Winter Study (18 page)

The
skeleton had been gnawed. One femur and both front leg bones were gone
entirely. Skull and antlers had been dragged away from the body and
cleaned of meat. Anna two-stepped over to take a closer look. Robin
slid gracefully up beside her.

“Hard
winter for everybody. Lookie.” The biotech pointed, her mittened hand
bright and indicative like a Lilliputian tetrahedron indicating wind
direction. “The antlers have been nibbled. There’s little nutritional
value in an antler. Eating it is the animal world’s equivalent of
boiling shoe leather for supper. Or eating fried pork rinds.”

Bob
and Katherine caught up with them. Katherine’s oversized glasses,
perennially steamed, gave her a blind and helpless aspect, but she was
a natural on the ice. Her shuffling skate was a match for Robin’s. Bob
had more trouble. “Pig on roller skates” came to mind, but, still
pleasantly full of the breakfast he’d cooked, Anna said nothing.

“Are
we going to set traps here?” he asked, looking around as if another
area of ice would be different, better, than the one on which they
stood.

“Not here,” Robin said, and her mouth crimped in a tight line.

Anna
didn’t so much read her thoughts as share them. Bob knew nothing about
trapping, or about wolves. He knew nothing about Isle Royale. Yet he
would decide if the study would continue. Only FEMA had proven more
inept and corrupt than Homeland Security.

“George
W. Bush is the Antichrist,” Anna said, apparently apropos of nothing.
Leaving her companions to think she suffered from political Tourette’s
syndrome, she shuffled off.

At
the east end of Siskiwit, where the short section of trail from
Siskiwit to Intermediate Lake began, Robin stopped. “We start here,”
she said.

The
trapline Ridley had outlined ran from the western shore of Siskiwit,
embraced Intermediate, then ran on to Lake Richie and ended at Moskey
Basin, about five miles total. The lakes between Siskiwit and Moskey
Basin were small, part of a scattering of puddles that dribbled across
the island, from north to south, where the retreating glacier had
gouged more deeply. The trapline would cover lakes, land, developed
trails and open runs. Used by both East and Chippewa packs, they would
have a shot at trapping wolves from more than one pack.

Two
wolves in East pack and three of the known seven in Chippewa pack had
been radio-collared previously. Unless there was a force on the island
so powerful it could alter existing DNA in a living wolf, they could be
ruled out as carriers of the foreign DNA. If they were caught again,
the opportunity would be taken to check them for parvovirus, weight,
general health issues and statistical information. One of the
inestimable values of the wolf/moose study was that it had collected
mammoth amounts of such data over a long period. Longevity had been
important in earlier times, but, with the advent of computers, massive
quantities of information could be processed in ever-more-illuminating
ways.

Anna
had experience with foothold traps but hadn’t used one in years.
Katherine was familiar only with old barrel-type live traps. Bob knew
nothing about either.

In
her quiet, pleasant voice, Robin explained each step of the process as
she set the first trap. Foothold traps resembled old-fashioned leghold
traps, the spring-loaded steel jaws with jagged teeth that were famous
for causing animals to chew their feet off to free themselves. The
foothold was designed to avoid harming the wolves. The jaws were
shallower and had small steel knobs in place of the teeth. The knobs
were placed so that when the animal stepped down on the plate and
sprung the trap, they would clamp above and between the toe joints to
hold the foot fast without tearing the skin or breaking bones. Each
trap was supplied with a tranquilizer device, a black rubber nipple two
inches long and loaded with oral tranquilizer. The drug was to calm
them, to keep them from harming themselves or the trappers, but it was
an inexact science. It was impossible to tell how much of the sedative
would actually get into the animal’s system.

“What drug do you use?” Bob asked.

“Propriopromazine,”
Robin replied. “It usually keeps them sedated till we get to them. Then
we give a mix of ketamine and xylazine to knock them out.”

“Ketamine. That’s the hallucinogenic that can cause amnesia,” Bob said.

“You’ve worked with ketamine?” Robin asked.

“Have we ever used ketamine?” he asked Katherine.

She turned away as if the question brought up a shameful failure.

“I can’t remember,” she mumbled, and Bob laughed.

“That’s what the stuff is known for.”

He
winked at his assistant. Her face was blank, dead, as if at a secret
joke between old lovers, a joke only one of them still thinks is funny.
A moment of awkward silence followed, Anna and Robin feeling there’d
been too much sharing, even if they had no idea what had been shared.

“Ketamine
doesn’t depress the central nervous system,” Robin started again.
“That’s why it’s good with animals. They’re pretty fragile. The
xylazine works as well and wears off quicker, something you need to pay
attention to when you’re letting them go again.”

“Are the trap tranquilizing devices already charged or do we need to charge them?” Anna asked.

“The
TTDs are filled with six hundred milligrams of the propriopromazine.
All you have to do is clamp it on one side of the jaws. First thing a
wolf will do is try and bite the trap. I’ve never seen a TTD that
wasn’t destroyed. They always get some tranquilizer into them, but
we’ve found them both out cold and awake and alert. Depends.”

