Winter Study Read online

  “We’re not finding anybody tonight,” Anna said. “We’re liable to lose ourselves.” She told them of her thought that Katherine was hiding, playing games.

  “If she is, it’s the last game she’ll ever play,” Ridley said grimly.

  “She’ll freeze to death.” He was shouting. They were all shouting to be heard above the wind. Their puny noise did little to dent the immensity of the night and the storm.

  “There’s three places she could survive,” Robin said. “If she broke into permanent housing, she might find blankets. Or, if she took some, she could make it in a shelter for a few hours.”

  “Good,” Anna said. “Ridley, you guys take the permanent housing. Robin and I will do the lean-tos. Then we’re done for the night.”

  Ridley started to protest but Anna overrode him. He wasn’t versed in search and rescue. Anna was. “We can’t search in this. Period. It’s too risky. We wait till daylight.”

  “Okay,” Ridley said. “You’re right. Come on, Jonah. You two be careful.” Ridley was one of those rare leaders who only choose to lead when they are in their area of strength. Maybe this once Anna’s first impression had been right, maybe he was a terrific man.

  “Lead on,” Anna said to Robin and, feeling trollish and lumpsome, stumped down the road beside Robin’s fairy-stepping form. At the orange fuel tanks, they turned onto a smaller trail leading toward Washington Creek campground. The ugly monument to fossil fuels was invisible in dark and snow, but Anna could feel it being hideous all the same.

  Lean-tos – screened-in sheds for campers – were scattered along the bank of Washington Creek above the harbor, about a ten-minute walk from the housing area.

  “It’s hard to believe a rational woman would spend the night freezing in an open shed when her toasty bed is so close,” Anna shouted.

  “Thermal wimp,” Robin accused good-naturedly.

  They shined their lights into every shelter. As the cold, dusty emptiness of one lean-to after another whispered of summers dead and winters lasting forever, hope dimmed. Had the missing woman been Robin, Anna would have been more optimistic. Robin was acclimatized, winter was her friend and she was accustomed to physical hardship. Robin wouldn’t panic.

  Katherine was none of these things.

  Katherine was also not in any of the employee housing.

  ANNA SLEPT FITFULLY, wriggling like an uneasy larva in her down cocoon. The single bed was adequate most nights, but this night she kept waking to find she’d squashed herself against the wall or was perilously close to falling off.

  Robin didn’t sleep much better. Anna could hear her thrashing about. Once she leaped from her bed, dug through her rucksack – at least that’s what Anna assumed; the dark was impenetrable – clunked a found object down on the desk at the bed’s foot and squirmed back into her sleeping bag. Or maybe Anna only dreamed she did.

  Her dreams were thick and convoluted, dragging images from unrelated drawers and cobbling them together into stories Harlan Ellison couldn’t unravel. She woke, thinking she heard the howling of coyotes on her mother’s ranch. The call of a loon dragged her from sleep. She woke again to wretched disappointment, finding she was not in Paul’s arms but curled up like a sow bug on a strange bed.

  The sun didn’t so much rise as the snow, still falling but with less vehemence, grew gray. There would be no search from the air. Breakfast was quick. Each person would take a radio and a different trail. Ridley attempted to call in to dispatch in Houghton, Michigan, to alert them to the situation, but radio contact, always sketchy, had been obliterated by the storm and the phone lines allowed more static than language. He e-mailed.

  As they were dividing up the trails for the search, Adam dragged in. He had the body type Anna associated with the cowboys where she’d grown up and, later, the die-hard wildland firefighters: long muscles and bones, big knuckles, wide shoulders and skinny legs. The kind of men that can just keep on working, keep on digging firebreaks or building fence or riding line as if their lanky bodies were made of sterner stuff than mere flesh and didn’t burn as much fuel as other humans.

  Adam looked like he’d finally run out of gas. No longer held at bay by the strength of his personality, age dragged down his cheeks and made pouches beneath his eyes.

  “You look like hell,” Ridley said without sympathy.

  “Yeah, well, freezing your butt off all night, then hiking nine miles in deep snow before breakfast, will do that to a guy,” Adam snapped, and shrugged out of his coat.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” Ridley warned.

