Winter Study Read online

  “Word came down from Washington. Terrorists.” Robin snorted, and Anna was surprised such a delicate sculpted nose could produce such an excellent snort. “If they’re from the Middle East, creeping across the Canadian border in the dead of winter to paddle to the island, they’re going to freeze their little terrorist butts off.”

  Word had come down from Washington.

  After 9/11, Homeland Security dumped money on the NPS. Everybody loved it. It was like Christmas, till they noticed the money was earmarked for law enforcement. Like Popeye’s arms, the LE divisions were puffed up in classic steroidal fashion, the interpretive programs relegated to the leavings.

  Now D.C. sent down the “Interpretive Theme” for the year, and campfire programs – from the Everglades to Death Valley to the Kenai Peninsula – had to focus on pollution or endangered species or bioterrorism – whatever the folk in Washington thought was important at the moment. Never mind that the public wasn’t interested, or that the theme didn’t suit the park.

  Free money was never free.

  “ Lake ’s wide open,” the pilot said.

  Anna looked at what she’d thought was the gleam of ice on the approaching shore of Lake Superior. Open water. In a colder winter, a pair of wolves had crossed an ice bridge from Canada and set up housekeeping on the island. The lake freezing solid from Isle Royale to the Canadian shore was rare; it hadn’t happened in over thirty years. She watched as water replaced land beneath the wings and Isle Royale began to take shape on the horizon. In the joy of seeing the island from the air, she forgot about Paul, the cold and the antagonisms of mere mortals.

  Washington Harbor reached out a welcoming arm, and the airplane flew in low and slow. Water, catching the iridescent blue and amber of the sky, riffled between narrowing banks of evergreens, black with shadow. Blue turned to white as ice formed in the shallower water, ringing Beaver Island in a necklace of diamonds. At the level of the treetops, and hugging the bank to avoid the worst of the crosswind, the pilot lined up on the expanse of white between the tiny harbor island and the docks at Windigo.

  The weekly arrival of food and people from the outside world was apparently quite an event. A snowmobile, surrounded by four figures so muffled in layers of clothing that they looked like bags of dirty laundry, was parked on the ice east of the dock. As the airplane slid gracefully from the sky, one of the bundles turned its back, dropped its insulated trousers and mooned them; a pale butt exposed to the elements. Anna laughed. The pilot ignored it.

  As the propeller came to a stop, bearded faces with fur-rimmed hoods peered up at them, and Anna was put in mind of Cro-Magnons first sighting a metal bird from the gods. The pilot shut down the engine, unbuckled his harness and slid from the left seat. Robin Adair, light as a snowflake in a Christmas globe, drifted from the rear seat to the harbor ice. Anna pawed open her harness buckles and maneuvered her oversized boots out one at a time, thrust her down-padded rear end through the door and clambered awkwardly down the itsy-bitsy steps on the wheel pant. Ninety minutes sitting in the cold had done nothing to add to her natural grace and she clumped to the ground with all the dignity of a garbage bag tossed into a Dumpster.

  Wind, razor-sharp and just as cruel, cut across her cheek as she turned to the troglodyte welcoming committee. A wall of parka-puffed backs greeted her.

  Robin’s voice cut through the whistling silence: “Holy smoke!” She spoke in the hollow whisper of a celluloid citizen seeing the mother ship. Anna toddled to the end of the wall of flesh and goose feathers. Through the dense night of trees on the ragged shore, a huge dark shape moved erratically.

  “A windigo,” Robin breathed.

  The Algernon Blackwood story of the Ojibwa legend that rangers told around the campfire to scare the pants off park visitors flooded Anna’s mind. The windigo was a voracious and monstrous cannibal that feasted on human flesh and souls on the shores of northern lakes, where no one could hear the crying of its tortured victims.

  Anna was not given to superstition, but the summer she worked on the island the story had given her the creeps for a few nights. Robin’s pale, pinched face and hollow voice brought them back.

