Winter Study Read online

  BECAUSE OF KATHERINE, they set a slow pace. Freed from the fear she would shame herself by huffing and gasping and throwing herself facedown, crying “I can’t go on” – all of which would have been distinct possibilities had she been trying to keep up with Robin – Anna took pleasure in the simple act of breathing out of doors, moving away from “civilization” and into the backcountry.

  Ridley had mapped out five miles of trail west of Lake Siskiwit for the trapline. East and Chippewa both claimed the mapped section of the island as part of their territory. Several pack interactions had been recorded in the vicinity.

  Ridley and Jonah had had the rare luck to watch one unfold. The photo sequence Ridley captured remained some of the study’s most compelling footage. For some reason, a female had been drummed out of East pack. Ridley and Jonah watched the lupine drama play out, with all the pathos of Troilus and Cressida, beneath the supercub’s wings.

  East pack had pursued the female till they cornered her on a finger of land jutting into Siskiwit Bay. Too many to fight, she’d taken to the water. The pack paced her along the shore, twice driving her back in when she tried to reach land. Finally she no longer had the strength to swim and moved to land through the teeth of her former pack mates. They didn’t kill her immediately but dogged her, tearing at her back, neck and flanks as she tried to escape. More than once, Jonah and Ridley believed her dead, but then she would force herself up, repel her attackers and run again. Finally the pack, as if tiring of the game – or as a mob stoning a fallen woman will suddenly need a kill – surrounded and savaged her, then fled as if the law was on their tails.

  After two more passes, Jonah and Ridley were sure this time she was dead. They were turning for home when they saw a lone male from East pack return. He nosed and pawed the downed female, and, after a while, she staggered to her feet.

  On flights over the following days, they saw two bloody beds. The two wolves not only survived but started the island’s third pack: Chippewa Harbor pack.

  Five years later, the winter of 2005, East pack caught that same female away from her Chippewa pack mates and killed her. The wolves remembered. Anna couldn’t help wondering what pack law the female had broken that had a statute of limitations that didn’t run out in half a lifetime.

  Watching the photographs click up on Ridley’s computer screen, Anna had found it hard to believe these intelligent and phenomenally complex animals could be hunted down and butchered so that some fool could have the pelt and head for a hearth rug. But, then, human beings hunted down and butchered one another for stranger reasons.

  Two miles up the trail, Robin turned the lead position over to Anna. The young biotech was finding it impossible to hike slowly enough not to kill her companions. Bob Menechinn, probably still smarting from having Ridley buckle him into his pack, pointing out he was the tallest and strongest and best able to protect and serve – an argument that basically boiled down to “has a penis” – wanted to go first. Anna stepped back, content to let him do whatever it was he needed to do.

  The third time he led them off trail, she suggested he drop back. She added, “And make sure no one falls behind,” to keep the machinery of the team oiled. She then set a pace that would challenge Katherine – they had a lot of miles to cover before the light went south – but, she hoped, would not exhaust her. Katherine was from a sedentary background and carrying a pack too heavy for her. Anna could hear what it was costing her in the push of her breath, yet Katherine never complained. Anna admired her will to endure.

  Anna didn’t complain either. Her body would complain enough in a day or so. Her pack weighed fifty-three pounds. She weighed one hundred eighteen. Muscle wasn’t enough to offset the blunt trauma her joints suffered as she lifted her feet and gravity put them down. Hips, ankles and knees were going to ache like crazy. In her thirties, the aching was gone in less than a week; in her early forties, two. Now she could look forward to nearly a month of groaning every time she stood up.

  Since the alternative was to not backpack, Anna gave it no more than a passing thought. What she did think about was her nose. Her nose had become increasingly important. By closing one eye, she could see the tip of it, but, up close, out of focus and viewed through eyes rimmed in frosted eyelashes, she couldn’t tell if it was turning white and waxy or not. Frostbite could be gnawing her nose off her face and she wouldn’t know it. With increasing frequency, she slid her hand out of its mitten and touched her nose, trying to see if it was warm or cold, if it had feeling, but her fingers were cold and she could never be sure, not positively sure, that her nose wasn’t frozen. So, in one or five or ten minutes, she’d give in to the compulsion to go through the whole process again. She was driving herself nuts.

