Winter Study Read online

  “Do you want me to set the next one?” she asked Anna.

  “No. It’s coming back to me. I think I’m good.”

  “Okay.” Robin pulled a topographical map from her pack and folded it so the area where they were was uppermost. “You and Bob take the western side of Intermediate. Katherine and I will go around to the east. Lay the first trap here.” She pointed to where the trail split on the shore of Intermediate Lake to embrace the perimeter.

  “When you get to where this little triangle of land sticks out into the water – the ice – you need to cross right here.” Robin took a mitten off to better point at the narrow bay where an isthmus curved back toward the main shore. “Put a trap there.”

  “Why there?” Anna asked. It seemed out of sync with the pattern of following improved trails that Ridley had laid out.

  “The wolves have been known to den up on that triangle of land.” Robin’s voice tightened as if Anna challenged her authority.

  “Got it,” Anna said.

  “Bob, you go with Anna. Katherine, come with me.” Anna suspected Bob would rather have learned the art of livetrapping from the lovely young biotech than the crusty old ranger, but life was full of disappointments.

  “Help me with my pack,” she said. Apparently not too put out at drawing the short straw, Bob complied.

  Anna leading, they reached the fork in the trail where Robin had told them to place the first trap. Snow was falling more thickly than it had been, but the wind let up, and Anna was satisfied with the compromise. Given her familiarity with ISRO – and the fact they’d be following lakeshores most of the day – there was little danger of getting lost regardless of how bad the visibility, and snow was warmer than wind.

  Setting the trap was harder than Anna remembered. Cold – and the gear needed to protect from the cold – made simple tasks difficult. She had on gloves, but without mittens over them, and handling freezing steel, her fingers were awkward. Having laid the trap on the ground, Anna put a foot on each of the springs to depress them, then pulled the jaws of the trap open. Her left boot slipped and the jaws snapped shut viciously, catching a pinch of glove and skin. Anna yelped as if a finger had been bitten off. She was positive the pinch hurt far worse than it would have had there been a speck of sympathetic kindness in the elements and half remembered a short story about how wounds festered and rotted in the arctic. Having pulled off the scant protection of the glove, she surveyed the damage. No blood. She would live.

  Bob turned out to be deft with his hands. Given the thickness of his fingers, it was a pleasant surprise. He uncoiled the chain and buried it as neatly as Anna could have managed. He attached the TTD and stayed out of the way while she did her best to rehabilitate the area before they left. And he had insisted that this, the first trap set, be one of the two she carried, a ten-pound weight lifted from her shoulders. All in all, the man was beginning to ingratiate himself.

  The cynical core of her suspected Dr. Menechinn wasn’t ingratiating himself so much as Dr. Jekyll was in the ascendant. She had seen too much of Mr. Hyde to expect Bob’s goodness and light to last. In the meantime, she was only too happy to let him carry heavy objects.

  It had taken them twice as long to set the trap as it had taken Robin, and twice as long again as it would have taken Anna in the summer. By the time they finished, it was nearly noon. With truncated days and lowering clouds, Anna doubted she and Bob would manage to set all of the remaining traps before they ran out of light.

  “There’s where we’re going,” she said as they packed up and pointed to a hump of land beyond which lay the triangular isthmus that marked where the next foothold trap was to be laid. Intermediate had not been blown clear of snow and the walking was easier. The ice was also considerably thinner than Siskiwit. Ice was often untrustworthy near shoreline and Intermediate was all shoreline.

  Long habit of tracking kept Anna’s eyes on the ground as they worked their way across the western third of the lake. Fresh snow created a clean palette for the day’s news, but creatures were not doing a great deal of stirring. Gusting winds, flurries of snow and the promise of more to come kept them snug in nests and burrows. Anna saw the scratching of small birds and a litter of seed coverings from a cache that had been found or recovered by a squirrel. On a slope running down to the lake from a low rise, she noticed what looked to be the tracks of saucer sleds, the kind used by little kids. It took her a minute to refocus from the image of tots in pointed hoods. Then she laughed. “Otters,” she told Bob. “They like to slide in the snow. Look where they’ve run up the hill just for the fun of sliding down again.”