  The creature in the trees was immense, larger than a horse, and moved in painful lurches. It appeared to shrink and expand in an unnatural way, and it took Anna a tense moment to realize the animal was not drifting in and out of supernatural realms but falling to its knees and fighting its way up again. It stumbled clear of the masking trees and onto the lake ice, hooves ringing loud against the rimed stones.

  “Watch out,” one of the bearded men said. “Not all moose are Bullwinkle.”

  Anna shaded her eyes against the glare. Where the moose’s antlers should have been were freakishly twisted horns with gobbets of diseased-looking flesh, pustules the size of hens’ eggs, six or more inches long, and dependent from a bony structure grown wild as coral, cancerous and out of control.

  Head swaying in wide, low arcs, as if the deformed antlers tugged at its sanity and drove spikes deep into its brain, the animal lurched toward them. In the harsh light reflecting from the ice, the grotesque growths looked pink and alive. Sixty yards from where they stood, the moose went to its knees. Dark eyes, full of anguish; it raised its massive head and cried, a tiny bleat like that of a newborn lamb. Then its chin fell to the ice and it didn’t move again.

  In sci-fi movies, when a plague was loosed on mankind, it invariably produced a growth unfettered by gravity or plan; warts and goiters to cause a makeup artist to wriggle with delight. This windigo was as cursed as any Hollywood extra, dying for eighty dollars a day.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Anna was startled at the anger in her voice.

  “It’s rare, but it happens when an old or malnourished bull hasn’t enough juice to grow a set of new antlers for breeding season,” replied the youngest looking of the beards. “At least we think that’s part of it. The Ojibwa thought these moose were taken by the windigo, possessed by evil.”

  “We should put it out of its misery.” This from the tallest and bulkiest of the Cro-Magnons.

  There was a note of excitement in his voice that bothered Anna almost as much as the crumpled monster on the ice.

  2

  “I’m Ridley Murray,” said the man who’d explained the twisted antlers. All Anna could see of him were his eyes, deep hazel, with thick dark lashes. His voice was alto rather than tenor, but he didn’t sound weak or womanish; he sounded gentle. Anna liked him instantly; always a red flag in her book. Judgment of character wasn’t one of her strong suits.

  “I’m the lead researcher,” he told her. “This,” and he waved a mittened hand in the direction of the large man who’d evinced the desire to kill the windigo moose, “is Bob Menechinn, Homeland Security.” Ridley’s voice was bland almost to the point of insolence. Almost.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Bob said and offered Anna his hand. He resembled the actor John Goodman. Even without down padding, he was a big man, well over six feet, and had the fleshy, plastic face Goodman was so deft at morphing from benevolent goodness to bloated evil, as a role required.

  “Anna Pigeon, Rocky Mountain,” Anna said.

  “It’s dead,” Robin called. While they’d introduced themselves, she’d scooted quickly and easily over the slippery surface to where the moose lay. The fourth Cro-Magnon was with her.

  “Adam, would you get the camera and an ax?” Ridley asked a lanky individual wrapped in the most disreputable winter gear Anna had ever laid eyes on. His parka had at one time probably been a uniform khaki but had been smudged, drizzled, splashed and spotted by so many substances the original color showed only under the zipper flap. Ripstop nylon had proved unable to stop the incursions of sharp objects. Sleeves and body sported tears sprouting feathers, and his cuffs looked as if they had been caught in a paper shredder.

  “Will do,” Adam said and loped off toward the snowmobile, joints loose, back straight, a scarecrow in an arctic Oz.

  Anna, Bob and
Ridley shuffled over the ice to join Robin and the remains of the windigo.

  Robin was on hands and knees by the deceased animal. Ridley clapped a hand on the shoulder of the man Anna’d not yet met. “This is-”

  “The only sane, and by far the handsomest, man on the island.” The man swept back his hood as if to show Anna the extent of his beauty. His hair was snow white. Awry from being smashed, it stuck out everywhere it wasn’t glued to his skull. His beard was close cropped and white to the point of iridescence. Reflections flashing off lenses in round wire-rimmed glasses obscured his eyes.

  “Robin has been after me for two seasons,” the sane and handsome man went on, his smile showing small straight teeth that would have suited the face of a beatific child or a feral badger, “but the poor child has had to settle for – what’s his name, Robin?”