  “Katherine’s gone missing,” Anna told him.

  Adam put his coat back on.

  “Grab some food,” Ridley said, “then search the Hugginin Trail loop. That’ll free Jonah up to stay near the airplane in case the weather breaks.”

  Bob announced he would stay at the bunkhouse near the radio. In case Jonah flew and they needed to coordinate, he said. Given the missing woman was his graduate student and, at least on her end, there seemed to be a proprietary interest, he didn’t seem overly anxious to help find her. “Recheck the permanent-employee housing and check the maintenance buildings at least,” Ridley said. He didn’t bother to disguise the scorn in his voice. “She might have broken into one of the equipment sheds if she was upset enough.”

  Bob turned his face slightly away. Maybe Katherine’s going missing had hit him harder than Anna’d given him credit for. Before this, Bob might have goldbricked out of fear of wild beasts or plain old sloth, but he wouldn’t have bothered to look guilty about it.

  “What did you and Katherine fight about last night?” Anna asked bluntly.

  His shame, or whatever it was, vanished, replaced by the tucked-back smile of false bonhomie. “We didn’t fight. I don’t fight with women.”

  He didn’t wink. Anna was making progress.

  There, snow was deep enough for skiing. The best skier, Robin, was given the Minong. It was the roughest trail on the island, running as it did along the broken crest of glacial ridges. Anna had skied a little, she’d seen others – people who were good at it – ski, but she’d never seen anything like Robin. It was as if the snow conspired with the skis to carry her effortlessly like Winged Victory into battle.

  Ridley would cover the Greenstone Trail. Because of the shortcut from the housing area to the head of the trail, if Katherine had found a trail and not just stumbled off into the bushes the Greenstone would be it. He pushed off. Ridley’s style was more prosaic than Robin’s, but the power in his legs and his familiarity with wintry things was apparent.

  Anna took Feldtmann Lake Trail. Adam had returned to Windigo that way, but he’d been traveling fast in bad light, not looking for a sign. She considered taking the one remaining pair of skis, but, in the end, she laced on her Sorels. She wasn’t proficient enough on skis not to wear herself out with them.

  In full winter regalia, passing through a snowy landscape, her suit bulky and her face peeking out through a bucket, the wheeze of her breath and the squeak of her boots all that penetrated to her muffled ears, Anna felt cut off from the natural world.

  Isolation exacerbated by a sense of being crowded. A neurotic wouldn’t know which way to flinch.

  When she was a ranger on Isle Royale, she’d hiked the Feldtmann many times. It was easygoing, running over small hills and occasionally a basalt outcropping high enough to afford views of the lake.

  Easy.

  Except the cold was a wall. Sweat ran beneath the parka, while her toes, fingers and face burned like frost was gnawing on them. She unzipped her coat and pulled off one glove – the equivalent of sticking a foot out from under the covers to cool off. Taking Robin as her example, she tried to embrace winter but kept finding herself trudging along without thinking much and seeing even less. On a search and – it was still to be hoped – rescue, this was bad.

  In frustration, she pulled off hat and balaclava. The cold hurt, and she wondered if Paul would still love her if the tips
of her nose and ears turned black, but the sense of being bundled into helplessness diminished. At least she could hear the rat-tatting of the woodpeckers and the chittering of squirrels.

  Life had come back while she wasn’t paying attention. She tilted her head back and looked at the sky. The snow had stopped. The clouds were still too low for Jonah to take the airplane up, but they looked like they might lift in an hour or more. The thought of backup – or an audience to witness her weakness – gave her usable energy and she pushed on in better spirits.

  Another two hours elapsed before she reached Feldtmann Lake. It was too far. A woman running from a bad exchange with her mentor/ tormentor, or whatever Bob was to Katherine, didn’t run nine miles on the proverbial “dark and stormy night.” Either she didn’t want to be found or she’d gone off trail. Still, like the postman, Anna made her appointed rounds. When she got tired, she had to remind herself to drink. The body didn’t give the same clues in a Michigan winter as it did in summer in the south.

  She didn’t have to remind herself to eat. The pathetic little peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich was gone before the morning was out. By noon, she was so famished she wondered if she could catch a squirrel and force it to give up the location of its stash.

