Winter Study (15 page)

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.

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.