Winter Study (41 page)

By
eleven-thirty, the candle was burned to a stub, and Robin was waxing
fairly coherent. Anna watched her get undressed and slip into her
sleeping bag. Her clothes didn’t look as if they’d been messed with and
there was no bruising visible on arms, back or thighs. Reassured, Anna
blew out the candle.

Before
she crawled into her own sleeping bag, she turned the lock on the
bedroom door. Without the heat from the stove, the room would be cold,
but at least she would know no one was watching them as they slept.

24

Anna
had hoped to plummet deep into the land of Morpheus as her roommate had
done. Sitting, talking by candlelight, it had been all she could do to
keep from falling asleep midword. Now her legs twitched and her mind
raced and she couldn’t get comfortable.

To
stop the racketing thoughts, she focused into the night, hoping its
deep quiet would creep into her soul. The bunkhouse groaned and popped
in a satisfied manner as it cooled. Robin snored softly, something she
never did sober.

Now
that Katherine slept in a black plastic shroud on the floor in the
carpenter’s shop, the room across the hall was empty. Anna could move
in. It would be a simple matter of dragging her sleeping bag and pillow
fifteen feet to another single bed and another bare mattress, but her
usual need for aloneness had given way to the comfort of safety in
numbers. Even if that number was two, one of whom was semicomatose.

Jonah
or Adam might take the room. Adam, probably. When he was in the
bunkhouse and not on the couch, he shared a room with Bob. Anna
couldn’t figure out that relationship. Adam seemed to want to be Bob
Menechinn’s friend one moment and showed nothing but contempt for him
the next.

Bob,
as the axman from Homeland Security, wasn’t in much of a position to
make friends. Anna doubted if he fared much better when he was
elsewhere, then wondered what it was about him that set her teeth on
edge. When a person — or a situation — brought out a strong sense of
unease, she’d learned to pay attention to it. A thousand “tells” were
broadcast every minute: a tic, a wince, a smell, a shadow, a draft, a
flick of the hand, a door ajar. The human senses experienced them all.
The human brain registered them. The human monkey mind, clamoring with
the shouting littles of life, was lucky if it recognized one or two.
The message from the gestalt trickled down in intuition, gut feelings,
geese walking on one’s grave, déjà vu. There was a reason or reasons
she didn’t trust Bob. She just didn’t know what they were yet.

A
shivering ululation cut into her thoughts, reminding her that she had
been seeking to quiet their flames, not fan them. A wolf’s howl
embraced rare magic; sound transforming into pure emotion, the kind
that exists beneath the level of language. Train whistles had it. They
touched a chord in the human breast that echoed a longing for things
unknown. For Anna, the sound of a cat purring or the tiny thunder of
their paws racing over hardwood floors had the power to cause instant,
unthinking delight, but that might not apply to everyone.

Train
whistles and wolves howling seemed to be universal in their ability to
pass through the paltry defenses of civilization to the more
fundamental primitive heart of people. Anna loved the sound, loved the
pleasurable shivers it sent up her spine. At least until she remembered
the wog, the pack coming through the housing area, the attack on
Katherine.

Giving
up on the idea of sleep, she slid from her sleeping bag and into Levi’s
and a sweatshirt. It occurred to her as she completed this abbreviated
toilette that, should an unfortunate incident befall her, she would be
found without underwear, clean or otherwise. She’d be careful not to
get hit by a truck.

Lighting
her way with a battery-powered headlamp secured around her brow with an
elastic strap — the preferred headgear of the Winter Study team from
ten p.m. till sunup — Anna found the kit Katherine had used to extract
blood from the wolf. Two of the eight vacuum tubes remained. She took
them both, returned to the bedroom and put the headlamp on the table,
facing away from Robin.

The
biotech was deeply asleep, but her breathing was even and twelve
breaths per minute so Anna wasn’t unduly worried. In fact, she hoped
the girl was far enough out she wouldn’t wake up when the needle
plunged into a vein in her antecubital site. Robin did flinch, but she
didn’t wake. Anna watched as first one vial, then the second, filled
with rich, dark blood. She’d neglected to bring a bandage, so when
she’d finished she folded Robin’s arm over the ruined sweater.

The
blood should have been drawn hours before, but Anna had other things on
her mind. Tomorrow morning, when she could get Robin’s permission,
would be too late. She hoped it wasn’t too late already. Pocketing her
purloined hemoglobin, she left the bedroom. The door locked only from
the inside, and she locked it before she closed herself out. If need
be, she’d bang until Robin woke to let her in.

In
the faint glow from the fire, Anna donned the necessary layers of
clothing and then laced up the Sorels. Her body felt heavy and tired,
but she ignored it. Till she could shut down her mind, her body was
going to have to lump it. Another wolf’s howl threaded beneath the
doors and around the window glass, and she stopped to listen. This call
sounded closer, and she wondered if she was a fool to be heading out
into the woods alone. Even having seen Katherine’s body, Anna harbored
a belief that the wolves would not attack her. She felt that way about
mountain lions and bears as well — about most wild animals in parks
where she’d worked. The major exception was the alligators of
Mississippi. They, she was sure, would like nothing better than a bite
of Pigeon meat.