  THEY HAD PASSED South Lake Desor and reached the halfway point between Windigo and Malone Bay when Anna suggested they set up camp. The short winter day was nearly gone, and Katherine was worn down to the point hypothermia could set in if she didn’t get rest and hot food.

  Anna chose a hill where the Greenstone curved gently around what, in summer, would be a tiny meadow waist-deep in wildflowers. In January, it was a flat, white disk of land with white spruce nibbling one edge. Niggardly snowflakes, desiccated by the cold, left a dusting less than half an inch deep. Yellow-and-gray stalks of long-dead grasses poked up through winter’s thin skin like old men’s chin stubble. White spruce crowded the edges of the open space in a curtain of black, color leached from the boughs by the day’s eternal dusk.

  Anna’s pack was too heavy to shrug out of without the torque twisting her skeleton from its natural state. A kindly rock waited by the side of the trail as if for that very purpose. Sitting on the edge, she let it take the weight, unbuckled hip belt and chest strap and stepped free of the shoulder straps.

  Tempting as it was to let the instrument of her torture topple to the ground, she lowered it as carefully as she could, then stood with a groan. Apparently her grace period had grown significantly shorter since last she’d carried an overloaded pack.

  Robin followed suit and leaned her pack against Anna’s. Bob and Katherine stood dumbly on the trail, two spavined nags asleep in the traces, too tired to think or move without direction. That Katherine did so didn’t surprise Anna. She was nearly to that point herself. Only pride and the promise of hot drinks kept her moving. That Bob had reached paralysis wasn’t what she’d expected.

  Big game hunting, she remembered.

  Big game hunters were not known for long, arduous treks carrying heavy loads. There were native peoples for that, and ATVs to carry the carcasses and the conquerors back to the lodge and the wet bar.

  Uncharitable, she thought without caring.

  She and Robin checked the camp area. As far as they could tell, the little meadow was devoid of hidden evils. Had it possessed a snake pit or hellmouth, Anna would have voted for stopping there anyway. Much as she would have loved feeling superior, she could identify with Katherine all too well. She doubted she had the where-withal to take up the fifty-three pounds again.

  They headed back to spark enough life in Bob and Katherine to get camp set up.

  “Stop that,” Robin said as they crunched south shoulder to shoulder.

  “Stop what?” Not only was Anna not doing anything, she was too tired to think of doing anything.

  “Stop touching your nose. You’ve been touching your nose all day. It’s not frozen.”

  Sheepishly Anna put her hand back into her mitten.

  “You’re obsessing, aren’t you?” Robin asked. The question wasn’t judgmental. She asked it like a physician familiar with the symptoms of poison ivy might ask: “You itch, don’t you?”

  “I guess,” Anna admitted. “I keep thinking it might be frostbitten.”

  “Mine’s here,” Robin said and tapped her mittened fingertips against her high cheekbones. “I can see them turning dead white out of the corners of my eyes and I picture myself with two holes in my face. Leave your nose alone. You touch it all the t
ime like you’ve been doing and you’ll irritate the skin to where it’ll peel. Then you’ll really think your nose is falling off.”

  Anna nodded and stifled the urge to check her nose one more time before she went on the wagon.

  Because it was lighter to pack in and their body heat would be consolidated, the four of them were sharing a single dome tent. While Bob and Robin went about pitching it – a task that in moderate weather would have been the work of fifteen minutes but was roughly doubled by the clumsy mandate of winter – Anna settled Katherine on a sleeping pad, for the little insulation from the ground it afforded, and set about boiling water. In a pinch, snow could be melted to drink, but the process wasn’t as easy as one might expect. On a freezing day, if snow were packed into a cooking pot and the stove turned up, the pot would burn before enough snow melted to even out the temperatures. Small portions had to be heated slowly till slush formed before the gas could be cranked up. Eating snow was a taboo of which even Anna, with her penchant for avoiding the cold at every opportunity, was cognizant. To convert snow to water robbed the body of so many calories that the heat transfer could lead to hypothermia.

