Winter Study Read online

  “What have you got?” Ridley asked.

  “Nothing.” Now she sounded breathless. “The trap and line have been torn all to hell. Whatever was in the foothold ripped free. The metal is bent and there’s blood everywhere.”

  “Get out of there,” Anna whispered at the same moment Ridley said: “Get out of there.”

  The radio went silent.

  14

  Bob talked. Anna listened for the radio. Katherine sat lost in thoughts Anna could only guess at. More than twice the time it had taken her to ski to the trap site elapsed. Robin did not return. Anna called on the radio and got no answer. The second time she radioed, the biotech’s voice came back. Robin was almost to the cabin. She did not say what had kept her.

  Anna didn’t ask. The night was clear and full of stars. Robin was an excellent cross-country skier. Had it been Anna, she might have taken time to be free of others and in her natural element. Maybe Robin had done the same.

  RIDLEY RECALLED THEM to Windigo. Robin skied out at first light and sprang the traps.

  The next front had yet to arrive; the sky was clear and there was no wind. No one was sorry to be leaving Malone Bay. The meager comforts of the bunkhouse were palatial compared to the tiny cabin.

  Anna had lost her mittens, her pack was ruined, the straps slashed and her clothing was still wet. Robin had lost one of her jab sticks and Katherine couldn’t find her scarf. Other than that, they were in one piece.

  An hour after sunup, the warm buzz of the supercub rolled over the tin roof and they started down to the bay. Anna flew out first. She was still coughing and there was not a part of her that didn’t hurt, but she had walked to the airplane without falling over. She took that as a good sign.

  ANNA’S TOUCHING NOSTALGIA for the bunkhouse vanished as soon as she opened the door and the reek of death slapped into her senses. The wolf had thawed.

  By one o’clock, the team was reassembled, and Ridley declared the animal was ready for the necropsy.

  “I’m going to miss this old boy,” Jonah said as the wolf was transported from the kitchen to the carpenter’s shop. “He was just beginning to smell good enough to drown out the smell of Ridley’s feet.” The pilot had to shout. The front had arrived with a vengeance. Snow was in a frenzy; naked branches of the trees creaked and whistled above them.

  They carried the carcass on a tarp held at four corners by Ridley, Jonah, Katherine and Anna to the carpenter’s shop, a twenty-by-fifteen-foot building behind the trail crew’s bunkhouse. Designed for seasonal summer use, in January it was as cold as a deep freeze and used as such. Bones and bags of scat and urine, a half-eaten head of a young moose, the older moose head, with its windigo antlers and other delicacies, were wrapped in plastic and piled on the tool bench next to the wall.

  A metal folding table, the kind used in church halls for potluck suppers, was in the middle of the room, samples from Robin’s last expedition piled on one end. The wolf was placed on the table and the five of them gathered around. They looked like a band of homeless people, worshipping a long-awaited meal. At Ridley’s suggestion, they’d all put on old clothes; at the suggestion of an icy Mother Nature, they’d donned many layers.

  Ridley opened the wolf’s jaws. “They must have a good dental plan,” Anna said, startled by the clean, white, perfect teeth.

  “Wolves’ mouths are amazingly clean,” Ridley said. “If a tooth gets broken, you’ll see some brown at the edges; otherwise, they’re like this guy’s.” He pinched the animal’s tongue between thumb and forefinger and pulled it out to do a sweep of the throat. Short of a giraffe’s, the wolf had the longest tongue Anna’d ever seen, cartoon long. Teeth, tongue and jaws: beautifully designed equipment for the work of staying alive.

  “Let’s open him up,” Ridley said.

  Anna was expecting a scalpel, but he pulled a steel knife with a six-inch blade and heavy hilt from one of his torn pockets. He smiled at Anna. “Vollwerth and Company, sausage makers over in Hancock. German made.”

  Jonah and Anna rolled the wolf onto its back and held it steady while Ridley slit the skin from throat to anus, then began to peel back the hide.

  “You can see bruising or wounds better on the underside of the skin,” he said. “They show up as dark red blotches or punctures.” He stood back and Robin photographed the denuded animal.

