Winter Study Page 5

  Channeling the Pillsbury Doughboy, she lifted the camera and pushed her body closer to the window as the plane banked and circled for another pass. The wolves had been on the moose for a while, harrying it in hopes it would die of a thousand cuts or exhaustion. Reading the tracks, Anna could see how the battle had unfolded: the line of hoofprints from the northern shore of the lake to dead center; behind, the single-track wolf paw prints spread out among the trees – the pack pushing the moose to open country. Once on the lake, the wolves’ tracks fell into close formation behind the hoofprints, keeping back from the sharp hooves and bone-breaking antlers.

  “They’re going in,” Jonah shouted in her ear.

  A wolf lunged, battening onto the narrow haunch of the moose. Trying to throw off the beast locked on its rump, trying to keep the pack in front of it where it could use its front feet to defend itself, the bull spun around, the center of a tornado of gray-furred predators. Blood spattered in a mutant circle thirty or more feet in diameter. In the trees, the moose would have slammed the wolf on its rear into rocks or tree trunks, tried to smash it with brute force. On ice, the moose was at a disadvantage.

  Blood and beasts tangled in a macabre snow angel, then the moose broke off and bolted for shore, the wolf still hanging off his haunch. A second wolf drew down, long and lean, and streaked across the snow, then lifted into the air, struck the moose’s other rear leg, bit down and hung on. The moose, with this burden of death, fell to its knees. The rest of the wolves began to circle. To Anna’s surprise, the bull struggled to its feet, three wolves on it now. Twice more it fell and twice more rose and fought on.

  “Can we land?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t trust the ice. Nobody’s checked the thickness yet,” Jonah said. He brought the supercub lower for the last act of the moose’s life. Three wolves on its back, the others made side rushes, cutting at the tendons in its legs. The moose stayed on its feet another ten yards, then stopped.

  As if he was not being savaged by wolves but had chosen, like Geronimo, to fight no more forever, he folded his long legs neatly beneath himself and sank onto the ice. Wolves closed in, tearing at the moose’s sides, ripping out entrails in a wild display of color on the white canvas of snow.

  Anna breathed. Till that moment, she’d not been aware she wasn’t. The savagery and death didn’t sadden her. As the wolves fed, she didn’t feel anger toward the predators, nor did she feel sorry for the prey. What moved her was the stunningly beautiful dance of life and death. The bull was old. Tough as he was, he probably wouldn’t have lasted the winter and, if he did, he wouldn’t live to mate next rutting season. Today he had died as he was meant to, gone down fighting with a respected enemy, his body nourishment for the next cycle of life. The wolves would stay with the kill till they had consumed it; nothing would be wasted. Ravens and foxes would feed. Come spring, fishes would get the bones.

  The cub banked and climbed, and Anna lost sight of the dinner party. “Did you get some good shots?” Jonah crackled in her ears.

  “Damn.” Anna heard a breathy chuckle in return.

  “Greenhorn,” he said without malice. “We got to head back. Look at the horizon east there.”

  The horizon had solidified into a dark wall. Clouds touched the surface of the lake. Both water and air were the color of slate. A mile or so out, whitecaps snapped to life on black water.

  Jonah radioed Ridley to let him know about the kill and that they were returning to Windigo.

  There was a moment without response, then Ridley came back: “Robin saw fresh tracks along the Greenstone Trail. It wasn’t Middle pack; they haven’t moved. If you’re looking at Chippewa Harbor pack, then it’s not them. It’s either East pack or a lone wolf. Could you swing by and check it?”

  East pack was so named because the east end of ISRO was its territory. Wolves were warriors; they protected their turf, and the fights were vicious and often to the death. East pack that far from home would indicate a major disturbance in the population, proof of Ridley’s assertion that “something stirred them up.” A lone wolf wouldn’t. On ISRO, only the alphas mated. Maturing animals would often leave the pack to seek another lone wolf with whom to start a new pack. Occasionally they joined a rival pack. Most often, after a month or two, they came home humbled. Wolves, like other sentient beings, had their own minds. One female had been noted to move, apparently with ease, between all three packs.

