Despite the tight quarters and the snapping and snarling of animals and humans over the past twenty-four hours, once Adam and Jonah were gone Anna, Katherine, Robin and even Bob began to enjoy one another’s company. A night of shared danger – or perceived danger – a hard hike well done, and the reward of heat and food at the end, bonded them as nights in a bunkhouse could never do.
Adding to the general sense of well-being was what Anna’s District Ranger in Mesa Verde had liked to call the idiot’s delight aspect of camping: after hitting oneself over the head with a two-by-four, it felt so good to stop.
Bob cooked. The big bearish man put on an apron left by a summer seasonal with a taste for frills and bows. Ruffled pinafore straps over his thick shoulders, he began cutting the onions Jonah had brought. His size dwarfed the two-burner stove, his hands made the knife look like a toy and the sash of the apron barely reached around him, but he looked more at ease than Anna had ever seen him. It was as if in a kitchen – even such a kitchen as the backcountry cabin afforded – he felt completely in control, full of confidence, the genuine kind that allows a man generosity of spirit because he needn’t constantly put others down or puff himself up to guarantee his place in the pecking order.
As he changed, Katherine changed. She let down her guard. If Bob’s armor was arrogance, Katherine’s was meekness. Without it hiding her like a translucent burka, she shined. Not a lot, not a shooting star, but she exhibited a sense of humor with a black streak Anna enjoyed. Almost, almost, if she squinted and tilted her head to one side, Anna could see what brought graduate student and professor into a relationship. There was no doubt in her mind that they were in a relationship – or had been – and it was more than merely academics.
By the time they turned out the hurricane lantern to sleep – Anna on the top bunk, Katherine on the bottom, Robin and Bob on the floor – Anna was feeling downright warm and fuzzy.
Maintained by coffee and a breakfast that didn’t ice up on the spoon, the camaraderie survived the morning.
Carrying four traps – forty pounds – Anna felt strong and ready as she shouldered her pack after breakfast. Bob offered to carry Katherine’s traps for her, but apparently Katherine felt the joy of not being crippled from the day before as well and insisted on taking her share.
The storm Jonah and the supercub fled the previous afternoon squatted on Malone Bay, settling slate-colored skirts in the hollows and down the hillsides. Three inches of snow had fallen during the night, and more whirled on a scouring wind that erased the track of the cub’s skis across the harbor ice and the footprints of the Winter Study team. In the isolated places of the world, nature still retained the power to erase human lives as easily as she did the prints of their shoes. The feeling gave Anna hope that mankind wouldn’t sound the earth’s death knell quite yet, that Mother Nature wouldn’t go quietly and she would take as many of the enemy with her as she could.
Ice on Siskiwit Lake was eight to nine inches thick and blown clear of snow in many places. Wind from the northwest scudded over the surface of the lake with razor-blade cold. The snow had stopped, but the clouds looked heavy with more. A renegade flurry of fat flakes leaped and soared on the gusts of wind, in no hurry to reach the earth. These were not the mean-spirited snowflakes, fine as beach sand in the teeth, that scathed the east end of the island but the lacy flakes that adorned Christmas cards. Their playful beauty made the cold seem less personal. Less deadly. It was a comforting illusion.
Where the wind cleared it, the ice was slick and black. Anna could see bubbles and cracks that ran like zigzagging white cliffs beneath the surface.
“Leave your nose alone,” Robin said.
“What about the cracks?” Anna asked, slipping her hand back in its mitten. She thought she’d gotten past the nose thing.
“There are always cracks,” Robin said. “It usually doesn’t mean anything. Ice is in flux, expanding and contracting. The cracks are stress fractures.”
Usually doesn’t mean anything. Anna was only slightly reassured.
Halfway to Ryan Island, famous for being the biggest island in the biggest lake on the biggest island in the biggest lake in the world but still only a froth of evergreens and rocks, they came to the remains of the moose kill that Jonah and Anna had watched from the air several days before. The carcass had been picked clean. What scraps of meat still clung to the ripped hide were being worked on by two ravens. They eyed the human interlopers critically, then, unimpressed, turned back to their work.
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.
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.