Winter Study Read online

  One arm came free of the confining straps, the hand with the bloated mitten. Anna watched it as it drifted out from her body. Above it, the irregular half-moon shape of light was no bigger than the palm of her hand.

  Oddly detached, she watched it shrink to the size of a half-dollar. A gentle bump stopped her fall. She rested on the bottom of the lake, the moon of light feeble in the liquid sky. Quiet surrounded her. Her breathing stopped, her heart starved and pounded throughout her body, a frenetic drumbeat in a deaf world. The water was so clear she could see gravel on the lake bed, a vestige of weeds as unmoving as if sculpted in stone.

  Dropping arrow straight from the world above was a single line, inked black against the gray of the water. At its end, a D was written in crushed script. The foothold trap on the line of kinkless chain. She had wanted to trap a wolf with it, wanted to stroke its living fur and feel its breath. Cruel to want that, she thought. To frighten such a grand creature that she might be close to it.

  Water was clearer than air; she could see each individual link in the chain she had carried so far. She marveled that an entity as fierce as the lake could be so completely still; not a ripple showed its power yet it had swallowed Anna as neatly as a trout swallowing a fly. The lake had slipped away into silence. And the water was so clear, soon, Anna believed, soon she would be able to breathe it.

  The trap was an ugly thing, a reminder of the metal rampage humanity with its mines and forges and industry had loosed on the world. Anna didn’t want it to be in her eyes when she drew the lake into her lungs and took her first breath in this new world. As she mustered the energy to turn her head away, the foothold trap leapt; a quick jerk upward, then fell again, the way an angler’s bait pretended life to lure greedy fish.

  Anna wondered if she was a fish yet.

  The line jerked again. Lazily she reached for it, wanting to make it be still, make it part of the lake with her. Her fingers fumbled. The trap swayed away. Slowly it drifted back. She threaded her hand and wrist through it and pulled, a tiny pull, maybe not a pull at all.

  The crescent of light dimmed. Her brain was shutting down. The pounding from her heart eased to a soft rush, waves breaking lazily against sandy beaches. Bands of pressure within her lungs pressed outward, attempting to break through to the air.

  When she was asleep, she would breathe in the lake.

  Ophelia.

  HOOKS CAUGHT IN HER MERMAID MOUTH, cutting the flesh and trying to drag her from the sea. Anna tossed her head from side to side. Fishes chewed at her face; she felt the ripping but not the pain. A hammerhead shark rammed into her chest and the air blasted out of her.

  And in again.

  “Annnhhh. Annnh.”

  Breath out and in and vomiting, her lungs caught fire, her throat burned with charred flesh.

  “Annh. Annnh.”

  Hot lead spewed from her scalding her tongue, blistering her lips.

  “Annhh. Anhhh.”

  The noise maddened her, and she knew she was crying as she descended to hell in fire and ice. Her eyes would not open, as in dreams of blindness they had been sewn shut. Screaming, she forced her lids wide.

  She was out. She was on her side, one arm stretched over her head. Her right eyeball was so close to the ice, she could see crystals moving by in fits and starts. The endless embrace of the lake was being scraped off. A machine gun battered through her head. Her teeth were chattering.

  “Annnh.”

  Anna had not made that sound. Fish did not speak. Fish got fried over hot coals. She was looking forward to that.

  “I’ve landed four-hundred-pound marlin that were easier to reel in than you.” This was grunted. Anna had been caught by a bear. Too bad. Bears ate their fish raw.

  “Are you alive?” The bear pawed at her and she was rolled onto her back.

  “Hey, Bob,” she said when she saw his red, sweating face.

  “Are we going to have to get naked in a sleeping bag together?” he asked.

  “Throw me back in,” Anna croaked.

  13

  Bob was a hero.

  When Anna had gone under, trap and line snaking after her, he’d stomped on his end of the chain to stop it. For a nanosecond, he waited to see if she would resurface.

  “Nanosecond” was Bob’s assessment of the time. Anna was fairly sure it had been at least five minutes, never mind that she could only hold her breath for two, and that was under ideal conditions.

