Winter Study Read online

  For a moment, she, Robin and Jonah stood without speaking, eyes on the sky where the USFS plane had gone. Then, as if moved by the same impulse, the way a flock of birds will suddenly change directions, they turned and followed the track left by the snowmobile. Ungainly in bulky clothes, boots unsure on the slippery surface, Anna felt like a toddler. Robin, doing a kind of Texas two-step, the soles of her soft mukluks never leaving the surface of the lake, shuffled expertly along.

  Partway back to the dock, a supercub was tied down, a tandem-seat fabric airplane used since before World War II for air reconnaissance, search and rescue, hunting – any job that called for flying low and slow and being able to land anywhere the pilot had the guts to set it down. This one was a classic, down to the fat brown teddy bear painted on the tail, and skis where wheels would be in summer. Lines, dropped through holes cut in the ice and held there by lengths of two-by-four, were gripped by the ice when the hole froze again, making as firm a tie-down as any hook set in concrete.

  “That’s my airplane you’re admiring,” Jonah said. “She’ll let you pet her if you kiss her on the nose first.”

  Jonah was the team’s pilot. Old, Anna thought. Moon, was her second thought as she realized that when the Beaver was coming in on final approach it was Jonah’s pale old behind that dared the frigid air to welcome them in proper style.

  The glare went off the lenses of his eyeglasses and showed Anna eyes the palest blue she’d ever seen, the color of the sky with a high, thin overcast. They’d probably taken on the tint from too many years staring through the windscreens of airplanes. Jonah Schumann had to be seventy. Seventy-five, maybe.

  Jonah looked as if he could see her doing math in her head and said: “I normally don’t offer my lady’s favors to strangers such as yourself, but she may have been traumatized by recent events. The old gal is pushing fifty, and it would be a comfort to her to have the company of a contemporary.” His eyes twinkled through the deadpan seriousness of his words.

  Anna laughed and realized she’d not introduced herself. “Anna Pigeon, Rocky Mountain.” Reflexively they both thrust out their hands to shake in the approved manner, but with the mittens and gloves they were more like two old declawed bears pawing at each other.

  “Nice butt,” Anna said.

  “Thank you,” Jonah replied gravely. “Many women and some men have told me that. You have already met my fiancée.” He was looking at Robin, with her sweet, unblemished face perfectly framed by long, straight brown hair. Anna had a balaclava with the drawstring pulled till only her eyes and nose showed and, around that, to keep the cold from creeping down the collar of her parka, a wide thick scarf. The only concession to the cold Robin had made was a wool Laplander’s hat, the kind with a pointy top and silly earflaps.

  “In your dreams, Jonah,” Robin said.

  “She’s shy,” he confided. “It embarrasses her that she would marry me just for the sex.”

  Robin ducked her head and looked inland. “I’ll walk back by the Nature Trail,” she said. “I need to stop and take a look at the weather.” With that, she was two-stepping toward shore, slender and graceful in her minimalist wear.

  Anna’s twenties came back in a hot flash: the flattering but endless and, finally, exhausting sexual references and jokes, the mentioning of body parts, the sly looks, the double entendres. She’d thought that sort of thing had gone down beneath the nineties tsunami of lawsuits and political correctness. Maybe it had just gone underground, or, maybe, it would not be dead till every man of her generation and the generation before her was rotting in his grave.

  She and Jonah shuffled on toward the dock and his little airplane. On the ice to the right was a waist-high pile of snow with a shovel stuck in it. “Ice fishing?” Anna asked. “Pretty grim pastime without an ice-fishing house. I hope it’s voluntary.”

  “That’s our well,” Jonah said. Then: “Doggone it!” He hurried over to the hole chopped in the ice. “The little bastard is trying to poison us. He’s done it before.” Jonah snatched up the shovel. On the side of the excavated snow and ice was a patch of yellow. “Fox,” Jonah said. “A pesky, pissy little red fox whose mother was no better than she should have been.” Shoveling up the tainted snow carefully, he tossed it as far from the well as he could. “I tell you, this little fur ball is potent. One drop of his urine got in the well a while back. One drop and our water reeked of fox for two days.”