  Anna used the water she’d carried inside her parka next to her body. When it was hot enough to pass muster, she stirred in cocoa, twice as much as she would normally use. Backpacking in winter burned three times a person’s baseline calorie requirements. To stay warm, a woman Anna’s size needed nearly five thousand calories a day.

  “Drink this,” she said and handed a plastic insulated mug to Katherine. Metalware was useless when the cold got serious.

  Katherine shook her head wearily. “No thank you. I just want to sit for a minute.”

  “You need to drink it,” Anna told her. “It’ll make you feel less tired.”

  Katherine took the cup between her mittened hands, and Anna was put in mind of a seal trying to clap with its flippers.

  “Hold it tighter than you think you should,” she cautioned.

  Katherine began to sip.

  Anna slipped off her mitten, stopped her hand halfway to her nose, then put the mitten back on.

  The tent was up. Robin handed out hot drinks and candy and granola bars while Anna started another pot of water for their dinner of freeze-dried pasta, peas and chicken. Robin unwrapped a block of cheddar, cut it into four pieces and said: “Hors d’oeuvres.”

  They ate in silence as the light dimmed to nothing. The snow, mean and sparse all day, showed no sign of changing, and Anna was glad. On the Great Lakes, changes in the weather were usually heralded by high winds. The balmy sixteen degrees they’d enjoyed in the heat of the day was going with the light. Had there been wind, what scant warmth the food generated would have been quickly stripped away.

  When it was too dark to see the cups in their hands, they put on headlamps and blinked at one another.

  “The lights of Marfa,” Anna said. Maybe the others knew of the Texas town, famous for its mysterious UFOs. Maybe they didn’t. Nobody had enough energy to say either way and she hadn’t the energy to volunteer an explanation.

  Dishes were scraped and wiped. Washing was out of the question, but since no self-respecting bacteria could survive in such cold the health risks were minimal.

  When they’d finished, Robin announced “Jumping jacks!” and Anna feared for the young woman’s sanity.

  The jumping jacks were to warm them before they crawled into their sleeping bags; calories and layers alone would not suffice.

  “Pee,” Robin suggested after they’d run around the tent and jumped like mad things for several minutes. “Your body has to work harder keeping extra fluid warm.”

  They separated in four directions and bared various parts of their anatomies to Jack Frost’s kiss.

  “No mosquitoes,” Anna told herself, trying for a scrap of good cheer.

  Then it was bedtime. It wasn’t yet seven p.m.

  Retiring was a miserable process. Food for the following day’s lunch was retrieved from packs; full water bottles were dragged into the tent. To keep these precious items from freezing – or to thaw them out for the next day’s use – meant they would spend the night in sleeping bags with the campers. The bags’ stuff sacks were turned inside out and boots put in and stowed between the knees to keep from freezing overnight. Parkas and what outer garments wouldn’t fit into the bags were piled on top. Thus cocooned, neck scarf and balaclava still on, Anna switched off her headlamp.

  “Good night,” she said to the black nest filled with her fellow larvae. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded so gloomy that she laughed.

  “It’ll be okay,” Robin whispered. “You’ll sleep.”

  Anna said nothing, but she took comfort.

  “Leave your nose alone,” Robin said.

  The biotech was freakishly intuitive. Anna pulled her hand back under the covers.

  “Don’t breathe in your sleeping bags.” Robin’s voice filled the cramped space though she spoke quietly. “It’ll make them damp and you’ll freeze to death.”

  Anna quit breathing warm air into her bag.

  “Will it happen soon?” she asked hopefully.