  The ice was paper thin, Bob told Robin and Katherine, and he’d tugged on the chain so Anna would be able to see it, then pulled her from the lake bottom.

  Anna was sufficiently grateful to have been saved from a watery grave that, for a while, she forgot it was Bob who’d put her there. She chose not to remind him of this because he had raised not only her from the dead with nothing but brute strength and determination but her pack as well, trailing behind her by a single shoulder strap.

  She remembered nothing of their return to the cabin but knew without a doubt she would have died if Bob had not taken quick action. He’d cut her free of the backpack, stripped her wet coat from her, wrapped her in his own parka and carried her back to Malone Bay.

  Clad in dry clothes and propped on the bottom bunk in a sleeping bag, a fourth cup of hot Ovaltine in front of her – the first she’d been able to hold all by herself – Anna listened as Bob again told Robin and Katherine how he’d run the two miles.

  “Flat out,” he said. “I knew she was going to die.”

  Anna doubted he’d managed to sprint the whole way, but he had covered the ground rapidly. And he was right: she was going to die and now she wasn’t.

  “You saved my life, Bob,” she said. “Remind me to buy you a beer sometime.”

  He grinned hugely, tucking his chin back into his neck. Anna’s words had been meant to sound grateful and they did. She was. There was no arguing with the feats of strength he had performed. The man was powerful and she was grateful to him. Grateful. For some reason, she had to keep reminding herself of this, and felt small and mean because of it.

  Bob Menechinn mystified her. One moment, he was a coward shaking in his boots, a streak of yellow down his back so bright it shone through his thermal undershirt. The next, he was carrying a damsel in distress miles through a storm to safety. Anna had long known that everyone has a panic button. Those who are considered brave are simply people lucky enough to wander through life without theirs getting punched. She’d known men who would scale precipitous cliffs, only to fall apart when a water snake slithered into the tent; women who marshaled the combined forces of Boy Scouts and church camps but would faint at the sight of their own blood.

  As near as she could figure, Bob had two Achilles’ heels: he was terrified of wild beasts who were better armed than he and women who knew he was terrified. Watching him bask in glory, Anna wondered if that was why he loved hunting – killing them before they killed him – if that was why he kept Katherine under his thumb.

  Fear made some people brave and some dangerous. Bob was in the latter category. Because he was strong, he’d not been afraid he couldn’t carry Anna a couple of miles. He’d also known fishing her out with trap and line would not put him in any danger. And there was no risk of failure. Either he’d succeed or the witness to his humiliation would be dead.

  Anna took a sip of the oversweet Ovaltine. The drink was hot, the cabin so warm the others had stripped down to trousers and T-shirts. Anna was packed in goose down and surrounded by plastic bottles filled with water heated on the stove, yet the core of her was still on the bottom of Intermediate Lake.

  “I was looking for tracks up in the rocks when I heard that ice crack,” Bob embellished his tale. “I was on that ice like a man shot out of a cannon. What a noise! I didn’t think anything but a Remington could crack like that. Anna was trapped, yelling, ‘Bob, Bob,’ and the ice was so thin I couldn’t get to her. Man,” he said and shook his head.

  “God, I’m sorry,” Robin said to Anna.

&n
bsp; “Not your fault,” Anna told her.

  “The ice on Intermediate is good. You shouldn’t have broken through.”

  “It happens,” Anna said. Then, to make Robin feel better: “I jumped.”

  “I can’t figure out what made the ice break like that. It should have been fine. You were where I said to place the trap?”

  Anna nodded and took another sip of Ovaltine.

  “It makes no sense. I am so sorry. You could have died.”

  “Nah,” Anna said. “Bob’s making it all up. We formed a polar bear club and he chickened out at the last minute.”

  “Don’t joke,” Robin pleaded. “You really could have died.”

  Robin was obsessing and Anna didn’t know how to stop her. As a young woman leading her first backcountry trips, Anna had felt the same way a few times when people in her care, following her instructions, were endangered. She hoped she hadn’t carried on as much as Robin was. The biotech was three pews short of banging her heart with her fist and crying, “Mea culpa, mea culpa.”