  “Gavin,” Robin said. Anna couldn’t tell if she was flattered or simply bored by the pseudosexual attention. At any rate, she seemed used to it.

  “That’s right, Gavin, a callow boy, and tall enough to be my father. Jonah Schumann at your service,” Jonah said to Anna.

  Ridley Murray showed no irritation at Jonah’s interruption or at being relegated to, at best, the second-handsomest man on Isle Royale but watched with a slight affectionate smile on his face as one might watch a favorite uncle.

  “You want to tell her about antlers, Jonah?” Ridley asked.

  Jonah ducked his head in graceful declination. “Let’s see if I’ve taught you anything,” he said.

  “Antlers are grown over the summer to impress females when mating season comes in the fall,” Ridley told Anna. “They’re expensive. Enormous amounts of food and minerals and energy go into growing them.”

  “Size does matter,” Jonah interjected solemnly.

  Ridley laughed. “Older moose, or animals that are too worn down – maybe the winter’s colder or there’s not much fodder – can spend the last of their reserves growing antlers. If they pull it off, they get the girl, but they usually die the next winter.”

  Anna thought of old men and Corvettes but had the good sense to keep her mouth shut.

  “The deformity is called a peruke, French for ‘wig.’ This is one for the record books. I’ve never seen one this extreme. Shoot, I’ve never seen one alive, just photographs.”

  “Everything he knows is from my book on the crepuscular deviations of caddis flies in ungulates,” Jonah said gravely.

  With a stiff-backed arrogance that could have indicated a big ego or chronic lower-back pain, Bob Menechinn squatted at the animal’s head. Momentarily he lost his balance and grabbed a twisted antler to steady himself. Ridley flinched.

  “Careful of the antlers, Bob,” he said evenly.

  “Whoa! This is the mother lode. Lookie,” the biotech said as she deftly pulled a small ziplock bag out of the army rucksack she’d offloaded from the plane. “Ticks. This old guy was about drunk up. How many you figure?” she asked Ridley.

  He surveyed the carcass. The moose’s ribs showed stark from starvation. The flanks were caved in, the hide patchy with bald places where he’d scraped against trees to free himself of the pestilence of winter ticks. “Jeez. At least fifty thousand, maybe sixty,” Ridley estimated. “This boy was a regular Red Cross blood bank.”

  Robin plucked a thick tuft of hair. Half a dozen fat ticks clung to the roots. She put the little colony into the plastic bag, zipped it and put it back in her rucksack. Anna hoped the baggie was one of the fancy double-lock kind.

  No one spoke for a moment and silence settled like snow. A sound, both distant and immediate, didn’t so much break the silence as join it, the call of a gray whale beneath fathoms of seawater. Anna looked to Robin to see if she’d heard it too. A reflex from the bad old days, when windowpane acid had slammed into her brain so hard for years she’d been careful not to remark on odd phenomena lest she be the only one experiencing them. She’d thought she’d left that particular paranoia behind. The retro twitch must have been triggered by the weird black-and-white world, with its windigo and Cro-Magnon tribe.

  And cold so vicious and unrelenting, it felt personal.

  She tried to shove her hands in her pockets, but they were too fat to fit.

  “The ice is singing,” Robin said. “It’s always moving, shifting. Sometimes it cracks like a gunshot. All kinds of sounds.”

  Anna blocked out the fact that Jack Frost was gnawing her bones and opened to the song: far off, underfoot, a murmur of instruments not yet invented, hollow lutes and soft drums, the warble of birds without throats just beyond the threshold of hearing, as if it came into the mind on some other wavelength. In Texas, the wind sang in that same way when the rock formations were just right. Music so deeply ingrained in the world, Anna felt if she could listen long enough and hard enough, she would learn a great truth.

  Before enlightenment was achieved, the snowmobile came shrieking back down the hill from the bunkhouse. Dragging a trailer – a lidded aluminum box the size of a coffin set on skis – the machine raced over the lake and came to a stop beside the moose’s body.

  “Adam Peck,” Ridley said as the driver turned off the engine. “He missed our meet and greet.”