Attached
to each trap was eight feet of kinkless chain with a vegetation drag on
the end that looked like a miniature boat anchor. The drag was
amazingly efficient at catching on any bit of vegetation to keep the
animal from getting very far while giving it freedom of motion, another
stress reducer. Near the drag, affixed to the chain, was a
seven-inch-long silver cylinder with a rubber-coated antenna. This was
a motion-activated radio transmitter. The metal cylinder protected it
from being chewed. When the wolf — or occasionally a marauding fox —
pulled on the chain, a receiver in the cabin at Malone Bay would beep
to let the trappers know something was on their line and where. In
summer, this allowed the researchers to find the wolf before a hapless
tourist did — and before the sedative wore off. In winter, it served a
more important purpose; sedated, the wolf could lose toes to frostbite
or even freeze to death if left too long in a trap.

Robin
opened the metal jaws and set the pressure plate, then packed trap and
paraphernalia in snow till it was no longer visible. “This trap
probably won’t fool anybody,” she said as she stood and addressed her
audience. “There are too many of us and we’ve been here too long being
stinky. The wolves will smell a rat. After you all move away, I’ll
sprinkle around some clean snow and that might help. It’s best to get
in and out with the least interruption of the space as possible.

“Do you want me to set the next one?” she asked Anna.

“No. It’s coming back to me. I think I’m good.”

“Okay.”
Robin pulled a topographical map from her pack and folded it so the
area where they were was uppermost. “You and Bob take the western side
of Intermediate. Katherine and I will go around to the east. Lay the
first trap here.” She pointed to where the trail split on the shore of
Intermediate Lake to embrace the perimeter.

“When
you get to where this little triangle of land sticks out into the water
— the ice — you need to cross right here.” Robin took a mitten off to
better point at the narrow bay where an isthmus curved back toward the
main shore. “Put a trap there.”

“Why there?” Anna asked. It seemed out of sync with the pattern of following improved trails that Ridley had laid out.

“The wolves have been known to den up on that triangle of land.” Robin’s voice tightened as if Anna challenged her authority.

“Got it,” Anna said.

“Bob,
you go with Anna. Katherine, come with me.” Anna suspected Bob would
rather have learned the art of livetrapping from the lovely young
biotech than the crusty old ranger, but life was full of
disappointments.

“Help me with my pack,” she said. Apparently not too put out at drawing the short straw, Bob complied.

Anna
leading, they reached the fork in the trail where Robin had told them
to place the first trap. Snow was falling more thickly than it had
been, but the wind let up, and Anna was satisfied with the compromise.
Given her familiarity with ISRO — and the fact they’d be following
lakeshores most of the day — there was little danger of getting lost
regardless of how bad the visibility, and snow was warmer than wind.

Setting
the trap was harder than Anna remembered. Cold — and the gear needed to
protect from the cold — made simple tasks difficult. She had on gloves,
but without mittens over them, and handling freezing steel, her fingers
were awkward. Having laid the trap on the ground, Anna put a foot on
each of the springs to depress them, then pulled the jaws of the trap
open. Her left boot slipped and the jaws snapped shut viciously,
catching a pinch of glove and skin. Anna yelped as if a finger had been
bitten off. She was positive the pinch hurt far worse than it would
have had there been a speck of sympathetic kindness in the elements and
half remembered a short story about how wounds festered and rotted in
the arctic. Having pulled off the scant protection of the glove, she
surveyed the damage. No blood. She would live.

Bob
turned out to be deft with his hands. Given the thickness of his
fingers, it was a pleasant surprise. He uncoiled the chain and buried
it as neatly as Anna could have managed. He attached the TTD and stayed
out of the way while she did her best to rehabilitate the area before
they left. And he had insisted that this, the first trap set, be one of
the two she carried, a ten-pound weight lifted from her shoulders. All
in all, the man was beginning to ingratiate himself.

The
cynical core of her suspected Dr. Menechinn wasn’t ingratiating himself
so much as Dr. Jekyll was in the ascendant. She had seen too much of
Mr. Hyde to expect Bob’s goodness and light to last. In the meantime,
she was only too happy to let him carry heavy objects.

It
had taken them twice as long to set the trap as it had taken Robin, and
twice as long again as it would have taken Anna in the summer. By the
time they finished, it was nearly noon. With truncated days and
lowering clouds, Anna doubted she and Bob would manage to set all of
the remaining traps before they ran out of light.

“There’s
where we’re going,” she said as they packed up and pointed to a hump of
land beyond which lay the triangular isthmus that marked where the next
foothold trap was to be laid. Intermediate had not been blown clear of
snow and the walking was easier. The ice was also considerably thinner
than Siskiwit. Ice was often untrustworthy near shoreline and
Intermediate was all shoreline.