Winter Study (19 page)

Long
habit of tracking kept Anna’s eyes on the ground as they worked their
way across the western third of the lake. Fresh snow created a clean
palette for the day’s news, but creatures were not doing a great deal
of stirring. Gusting winds, flurries of snow and the promise of more to
come kept them snug in nests and burrows. Anna saw the scratching of
small birds and a litter of seed coverings from a cache that had been
found or recovered by a squirrel. On a slope running down to the lake
from a low rise, she noticed what looked to be the tracks of saucer
sleds, the kind used by little kids. It took her a minute to refocus
from the image of tots in pointed hoods. Then she laughed. “Otters,”
she told Bob. “They like to slide in the snow. Look where they’ve run
up the hill just for the fun of sliding down again.”

“In winter?” he asked.

“In
winter,” she assured him. “The park heals in the winter, when people
aren’t here.” She figured she might as well get in a plug for keeping
ISRO closed from October to May.

Bob grunted.

The
isthmus, comprised of volcanic rock surrounded in glacial rubble, rose
from the ice in ragged chunks of stone dusted with white. Desperate
earth-starved trees poked skeletal branches through the snow cover,
black arthritic fingers reaching for a sky that was the same color as
the grave they sank their roots in. Wind bared the rock in places,
exposing the tops of granite-colored boulders, till the land resembled
a boneyard for formless beasts that had come there to die. Out from the
steep shore, ice piled up, six-inch slabs where the water of the lake
had risen and receded, refreezing each time.

Using
hands and feet, Anna scrambled toward what passed for dry land. Despite
the lightened pack, it was hard to keep her balance. A moose had
managed it; there were a tangle of hoofprints half filled in with snow.
Anna found her center of gravity and a flat place to stand, then turned
and watched Bob making his way over the broken ice field. “Take it
slow,” she warned.

“Umph.”

“The next trap we set will be one of yours,” she promised as he tottered and fell to one knee.

“God damn!”

He stayed where he was, his backpack rounding up like the hump of a camel kneeling to let a rider mount.

“You okay?”

“My knee,” he huffed, but he got himself upright and crossed the rest of the broken ice without incident.

“You’re limping,” she accused. It was not good to let oneself get injured in the wilderness in the winter.

“It’s a bad knee,” he said. “How many more traps do we have to set?”

Bob sounded like a little boy who couldn’t add and was whining about it. So much for Dr. Jekyll.

“A
couple more.” Anna started up through the rocks. Abruptly she stopped.
In the lee of one of the boulders, half buried in the deeper tracks of
the moose, was the print of a wolf’s paw.

Maybe.

With
the snow drifted in, it was hard to tell, but it was larger than fox
and smaller than moose. In spring, she might have assumed it was a
calf. Not in January.

“We’re
in the right neighborhood,” she said. Bob limped up and looked at the
tracks. “The one on the left,” she said. “Wolf, I bet.”

“Big.” A trace of the fear she’d seen and heard the night they’d been called upon by the wild was in his voice.

The
print was beyond big; it was monstrous. “Hard to tell,” Anna said,
images of Bob, wild-eyed, lamp beam striping the tent walls,
transposing over him, charging off through the falling snow, arms
waving wildly, foot traps clattering. “Once the wind and snow and drift
start, animal tracks can be made to look like almost anything.”

“It’s
crazy to be out here without a rifle,” Bob said. He looked around like
a virgin in a haunted house. What good humor survived the knee hitting
the ice was gone from his face. Anna wished she had an apron or a
spatula or some other homey kitchen utensil with which to comfort him.
“What are you making us for supper?” she asked to keep his mind busy,
then ignored him while he answered.

There
hadn’t been any wolf tracks on the lake. She looked at the boulder head
high to her left. A furrow cut the snow where something had slid or
fallen. The wolf had come down off the rock, possibly following the
moose. There was just the single print; it had been traveling alone.
The animal that had come to their tent had traveled alone.

“Okay,” Anna said. “Let’s follow our boy here.”

“Are you nuts?” Bob swallowed his fear, but it soured him. “We’re losing the light. Let’s head back,” he said peremptorily.

“No
we’re not. It’s one o’clock, the heat of the day.” She could have been
more politic, but her mind was taken up with tracking. Moose prints
were easy, dimples in the snow eight to ten inches across in two
parallel lines. Paw prints were harder, especially without good light.
Anna blinked at the unyielding sky, weeping snow static on a gray
background. Rocks crowded in, sucking up what little illumination
leaked through from a sun gone AWOL.

“It’s like living in an old black-and-white TV with bad reception,” she said. “I can’t see a damn thing.”

