Winter Study Page 4

  She learned that the researchers had two modes of dinner conversation: mocking the Park Service, most particularly the law enforcement end of it, and talking nonsense, the ringleader of the nonsense being Jonah, the audience Ridley and Adam.

  By the end of the meal, which was excellent – that or the calories one had to burn just to stay warm leant savor to it – Anna realized that this style of communication, or, more to the point, noncommunication, allowed them to live together in greater harmony than meaningful exchanges would have; an American backwoods version of the privacy once maintained in the Orient by elaborate ritual courtesy.

  In another setting, Anna might have taken offense at the scorn heaped on the rangers and management of Isle Royale. Being law enforcement and, with her new position at Rocky Mountain, at least nominally management, the mean-spirited gossip should have offended her. In principle, it did and, like the ongoing sexual teasing of Robin, grew tiresome, but it didn’t hurt her feelings. There was a habitualness about it that transcended insensitivity or insult. Like the other rituals, it had evolved over the years, and they carped with much the same lack of devotion as illiterate Catholics mouthing a Latin mass.

  Anna was happy to sit without speaking and let it wash around her. She couldn’t remember being so hungry. The helpings she was given – and the seconds she took – were double what she was accustomed to, yet she was as excited about the dessert as any of the men and had to restrain herself from asking for more ice cream.

  When the meal was finished, Ridley and Adam thanked Jonah for a fine dinner. Anna hadn’t seen the old pilot do anything, but, not wanting to be rude, she thanked him as well. Jonah hauled one of the two large metal containers of hot water that lived on the woodstove and poured the double sinks full. He and Ridley began pulling on yellow rubber gloves as Jonah joked about his favorite subject; this time it was Ridley he pretended was madly in love with him and was lecturing him about unwelcome visits to his room in the night. Neither was gay – Anna would have bet on it – it was simply another game that had taken root so long ago no one was sure why they still played it.

  She offered to do the dishes, which she thought was mighty big of her, but was met with uncomprehending and none-too-friendly stares. Precisely what custom dictated who a chief bottle washer was, she didn’t know, but, wanting to help, to thank them for the meal, to ingratiate herself – or whatever it was she felt a need to do – she insisted.

  Confused rather than appreciative, they abandoned her to it. The only one who remained to help or keep her company was Dr. Huff.

  “Do you want to wash or rinse, Kathy?”

  “Katherine. Rinse.” That speech brought the sum total of words the woman had uttered since the toilet seat introduction to about twelve. She made Robin seem like a motormouth.

  As the steam rose and the pile of dirty dishes diminished, to make conversation Anna asked Katherine what her doctorate was in. Again, there was the odd ducking flinch and the furious blush. Katherine wasn’t much older than Robin, not yet thirty, yet her skin had the opacity associated with women considerably past menopause. The blush didn’t prettily pink her cheeks but dyed them the color of new brick.

  “I haven’t got it quite yet,” Katherine admitted. Moisture blanked her glasses, and Anna couldn’t read her eyes. “I’m all-but-dissertation. Bob – Dr. Menechinn – has my thesis. Then it goes to committee. It’s on the wolves in Wyoming. The alphas have started mating with more than one female in the pack.”

  “They must be becoming habituated to humans,” Anna said.

  They had progressed to the flatware, washed last, and dumped into a long-handled deep-fat fryer set in the rinse water for that purpose – another rule, and one Anna would have bent had not Jonah appeared behind her and Katherine with the implement and the instructions at the proper moment – when Katherine whispered:

  “God’s nightgown.”

  The archaic oath made Anna laugh. The look on Katherine’s face made her stop. Religious awe or deep-seated horror drew the skin around her eyes tight. Her jaw had gone slack.

  “What is it?” Anna demanded.

  Katherine pointed at the small window over the sink. Her hand was shaking so bad tiny bubbles from the dish soap floated free and rose on the warm air. When Anna tossed the flatware into the rinse, steam had blanked the window. Undoubtedly shattering half a dozen traditions, she wiped it clear with the red dishrag.

