Winter Study Read online

  Robin caught her hand and held it. The pawing stopped. There was no pad-pad-pad of the animal, curiosity satisfied, going away. Anna could feel it outside the tent, feel it so close to them, had she been able to reach through tent and fly she could have touched it.

  They waited.

  It waited.

  From the huge paw prints Robin had seen and the great curled beast Anna had glimpsed from the supercub, Anna’s mind formed a vision, and a jolt of primitive fear shot through her as this monster of the id bared teeth the size of daggers and lunged for her throat. Anna shook the thought off. Claustrophobia and cold were getting to her.

  “Shh. Shh. There!” Robin hissed.

  Slightly above them came short, sharp whuffing breaths of a creature tasting the air the way a bear might, lips pulled back, nostrils flared, scenting danger or prey. Anna had never heard a canine do it; not fox or coyote or her old dog Taco. The whuffing stopped. The silence was deafening.

  Anna pulled off her mittens and fumbled through the jetsam that had been extruded from her sleeping bag until her hand closed around her headlamp. With fingers already clumsy from their short sojourn away from her armpits, she pushed the ON button.

  Bob and Katherine were as the dead; so worn out, neither the external noises nor the light woke them. Anna switched the lamp off. Instinct warned her not to make a magic lantern of the tent, with the four of them the shadow players.

  Sudden and loud, clawing erupted near the tent flap and Anna squawked, not just at the noise but because Robin had shrieked in her ear.

  “What is it?” came a frightened voice. Katherine had woken.

  “Nothing,” Anna lied. “Probably a squirrel. We may have pitched our tent on top of his dinner cache.”

  “Too big to be a squirrel,” Robin murmured, and her grip on Anna’s shoulder became painful. Fear is the most contagious of emotions, and Anna flashed on nights in high school, girls in their pajamas, tales of the escaped lunatic with a hook, the sudden frenzies of fear.

  “Would you stop?” she snapped. “We’re not doing Night of the Grizzly here. And I’m not getting out of my sleeping bag and braving the arctic to chase away a fancy dress rat.” She wasn’t hoping to fool herself or the biotech; she was hoping to soothe Katherine and snap Robin out of whatever horrors she was entertaining before they all succumbed.

  As if to deny the unflattering characterization, the snuffling came into the black of the tent followed by a low growl that brought up Anna’s nape hairs.

  “Oh my God,” Katherine whispered. “Wolf.”

  A light beam, sudden and harsh, smacked Anna between the eyes, and a bear-sized shadow raked up toward the tent dome. She screamed like a teenager. So did Katherine and Robin.

  Bob had regained consciousness.

  “Shh,” Robin hissed.

  “Kill the light,” Anna said. He didn’t, but he turned its lens down in his lap.

  “What-”

  “Be quiet,” Katherine said, the first show of rebellion against her professor Anna had noticed. “You’ll scare it away.”

  Robin made a soft sound in her throat, a groan or muted cry. Anna tried to read her face in the dim light of Bob’s smothered lamp, but the shadows of hat, scarf and long hair effectively screened her.

  Bob was easy to read. His head probably wasn’t any bigger than a normal human being’s – unless one was speaking metaphorically – but his face appeared immense, meaty, slabs of cheek and jowl dwarfing eyes, nose and mouth. On this wide canvas, fear was clearly writ. The big game hunter didn’t like being hunted.

  “What’s it after?” he asked. He’d meant to whisper, but the words came out in a squeak.

  “Food,” Robin replied succinctly.

  Anna couldn’t argue. The chocolate and cheese and other high-fat, high-sugar, high-protein items they’d tucked into bed with them might have been rendered odorless to human noses, but to a wolf they would smell like a deli at lunchtime. For decades, humans and wolves had lived separate lives on the small island. Though ISRO was only forty-two miles long, and trails raked down both sides of her spine and crisscrossed the many lakes and coves, wolf sightings weren’t common. Wolves were a private people, a quiet, watchful people. Undoubtedly the frequency of wolves seeing visitors vastly outnumbered that of visitors seeing wolves.