“Time to start back. We’re losing the light,” Bob insisted.

“No
we’re not.” Anna found another partial print. The wolf was following
the moose or they had used the same route within hours of one another.

“My knee,” Bob said. “It’s an old injury. I think I threw it out back there on the ice.”

Anna
found another track. A good one this time, the edges blurred with snow
and drift but the clear mark of the toe pads. “Whoa! Take a look at
this.” She squatted, her back soldier straight to keep her center of
balance over her heels.

Bob
was following so close he bumped her pack and she pitched forward.
“Watch it!” she said. “Look.” She’d managed to catch herself without
damaging the print. It was immense, huge, beautiful, the track of a
magnificent animal. “God, I wish we’d brought the camera.”

“We should go back. We need to report this to Ridley — the sooner, the better.”

“Radio him,” Anna said.

“I got to take a leak,” Bob said suddenly.

“Yeah,
yeah. Go ahead.” Without rising, Anna squinted down the sloping bank.
They had reached the far side of the finger of land in a matter of
steps. The isthmus wasn’t more than thirty feet across. Tracks of wolf
and moose, muted and strange with snow and wind, led across the narrow
arm of the lake toward the far shore, crossing where Robin had said to
set the next trap.

“Perfect.” Anna managed to stand without grabbing onto anything.

From
her left came moose-sized crashing through what little shrubbery the
place offered: Bob dumping his pack. The guy might be a while. Keeping
to one side of the faint trail, Anna picked her way down the gentle
slope and over the ridged ice where lake met land. Wolf and moose,
traveling together or in tandem, the moose tracks close together as if
meandering without concern, the wolf’s farther apart as if loping after
prey.

Ten
or eleven yards out — distance was hard to estimate in poor light and a
monochromatic world — the tracks vanished as if wolf and moose had been
snatched off the surface of the lake by a great carnivorous bird.

“Not
possible,” she whispered and pulled her focus back to what was directly
in front of her. “Hah!” The impossible had not occurred. The snow
covering the ice had formed a slight depression. The tracks led into
this irregular bowl, effectively vanishing from a distance.

Before
coming to Winter Study, Anna had not given ice much thought. She’d seen
pictures of arctic floes heaped into mountains, crinkled into badlands
and shattered over a white-and-blue no-man’s-land. Yet in her mind it
remained flat, evened out by God’s Zamboni.

On
ISRO, she’d realized it was a living thing: changing, moody,
struggling, resting, singing. Surrounding this shallow crater, water
had oozed up through a circular crack and refrozen, creating a scar, a
rugged ridge four and five inches high.

Moose
and wolf tracks crossed in the center of the circle, where it looked as
if they’d skirmished. “Hey, Bob, you’re missing this,” Anna called back
as she hopped over the ridge.

She
landed, and a rifle shot cracked through the silence that had wrapped
them since leaving the cabin. Bob was a big game hunter. Bob had wanted
his rifle. Rifles could be broken down and carried in a day pack. Bob
had slipped away, letting her go, alone and exposed, onto the ice. All
this flashed through her mind in an instant of acute paranoia.

She started to look back to where she’d left Menechinn. Another

crack,

a noise like a baseball bat being snapped in half, then the ice began to shift beneath her feet.

11

The
sound Anna had mistaken for a rifle report was ice breaking. She felt
the shift beneath her boots and engaged all her muscles in the act of
remaining motionless. She hadn’t punched through a thin place caused by
an underwater spring or a rock near the surface; the ice in the
depressed area had broken free. If she’d been quicker, she might have
jumped to safety after the first

crack.

The
second had created an island of ice no more than eight feet in
diameter, with her in the center. Around the perimeter, the scar from
the old ooze had opened, like the movement of tectonic plates the ice
sheared. Water welled up, pouring into the snow in a flush of gray.

If
she moved, the free-floating island would tilt and she would slide into
the lake. Under the lake. The land spit stretched thirty feet behind
her. Another thirty or forty lay between her and the shore in front of
her. Possibly the water was no deeper than her waist. Then again,
glacial lakes could drop off fifty feet a yard from the shore.

Depth probably wouldn’t matter,

she thought.

The
cold would kill her before she had a chance to drown. Stories of kids
revived after forty-five minutes beneath the ice were legend in the
north. The shock of the stunning cold produced a phenomenon called a
mammalian reflex, causing the body to shut down without dying, the way
a bear shuts down to hibernate or a frog to sleep under the mud. Anna
was too old to qualify. The courtesy of mammalian reflex wasn’t
extended to adults.