Winter Study (16 page)

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.

Too
tired to focus, she let her body sag and her mind slide inward. After
Jonah and Adam departed, she would try to get her boots off. With them
gone, there might be room enough to bend over.

Above
her, the life of the herd went on. Bob was behind Robin, holding on to
her shoulder straps as she fumbled with the buckles. “Here, let me help
with those,” he said warmly and started to reach around her and the
pack in a Kodiak-sized bear hug.

“Let
me,” Anna said acidly and was about to contemplate the effort of rising
when Adam turned from where he’d stowed Katherine’s pack against wall
and bunk and stowed Katherine, as limp looking as Anna felt, on top of
it.

“I got it,” he said.

Bob snorted.

“Bob,
could you help me?” Katherine’s voice was plaintive, with a thread of
something sharper running beneath — anger or love, maybe both. Bob
shouldered his way to where his assistant sat, crumpled.