  With its hide partly peeled away and the sinews and ribs exposed, it bore an uncanny resemblance to a werewolf in transition from man to animal. A scene from An American Werewolf in London exploded in Anna’s brain.

  “See there?” Ridley pointed with the business end of the knife. “You can see where a rib has been broken and healed. That’s fairly common. Moose will fling them against rocks, bash them against trees, anything to get them off.”

  Robin moved around the table and took several pictures of the rib. No bruising was apparent. “No defensive wounds,” Anna said. She’d thought that once the hide was off, there would be evidence of damage incurred prior to the killing bite.

  “Maybe our wog is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of wolves,” Adam said and laughed, but none of the rest of them did. Bob snorted to indicate he had not been given the creeps, but Anna noticed he glanced out the shop’s window as if concerned some inhuman force might hear his mockery and take against him.

  “Governor Wolf,” Jonah said.

  “Subcutaneous fat?” Katherine asked.

  “Not enough to collect.” Ridley adjusted the shop light over the table, a light better suited to interrogating suspects than dissecting them. With the tip of his knife and his fingers, he pulled and pricked beneath the skin where it folded down over the paws and sides. “This time of year, with the moose population down, we don’t see much fat on these guys.”

  Katherine cut out a sample of muscle tissue with a scalpel, the shiny, precise instrument looking delicate and civilized next to Ridley’s sausage knife. She put the tissue into a glass vial with alcohol.

  Ridley inserted his knife into the hide at the throat to make a lateral cut.

  “Hey,” Bob said, showing his first real interest in the proceeding.

  “Don’t ruin it. And don’t peel the skin off the head.”

  Ridley looked at him. His eyes went as dead as the wolf on the table. His hand tightened on the knife till the rubber glove he wore was pulled taut as a second skin over his knuckles. Anna thought he was going to cut Menechinn and she had no intention of trying to stop him – nothing against Bob Menechinn, just not a guy she wanted to get in the way of a knife for.

  “I’ll be careful,” Ridley said and smiled. Anna got the feeling the smile was not a good sign. He turned his attention back to the wolf and made the lateral cuts in the hide. As good as his word, he did it conservatively and with precision, doing as little damage to the pelt as he could. When the cut was complete, he took two of the four corners in the X he had made and opened them like the pages of a book.

  The wolf’s throat wasn’t shredded by repeated attacks from different angles the way most wolf-on-wolf kills were; it was ripped deeply four times. The tears went through an inch of hide and muscle. Two cut across the wolf’s aorta, and two were near the carotid, in a distorted mirror image of the killing punctures.

  “We got any tigers on this island?” Jonah asked. Nobody said anything. Whatever had attacked the wolf had a bite pattern close to twice the usual size wolf’s.

  “Any number of scenarios could have led to these marks,” Ridley said. “Let’s move on.”

  They did but a sense of the eerie, of the windigo screaming down out of the north woods to devour human flesh, remained. A hybrid, Jonah’s wog, causing havoc in the wolf population wasn’t impossible. Gray wolves mated with red wolves, red wolves mated with coyotes. There’d been a case in California of a seal/sea lion hybrid suffocating the female seals he tried to mate with because of his size. On the sunny summer beaches of California, dealing with creatures of the sea when one was on dry land didn’t carry the psychological impact of a s
laughtered wolf on an abandoned island in winter.

  One of the reasons humans tended toward insanity was the weight of fear they carried. The blessings of storytelling, the handing down of knowledge and warnings, had a flip side. People carried the collective fears of their history, the biases of those long dead, the paranoias of other ages.

  Anna flashed back to her college days. It had been raining hard; she’d been sitting in her sister Molly’s kitchen, doing something or other. There was a horrific clap of thunder, the lights went out and the grandfather clock in the living room began striking midnight. Without bothering with coat or umbrella, she rose from the table, slipped out the back door and ran to a friend’s house. She wasn’t so much scared as wary; the setup was there, the cues were in place, she’d seen the movie half a dozen times. Should life mirror art, she didn’t want to be in the kitchen in the dark when whatever was coming for her arrived.

  She shrugged off that same feeling now and concentrated on the necropsy.