  8

  As challenging as it was to play the Pollyanna glad game with dirty boots and a hunk of half-eaten cheddar snugged between her thighs, Anna was glad for the physical demands of the past day. She was so thoroughly tired that she knew Robin was right; she would sleep. Eventually.

  Darkness inside the tent was absolute, thick, pressing down on skin and mind the way it did underground: Carlsbad Caverns, Lechuguilla. Anna remembered that crushing blindness, air so hard with earth and ink that it choked her.

  Claustrophobia tightened her skin and squeezed on her lungs. People, flesh, crowded in on her: breathing and rebreathing the air, snuffling, wriggling, adjusting; a filthy monstrous womb and the four of them stillborn.

  “Enough!” Anna hissed.

  An elbow pressed into her side. Robin. Her feet were jostled. Bob. Bob Menechinn took up the lion’s share of the space. This was almost balanced out by Katherine, who had squished herself into the corner between tent wall and floor until Robin made her move farther in, where it was marginally warmer.

  Cold, as palpable and suffocating as the crowding night, negated the odors attendant on such a pile of humanity, but nothing could negate the ectoplasm – or whatever the stuff was called when people were not yet dead. The lives of the others fluttered and battered in the enclosure as if they were captive birds flying against the bars of a too-small cage.

  On the best of nights, tents were not necessarily Anna’s friend. She’d woken more than once to claw her way through the opening flap, past the rain fly, to see the sky and breathe new air. This was not the best of nights. Forcing her mind away from crazy places, she readjusted the bagged boots between her knees. Had they been left outside the tent, or even outside the bag, the boots would freeze, Robin said. There would be no getting them warm in the morning.

  Who knew boots could freeze? Anna could have gone to her grave without knowing that.

  Time passed. The parts of Anna touching the ground cloth numbed. She curled up as best she could with half of North Face’s inventory jammed in the sleeping bag with her. The spectral birds began to settle. One by one, pairs of wings ceased to scrabble on her consciousness. The others slept. She tucked her hands into her armpits and tried to focus on a single point of white-hot light in her mind. Shirley MacLaine had done it with some guru or other and gotten so hot, she felt like she was burning up. It didn’t do much for Anna. After a time, she drifted into a chilled coma full of aching dreams.

  A nightmare wind gusted in her ear: “Anna! Anna, wake up!” The second hiss brought her out of her icy dreams. Her eyes opened to total blindness, her arms were pinioned to her sides and she couldn’t feel her legs. She began to panic.

  “Listen!”

  Robin; it was Robin. Panic subsided. The biotech had hold of her shoulder. She was pressed so close Anna felt her breath on her cheek. It was warm
. Anna remembered warm. “What-”

  “Shh. Listen,” came into her ear on a balmy breeze.

  Anna listened.

  Beyond the tent walls, the preternatural stillness of a night, frozen into a timeless instant, creaked in her ears. With a mittened paw, she shoved her hat up the better to hear. Silence, thick as an ice floe, pressed against her eardrums.

  “There it is again.”

  Now Anna heard it. Into this concrete quiet came the pad of a soft-footed animal, an animal heavy enough that the snow squeaked under its weight. Faint and ethereal, the sound moved around the tent, then stopped. Anna’s ears rang with the emptiness and she tried to sit up, but Robin was on Anna’s left arm and the detritus of Anna’s life was tangled around her body.

  A thin skritching sound scratched through the black air, clogging Anna’s ears. Whatever it was pawed at the rain fly. “Fox,” Anna whispered.

  “No.” Robin’s hands clutched and her voice shook. The woman was terrified.

  In her short life, Robin had probably hiked nearly as many miles as Anna had in her significantly longer existence. Robin had camped out in all seasons and all weathers. That this night she suddenly got the megrims chilled Anna as surely as the flatlined mercury. She tried to pat Robin reassuringly but ended up hitting her in the face with a great mittened hand. “Sorry,” she murmured.