  “In winter?” he asked.

  “In winter,” she assured him. “The park heals in the winter, when people aren’t here.” She figured she might as well get in a plug for keeping ISRO closed from October to May.

  Bob grunted.

  The isthmus, comprised of volcanic rock surrounded in glacial rubble, rose from the ice in ragged chunks of stone dusted with white. Desperate earth-starved trees poked skeletal branches through the snow cover, black arthritic fingers reaching for a sky that was the same color as the grave they sank their roots in. Wind bared the rock in places, exposing the tops of granite-colored boulders, till the land resembled a boneyard for formless beasts that had come there to die. Out from the steep shore, ice piled up, six-inch slabs where the water of the lake had risen and receded, refreezing each time.

  Using hands and feet, Anna scrambled toward what passed for dry land. Despite the lightened pack, it was hard to keep her balance. A moose had managed it; there were a tangle of hoofprints half filled in with snow. Anna found her center of gravity and a flat place to stand, then turned and watched Bob making his way over the broken ice field. “Take it slow,” she warned.

  “Umph.”

  “The next trap we set will be one of yours,” she promised as he tottered and fell to one knee.

  “God damn!”

  He stayed where he was, his backpack rounding up like the hump of a camel kneeling to let a rider mount.

  “You okay?”

  “My knee,” he huffed, but he got himself upright and crossed the rest of the broken ice without incident.

  “You’re limping,” she accused. It was not good to let oneself get injured in the wilderness in the winter.

  “It’s a bad knee,” he said. “How many more traps do we have to set?”

  Bob sounded like a little boy who couldn’t add and was whining about it. So much for Dr. Jekyll.

  “A couple more.” Anna started up through the rocks. Abruptly she stopped. In the lee of one of the boulders, half buried in the deeper tracks of the moose, was the print of a wolf’s paw.

  Maybe.

  With the snow drifted in, it was hard to tell, but it was larger than fox and smaller than moose. In spring, she might have assumed it was a calf. Not in January.

  “We’re in the right neighborhood,” she said. Bob limped up and looked at the tracks. “The one on the left,” she said. “Wolf, I bet.”

  “Big.” A trace of the fear she’d seen and heard the night they’d been called upon by the wild was in his voice.

  The print was beyond big; it was monstrous. “Hard to tell,” Anna said, images of Bob, wild-eyed, lamp beam striping the tent walls, transposing over him, charging off through the falling snow, arms waving wildly, foot traps clattering. “Once the wind and snow and drift start, animal tracks can be made to look like almost anything.”

  “It’s crazy to be out here without a rifle,” Bob said. He looked around like a virgin in a haunted house. What good humor survived the knee hitting the ice was gone from his face. Anna wished she had an apron or a spatula or some other homey kitchen utensil with which to comfort him. “What are you making us for supper?” she asked to keep his mind busy, then ignored him while he answered.

  There hadn’t been any wolf tracks on the lake. She looked at the boulder head high to her left. A furrow cut the snow where something had slid or fallen.
The wolf had come down off the rock, possibly following the moose. There was just the single print; it had been traveling alone. The animal that had come to their tent had traveled alone.

  “Okay,” Anna said. “Let’s follow our boy here.”

  “Are you nuts?” Bob swallowed his fear, but it soured him. “We’re losing the light. Let’s head back,” he said peremptorily.

  “No we’re not. It’s one o’clock, the heat of the day.” She could have been more politic, but her mind was taken up with tracking. Moose prints were easy, dimples in the snow eight to ten inches across in two parallel lines. Paw prints were harder, especially without good light. Anna blinked at the unyielding sky, weeping snow static on a gray background. Rocks crowded in, sucking up what little illumination leaked through from a sun gone AWOL.

  “It’s like living in an old black-and-white TV with bad reception,” she said. “I can’t see a damn thing.”

  “Time to start back. We’re losing the light,” Bob insisted.