  In recent years, that had begun to change. A wolf had been seen hanging around a campground in Rock Harbor on several occasions. A dead wolf washed up on shore in Robinson Bay, apparently drowned. People reported seeing wolves near the lean-tos in Washington Harbor. The wonder of this was that it hadn’t happened long ago. Wild animals quickly became habituated to humans when food was involved.

  “We’re food,” Robin said, as if reading Anna’s thoughts.

  Anna could have smacked her. “Don’t be an idiot. When was the last time a wolf ate anybody?” she demanded.

  Robin looked slightly cowed, but she said: “Maybe this isn’t a regular wolf.”

  The animal, quiet since Bob had come to life, began frenzied digging, claws scraping loud against the fabric of the tent and the frozen earth.

  Bob yelped. Robin, still pressed to Anna’s side, screamed. Bob jerked his lamp from his down bag and shined it frantically around the tent walls, a wild, dizzying rush of light. Anna felt as if she was falling into a vortex of hysteria.

  “My God,” Katherine cried. She grabbed Bob’s wrist and steadied the light on a section of tent opposite the entrance flap. The fabric was pounding in and out as the animal’s claws raked against it. Big paws. Bigger than a man’s fist, and high up the tent wall. The urgent whine of a carnivore closing on its quarry cut through the rapid clawing, then a growl from deep in the chest; the growl of a dog who does not bark but bites.

  “God damn,” Anna breathed. Her heart thudded against her rib cage, skin prickled, adrenaline poured into her till she was strung out with it. Night of the Grizzly no longer seemed so far-fetched. Neither did The Haunting of Hill House.

  The pawing stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Paws padded away.

  Then nothing.

  Silence was so complete, Anna realized, not only had the nocturnal intruder ceased its onslaught but the four of them had pretty much stopped breathing. Her hand was cramping. She was hanging on to Robin as tightly as Robin was holding on to her.

  She laughed shakily. “Whoa! That was-”

  “Shut up,” Bob cried and began swinging the headlamp, clutched in both hands, in crazy patterns, as if the circle of light was an eye through which he could see outside the tent. Shadows rushed and retreated till the space seemed full not only of human bodies and gear but a host of unquiet spirits.

  “Stop it!” Anna ordered.

  “It’s gone, Bob,” Katherine said softly.

  “Shut up,” Bob snarled.

  “It’s gone,” Anna said, forcing her voice to the light and conversational. She found her lamp, turned it on and shined it in Bob’s eyes to get his attention. White showed around the irises, and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his upper lip. His fear was phobic; pure terror. The kind that runs amok. “We’re okay,” Anna said, not sure it was true. She, too, was scared, but she wasn’t sure whether it was of the creature outside or that Bob would begin throwing himself around like a panicked bull in a china shop, where her bones took the place of the porcelain.

  “Let’s all settle down,” she said reasonably.

  “You fucking settle down,” Bob snarled. “You fucking settle down! Ridley sends us out to fucking freeze to death because he’s bred some freak wolf/dog hybrid that’s ripping the shit out of our goddam tent-”

  “It’s okay, Bob. There’s nothing to be scared-” Katherine was begging, reaching out to touch the back of his hand.

  He batted her away and yelled: “Keep your hands off me, you fucking cunt.”

  “That’s enough,” Anna ordered sharply. “It’s gone. We’re all right. Now we sleep.” Anger had taken up the space where fear had been.

  Bob’s
eyes cleared marginally. He was coming back to himself from a hunt where he was the trophy animal, but the bone-deep horror remained. Anna saw it and she snorted; a stiff sniff of air through nostrils pinched with cold. Had she been less tired, less chilled, less freaked out by the bizarre behavior of the animal, she would have been able to stop herself. As it was, she saw his fear, and he saw her contempt for it. They all saw it.

  As she lay down and turned off her lamp, she knew that was something a guy like Bob Menechinn would never forgive them for. Lying in the frigid dark, she could feel the others listening. She could smell the fear sweat from Bob.

  The animal did not come back. And none of them slept.

  9

  Morning did not come until eight twenty-seven a.m. By then, Anna was desperate to get out of the sack she shared with groceries and laundry. The tent had become intolerable. If she didn’t slip out through the zippered fly, she knew she’d claw her way out with greater determination than the wolf had tried to claw his way in. With the first bare hint of gray, she was pulling on socks and boots and layers, not much caring who she jostled or kicked in the process. Their combined respirations had rimed the inside of the tent with ice. Anna’s thrashing loosed a tiny avalanche down on her tent mates. She was not sorry.