  “Lots of things don’t make sense,” Anna said reasonably.

  “It couldn’t have broken.” Robin shook her head, her hair swinging in the silvery light from the window over the small dining table. The sun had creaked out, making an appearance between fronts. They had been without showers for days, during most of which they wore hats and hoods crammed on their heads, yet Robin’s hair was shining, silken.

  “Go figure,” Anna said aloud. She didn’t bother to explain she was remarking on the hair. “Go figure” was one of those contentless statements that mean whatever the listener chooses to believe they mean.

  During Bob’s regaling, Robin’s breast-beating and Anna’s slurping of hot drinks, Katherine had been unusually quiet. She was retiring by nature, but since Anna had been dried, warmed and declared officially among the living Katherine had not uttered a word. She’d not congratulated Bob on his bravery or marveled at his Samson-like strength; she’d not asked Anna what it was like to die or live. Like the Cheshire cat, she had slowly disappeared, till all that remained was the reflection of the window’s light on the rim of her spectacles. Wordlessly, making eye contact with no one, she’d drifted from the stool by the door to the straight-backed kitchen chair tucked next to the water heater to a footlocker jammed into the space between the foot of the bunk beds and the wall that was so narrow the locker had to be pulled out to be opened. On this low bench, Katherine had drawn her back to the wall and her feet up on the locker, a folded bit of woman tucked in a dark corner.

  “What are you hiding from, Kathy?” Bob said in a voice loud enough that Anna watched the liquid in her mug shiver as the aftershocks struck its ceramic shores.

  Katherine raised her head, her eyes invisible behind her glasses. “Just trying to stay out of the way,” she said.

  “You’re not in the way,” Robin reassured her. In such cramped quarters, they all were in the way all the time.

  “Bob once carried me,” Katherine blurted out. “He carried me up five flights of stairs.” Her voice had an edge, as if she was making a point.

  “Hey, careful, my head will get too big,” Bob said with the first show of humility Anna’d seen.

  “I don’t really remember it,” Katherine went on. “I was out cold.”

  Bob laughed and Katherine shrank back into her self-made cave.

  Anna’s thoughts sank to the lake bottom, how deep the silence had been, how like crystal the water, how the sand had seemed to go forever, never disappearing in the distance but merging with it, the two becoming one, how she had sensed she would be the lake when she breathed it, how she had come to want to breathe it, not because she wanted to die, or because she had to, but because she knew she teetered on the brink of something vast and a part of her was excited to step off that brink and experience the vastness.

  ARRAYED IN THE FRILLY APRON, Bob started dinner. Onions frying in butter smelled of home and safety and warmth, but for once Anna wasn’t hungry. Her fingers loosened around the mug she held, but it didn’t fall into her lap, spilling the dregs of her drink. Other hands lifted it from her. Robin. Anna hadn’t the energy to open her eyes, but she could smell the biotech. Like onions and butter, Robin smelled of life and rich earth, of young plants pushing up after the rain, meadow grass when it’s crushed underfoot.

  Soft hands touched her face, brushed the lank hair from her forehead. Gray, Anna remembered: red and gray, salt and cinnamon. Robin stroked her cheek and Anna felt the silky whisk of her ancient orange tiger cat Piedmont’s tail, followed by the rasp of his tongue, a tongue designed to abrade flesh from bone. Robin, she reminded herself, calluses, hardworking hands.

  “I am so sorry,” Robin whispered. A kiss or a tear settled on Anna’s cheekbone.

  “De nada.” Anna’s lips moved, but if they made a sound she was asleep before she heard it.

  ANNA SHOULD HAVE slept like the dead – or the very nearly dead – but she was troubled by dreams and the revenge of muscles she’d abused. Her legs flinched and quivered and sent mixed messages to her brain, unable to decide whether they were hurting or bored. She wasn’t asleep when the beeping started.

  Either Robin shared Anna’s insomnia or was a light sleeper. She wriggled out of her sleeping bag and went to the radio receiver on the table.

  “Which one?” Robin whispered.