  Silver light from a three-quarter moon caught ice crystals on the snow and rime on pine needles and tree branches. In the superdried air, the light was so pure the world beyond the glass glowed with it, and Anna could see with surreal clarity. Whatever Katherine had seen was gone. Or had been imaginary.

  Hands dripping, Katherine turned and ran to the common room.

  Anna ran after her, drying her hands on her trousers. Katherine squeezed behind the television set, cupped her hands against the glass of the picture window and pressed her face to the glass. Anna did the same.

  Delineated by moonlight and snow, seven wolves trotted across the compound. Heads low, they came single file, long legs and big paws carrying them effortlessly over the patchy snow. Anna’d seen wolves in captivity, seen wolf pups, but to see seven adult wolves in the moonlight, wolves that moved through the night the way they were meant to, the moon catching their fur until they were frosted with silver, their shadows black on the ground, was pure magic.

  Then they were gone, the last tail swallowed up by the shaggy line of birch trunks at the edge of the clearing.

  “Wow!” Anna whispered inadequately.

  “They’ve never done this. Never. Not even close,” Ridley said.

  “Something’s got them stirred up.” He’d crowded so close behind Anna, she felt his breath on her hair. He must have noticed the moment she did. He backed away awkwardly.

  The others began to move and talk. Katherine remained immobile. Her face had the same rapt look that had scared Anna over the dirty dishes. In a child, she would have termed it awe. In a woman grown, it was the aspect of true love beholding the object of adoration.

  “I didn’t think they came around people,” Bob said.

  “They don’t,” Ridley replied. “Three times in the last fifty years, we’ve found wolf tracks in the housing area. Not a pack, tracks of a single wolf. Every time, there was a dead wolf in the carpentry shop, either dissected or about to be. They stay away from us and we stay away from them. We try and keep it that way. In wolf/tourist run-ins, wolves always come out the losers. The island is too small to destroy or transport a wolf without damaging the population and screwing up the study. Something stirred them up,” he repeated.

  “The windigo,” Robin said. It sounded as if she wanted to believe in a windigo more than moose meat. People loved their ghosts, demons, fairies and angels. Anna didn’t. For her, stark reality was magical, mysterious and sufficiently deadly. She didn’t need to put monstrous faces on starvation and cruelty, or wings and feathers on hope.

  “I thought windigos were strict humanitarians,” she said. “Don’t they just eat people?”

  “Everybody loves junk food,” Jonah said.

  “They smell the blood of the moose,” Bob said. “Their sense of smell is acute.”

  “Exactly.” Ridley’s word was agreeable but the tone was not. The lead researcher evidently didn’t like an axman from Homeland Security educating him on wolf traits. “They can smell over a thousand times more efficiently than humans. And they can smell humans. We must reek like a paper mill to them. There is any number of ways the pack could get to the moose. Why come so near us?”

  “Do you think the other packs will come?” Robin asked.

  “They shouldn’t.” Ridley moved to the piano bench and began pulling on high-waisted woolen ski pants, snapping the suspenders over his shoulders.

  “If they do, it could get ugly,” Adam said, and Ridley shot him a look, a widening of the eyes and downturn of the lips that Anna associated with social conspiracies, like l
istening to your best friend lie her way out of detention.

  “Pack wars,” Robin said somberly. Anna figured it out. They were trying to scare the pants off the Homeland Security guy.

  Pack wars were not uncommon, but there was sufficient territory for East, Middle and Chippewa Harbor packs so they didn’t clash too often. When they did, it was hit-and-run, not the full-scale slaughter humans had perfected.

  Ridley took mukluks from the drying rack beside the woodstove and sat down again to put them on. The anesthetizing influence of a wolf sighting wearing off, it dawned on the group what he was doing.

  As one, they scrambled for their boots and coats. Cursed with new gear, Anna was last out the front door. The rest were halfway across the housing complex. Uplifted by the excitement of watching a pack of wild wolves devour a kill, she wasn’t bothered by the cutting wind from the northwest as she duckwalked quickly down the slippery steps in her ungainly boots and started across the clearing.

  Suddenly she stopped. A whiff, a hint of something freakishly bad, evil and death and old fish distilled into a toxic perfume, was borne on the wind. Tilting her head back, she sniffed. It was gone. She smelled nothing but the clean, vicious perfection of winter.

