The following day, the promised snow began to fall. Robin laced up her mukluks, shouldered her army-issue rucksack and headed out to photograph the track of the gigantic hound with Adam. The others slept late and dawdled over breakfast. The wolf pack on the ice had changed the daily habits of the researchers. Usually, when the sky was clear and there was little wind, Ridley would spend the day in the air with Jonah watching and photographing the wolves. When the weather was too bad to fly, there were chores, but not enough to keep them busy.
For most of breakfast, they chewed over the DNA Katherine had identified as alien. The wolf that had left the scat wasn’t from the island. At first, Anna hadn’t grasped the magnitude of that revelation. Wolves had come across the ice once, had they not? It was only when Ridley reminded her that the lake hadn’t frozen over in nearly thirty years that she understood. A wolf in the wild had to be lucky and strong to live ten years. The wolf who’d left scat along the Greenstone Trail to Siskiwit Lake would have to have been the Methuselah of wolf kind to have traversed the last ice bridge.
This wolf had come to the island in some other manner. Wolves could swim, but they could not swim eighteen miles. That left boat, ski plane, seaplane, canoe, kayak or Ski-Doo. A pup loosed by a misguided do-gooder? A wolf/dog hybrid bred in domesticity, the owner grows bored with it and lets it “go free” on the island? Had a wolf/dog hybrid been raised to be vicious, attacked somebody and, rather than kill it, the owner dumped it at a campground or in the bay?
This last was the most probable. Wolves’ reputation as cold-blooded killers of little girls in red capes was unearned. No one around the breakfast table could think of a single recorded incident in their lifetimes or that of their parents. In 2005, a presumed wolf/ human killing had been reported, but the attack animal turned out to be a bear.
What there had been were attacks on people by wolf/dog hybrids, kept and bred by dog owners. Like any animal that cannot be fully domesticated, these breeds were volatile. The owners weren’t any better. Most obtained wolf/dog hybrids because they wanted a big, scary, mean dog or, worse – illegal but available in all fifty states – a fighting dog. Brutal attacks by these animals had stirred up public opinion to the point that, in many urban areas, it was illegal to own or keep a wolf/dog hybrid.
Jonah tired of saying “wolf/dog hybrid” first and dubbed the speculative animal a “wog.”
A wog could have been dumped on the island at any time, but most likely in the last six or seven months. Had the creature been in the park the previous winter, Ridley believed there would have been sign of it, a sighting or scat or the outsized paw prints Robin had reported.
Most domesticated – or even partially domesticated – animals couldn’t survive in the wilderness for long, but if the wog was as big as the tracks Robin found suggested, and trained to kill, it might have joined – or taken over – a pack. This could explain why the pack had apparently lost its fear of humans and sauntered through the bunkhouse area. If the wog were big enough and fierce enough, it could have killed the wolf now decomposing in the kitchen, dispatched it so quickly there were no signs of a fight.
“Any alien wolf or wolf/dog hybrid,” Bob declared, pointedly refusing to use Jonah’s word, “would be killed by any pack that came across it.”
“What if it was big, really big?” Katherine said.
“It’s not one-on-one in a fair fight, Kathy,” Bob said with a smile that pushed his cheeks up till his eyes were crescent moons. The smile notwithstanding, the “Kathy” was a clear rebuke. “The pack would kill it.”
“Maybe not,” Ridley said. “If there was a breeding slot open, the wolf might be assimilated.”
Bob snorted. “Pretty hard to arrange,” he said.
“It could happen by chance,” Ridley said. Anna wasn’t sure whether he believed it or was just baiting the other man. “Chance is the only reason we have wolves here at all. A big enough, aggressive enough wog might pull it off.”
The breakfast club finally broke up: Ridley to his laptop to work on reports, Jonah to wander the bunkhouse looking for somebody to pester and Bob to the chair closest to the woodstove to read through the daily log, a thick, three-ring binder full of the forms provided for record keeping. The park service was full of such information-gathering tools. For the most part, they were a tedium of pages hurriedly filled in by the lowest-ranking member of any team. On the island, the biotech did it each day. Temperature at sunrise, at sunset, snowfall, comments; office closets were full of these binders, detailing one study or another. As far as Anna knew, Bob was the first person to actually look at one.
For a while, she amused herself in the DNA lab kitchen, watching Katherine pore over her alien sample, running and rerunning it only to get the same answer. When that palled and looking at the wolf, who was beginning to smell, lost its edge, Anna began drifting back toward the common room.
“Anna?”
It was the first time Katherine had spoken in a quarter of an hour and her voice was so low Anna barely caught it. She looked back. The researcher was still bent over her PCR, her back to the room.
“I’m here,” Anna said. She, too, whispered though she’d not meant to.
“Tell Robin to stay away from Bob,” Katherine said quietly and without turning. Anna waited for further illumination on the subject, but it was not forthcoming.
“Sure,” she said. Then, in hopes it would ease Katherine’s mind: “She’s got a boyfriend.”
Katherine acted as if she’d not heard. After a moment, Anna left the kitchen and wandered into the common room. Standing between the door and the stove, she stared at Bob, trying to figure out why anybody would defend that particular chunk of turf.