  Ridley cut through the thin wall muscles covering the abdomen and exposed the internal organs. Since the wolf was fresh, the organs were identified and preserved for histological work. When an animal was partially decomposed, the organs turned to mush and the thin tissue samples required were unusable. Ridley lifted out the intestines and stomach. Small pieces of the liver and spleen were taken for DNA work.

  Anna served as surgical nurse, handing the organs to Katherine, who identified, preserved and labeled them. Robin photographed each step. Jonah made wisecracks, and Bob watched.

  “The pluck,” Ridley said, the business of dismemberment apparently cleansing him of residual heebie-jeebies from the initial wound discovery. Reaching up under the ribs, he plucked out lungs and heart as a single unit.

  Other than the bite on the throat, they found no other cause of death.

  They completed the necropsy: salvaging bones, chopping off paws to preserve the small tarsals and metatarsals, breaking the rib cage to wrestle it free of the cavity. Bones would be macerated by boiling or, the preferred method, because it didn’t dry the bones out, buried in soil in screen envelopes for slow decomposition of tissue.

  This scientific butchering was grim work and Anna wasn’t accustomed to it. Mated with the ambient weirdness of the throat wound, the oversized tracks and, most nerve-racking of all, being forever in the company of people in a small space, she found the necropsy depressing. And unsettling. A knot formed in her chest, and she wanted little more than to get away, get out into the woods. Caves and closets weren’t the only threats for claustrophobes.

  Ridley excised the muscle mass with the puncture marks. “Usually we don’t need to do this,” he said as he handed Anna the bloody chunk. “The wog bite – or whatever – makes it interesting. The lab in Michigan might be able to make something of it. My wife works there.” A hint of pride touched his voice, warming it past the merely clinical. “She specializes in animal forensics.”

  Anna hadn’t known such a discipline existed, but it made sense. There were animal DNA labs – she’d used one in Oregon, when she was working a case in Glacier.

  “Bite patterns, tracks, fur – just like CSI,” Ridley said.

  But without criminals. However vicious an animal attack, it was neither a sin nor a crime, to Anna’s way of thinking. Even when done with malice, it was without evil. One had to know what the taking of life meant before taking it could be elevated to the status of true evil.

  “A married man,” Bob said. “Any kids?”

  “Not yet,” Ridley said.

  “Maybe when you stick closer to the den in winter she’ll pop out a litter every spring. More fun than cutting up wolves.” Bob grinned and winked at Anna. Having saved her life, he seemed to think he owned it. She wondered what he would look like with a plastic bag tied tightly over his head.

  “Fuck!” Ridley jerked his hands out of the wolf and held his left cupped in his right, the knife trapped between them. The palm of his rubber glove was filling with bright, new arterial blood.

  “I’m an EMT. Can I help?” Anna said, instantly forgetting Bob. Over the years, she’d said it so many times it was as instantaneous as “God bless you” after a sneeze.

  Ridley kept his head down, his eyes on the blood welling in his glove.

  Face averted in the growing dimness, hidden behind beard and mustache, he could have been thinking of anything from killing to Captain Kangaroo and Anna wouldn’t have been able to see it. “Ridley, are you okay?”

  He nodded without looking up and held out his hand. The gesture put Anna in mind of the pen-and-ink drawing in her childhood book of Androcles and the lion, the great beast’s paw held up so that the thorn might be removed.

  Anna handed the chunk of wolf neck to Katherine, peeled off the surgical gloves and pulled on a clean pair, then bent to examine the damage to Ridley’s hand. A squeak, a tiny sound like that of a newborn kitten fighting for a nipple or the last sound of a mouse meeting a trap, distracted her. Hands dripping gore in front of her like a zombie in a B movie, Katherine looked the cliché of someone who’s seen a ghost: her skin had paled and her lips gone slack. Behind the oversized lenses, her gentle eyes were so wide that white showed beneath the irises.

  Having spent the afternoon elbow-deep in flesh and bone, Anna had a hard time believing Katherine was going faint at the sight of a little fresh blood. She wasn’t. She was looking past Ridley, his wound beginning to drip human DNA into the carcass of the wolf, at Bob Menechinn. His heavy face had gone from flab to granite.

  Frozen meat, Anna thought. The image jarred her.