  Quick as Anna was, Robin was quicker. Before Anna’d laced up, the biotech was outside, her mukluks squeaking on the snow as she retraced the path of their visitor. Like a grouchy bear, Anna lumbered from the tent and stood on her hind legs to join her. The light was lousy: dreary, gray-white and gritty; a carbon copy of the day before.

  The light would be lousy till it was gone, and lousy the day after that and the week after that, till she got back to the high-country winter in the Rockies or the sweet attempt at winter in Paul’s backyard in Mississippi.

  “Think happy little thoughts,” she sang mockingly under her breath. Discipline would have to take the place of optimism till her body temperature was a few degrees above that of the average corpse.

  “Oh, goodie!” Anna heard Robin exclaim.

  Scat. The woman had found scat. There was only one sample, and it was not particularly impressive in size or texture that Anna could see, but Robin bagged it happily.

  “Not much for tracks,” the biotech said as she casually stuck the baggie into her jacket pocket.

  They tried the trick of shining their headlamps low and laterally to create a false sun, but Robin and Bob had done a terrific job of stomping around when they’d pitched the tent, and the four of them had continued the stomping with jumping jacks, cavorting to warm up before bed and trips later to answer the call of nature.

  If there were wolf prints, they were lost in the crusted mishmash of snow and dead grasses. No prints led in or out of the clearing across the unmarked snow. The animal had probably come into the camp from the trail as they had. Given the choice, wild animals – bears, cougars, foxes, wolves, deer – preferred improved trails just as people did, and for the same reasons.

  In the area where the digging had occurred, they found a partial print. Had they not already ruled out foxes in their minds, the print would have. Foxes had tiny catlike feet. The snow and earth had been scored, and the wall of the tent had stress lines running through the fabric where claws had raked it repeatedly.

  “Look at that,” Robin said. There was no fear in her this morning; she was all business and curiosity. In this competent woman, Anna had trouble finding the squeaky, shrieky teenager of the previous night. “Look at these marks.” Robin pointed with her lamp. The light was dirty gold on the gray snow.

  Anna squatted down and looked where Robin indicated. To one side of the digging were two clear claw marks, probably made by the first and second digits of the animal’s left front paw. The marks were parallel and two inches apart.

  “The thing must have been a monster,” Robin said. There was a quality to the biotech’s voice Anna couldn’t place, self-consciousness maybe, like a bad actor pretending to be brave or a brave person trying to empathize with the fear of others. Anna didn’t like it.

  “This could just as easily have been made by two passes of a real-sized wolf as one pass by a gigantic wolf,” she said repressively. Remembering the wild-eyed panic in Menechinn’s face the previous night, she scuffed the marks out with the toe of her boot.

  “If something’s dangerous, don’t the others have a right to know?” Robin asked.

  “No.”

  HOT DRINKS AND INSTANT OATMEAL – cold as dirt by the last spoonful – duly consumed, they broke camp. It fell naturally to Anna to take the lead, but before she could set foot on the trail Bob shoved past her. His heavy pack clipped hers and she staggered as her center of gravity shifted. But for Robin’s supporting arm, she would have fallen.

  He has to reassert his masculinity, she thought without a shred of sympathy. She didn’t challenge him; Anna never felt the need to reassert hers.

  Despite being condemned to watching Menechinn’s butt, after a mile or so on the trail she felt immeasurably better. There was nothing like spending the night in a deep freeze with one’s food while unknown forces contemplated one for its own supper to make a woman appreciate the little things. It was good to be upright and moving. It was good to be hiking downhill instead of up. It was good to be carrying three more meals in her stomach instead of on her back. It was heaven to know she’d be spending the coming night in the cabin at Malone Bay, with a fire in the woodstove; an outhouse with a warmed seat, rather than a snow-covered log, for the less glamorous moments of life.

  In an embarrassment of riches, the overcast cleared, and, though they paid for it with a drop in temperature, seeing the sun’s pale, cheerful face and the blue sky lightened everyone’s mood.