  She saw a red fox, woodpeckers, red squirrels, chickadees, wolf tracks, moose tracks and what looked to be martin tracks. Nothing to indicate Katherine had been this way.

  Ridley radioed in. He’d skied ten miles up the Greenstone and seen nothing but two half-starved moose and more wolf prints.

  Robin radioed in soon after. She, too, was turning back. She’d skied as far as Lake Desor, a brutal jaunt for a lesser person, and was still talking without gasping. Robin had seen nothing. Not so much as a fox.

  Nobody could raise Adam.

  “Battery must have gone dead,” Ridley said drily.

  “Yeah.” For a man supposedly in charge of the physical plant, he seemed to be developing a penchant for being out of pocket and unreachable.

  The sun didn’t show its face, but the wind dropped to nothing and the sky lightened. When Anna was halfway back to Washington Harbor, she heard the buzz of the supercub.

  Half an hour later, Jonah found something. Color, he said. Like a piece of clothing thrown off, and a disturbed area in a cedar swamp between the Greenstone and the Feldtmann. He couldn’t see much, just that there was color on the snow where there shouldn’t be, and it was the same gold and barn red as the old parka Katherine had been wearing at the necropsy.

  No place to land that was any closer than the supercub’s tie-down on Washington Harbor, Jonah circled low and slow to see if he could get a rise out of anything in the trees around the scrap of gold and red.

  Anna radioed Ridley. “When you get to the bunkhouse, bring the Sked, a body bag and flashlights. Where’s Robin?”

  “Two miles out,” Robin’s voice came back over the air.

  “Head down the Feldtmann,” Anna told her. “I’ll mark where I go off trail.”

  Jonah circled till he spotted Anna, then waggled his wings and led off trail toward the scraps of color. She followed like a baby trumpeter swan following an ultralight.

  The find. Scraps of color. Anna suspected they no longer went to rescue a victim but to recover a body.

  She’d never have said it aloud. Bad juju.

  16

  Following Jonah’s lead, Anna made it to the cedar swamp in forty minutes. At every moment, she expected to be overtaken by the skiers but was still solo when Jonah made his last transmission: “See that rise ahead of you? Got a big nose of rock sticking out of it and trees like nose hairs?”

  “I got it,” Anna radioed back.

  “The body is right beyond that. Trees’ll clear out and there’ll be a rock about the size of a refrigerator, then you turn left. Can’t miss it. Wind’s coming up. I’ve got to head back.”

  Jonah had said “body” out loud. Out loud and over the radio. The breach of tradition gave Anna a shiver akin to that of an actor when the Scottish play is mentioned by name or peacock feathers are worn on stage. Till they knew for sure Katherine was dead – and that this was Katherine – time had to be considered of the essence. Close on quarter till four, wind rising, and fatigue dragging her steps, Anna had no choice but to keep on, but she was not averse to a little company at this point.

  “Where is everybody?” She didn’t whine, but she felt like it.

  “They’re coming,” Jonah promised. “They got held up leaving the bunkhouse.”

  Anna wondered what in the hell could have held them up. Cell phones didn’t work on the island, the radio was out, the island was socked in so seaplanes couldn’t come and go.

  Maybe somebody dropped by. Given recent events, that thought bordered on the sinister.

  She topped the rise by the nose, spotted the refrigerator, half slid down and turned left as she’d been directed. Jonah said, “You can’t miss it,” and he was old enough and wily enough not to say that unless it was true.

  In swampy areas, cedar trees fell like jackstraws, one over the other, the living with the dead, branches entangled. During the growing season, the swamps were water filled and choked with under-growth. In winter, they were navigable, but just barely. Fresh snow cloaked the branches of the upright trees and filled tiny ledges in the bark. Downed trees, fallen willy-nilly, made a lumpy quilt, protecting the living trees’ roots. Snow hid where one deadfall crossed another, and maybe three more below that, till walking through was like negotiating an icebound jungle filled with Lilliputian tiger traps.

