting in the right seat of the Beaver, watching the landscape scroll by, she wanted to be with him with a fierceness that bordered on panic. Being a park ranger was a job, not a life; loneliness a choice, not a necessity anymore. It was all she could do not to scream at the pilot to turn the plane around. For a gut-wrenching minute, her career seemed a foolish exercise, a pointless labor for little pay, a cruel hoax that had lured her from her marriage. Being with Paul was the only thing that mattered. She tried to clench her fists, to concentrate her mind, but they only balled into soft paws in the thick down mittens.

  A breaking sound in her ears let her know relief was coming, in the form of distraction, and she welcomed it. Robin spoke again, the edge of anger in her voice a refreshing antidote to Anna’s weakness.

  “Ridley recommended the Homeland Security guy from this list they sent the park, but nobody who knows anything made up the list.”

  Nobody who knows anything. Anna’d been around research projects enough to know that meant an NPS person. There was a strange and mutually hostile love affair between scientists and the parks. Years back, the Park Service abdicated the role of science in the parks and opened it up to outside researchers. Researchers tended to look on the parks as their private laboratories and the Park Service as an annoying necessity at best and interfering ignoramuses at worst. A professional hazard of research was the tendency to narrow-mindedness. Often researchers lived for the one thing they studied. Anything that did not serve that study was viewed with scorn. The wolf/moose study on Isle Royale had decades of homesteading by researchers, most of whom came back year after year, six weeks in winter, six months in summer.