  Everyone but Bob. Menechinn had returned to his customary jocularity, but there was a razor-edge to his comments: jokes that weren’t jokes and double entendres whose single meanings were hard to pretend missing. Katherine took the brunt of it, and Anna felt sorry for her. She was coming rather to like Katherine. It occurred to her to deflect Menechinn’s venom onto herself to give the researcher a rest, but she decided against it. Katherine didn’t let it roll off her back exactly, but she seemed accustomed to the abuse and handled it better than Anna would have. He made the occasional sideways gibe at Anna, but nothing she couldn’t ignore. Fortunately he left Robin alone.

  The biotech was a woman of steel; Anna suspected that, if pressed, Robin might leap a tall building in a single bound. Yet her years on the road, competing in countries where she had no one but her coaches and teammates, had left her vulnerable and oddly innocent, a bit of a stranger in a strange land.

  Robin might have been able to withstand Menechinn’s unsubtle retribution for what they’d witnessed, but Anna knew for a fact that she wouldn’t have been able to withstand watching it happen.

  EMASCULATION RECOVERY wasn’t swift, but by lunch Bob seemed over the worst of it. He quit sniping at his graduate assistant and tied her sleeping bag to the top of his already-overloaded pack. Anna guessed it was his way of making amends and considered dumping hers and Robin’s on him as well; see how much the bastard could carry. Had the sun not been out, she might have done it. As it was, she was feeling magnanimous.

  Katherine rallied somewhat with the lighter load, both on her back and her psyche, but it didn’t last. Anna could tell her joints were causing her pain by the way she pulled on the pack’s shoulder straps and tried to ease her steps. Anna’s pack was grinding her bones as well, but, like Lawrence of Arabia – at least in the version with Peter O’Toole – she felt the pain but had learned not to mind.

  AT THREE THAT AFTERNOON, they reached the rise above Malone Bay. The sun was already close to the horizon and so far to the south that the bay was in shadow. Snow, deeper here by several inches than on the other side of the ridge, was dyed the same battleship gray as the water of Lake Superior, lying cold and still beyond the bay’s straitjacket of ice. The sky’s winter coat of pale blue had faded till it seemed
but a thin sheet of tinted glass between the Earth and whatever lay beyond.

  In this colorless stillness were two cacophonous spots of color. On the ice of the bay, a few hundred yards from the dock, was Jonah’s red-and-white airplane, her raucous orange down comforter wrapped around engine and cowling, and, on the tiny porch of the cabin, the bright red blade of a snow shovel leaning against the railing.

  Blessed as it was by a thick curl of lavender smoke issuing from the stovepipe, the cabin, scarcely bigger and slightly less ornate than a closet in a 1950s tract house, struck Anna as utterly charming. As they started down the gentle grade, the figure of Jonah Schumann emerged from the door and started up the trail.

  Jonah met up with them and gallantly offered to take Katherine’s pack for the last mile. Anna hoped Katherine would accept and was impressed when she didn’t. The old pilot further wormed his way into Anna’s affections by telling them he’d flown in canned food, a box of wine, pasta and other delicacies to round out what would have been a bleak diet had they had to subsist on what they’d been able to carry in on their backs.

  Adam, who’d cadged a ride on this mission of mercy, had hot Ovaltine waiting when they reached the cabin.

  Anna was wearier than she’d bargained on. The cold, she told herself as Adam helped her off with her pack.

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed as the weight hit him. “Are you crazy or what? I don’t carry a pack this heavy. Holy smoke! Iron Woman.” He pinched her upper arm, and Anna was gratified.

  “Fifty-three pounds,” she wanted to say, but boasting had a way of canceling out achievement, and, besides, she was too tired to talk.

  “Help Katherine,” she managed. The cabin was so tiny, six people, four of them in backpacks, were like great Herefords in a pen made for lambs. She had to mill her way past Adam and Katherine to find a place to sit, then she was squeezed into a small straight-backed chair between a doll-sized table and a gas hot-water heater. Bob brushed his butt – a butt Anna had gotten to know far too well over the past nine miles – across her face to help Robin off with her pack. Anna might have taken petty revenge with a two-tined meat fork the summer ranger had left behind, but the offending portion of his anatomy was encased in too many layers for penetration.