  Traversing a cedar swamp in the snow was just begging to have an ankle broken or a knee sprained. Anna forced herself to slow down. Becoming a second victim was too humiliating to contemplate. A gust of wind knocked snow from branches down her collar, and something else that brought her to an abrupt stop, head up, sniffing the air like an animal. She’d caught a whiff of the odor she’d noticed the night they followed the wolf pack down to the harbor. A death-and-worse smell she’d associated with the stench of Algernon Blackwood’s windigo, the horrible odor that heralded its coming. As before, the smell was snatched away before she could be sure she hadn’t conjured it up from an overactive imagination.

  Then the “find” was in front of her. A body.

  Parts of a body.

  The reason Jonah had been able to spot anything from the air was due to small creatures, probably foxes, which had worried and dug until they’d uncovered the arm. Not Katherine’s body, just her arm, still in the sleeve of her parka, her ungloved hand a stump of chewed fingers. At least Anna assumed the arm was Katherine’s; it was wearing her coat.

  The sleeve of the parka wasn’t the only color in the naturally black-and-white landscape. There was no blood on the ground – or, if there was, the snow had covered it – but on the trunks of the trees leading away from the severed arm was iridescent orange paint applied with a spatter brush. The neon color was so screamingly out of place, Anna had a moment of pure confusion as her brain tried desperately to make sense of the phenomenon, flashing through traffic cones, construction sawhorses, vandalism, police tape, confetti, graffiti, trail blazes.

  A macabre vision of the severed arm blazing a trail to the body it was snatched from played through her mind. She shook it off, the way a dog shakes off a bath, and skirted the area where the arm lay, palm to the sky, fingers gnawed to the knuckle bones. At the first of the orange-daubed trees, she stopped. The neon dots were crystalline. She pulled off her glove and pinched a bit of the stuff up, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger. Body heat melted it, leaving a trace of red on her skin.

  She didn’t sniff it or taste it. Blood was said to smell metallic, but she could never smell anything unless there was a lot of it and it was getting ripe. Still, she was sure it was blood. The spatter patterns formed when Katherine had fought whatever had taken off her arm. For some reason, the interaction of blood with the intense cold turned it Halloween orange.

  White cedar trunks, bright
Pollock-like paintings in blood orange, black of the branches overhead sketching a white sky: the scene was stunningly beautiful.

  Until she saw Katherine.

  The body was facedown, head shoved partly under a log as if Katherine had tried to burrow away from her attackers. The back of her parka was torn, tufts of down leaking out rents that ran shoulder to hip where claws had dug to get at the chewy center. Strands of light brown hair mixed with the tatters of cloth and goose feathers. The fur that ringed the hood of her coat was ripped away, as was half the hood. Blood, not orange but black as tar, glued the mess together. From the waist down, she was clad only in Levi’s. Her ski pants had been shucked off of her, as a man might shuck an ear of corn, and for the same reason. The light down trousers had then been torn to pieces, played with until there was little recognizable as clothing but the suspender buckles. The Levi’s were surprisingly intact but for the bottom of the left leg. That had been chewed to a mess of string and blood. The foot was gone.

  Anna had to fight a bizarre urge to run. Mostly she liked the dead: they were quiet, undemanding and never complained if they were dropped on a carryout. Because the teeth of hungry little creatures had busily uncoiled the mortal coil had never bothered her. Human bodies were as dried leaves, acorn husks, snake skins: a thing of no import any longer left behind.

  Katherine bothered her.

  She concentrated on breathing in and breathing out and making excuses: The light was unsettling – dim and slanting and yellow-gray – cold carped on the bones, undermined body and spirit, the natural world behaving unnaturally, claustrophobic living conditions, discord in the human pack. The list of reasons did little to stop liquid fear coursing through her veins because reason wasn’t the root of it. Ghosts, yetis, skin walkers, vampires, zombies, gremlins, wogs and windigos – six million years of campfire stories – were undermining the rationale of everyone on the island.

  “Get a grip,” she growled and looked around the rest of the clearing. Focusing past the mutilated arm, she began to see other disturbances in the snow. Over an area about five feet in diameter, animals had been digging. Where they’d dug were bright orange stains. She saw the foot, boot torn off and bones showing where the flesh had been eaten away. In another depression in the snow was a hank of light brown hair clotted with black. Mostly whatever had stained the snow – fingers, flesh, a toe – had been carted off and eaten elsewhere.