  “Roger. We’re nearly there,” Jonah replied to Ridley. To Anna – or himself – he added: “A couple of minutes out of the way. We’ll make it.” As if in answer to his effrontery, a gust of wind, running ahead of the heavy weather, nudged the cub.

  Jonah dropped the airplane down till they were flying two hundred feet above the Greenstone Ridge. They were traveling at airspeed of eighty-five miles per hour, slow for most airplanes but incredibly fast for humans, creatures designed to go no faster than a horse can canter. Trees and rock outcrops flashed by, their nearness enhancing the sense of speed. Anna enjoyed the rush.

  They followed the trail for three miles but saw no tracks, then a fist of wind rocked the supercub and Jonah said: “This bird’s for home.”

  Anna watched the ground. Jonah watched the sky. She saw a dark shape where dead grasses had been mashed. It looked like a moose bed, but, lying in the makeshift nest, partially hidden by the lower branches of a stunted spruce, a dark shape was curled up.

  “Wait,” Anna almost yelled into the mike. “I think I saw something. Make another pass.”

  “Not today,” crackled back over the headset. “Pilots are a dime a dozen. Old pilots are rare as hen’s teeth.”

  Anna didn’t argue but she wanted to.

  “What’d you spot?” Jonah asked.

  “I don’t know what it was,” Anna said. She tried to look back but gear and seat belt trussed her as neatly as a straitjacket. “It looked like a great big dog.”

  The shape, the black silhouette curled nose to tail, had looked like a wolf. A monstrous wolf, more than half again as big as the biggest alpha she’d ever seen.

  5

  That night, the bunkhouse ran out of water. Since Middle pack had come to Washington Harbor, Ridley had banned the use of the snowmobile for all tasks, including hauling water up from the well. Wolves might be impervious to Jonah’s supercub, but a snowmobile was an unknown quantity.

  At first light, Anna positioned herself on the dock to get a final look. Robin was collecting along the Greenstone Trail. Adam had gone with her. Anna, Katherine, Jonah and Bob stood shoulder to shoulder, like cattle in the wind, watching the Middle pack as the angry whine of the snowmobile grew louder. The alpha female’s head came up first, then the others; not one by one but in concert.

  Ridley on the snowmobile broke free of the trees and the pack was on its feet.

  Then they were gone.

  Anna found herself laughing. They didn’t turn tail and run the way Taco, her old dog, did when squirrels chirred at him. They dissipated like mist burning off a pond in autumn.

  “Children of the night,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” Katherine begged.

  “Let’s do it.” With Bob’s permission, Katherine was off, trotting down the slippery dock and onto the lake, shuffle-sliding her way toward what remained of the moose.

  “Mmm-mm.” Jonah smacked his lips. “Fresh steaming wolf scat and lots of it. For a wildlife biologist, it just doesn’t get any better.”

  Apparently carnivore excreta being of little interest to him, Jonah stopped at the ice well to help Ridley refill the plastic water barrels. Anna and Bob joined the gnawed carcass and Katherine. “Will the wolves hang around?” Bob asked.

  “They may come back tonight, but I doubt it,” Anna replied. “They got most of the meat.”

  “I’m going to take a look at their trail,” Bob announced. “Want to come?”

  Anna shook her head. Bob seemed nice enough, but he was too big. With his height, bulldog jowls and thickening middle, he made th
e bunkhouse feel cramped. Add six inches of cold-weather gear and he was huge, a yeti. It made her claustrophobic.

  “Don’t get eaten,” she said to be personable. After a hard, lean winter, if a wolf ate Menechinn it would probably flounder and die like a horse in a granary.

  “The axman never gets eaten by the wolf.” Bob grinned and turned away. The trees took him bite by bite.

  For a while, Anna watched Katherine, absorbed in her work.

  While convinced that wolf poop was a fine and desirable thing, without the actual furry beasts around it, Anna found her interest flagging. The front that had chased the supercub home had settled in. Wind gusted with malicious intent, and the weather site on Ridley’s computer predicted snow. On the hill behind the bunkhouse was a vintage wooden weather station, the kind that had served parks and mom-and-pop airports for eighty or more years. The slat-sided wooden box housed a barometer, minimum and maximum thermometers and a thermometer designed – with some dipping into water and spinning – to give windchill. The NPS had given Robin the task of checking it daily.