Her
sense of safety with other carnivores was based on nothing factual. It
was a powerful and totally illogical feeling that they knew she loved
them and would leave her untouched. Aware it was irrational, and
probably born from watching too many animated Disney films as a kid,
Anna was careful never to test this notion. She wasn’t testing it
tonight. Given a choice, she would have waited till daylight, but she
wasn’t sure how long the blood sample would be viable.

Trudging
along in tracks — hers and half a dozen others, several of them being
moose — she reached the head of the trail to the V.C. A shape shifted
beyond the tree line; not a visual shape, a sound, the squeaking the
snow made when crushed, the peculiar, dry Styrofoam sound.

Moose,

she
told herself. Moose, like deer, were curious and would come to see what
was happening. Hunted only by the wolves, moose on ISRO had little fear
of people and often wandered through housing areas, campgrounds and by
the sundries store.

Anna
walked into the woods. Trees, naked with winter, closed around her like
a barbed-wire fence. The flashlight cut swaths through the black:
tunnels of white tangled with twisted branches and gray-scaled tree
trunks. The fear that had been with her earlier on her first ill-fated
trip down this hill returned.

“Damn!” she whispered.

At
each step, she began to think she heard the faint echo of snow being
compressed in the trees alongside the path. She stopped. The echo
stopped. Hard as she listened, as far as she tried to push her senses
and her flashlight beam into the darkness, it was impossible to tell
whether she was being stalked, followed or was hearing things. Panic
stirred beneath her sternum, not the fear that motivates action or
caution but the unreasoning whine of buzz saws in childhood nightmares.

Turning
out the light, she let the fear have her, let the panic throb on violin
strings out of tune, sirens and screeching tires on concrete. When the
first wave had passed, leaving her feeling light-headed and breathless,
she spoke to the darkness, within and without.

“Being
scared is beginning to bore me. Do what you have to do and I’ll do the
same.” Speaking aloud in the frigid darkness was oddly daring; a wild
act of sanity enacted in a classically insane way. It reminded her many
things were a choice. Fear, to a great extent, was a choice.

“I’m
headed to the Visitors Center,” she said to her monstrous, malevolent
or imaginary friend. “If you need to devour me, or whatever, I’ll be in
the back offices.”

She
thought she heard a snuffle or a smothered laugh trickle back through
the thick underbrush. It was so faint and quickly aborted she couldn’t
be sure it was anything more than the scrabble of a raven’s claw on a
branch.

The
building housing the V.C. and the ranger station was not locked. The
key was on the chest of drawers that served her and Robin as bed table.
Stopping before the double glass doors, she stomped the snow off her
boots so the first seasonals to arrive in summer wouldn’t have too
great a mess to clean up. Once inside, she closed the doors behind her.
The mindless fear was gone, but if a wog did wander the island seeking
human flesh there was no sense in tempting furry fate.

She
went to the District Ranger’s office, stopped in the open door and
automatically swept the light switch into the ON position. No
illumination was forthcoming. In the second it had taken her hand to
push the switch, she’d remembered it wouldn’t work. Finishing the
sequence made no sense, due to lack of electricity, but she pushed the
switch down again in the OFF position anyway.

Searching
by flashlight had its advantages. Able only to see the
three-foot-by-three-foot spotlighted area, the eye was not distracted.
Occasionally Anna’d turned the lights out when there was electricity to
burn and used a flashlight to concentrate her mind on details.

The
box of merlot was on the floor where they’d left it, the overturned
mason jar nearby. Anna shined her light on the bottom: number 4427.
Adam’s. Robin did well in the largely male world of wolf research by
keeping as much under the radar as a beautiful young woman can hope to.
In the days Anna had known her, she was careful not to call attention
to herself and did her best to fade into the woodwork when others did.
Breaking the tradition of the mason jars was out of character. If she’d
been sufficiently drunk, she might not have noticed she was taking
Adam’s jar — or noticed but been beyond worrying about consequences.
Robin might have taken Adam’s glass for spite. Had she been a silly
young woman, Anna would have considered that she could have taken it
for love, the island equivalent of wearing the boy’s letterman’s
jacket, but Robin wasn’t silly.

Fingerprints
could be lifted from the jar. Several were apparent in the beam of the
flashlight. Robin’s would be on it; Bob’s, probably. Maybe Adam’s. The
only print that would be telling would be the print of the human
version of the wog; someone on Isle Royale who shouldn’t be. Anna
bagged it. At the rate she was collecting evidence of crimes that might
or might not have been committed, the crawl space under the carpenter’s
shop would soon fill up.

Taking
her time, she followed the yellow circle of light around the office. A
few items had been left on the desktop when the island was closed to
the public in October and the District Ranger went back to Houghton: a
stapler, a plastic box with a magnetized opening half full of paper
clips, an empty in-basket and a bright pink pad of Post-it notes. These
were lined up neatly beside the many-buttoned phone.

Robin
hadn’t done the bulk of her drinking in this room. Not even a naturally
graceful bi-athlete could get that totally pissed without disarranging
a few things, spilling a few drops.