  “Reclaiming his territory,” Anna said.

  “Very broad-minded of you, Ranger Pigeon. Wait till you’ve had café au fox piss.” Grumbling, he began using the tip of the shovel like a gargantuan scalpel, incising spots of yellow. Anna looked back to where the moose with its cloak of ravens lay on the ice. Blood spatter from the ax formed three lines out from the pool where the animal’s head had lain. The sight was not gruesome, not ugly. Ravens were so black they seemed cut from construction paper and pasted on the reflective white of the snow. Blood was still the bright cheery red of life. The composition was set off by the inky lines of leafless trees against the blue of the sky. Stunning in its simplicity, the tableau put Anna in mind of a Japanese painting she’d seen: Death of a Samurai.

  “What are you going to do with the body?” she asked.

  Jonah jammed the shovel back into the snow pile. “Nothing. There’s nothing we could do even if we wanted. Used to, before the warm-and-cuddlies got up in arms, we’d shoot a moose once a winter. Middle pack always knew and always showed up. One year, the rules were changed, but Middle pack showed up right on schedule anyway, like they had a watch that read: MOOSE TIME. No free moose meat. They never came again. I don’t know how they know things, but they do.”

  “Think they know this is here?” Anna asked.

  “See that raven?” Jonah pointed to a sharp cut of black flying toward the western shore of the harbor. “He’s going to tell the pack supper’s on.”

  Anna believed him. She’d been around animals enough to know humans might know how much Jupiter weighs and where stars come from, but they remain in total ignorance about what the cat in their lap is thinking or who their dog tells their secrets to.

  They heard the snowmobile returning and, stiff in their bundling, rotated toward it. “We’ll load up on water, then head back up,” Jonah said. “You sure you don’t want a ride?”

  “I’m sure.” Without the distractions of dead ungulates and fox piss, she remembered how cold she was. If she didn’t move soon, she would freeze where she stood.

  “Stay away from the dock,” Jonah called after her. “Ice is always rotten around docks.”

  Anna waved an arm to let him know she’d heard. Though she’d been hypnotized by its singing and delighted in the canvas it created for the blood-and-bird painting, she wouldn’t be sorry to be on solid ground. The thought of getting wet, when the temperature was near zero and the wind brisk, scared her.

  There was no negotiating with thermodynamics.

  3

  Walking up the bank from the lake, Anna felt like a one-woman band. What snow the wind had not scoured from the Earth was so desiccated it didn’t crunch beneath her boots, it squeaked as if she walked on beads of Styrofoam. Fur and fleece rasped over her ears, nylon ski pants whistled as they rubbed cricket-like with each step. The racket made her think of Robin Adair and her friendship with winter. She and Robin spent a couple of hours together, eating breakfast and killing time, till the Forest Service pilot got the call that the clouds over Isle Royale had lifted. Though Ely and Washington Harbor were on the same parallel and not more than one hundred fifty miles apart, the lake made its own weather, often completely unrelated to what the mainland was experiencing.

  Over eggs and bacon, Anna learned Robin was born and raised on the St. Croix River in Minnesota, that she would have made the junior Olympics in cross-country skiing if she hadn’t been invalided out on a knee injury. Robin had been in love with winter her entire life. Winter was her favorite season. Either the woman had antifreeze in her veins or win
ter succumbed to her shy beauty and returned her affection. What else could explain the fact that she alone seemed comfortable in less than a walrus-sized amount of down blubber and moved as a wraith – or the apocryphal Indian – through the north woods?

  All by herself, Anna constituted a public disturbance.

  Where the dock met the shore, she stopped. The ranger station was gone. In its place was a picnic area designed with the inherent poetry of an RV-storage garage. The old, red rambling ranger station had been cramped and dirty and full of mice, but Anna missed it. The parks were never supposed to change; they were supposed to house memories of better days, keep them intact: nobody filled in the creek where one used to hunt crawdads or built a Wal-Mart in the field where the reading oak had grown.

  An unpaved road curved to the west by the fuel dock and up to the seasonal employees’ housing area. That was as she remembered it, but four huge orange fuel tanks had been put at the turn.