  The scientists thought this the height of absurdity, one more example of Park Service ineptitude. The machinery for weather recording had moved on while the NPS clung to the old ways. Still, when the stations were gone, it would be one more link broken from when the world was a more mysterious – and less endangered – place.

  “Think it’ll snow?” Anna asked to keep her mind off the hoarfrost forming on her eyelashes.

  “I hope so,” Katherine replied. “It makes it easier to map the packs’ movements. You can follow their tracks from the air.”

  Watching Katherine scooping frozen urine-soaked snow into ziplock baggies and packing up wolf scat, Anna was surprised to note she no longer looked mousey or hangdog at all. For the first time, Anna saw the fine bones in the nose and the delicately squared chin, the eyebrows, soft brown and perfectly shaped where they showed above her glasses. A flush touched her cheeks. Not the raw pink the wind scoured up or the dull brick of her blushes but a fresh rose hue.

  “You’re in love with the wolves,” Anna blurted half accusingly. She suffered a totally illogical stab of jealousy, as if she alone had the privilege of intimate connection with wild things.

  Katherine looked up shyly. A strand of hair escaped from her hood and curved around the swell of her cheek. “I saw one when I was little – three or four,” she said. “We had a cabin on a lake just north of the Boundary Waters.” She laughed. It was the first time Anna had heard it. “You know Minnesotans, they can live on Lake Superior, but they still have to have a ‘cabin on the lake’ somewhere.

  “We were there one winter, and Momma bundled me out to play.” Katherine rocked back till she sat on her heels like an Arab, arms clasped around her knees, and looked through Anna. “The snow was a couple feet deep, but I was so light I could walk on top of it. I felt like I was flying, swooping along above the ground. Then there was this wolf.” She laughed again. It wasn’t musical but a series of puffs blown out through her nose with the barest of sound, as if she’d learned to laugh in a library with a bat-eared librarian.

  “He was doing the same thing. Flying. That’s what I thought then. He was taller than me and couldn’t have been more than ten feet away. We just stared at each other for a long time. His ears twitched and he blinked. I blinked and tried to make my ears twitch under my hood. Then he turned and walked toward the woods. At the edge of the trees, he looked back over his shoulder, and I started to cry.” She sounded wistful enough to cry these many years later.

  “I thought he was asking me to go with him and I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?” Anna asked, caught up in the story.

  Katherine smiled and went back to her scat gathering. “Momma told me not to leave the yard.”

  Anna shifted from foot to foot. Her toes were getting numb. “No wolves in D.C. At least not the kind that will refrain from devouring children,” she said. Bob was a professor at American University in Bethesda, where Katherine worked on her doctorate.

  Wistful beauty burned away in a flash, and, for a second, Anna thought Katherine was going to wrinkle back her upper lip and growl. Whatever soured the young woman nearly to the point of spitting might have been sufficiently interesting to take Anna’s mind off freezing to death for another few minutes, but they were interrupted by the squeaky munch-munch-munch of boots on frozen snow announcing Bob’s return. Katherine’s face went blank, her eyes back to her collecting and packaging.

  Menechinn emerged from the trees. “Better get Ridley,” he said without preamble. “Looks like Stephen King is doing a wilderness version of Pet Sematary up here.”

  “What have you got?” Anna asked.

  “Let’s wait for Ridley,” Bob said and planted his feet as if the sheer force of his will would draw the lead researcher across the ice. Menechinn was either in shock or suffering an attack of melodrama.

  “Would you like me to radio Ridley?” she asked politely.

  When he answered the call, Ridley echoed Anna almost word for word: “What’s he got?”

  Anna looked at Bob.

  “It’s not far in,” Menechinn said.

  “It’s not far in,” Anna repeated into the mike. She could hear Ridley sigh all the way from the well and wasn’t sure it was over the radio.

  “I’ll be there when we’re finished.”

  Anna put the radio back in her parka; with mittens, it was more a process of shoving and squashing than pocketing. For a half a minute, she stood with Bob, cooling heels already numb from so long on the ice. Katherine kept her head down, staying busy with her collecting.