  The Ojibwa’s windigo was heralded by the stench of rotting corpses, the rotten stink of a cannibal’s breath, and the distillation of hopelessness. The cannibal spirit came on the wind from the northwest.

  For someone who had eschewed the supernatural not ten minutes before, Anna felt a distinctly unnatural chill along the back of her stomach and up both sides of her spine.

  She waited and watched the black of the woods in the direction from which the wind blew. The line of shadows that marked the trees hid anything that might have been there.

  4

  Despite the pack’s dramatic arrival, the wolves settled down in lupine domesticity around the unexpected gift of the moose carcass. Anna could have happily burned her calories just keeping warm and watching them, but the second day of the pack’s visit Ridley put the team back to work. Robin had gone cross-country with her rucksack and plastic baggies to seek out ever-more-marvelous bits of frozen excretions and effluvia. Adam was building a snowmobile shed. As far as Anna was concerned, he had the worst of the work. Construction at seven above zero struck her as a miserable way to make a living, but he’d acted as if he was looking forward to it.

  She landed the plum job. Jonah was taking her up in the cub to see if they could find Chippewa Harbor pack. Flights in the supercub were jealously guarded. From the scuttlebutt, Anna knew there’d been guests of the study who’d never managed an invite to fly. She doubted she’d have been so lucky had Ridley not had so many wolves close to home to play with.

  Four hours immobile in a two-seat fabric airplane with a heater that did not deserve the name was a recipe for misery, if not frostbite, and Anna had not come prepared. In borrowed knee-high, insulated boots that looked more like robot prosthetics than shoes – Ridley’s size nines – and more layers than a winter onion, she watched uselessly as Jonah walked around the airplane checking for damage, standard operation for preflight. At first, to be companionable, she’d attempted to follow him, but in the oversized boots she moved like an arctic clown on Quaaludes. The characterization was completed, she suspected, by a bright red nose.

  On the far side of the harbor, beyond the little airplane, wolves lounged around the moose carcass like fat house dogs around a hearth. “Won’t we scare them off?” she asked.

  “There’s not been a wolf on this island in three generations – that’s in dog years; ten years old is an old wolf – that hasn’t had an airplane buzzing around from the time he was a pup,” Jonah said and began unwrapping an orange, oil-stained down comforter he kept around his lady’s nose when she was earthbound so her engine wouldn’t turn into a block of ice. “The sound doesn’t bother them. Most don’t even look up. I think they live the simple life: food/no food, threat/no threat, sex/no sex. In the no food, no threat, no sex category, the cub and I aren’t worth a passing glance.

  “Get the tie-down, if you will.”

  Anna clowned over to where the wing was tethered to the ice and was amused momentarily by the image of the supercub taking off with the frozen harbor dangling cartoonlike from the tie-down lines beneath the wings. Loath to remove her gloves, she had barely loosed the knot by the time Jonah had untied his side and come around. Because she’d learned to do it on ISRO with boat lines, she carefully laid the rope in a coil.

  The cub had clamshell doors, a hexagon cut laterally and opening up and down. Jonah let the lower part of the door down and held the upper against the high wing. “Hop in. I fly from the rear seat.”

  Hopping was not an option. Anna clambered into the front seat and manually arranged her great booted extremities so they wouldn’t interfere with Jonah’s operation of the ailerons, then lay there helplessly gazing at nothing. The supercub was a tail dragger and, on the ground, sat nose high, the windscreen pointing at pale gray sky.

  The plane jounced. Jonah had gotten in. A prisoner of survival gear, turning around to look was in the same category as hopping. “Here,” Jonah said, and a headset was thrust over her right shoulder. “You know how to use one of these things?”

  “I do.” High-tech communications in an old supercub struck an odd note. It seemed as if the small-plane industry had not kept pace with electronics. But, then, nothing had kept pace with electronics. Anna put on the earphones, adjusted the mike and then continued staring at a blank sky while Jonah went through his checklist.