“Looks like a Christmas card, doesn’t it?” he said genially.
She looked out the picture widow. The bunkhouse had a wide deck with a railing. She remembered potluck suppers there the summer she’d worked boat patrol. Now it was three-quarters covered with wood cut by the NPS and stacked there for the use of the Winter Study. The sky was lost in the falling flakes, birch and spruce trees surrounding the cleared area veiled in drifting snow, a muted study in black and white.
Anna pulled on a sweater, stepped into her clogs and went outside. In Rocky Mountain, even in the backcountry, there was sound: a jet high overhead, birds singing, water running, wind through the pine trees, squirrels scuffling in the duff. In Mississippi, life buzzed and chirped year-round. Even Texas wasn’t silent; when all else failed, the wind howled and whispered and suggested angry things.
Here, in the thick fall of snow, the silence was absolute. In an indefinable way, even silence was muffled by the slow white flakes.
Anna hated to think of these winters being peopled by lodges, snowmobiles and skiers and beer. Though she’d never come to the island in January again if she could help it, she wanted to know there was a place where silence lived.
Opening the park in winter would effectively shut the study down. The noise and humanity attendant on a winter resort destination would disrupt the wolves to the point the study would no longer be viable.
There was no reason for Homeland Security to send one of their own to evaluate it. The NPS had debated every salient point regarding the study, first with David Mech, then Rolf Peterson and now Ridley Murray. The research was prestigious, high-profile and cheap. People loved the wolves, loved knowing they were around. At every campfire talk, regardless of the subject, the first question was always, “How many wolves are there?”
Pursuing its mandate to keep America’s borders safe, Homeland Security needed to plug up corridors used by unsavory aliens. Big Bend in Texas bordered on Mexico, as did Organ Pipe. Glacier, Isle Royale and Voyageurs national parks shared a border with Canada. Many national parks had stretches of seacoast within their boundaries. If Anna squinted and tilted her head, she could vaguely see the logic of souping up security in these areas, but the border parks were a drop in the bucket when one looked at the landmass of the USA. That which was cynical in her suggested the war on terror had gone after the parks because they were high-profile. “Protecting Our Parks” made a much better headline than “Taking Away Your Civil Rights.”
But why bring in anybody? And why Bob Menechinn? He was more interested in collecting trophy heads than doing science. Unless he was here to rubber-stamp what Homeland Security wanted stamped. Yet when the agency contacted the park and Winter Study team with a list of possible evaluators, Ridley recommended Menechinn. Was it because Menechinn could be bought? Bought with what money? Professors weren’t exactly overpaid. The NPS wouldn’t touch a deal like that. Maybe Michigan Tech. Maybe an angel who loved the park had ponied up.
ROBIN RETURNED EARLY. Adam wasn’t with her. So dull was the day, Robin’s return was heralded with great excitement. She had pictures of the track of the gigantic hound. The camera was plugged into Ridley’s laptop, and they gathered around to see if the paw prints were all they’d been advertised to be.
Robin had traveled fast, but there’d been at least a half an inch of snowfall before she’d reached her destination. The light was lousy for photographing tracks, directionless and muted. Tracking was best in the morning and at sundown, when the light was low enough it caught the minute contours of the prints. She’d used a pen for scale – the proper tool was a small ruler, but a pen or a dime was often as good as it got.
Shouldering Jonah aside, Anna leaned in for a better view.
The paw prints did appear significantly larger than those of the other wolves, but, in the diffuse light and with the snow obliterating the edges, it was hard to be sure they had actually been made by as large an animal as they suggested.
“They could have been made when a normal-sized wolf was running. Or this one here.” Robin leaned in, and her long hair fell across Ridley’s shoulder. He didn’t seem aware of it. For all Bob’s covert flirting and Jonah’s overt silliness, Ridley, the young alpha of this pack, had evidently mated for life. Robin put the tip of a well-shaped finger with cracked skin and a broken nail on the screen. “It could even have been made by a second wolf stepping almost but not exactly in the first one’s track. It seemed clearer before, but now I don’t know.”
“Anna saw something,” Jonah said.
Anna’d been thinking the same thing but didn’t want to commit herself. “Thought being the key word,” she said, but all eyes were on her. “On the way back from Siskiwit, I saw what looked like a huge wolf curled under the branches of a tree. It could have been anything, but it looked like a wolf.”
“Huge?” Ridley questioned the word.
“Half to twice the size of a normal alpha.”
“Wolves here run seventy to eighty-five pounds. Are you talking a hundred-and-sixty-pound wolf?” Ridley asked skeptically.
“Like I said, thought is the key word.”
“And you thought you saw huge tracks.” This was to Robin, and Anna couldn’t tell if Ridley believed them or not. He’d donned his scientist’s mien and she couldn’t read past it.
“I saw them,” Robin said firmly, abandoning her earlier wavering.
“Okay,” Ridley said, and: “Okay.” The second okay was more to himself than the others, and Anna wondered what he was giving himself permission to do.