  Finally Anna headed off toward the woods where Bob’s tracks tore up the bank. Katherine pushed up from the scat-dotted ice to come with her.

  “Hang on, you two.” Bob sounded like a schoolmaster dealing with overeager children. “I don’t want you tracking up the area before Ridley gets there.”

  Idiot, Anna thought charitably as she pretended not to hear him.

  Menechinn’s find was no more than a hundred yards from shore, near where the Feldtmann Trail joined the Nature Trail that led up to the permanent-employee housing. In a three-foot radius around the body, duff, dirt and snow were plowed up by Menechinn’s size thirteens. Mud and blood churned the snow to the unsettling brownish pink Anna associated with wallpaper in old ladies’ bathrooms.

  “Idiot,” she reiterated as she studied the radically compromised scene.

  A wolf.

  There was no scene. Dead animals did not constitute murder.

  Pet Sematary.

  “Right,” she said, and, careless of where she stepped, she walked up to the animal and squatted on her haunches. It lay on its side, eyes open, tongue – pink and silly looking like a goofball dog’s – lolling out of its mouth. Anna pulled off a mitten and touched the tongue. Frozen solid. Scavengers had been at it but not a lot. The animal had been there long enough to freeze but not so long that the body had been torn up. Five or six hours, maybe less. Ridley could make a more educated guess. He knew the island food chain better than she did.

  The blood was from the throat. A wolf-on-wolf killing; on ISRO, nothing else was big enough to take out a wolf. The wolves were isolated by miles of open water for decades at a stretch, and no other large predators had migrated to the island: no puma, no bears, no coyotes, not even a badger. The other wolf – the one who’d left the fray alive – was either very big or very lucky. This animal was a good-sized male, yet he hadn’t had time to put up much of a fight. Fur, matted with blood and frozen solid, masked the wound, but it had to have been severe. The wolf looked as if he bled out fast. There was little sign of movement after the neck was slashed.

  Anna laid her bare hand on the fur. In the Western world’s collective unconscious, wolves symbolized hunger, danger, vicious cunning and cold-blooded slaughter. The flip side was, they were the embodiment of the wild; like the wind, they went where they would, did as they pleased, then vanished into
the woods. Touching a wolf – even a dead wolf – Anna thrilled to the echo of primitive, amoral freedom.

  “What killed it?” Ridley had come. Everybody had come. Anna stood and moved back.

  “Neck wound,” Anna said.

  “Interpack rivalry,” Bob said.

  “Could be,” Ridley replied noncommittally.

  “What else?” Bob demanded.

  Anna leaned against the bole of a birch. She loved a good pissing contest when she wasn’t on the wrong end of it. Ridley said nothing but crouched over the wolf much as she had. Menechinn gave Anna a conspiratorial grin as if they shared a joke on Ridley. He winked at Anna, then said to Ridley: “You wanted a dead wolf. Now you’ve got it.”

  “Now I’ve got it,” Ridley echoed absently. He took off his left glove. With long, sensitive fingers, he pulled back the eyelids, then the lips. Ridley Murray was unmoved by the wolf’s death per se. Wolves were not wolves to him, Anna realized. They were subjects of study.

  Katherine was not quite so clinical, but she was detached and professional. After the story of her first wolf and love torn asunder by parental decree, Anna thought she’d show more emotion.

  “Let’s get it to the bunkhouse,” Ridley said, rising effortlessly to his feet. “It’ll need to thaw before we can do much.”

  “I’ll take the pelt and head,” Bob said. “I’ll have it shipped to American University. You know, for research, a research tool. Our students don’t get much of a chance for the hands-on like you folks do.” He smiled, turning it on each of them in turn.

  Katherine’s head twitched up, in a gesture oddly reminiscent of the alpha female’s, on hearing the approaching snowmobile. A shadow passed behind her eyes, and she turned away as if from something obscene. Maybe she wasn’t as unmoved as Anna had thought.

  Ridley pulled his glove on, his eyes blank under the glare of Menechinn’s grin. He looked the way Robin did when she came in at the end of the day; her face frozen – not figuratively, literally – cold paralyzing surface muscles and skin, as unable to show any expression as a Botox junkie.