  The engine fired smoothly and the plane began to taxi, skis sliding over the ice. The nose blocking the view forward, Anna looked out the side window at the pack. Ravens inked the snow in ever-changing kaleidoscopes of black and white. They ranted and teased, flying at the wolves’ heads, then stopping in a sudden outthrust of wings inches out of reach of the wolves’ jaws. Suddenly the radio-collared female whipped out of feigned sleep, and where there’d been a bird there was only a few feathers and new drops of blood, bright and jewel-like, on the snow. Neither wolves nor ravens turned a head as the supercub roared by.

  The engine revved up to a determined bellow and the cub picked up speed. The tail lifted off the lake and the horizon came down; Beaver Island was approaching with considerable speed, and Anna unconsciously braced herself for collision. Then they were airborne, banking around Beaver and flying down Washington Harbor. Forgetting the mike was voice-activated, Anna laughed aloud with the gust of pure expanding freedom.

  “I feel it every time,” Jonah said.

  The NPS was Anna’s favorite bureaucracy, but a bureaucracy all the same, and it had endless safety regulations. Aviation safety experts had come up with the mind-boggling discovery that many crashes were caused by the airplane colliding with the ground and passed rules about how low and slow was acceptable. Jonah Schumann exhibited a fine indifference to the rules. Anna could almost feel the treetops tickling the airplane’s canvas belly.

  She loved it. Except for the cold and the racket, it was like flying in dreams.

  “East pack has been hanging around Mott Island, but we haven’t found Chippewa Harbor pack yet,” Jonah said in her ears.

  Isle Royale was forty-two miles long and no more than twelve across at its widest point. It was hard to believe a group of seven or eight big animals could stay out of sight from air surveillance, but they did. Wolves traveled long distances, and slept a lot during the day. It wasn’t unusual to “lose” a pack for a week or more.

  “We’ll head up toward Malone Bay, see if we can scare anything up,” he said. Malone Bay was about halfway between Windigo at the west end of the island and Rock Harbor at the east. Malone Bay was one of the backcountry outposts; the ranger was inevitably dubbed the “Malone Ranger” because of the isolation.

  Anna settled into the joy of flight, of being up where there was air to breathe instead of sequestered in a smoky bunkhouse, of seeing the island in a glory of white and black.<
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  The bed of Lake Superior had been gouged out by glaciers. Isle Royale, made of tougher material, was scored and slashed but remained above water. From the air, the colossal shredding was evident; ridges ran the length of the island, and smaller islands, long and thin as scratches, stood offshore separated from the main island by deep channels. Hikers unfamiliar with the topography frequently underestimated the difficulty of traveling through country boned with sharp stone ridges and crosshatched with swampy valleys.

  As they flew toward Malone Bay, Anna caught glimpses of the Greenstone Trail, a ribbon of white weaving in and out of the trees.

  “This goes any lower or we get any wind, we’ll have to head back,” came Jonah’s voice in Anna’s ears. She looked from the trail to the sky. The cloud ceiling, high and solid looking in Windigo, was lower, the clouds darker. Situated in a cold basin of water, the island’s microclimates were pronounced and unpredictable.

  Anna didn’t want to go back; like Peter Pan, she wanted to fly to the first star to the right, then straight on till morning.

  An expanse of white unfurled inland from Lake Superior between the airplane and the cloud mass. “Siskiwit Lake?” she asked. Siskiwit was the largest lake on Isle Royale.

  “Siskiwit,” Jonah confirmed. “Hey!” He banked the cub so suddenly that Anna lurched to one side and banged her elbow on the Plexiglas window.

  On the clear expanse of ice, seven black figures made a fan-shaped pattern like the wake of a boat behind a larger dot. A pack of wolves had chased a moose out of the trees and onto the open area of the lake, an old bull by the look of it. Jonah closed the distance quickly and flew low and to the side so Anna could get pictures.

  “Chippewa pack, I think. I guess it could be East. Holy moly, look at the blood! You’d have thought the ticks would have drunk so much there’d be hardly enough left to fill a thermos,” Jonah said with more glee than Anna thought seemly. “Looks like what you’d get if you crossed Jackson Pollock with Bloody Mary.”