  “No we’re not.” Anna found another partial print. The wolf was following the moose or they had used the same route within hours of one another.

  “My knee,” Bob said. “It’s an old injury. I think I threw it out back there on the ice.”

  Anna found another track. A good one this time, the edges blurred with snow and drift but the clear mark of the toe pads. “Whoa! Take a look at this.” She squatted, her back soldier straight to keep her center of balance over her heels.

  Bob was following so close he bumped her pack and she pitched forward. “Watch it!” she said. “Look.” She’d managed to catch herself without damaging the print. It was immense, huge, beautiful, the track of a magnificent animal. “God, I wish we’d brought the camera.”

  “We should go back. We need to report this to Ridley – the sooner, the better.”

  “Radio him,” Anna said.

  “I got to take a leak,” Bob said suddenly.

  “Yeah, yeah. Go ahead.” Without rising, Anna squinted down the sloping bank. They had reached the far side of the finger of land in a matter of steps. The isthmus wasn’t more than thirty feet across. Tracks of wolf and moose, muted and strange with snow and wind, led across the narrow arm of the lake toward the far shore, crossing where Robin had said to set the next trap.

  “Perfect.” Anna managed to stand without grabbing onto anything.

  From her left came moose-sized crashing through what little shrubbery the place offered: Bob dumping his pack. The guy might be a while. Keeping to one side of the faint trail, Anna picked her way down the gentle slope and over the ridged ice where lake met land. Wolf and moose, traveling together or in tandem, the moose tracks close together as if meandering without concern, the wolf’s farther apart as if loping after prey.

  Ten or eleven yards out – distance was hard to estimate in poor light and a monochromatic world – the tracks vanished as if wolf and moose had been snatched off the surface of the lake by a great carnivorous bird.

  “Not possible,” she whispered and pulled her focus back to what was directly in front of her. “Hah!” The impossible had not occurred. The snow covering the ice had formed a slight depression. The tracks led into this irregular bowl, effectively vanishing from a distance.

  Before coming to Winter Study, Anna had not given ice much thought. She’d seen pictures of arctic floes heaped into mountains, crinkled into badlands and shattered over a white-and-blue no-man’s-land. Yet in her mind it remained flat, evened out by God’s Zamboni.

  On ISRO, she’d realized it was a living thing: changing, moody, struggling, resting, singing. Surrounding this shallow crater, water had oozed up through a circular crack and refrozen, creating a scar, a rugged ridge four and five inches high.

  Moose and wolf tracks crossed in the center of the circle, where it looked as if they’d skirmished. “Hey, Bob, you’re missing this,” Anna called back as she hopped over the ridge.

  She landed, and a rifle shot cracked through the silence that had wrapped them since leaving the cabin. Bob was a big game hunter. Bob had wanted his rifle. Rifles could be broken down and carried in a day pack. Bob had slipped away, letting her go, alone and exposed, onto the ice. All this flashed through her mind in an instant of acute paranoia.

  She started to look back to where she’d left Menechinn. Another crack, a noise like a baseball bat being snapped in half, then the ice began to shift beneath her feet.

  11

  The sound Anna had mistaken for a rifle report was ice breaking. She felt the shift beneath her boots and engaged all her muscles in the act of remaining motionless. She hadn’t punched through a thin place caused by an underwater spring or a rock near the surface; the ice in the depressed area had broken free. If she’d been quicker, she might have jumped to safety after the first crack. The second had created an island of ice no more than eight feet in diameter, with her in the center. Around the perimeter, the scar from the old ooze had opened, like the movement of tectonic plates the ice sheared. Water welled up, pouring into the snow in a flush of gray.

  If she moved, the free-floating island would tilt and she would slide into the lake. Under the lake. The land spit stretched thirty feet behind her. Another thirty or forty lay between her and the shore in front of her. Possibly the water was no deeper than her waist. Then again, glacial lakes could drop off fifty feet a yard from the shore.

  Depth probably wouldn’t matter, she thought.