  “Between Intermediate and Richie, about a quarter of a mile from where you went in.” She clicked on her headlamp. Using its light, she began pumping the Coleman lantern. Colemans worked. They’d worked forever, lighting places electricity would not. But they were noisy machines, clanking in the preparation and hissing like a thousand angry snakes when lit. Katherine and Bob woke up.

  “What is it?” Katherine asked, her voice fogged with sleep.

  “We’ve trapped a wolf,” Robin told her. She was already pulling on her ski pants.

  Anna swung her legs, bag and all, over the edge of the bottom bunk and sat up.

  “You’re not going,” Robin said.

  “I’m going,” Anna replied. She stood up and fell down. “I’m not going,” she admitted from the floor. “You’re not going alone,” she insisted.

  They both looked at Bob. He stared back at them. The Coleman was not a cosmetic light, and he looked pasty and scared. “I’m not Superman,” he said in a tone just short of surly. “I’ve already saved one of you today. Leave the fucking wolf in the trap till morning.”

  “It could die,” Robin said and sat in the straight-backed kitchen chair to put on her mukluks.

  “I’ll go.” This was from the top bunk. Anna, who had stayed on the floor rather than risk the humiliation of collapsing again, looked up at the researcher. The angle was bizarre; she was looking through Katherine’s stocking feet up between her knees where they bent over the edge of the mattress to a head small with distance. Katherine was as frightened as Bob, and probably nearly as tired, but she meant to go.

  Courage and bravado, Anna thought. It sounded like a TV cop duo. Anna sucked it up and tried again to rise. She made it to hands and knees, but the room spun, and she coughed till her chest ached with the spasms.

  “Get in bed,” Robin said. She picked up a radio from the table and called Ridley. He radioed back immediately. Robin told him about the motion detector going off.

  “If Anna’s not up to it, take Bob with you,” Ridley said.

  Bob moved back, legs still in his sleeping bag, and leaned against the wall, folding his arms over his chest.

  “It’s a fool’s errand,” he said.

  “Bob’s done in,” Robin said into the mike.

  There was a long moment of crackling silence, then Ridley said:

  “I think there’s an old pair of skis in the cabin. You go, take the jab stick. If we’ve got a wolf, just put him out and set him free. He should wake up and get moving before he freezes to death. You can reset the trap tomorrow. Keep me posted.”

  The jab stick was what it sounded like, a long s
tick with a syringe on the end, loaded with ketamine and xylazine. A trapped wolf was jabbed with it. In five minutes or so, the animal would go down long enough for the study team to do their work.

  The skis and poles were stowed in the rafters. Robin had them down in a minute and was prying off the bindings with a butter knife. “No boots,” she said when Anna asked. She dug in her backpack and pulled out a roll of silver duct tape. “Voilà!” She began taping the toes of her mukluks to the skis.

  “Radio and flashlight,” Anna reminded her as she jerked open the cabin door, skis with the unfilled boots over her shoulder.

  “Got them.”

  The door slammed shut. Life had gone out of the cabin. Anna and Katherine and Bob wavered in the hissing light of the Coleman, ghosts left behind in an empty house.

  “This study should be shut down,” Bob announced. “Border security for sure, but it’s run without any attention to the safety of the scientists. If they haven’t figured it out in fifty years, they’re not going to. Wolves eat moose; moose eat grass – how hard is that?”

  “Moose don’t eat grass,” Anna said. “Moose eat trees.”

  “New DNA,” Katherine said. “It might be a big deal, Bob.” This was the second time Katherine had stood up for herself. Anna liked it. Bob didn’t.

  “They can’t shut the study down now,” Anna interjected to deflect whatever barb Menechinn was going to throw at his assistant. “New information. Maybe a hybrid.”

  Bob dropped that line of conversation and launched into a lecture about how personal safety was number one with professional big game hunters. Anna didn’t hear it; she was listening for the radio.

  She didn’t have long to wait. Robin radioed Ridley. Anna turned the volume up.

  “I’m here,” the biotech said. She’d covered the miles in a startlingly brief time and didn’t even sound out of breath. Anna remembered she’d spent most of her life on skis, racing and shooting. Anna wished she had a rifle with her tonight.