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.
Anna intended to sit back down but realized she’d never made it to her feet. The mere thought of it had tapped her last reserves. She hoped Robin had the strength and patience to spoon-feed her the remainder of her required five thousand calories. Lifting an eating utensil might be beyond her powers.
Calflike in the corral, she watched dumbly as Adam undid the frozen buckles on Robin’s harness. There was definite byplay between the two of them, secret looks and small, quickly extinguished smiles, and Anna wondered if Robin’s boyfriend – Gavin or Galen or whatever – was on his way out. Seasonal Park Service life was hard on relationships. Permanent Park Service life wasn’t much better.
Life in general was hell on relationships, Anna thought tiredly. She wished Paul was there, wished she was in Natchez. How hard would it be? She could give up rangering – all it seemed to get her was wrecked knee joints and scars – and become a Mississippi housewife. Paul was an Episcopal priest when he wasn’t being the sheriff of Adams County. Anna could be a church lady. She liked hats. Anyway, she liked her NPS Stetson well enough. If she believed in God, it would be doable.
Damn.
There was always a catch.
Jonah excused himself to check on the weather. Adam and Robin left shortly thereafter. Bob went out to bring firewood and stack it near the door. Finally there was room to move. Anna roused herself to a little housekeeping, the only kind she was much good at: setting up camp. She began efficiently storing their mountains of gear. In summer, extraneous items could be cached out of doors. In January, anything they wanted the use of, including the wolf traps, had to be kept inside the cabin. The traps had been designed for all weathers. It wouldn’t have hurt their form or function to be tossed out in the snow, but working with them would be harder if the metal was cold enough to burn skin.
“Can I do anything to help?” Katherine asked.
Anna had forgotten she was there. “Can you even move after the last two days?” she asked.
Katherine laughed and shook her head. “Surely there’s something I can do.”
“There’s not room to do it,” Anna said. She almost added “How are you doing? Are you holding up?” but caught herself in time. Concern and condescension were hard to tell apart, and Katherine’s brain was probably as tired as her body. Instead she said: “We won’t have to pack like this again. We couldn’t count on the weather breaking, so we hauled the traps in. If the weather’s too bad for Jonah to pick us up, we’ll leave them here.” She shot a malevolent glance at the internal-frame pack hanging on the wall at the foot of the bunks. “I doubt if I could do it again. That pack nearly killed me.”
She’d said it to make Katherine feel better, but it might be true. She might not be able to take that kind of weight again for a while. The previous season, when she’d been on a twenty-one-day fire assignment in the mountains east of Boise, Idaho, she’d noticed that the difference between the old firefighters and the young ones wasn’t in strength or endurance. It was in recovery time. The old guys, the firefighters over forty, were as strong as the kids. She and the others could lift and run and dig with the best of them. But they wore down. The kids were stronger after three weeks of hard physical labor. The grown-ups were just bone tired.
With much stomping, Jonah opened the door and leaned in. “Seen Adam?” he asked. “Weather’s souring. We’ve got to roll.”
“I thought he was with you,” Anna said.
“He’s with Robin,” Jonah replied, sounding vaguely ominous. Anna couldn’t tell if he was jealous or just worried about getting the supercub up before they got weathered in.
Six bodies crammed in the tiny cabin overnight.
“I’ll help you look,” she said, grabbed up her parka and shoved her feet in her boots. She didn’t bother with balaclava and mittens. She had no intention of being out that long.
The light had dimmed from its paltry glory. A tidal wave of gray was rolling toward shore from the northwest. Above it was the clear silver-blue sky, but that was going to change. Wind was driving the clouds; they would have snow.
“Adam!” Jonah yelled.
Anna walked toward the outhouse. Bob met her carrying an armload of wood for the stove. “Have you seen Adam and Robin?” she demanded.
“He’s old enough to be her father,” he said.
Anna gave him a hard look. “So are you. Have you seen them?”
Before he could answer, the two missing persons emerged from behind the cabin. They had the excited air of lovers, sharing secret trysts. Or, more apt, a ragman and tinker, luring the lovely farm girl to sin and degradation. Adam’s affectation of a parka and ski pants worn and stained and patched with duct tape in half a dozen places leant his otherwise-honest-looking self a disreputable air.
“God dammit, Adam,” Jonah groused. “I’m taking off as soon as I get her fired up. Either you’re buckled in or you’re staying here.” The pilot strode off toward the lake and his lady. Adam started after him.
“Your pack,” Anna called. She reached inside the cabin door and snatched up the maintenance man’s day pack. “Jesus!” she exclaimed as the weight hit her sore shoulders. “What have you got in here anyway?”
“Give that to me,” he demanded harshly.
Wordlessly, Anna handed it over.
“Books,” he said and smiled sheepishly. “We’ll make another run with goodies if we can,” he said. “Hang in there.”
With those reassuring words, he started down the slight grade. The supercub’s engine purred to life, and he broke into a run, his long legs eating up the distance. Feeling abandoned in an arctic wilderness, Anna watched till he climbed through the clamshell doors.
Adam was up to something. Maybe that something was a twenty-four-year-old biotech. Whatever it was, it bore watching.