  The cold would kill her before she had a chance to drown. Stories of kids revived after forty-five minutes beneath the ice were legend in the north. The shock of the stunning cold produced a phenomenon called a mammalian reflex, causing the body to shut down without dying, the way a bear shuts down to hibernate or a frog to sleep under the mud. Anna was too old to qualify. The courtesy of mammalian reflex wasn’t extended to adults.

  “Bob!” she called. Tried to call; his name came out on a whisper of air so faint she wasn’t sure she’d managed to speak aloud.

  “Bob!”

  Audible, but only to her ears. The part of her that believed the vibrations of her voice against the air would be enough to tip the balance had shut down her voice box.

  For a dizzying second, she saw the ice patch flipping like a coin, her feet going from under her, hands scrabbling uselessly, as she slid into the black death waiting below the ice, the patch of ice rocking back level, shutting her away from the promise of life and light. Iron-clawed terror gripped her insides. Courage drained out as blood from a severed artery.

  “Stop that,” she hissed. “Die of hydrophobia – how stupid is that?” Dragging her vision out of the bowels of the lake, she looked for ways to stay alive.

  The edge of her iceberg wasn’t quite the length of her body away. Too far to make a clean jump, but if she hurled herself forward she should be able to get her arms and shoulders up on solid ice. The shoulders and upper back were key. Her backpack, seemingly light after removing one trap, would be a significant anchor underwater. Mentally she rehearsed the action. Bend the knees, going straight down so the ice wouldn’t tilt, push off like a standing broad jumper, throw her arms out like Superman and hit the surface of the lake in a belly slide. Home free.

  Unbidden, the movie in her head played past the Hollywood ending. A gap opened behind her. The push of her feet spun the ice. Water the color of ink flicked out a reptilian tongue; the ice plate spun on its axis and reared like a living thing, dropping from under her heels and smashing into the front of her thighs. Gravity and the weight of her pack dragged her back and down. Black water closed over her face. The ice island smashed down, driving her under.

  “Bob!” she yelled.

  She’d left him on the land behind her and was shouting her feeble pleas to the woods in the opposite direction. Desperate, she turned so her voice would carry. Ice lurched sickeningly under her boots and she screamed.

  “Easy, easy, easy,” she murmured to herself and the lake. “No need to prance about. Center. Breathe. Still.” Tal
king herself back into balance, Anna wished she’d studied yoga, learned to stay perfectly motionless and balanced for hours.

  “Bob,” she wailed. As the words flew from her throat, Anna’s eyes flew with them till she was in the sky over her own head, looking down on the pitiful creature, bundled up and hooded, crying out in a snowstorm. All she needed was a tin cup of matches to sell to complete the pathos.

  The Dickensian image made her laugh. The laugh destabilized her, and the ice slid down an inch or more on the left side. Her soul was sucked back into her body so hard, reality lit up like sixteen million candles, and she was so alive her hair hurt with it. “Whoa!” she breathed, arms out like a child learning to snowboard. Gently she slid her feet wider apart, shifted her weight the slightest bit. The ice did not come back to level. The lip had caught on the edge underneath. Black water pushed out, turning gray as it ate up her world.

  Bob had to come, she told herself. He was following her. All she had to do was wait without moving. The ice hadn’t shattered; it had broken in a piece. If Bob stabilized one side, took a wide grip and held it so it couldn’t rock up out of the water, she should be able to move from the center to the opposite edge without getting her feet wet.

  Maybe Bob didn’t have to come. The thought floated into her mind as the snowflakes floated onto her eyelashes and shoulders, soft, silently, dead cold.

  He’d been stacking excuses like cordwood: knee injury, losing the light, making a report. When he wasn’t armed with telescoping sights, beaters and a high-powered rifle, the sight of an oversized animal track scared him. Anna liked to think he was scared because he knew his karma was about as cheery as the inside of a taxidermist’s workshop, that word he was a serial killer had gone out through the animal kingdom along with the order to devour him on sight, but she doubted he respected those who died for his entertainment sufficiently to consider them a sentient danger.