  Whatever was communicated with that stare was over in a heartbeat. Bob was all amiability again; Katherine’s head was bent industriously over her collection equipment. Jonah started a long involved joke about the Sisters of St. Regis’s Convent and House of Prostitution. Anna looked down at Ridley’s hand in hers. An odd feeling of being once removed from the world came over her, the way it did when she had a bad cold, and, though she could hear perfectly well, she felt deaf; the way she felt in dreams when she needed to cross a busy street and her legs were lead.

  “May I?” she said and carefully took the German knife from Ridley’s hand. Despite the wound, he’d not let it fall. Using it, she cut his glove away. He’d gashed his palm, a bad cut, but blood had welled into the gash and she couldn’t tell how bad; she couldn’t see clearly.

  The way she felt when the optometrist put belladonna in her eyes.

  The room hadn’t filled with fog; it was four o’clock and the sun was almost down. The white that had blinded the window when they arrived had turned to gray. The work light over the table created more shadows than illumination.

  “We need to go inside,” she said. “I need more light.”

  “We’re about done anyway.” Ridley finally raised his head. His skin wasn’t pale but flushed, and, rather than having the vague alarm of shock, his eyes were so alive he looked feverish or half mad.

  “Jonah, would you help Katherine finish up?” he asked. The control in his voice was so at odds with the heat in his eyes that Anna put a hand on the back of his neck. It was not cold or diaphoretic; if anything, it was a degree too warm.

  “What are you doing!” he demanded as he pulled away from her.

  “Checking your skin temp,” she said. “Ready to go?”

  As they left, they could hear Jonah: “Fakes an injury to get out of mopping up the really disgusting parts. I thought I’d taught that boy better…”

  Anna half filled one of the metal basins from the water on the woodstove and washed and disinfected Ridley’s hand in the kitchen sink. “So what’s with you and Bob?” she asked, since she held him captive. She’d cooled the water from the stove with the drinking water in the second bathroom. Using the dipper, she ladled it over the cut.

  He flinched.

  “Sorry. Did I hurt you?”

  “Not too bad.”

  The cut was deep but not long. “You don’t seem to much like
Bob,” she prodded.

  “He’s not a real likable guy,” Ridley said.

  “Why did you want him to do the study evaluation?” She closed the gash with butterflies and patted his hand dry with paper towels.

  Ridley took his hand back though she’d not yet bandaged it. “He came highly recommended,” he said curtly.

  The conversation was over but Anna’d found out a great deal. Aggressively avoiding a topic broadcasts just how emotionally charged that topic is. Why was a mystery, but if the snow kept up she was going to need something to do to pass the time for the next five weeks. And it would keep her mind off whatever it was with very big teeth and very big feet that was stalking the island.

  She retrieved his hand and wrapped his palm with narrow gauze to keep it clean, then released him into the wild, wondering if, like Androcles, she’d made a friend. He went to his room and closed the door. Anna put her coat back on and headed for the carpenter’s shed. The play being enacted in the shop might have a plot closer to Saw III than Hamlet, but it was the only show in town.

  It wasn’t the only soap opera, however.

  Muffled in the saber rattle of winter branches and the fierce drive of the wind, and cloaked in the growing dusk, Anna was nearly on top of Bob and his graduate student before she saw them. They didn’t see her. Anna didn’t hide exactly or eavesdrop exactly; she just didn’t call attention to herself.

  Katherine was crying. “He was such a beautiful wolf.”

  Anna heard the words wailed on the wind, then the storm took the rest. After hours of slicing and dicing, pickling and bagging, all of a sudden Katherine was mourning her wolf. Bob said something, then Katherine hit him. She didn’t slap or punch; she hit his well-padded, parka-clad chest with her fists the way helpless heroines in old movies did.

  Bob had seen the movies too. He caught both of her wrists. He wore heavy gloves; Katherine was bare-handed. Anna tensed, waiting to see if she would have to intervene. Observing the escalation of violence was drummed into park rangers. Katherine could hit Bob all she wanted – she wasn’t doing him any damage – but should he, with his height and weight advantage, strike back, he had to be taken down. Anna had no idea how she would do that. It would be like taking down the Pillsbury Doughboy on steroids.