  Huge.

  Orange.

  She decided to take the trail through the woods.

  Twenty yards in, she saw what had become of the old ranger station. It had been replaced by a much-larger structure that housed a Visitors Center as well. Cranky as the cold made her, she could find no fault with it; it was beautifully done, and, with a boatload of tourists arriving every day in the summer from Grand Marais, when it rained the poor wretches would now have a place to seek shelter rather than sitting along the edge of the dock making pathetic attempts to keep dry beneath unfolded island maps.

  Above the new V.C. was the original concessionaire’s store: an unattractive brown wooden rectangle full of junk food, mosquito repellent and fishhooks. In the fall of her season on ISRO, two bull moose had fought in the picnic area by the door. Their antlers were so heavy, they could do little more than sway them at one another, rarely making serious contact. If moose felt the same about their antlers as old men did about their Corvettes, the windigo on the ice must have nearly died of shame.

  A quarter of a mile farther uphill, she stepped out of the trees into the clearing where the seasonal employees were housed. The place she had lived in – fondly known as the “Mink Trail” due to its plethora of mice and the weasels that came to dine on them – was gone. Beyond it, trees had been cut down and earth disturbed. In preparation for the threatened winter resort? Anna wouldn’t put it past an overeager concessionaire to finagle it through NPS channels prematurely.

  The bunkhouse where the Winter Study team would live for six weeks had smoke coming from the chimney. Anna hurried the last hundred feet. Designed for multiple occupants, the living space was laid out around a central room with a woodstove at the west end. Racks of drying socks and boots and shirts screened the heat from the fire. The three sofas, like in any self-respecting suburban home, were in a C shape around a television set. Along the back wall were computers and radio equipment. An old upright piano served as a bench for two laptops. To either side of the common room were small semiprivate apartments, with two bedrooms, a bath and a kitchen.

  Trying not to look obvious, Anna headed for the nearest bathroom, shedding her parka as she went. The door was closed, and she knocked softly before pushing it open. A blast of icy air met her. The window over the commode was open six inches, and the toilet, shower and sink area were filled with milk, orange juice, potatoes, cheese, onions, butter and a dozen other perishable food items.

  No electrical power; this was the Winter Study team’s refrigerator. She turned and started toward the bathroom in the mirror-image apartment on the other side. Halfway there, she could see three large, round plastic containers with spigots on the sink counter.

  “Our well,” Jonah had said of the hole chopped in the lake ice. There was no running water.

  No flush toilets.

  “It’s by the woodstove,” a soft voice said, and Anna realized she was not alone. Hunched in front of a computer was a small woman in gray sweater and cargo pants, on her feet the indoor version of Mrs. Steger’s moose-hide mukluks, available only in Ely and only from the store owned by übermusher Will Steger’s wife. The woman’s bland face was pleasant enough, and the brown eyes, small behind the thick glasses of the truly nearsighted, moderately welcoming. “There.” She pointed toward the stove.

  Anna looked where she indicated. Beside the woodstove, half hidden behind a rack of worn dish towels and industrial-strength winter boots, a toilet seat leaned against the wall. It had been lovingly decorated with bright red kissing lips and holly, WINTER STUDY painted on it in what looked like crimson nail polish.

  “Thanks,” Anna said, trying to look as if she’d not been foolish enough to hope for indoor plumbing.

  “The outhouse is through the kitchen door a ways,” the woman said helpfully.

  Anna caught up the ring of porcelain – or, more likely, plastic – on her way toward the northernmost kitchen, the one the study used. The toilet seat was warm from the stove. Evidently even the hardiest of souls required some few comforts.

  JONAH FIRED UP THE GENERATOR and informed Anna they would have power each evening till lights out at ten. Anna bunked with Robin on the refrigerator side. She divested herself of her layers and dressed in Levi’s and one of Paul’s old sweatshirts. On her feet was the one luxury she permitted herself to stuff into the two small-to-medium soft-sided duffels she was allowed to bring, fuzzy slippers, a sedate black but frosted with yellow-and-white cat hair. She joined the others in the working kitchen.