  “Hey,” Adam said affably. He looked to be in his forties, and, when he pulled down his muffler to speak, Anna noticed he hadn’t a beard but a lush mustache of the kind seldom seen anywhere but in pictures of Civil War heroes.

  He sprang off the snowmobile with the sharp suddenness of a switchblade knife opening and lifted the trailer’s lid.

  “Camera,” he said, like a surgical nurse might say “Scalpel.”

  Robin began taking pictures of the moose from all angles. The buzz of a scientific find – or an audience at a freak show – began over the size and peculiarity of the antlers, the number of ticks, the marks of starvation on the body.

  Due to moose predation, balsam fir, the favored food in winter, was almost gone from the island, and the once-thriving herd – nearly fifteen hundred when Anna had been a ranger on Isle Royale – was down to around three hundred animals.

  “Will hunger make the wolves more aggressive?” Menechinn asked. He’d been watching the recording process, with his arms folded across his chest and his chin buried in his neck scarf.

  “It will,” Robin said.

  “I’ve never seen an increase in wolf aggression that was tied to food availability,” Ridley said. “Only to sex and turf.”

  “There’s always a first time,” Adam sided with the biotech.

  Ridley shrugged. “Are we ready for the ax?” he asked Robin. “We need to take the head,” he explained to Anna. “It’s a perfect example of the peruke deformity. If we leave it, the critters will get it.” Already ravens were calling the good news of the slaughter to each other and cutting up the pale sky with ink-stained wings.

  “Here.” Bob Menechinn held out a hand for the ax. “I’ll do it. Man, it would be something to have that on your wall, wouldn’t it?”

  “Step back,” Ridley warned them, ignoring the offer. “This is going to be messy.”

  Ridley wasn’t much taller than Anna, five-eight maybe, and slight, but he swung the ax like a man long used to chopping his own wood. Hefting it back across his shoulder, he swung it in a clean arc, the strength of his legs in the blow.

  The axhead buried itself in meat and bone behind the moose’s ears.

  Anna’d thought it would be the way the guillotine was depicted in the movies; a single chop and the moose’s head would roll free of its body. Except, with the antlers, it couldn’t roll. With the long, bulbous nose, it couldn’t roll. Moose were not beasts designed for a beautiful life or a dignified death.

  Ridley put his mukluk on the thick neck and yanked on the ax. With a sucking crunch, it jerked loose, and blood flew like a flock of cardinals over the ice.

  The head lolled. Great, dark eyes stared upward; the executed watching the executioner botch the job.

  “He looks stoned.” Bob laughed. “Or is
it a she?”

  Ridley’s ax hit the animal between the eyes.

  “God dammit,” he whispered, took a deep breath and swung the ax again, severing the head but for an eight-inch strip of hide that Adam quickly cut with a mat knife he produced from somewhere in his ragtag clothing.

  Ravens were landing before they’d finished wrapping the moose’s head in a tarp. They hopped and scolded; their feast was growing cold. Bolder birds dashed in to snatch bits of flesh from the open neck wound; easy pickings, with no tough hide to tear through. By the time the carcass was consumed, all manner of smaller creatures would have had a good dinner; maybe the meal that would give them the strength to make it until summer, when the island provided in plenty.

  With the severed head wrapped in black plastic and stowed in the snowmobile trailer, Anna and the others shuffled back to the Beaver and finished transferring gear and food into the trailer around the moose head. Because of the size and awkward shape of the antlers, the trailer’s lid had to be propped partly open. Adam driving, Bob behind him, and Ridley, boots planted wide on the rear runners like a musher with a mechanized pack of dogs, headed up to the bunkhouse.

  The Forest Service plane took off, leaving the ground in a surprisingly short time and disappearing around Beaver Island as the pilot used the length of Washington Harbor to get up to altitude for the flight back to Ely.

  The sounds of internal combustion machines, simultaneously anachronistic and a reassuring reminder that Winter Study team was not marooned on an icebound island in the time of the mastodons, grew fainter. Anna wanted to hear the ice singing again, but there was nothing but the quarreling of ravens.