  Bob Menechinn was enthroned at the Formica-topped table in the chair nearest the wall, a glass of the boxed red wine, ISRO’s vin ordinaire, in his hand. Robin sat opposite him, quiet and smiling. The woman who had shown Anna where the bathroom facilities were hovered between Bob and the door to the outhouse as if, at any minute, she would make good an escape.

  Menechinn smiled at Anna appreciatively. “You clean up nice, Miss Pigeon.” The woman behind him shot him a look of alarm, quickly quelled, and Anna wondered if the woman stood where she did to be ready to protect her turf, in the person of Bob Menechinn.

  “Have you met my able assistant, Doctor Kathy Huff?” Bob said, affecting a drawl that made his words seem to linger in the air after he’d spoken. Smiling with a bonhomie that wrinkled his bulldog cheeks, he winked. Dr. Huff looked at her feet.

  Maybe Menechinn was proud of his helper’s doctorate. Maybe she was shy. Maybe he mocked her and she was hurt. Maybe they were lovers. The undercurrents were lost on Anna. She was too hungry to care.

  “What can I do to help?” she asked the kitchen in general.

  Adam peeled and chopped. Ridley cooked. Robin was allowed to make a salad, but only after begging for the honor. Over five decades of tradition was squeezed into the small kitchen: jobs were not up for grabs; one had to be grandfathered in for every task. Realizing the study’s dinner rituals were as full of social land mines for the uninitiated as the kitchen of a kosher chef on the eve of Hanukkah, Anna sat down out of the way and watched.

  It was the first time she’d seen her housemates divested of layers and hoods, gloves and down pants. Ridley was as she had envisioned him: a smallish man with wiry muscles and surprisingly broad shoulders. His hands and feet were small and would have suited a dancer, had he gone in a different direction. At thirty, he was a full professor at Michigan Tech, married and now the lead researcher on one of the country’s most prestigious studies. His hair was fine as a baby’s and curled down between his shoulder blades in a loose ponytail held by a rubber band. Ridley would have been beautiful but was saved by crooked teeth and a mouth too wide for his face. Had he gotten early orthodonture, he would have been a pedophile’s dream as a kid and a students’ heartthrob when he grew up.

  Except for Robin, Ridley was the youngest member of the team, but his authority wasn’t questioned – at least not by the Winter Study people. On the ice, he and Bob had swayed what passed in Homo sapiens for antlers at each other. Neither seemed intimidated. Bob might have Homeland Security’s ax, but Ridley was at
home on the island as Bob Menechinn was not. Like Anna, he seemed to suffer from the cold, and she got the feeling he was more comfortable with women than men.

  Adam struck Anna as the natural alpha of the group, but he apparently didn’t mind taking orders from Ridley. He was younger than she’d first thought, in his late thirties. Like Ridley, he wore his hair long, keeping it in a braid. Silver was beginning to weave through the dark brown plait. Anna loved men with long hair, a hangover from her college days. It suggested a wildness that appealed to her. Adam’s suited him. His scarecrow body was ridged with muscle and his hands scarred from work. The nineteenth-century mustache gave his gaunt face a dramatic appeal, the hero of a western saga or a soldier making a last charge into the valley of death.

  Adam maintained the machinery and the physical plants. From the talk, Anna guessed he was a perennial seasonal; one of the men and women who worked a northern park in summer and a southern park in winter. They had little in the way of material things, living with long-distance and commonly broken relationships, no children, no savings, no house. The lifestyle seemed glamorous till one hit forty; then, by the alchemy of age, it was touched with failure and sadness.

  During the course of the meal, Anna began to be initiated into the rules and regulations of Winter Study. Rules written nowhere except in stone. She learned the red rag was for dishes, the gray for wiping countertops. One did not wash with the wiping cloth nor wipe with the washing cloth. It had “just evolved” that way, Jonah told her, and she understood that it had calcified into law and would remain thus until one or the other of the rags – or the team – disintegrated with age.

  No one but the pilot could remove the cozy from the bowl containing brown sugar and then only with much discussion of “Mrs. Brown’s” disrobing and how that might or might not affect those attempting it.