Following Jonah’s lead, Anna made it to the cedar swamp in forty minutes. At every moment, she expected to be overtaken by the skiers but was still solo when Jonah made his last transmission: “See that rise ahead of you? Got a big nose of rock sticking out of it and trees like nose hairs?”
“I got it,” Anna radioed back.
“The body is right beyond that. Trees’ll clear out and there’ll be a rock about the size of a refrigerator, then you turn left. Can’t miss it. Wind’s coming up. I’ve got to head back.”
Jonah had said “body” out loud. Out loud and over the radio. The breach of tradition gave Anna a shiver akin to that of an actor when the Scottish play is mentioned by name or peacock feathers are worn on stage. Till they knew for sure Katherine was dead – and that this was Katherine – time had to be considered of the essence. Close on quarter till four, wind rising, and fatigue dragging her steps, Anna had no choice but to keep on, but she was not averse to a little company at this point.
“Where is everybody?” She didn’t whine, but she felt like it.
“They’re coming,” Jonah promised. “They got held up leaving the bunkhouse.”
Anna wondered what in the hell could have held them up. Cell phones didn’t work on the island, the radio was out, the island was socked in so seaplanes couldn’t come and go.
Maybe somebody dropped by. Given recent events, that thought bordered on the sinister.
She topped the rise by the nose, spotted the refrigerator, half slid down and turned left as she’d been directed. Jonah said, “You can’t miss it,” and he was old enough and wily enough not to say that unless it was true.
In swampy areas, cedar trees fell like jackstraws, one over the other, the living with the dead, branches entangled. During the growing season, the swamps were water filled and choked with under-growth. In winter, they were navigable, but just barely. Fresh snow cloaked the branches of the upright trees and filled tiny ledges in the bark. Downed trees, fallen willy-nilly, made a lumpy quilt, protecting the living trees’ roots. Snow hid where one deadfall crossed another, and maybe three more below that, till walking through was like negotiating an icebound jungle filled with Lilliputian tiger traps.
Traversing a cedar swamp in the snow was just begging to have an ankle broken or a knee sprained. Anna forced herself to slow down. Becoming a second victim was too humiliating to contemplate. A gust of wind knocked snow from branches down her collar, and something else that brought her to an abrupt stop, head up, sniffing the air like an animal. She’d caught a whiff of the odor she’d noticed the night they followed the wolf pack down to the harbor. A death-and-worse smell she’d associated with the stench of Algernon Blackwood’s windigo, the horrible odor that heralded its coming. As before, the smell was snatched away before she could be sure she hadn’t conjured it up from an overactive imagination.
Then the “find” was in front of her. A body.
Parts of a body.
The reason Jonah had been able to spot anything from the air was due to small creatures, probably foxes, which had worried and dug until they’d uncovered the arm. Not Katherine’s body, just her arm, still in the sleeve of her parka, her ungloved hand a stump of chewed fingers. At least Anna assumed the arm was Katherine’s; it was wearing her coat.
The sleeve of the parka wasn’t the only color in the naturally black-and-white landscape. There was no blood on the ground – or, if there was, the snow had covered it – but on the trunks of the trees leading away from the severed arm was iridescent orange paint applied with a spatter brush. The neon color was so screamingly out of place, Anna had a moment of pure confusion as her brain tried desperately to make sense of the phenomenon, flashing through traffic cones, construction sawhorses, vandalism, police tape, confetti, graffiti, trail blazes.
A macabre vision of the severed arm blazing a trail to the body it was snatched from played through her mind. She shook it off, the way a dog shakes off a bath, and skirted the area where the arm lay, palm to the sky, fingers gnawed to the knuckle bones. At the first of the orange-daubed trees, she stopped. The neon dots were crystalline. She pulled off her glove and pinched a bit of the stuff up, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger. Body heat melted it, leaving a trace of red on her skin.
She didn’t sniff it or taste it. Blood was said to smell metallic, but she could never smell anything unless there was a lot of it and it was getting ripe. Still, she was sure it was blood. The spatter patterns formed when Katherine had fought whatever had taken off her arm. For some reason, the interaction of blood with the intense cold turned it Halloween orange.
White cedar trunks, bright Pollock-like paintings in blood orange, black of the branches overhead sketching a white sky: the scene was stunningly beautiful.
Until she saw Katherine.
The body was facedown, head shoved partly under a log as if Katherine had tried to burrow away from her attackers. The back of her parka was torn, tufts of down leaking out rents that ran shoulder to hip where claws had dug to get at the chewy center. Strands of light brown hair mixed with the tatters of cloth and goose feathers. The fur that ringed the hood of her coat was ripped away, as was half the hood. Blood, not orange but black as tar, glued the mess together. From the waist down, she was clad only in Levi’s. Her ski pants had been shucked off of her, as a man might shuck an ear of corn, and for the same reason. The light down trousers had then been torn to pieces, played with until there was little recognizable as clothing but the suspender buckles. The Levi’s were surprisingly intact but for the bottom of the left leg. That had been chewed to a mess of string and blood. The foot was gone.
Anna had to fight a bizarre urge to run. Mostly she liked the dead: they were quiet, undemanding and never complained if they were dropped on a carryout. Because the teeth of hungry little creatures had busily uncoiled the mortal coil had never bothered her. Human bodies were as dried leaves, acorn husks, snake skins: a thing of no import any longer left behind.
Katherine bothered her.
She concentrated on breathing in and breathing out and making excuses: The light was unsettling – dim and slanting and yellow-gray – cold carped on the bones, undermined body and spirit, the natural world behaving unnaturally, claustrophobic living conditions, discord in the human pack. The list of reasons did little to stop liquid fear coursing through her veins because reason wasn’t the root of it. Ghosts, yetis, skin walkers, vampires, zombies, gremlins, wogs and windigos – six million years of campfire stories – were undermining the rationale of everyone on the island.
“Get a grip,” she growled and looked around the rest of the clearing. Focusing past the mutilated arm, she began to see other disturbances in the snow. Over an area about five feet in diameter, animals had been digging. Where they’d dug were bright orange stains. She saw the foot, boot torn off and bones showing where the flesh had been eaten away. In another depression in the snow was a hank of light brown hair clotted with black. Mostly whatever had stained the snow – fingers, flesh, a toe – had been carted off and eaten elsewhere.
Little guys, foxes and ravens and rodents, had feasted. But the little guys had not torn a full-sized woman to pieces.
“Anna!”
She twitched so hard it hurt her neck. Being startled pissed her off and being pissed off was a lot better than being tired and scared.
“It’s about damn time you got here,” she hollered. “Where the hell have you been? What in God’s name could have held you up on this godforsaken island?”
Ridley, following her blasphemies, came through the tangle of downed trees with more grace than she had managed. Behind him was Robin and, beside her, Bob. That was what had held them up. Anna realized she was about to get out of line and scaled back her anger.
She thought to warn them, to say: “It’s bad” or “Pretty grim scene” or “Take the women and kids back to the house,” but instead she just waited till Robin and Ridley noticed the digging, the arm. Then, like a tour guide from hell, she pointed out the various pieces.
Bob waded in and started brushing snow away from the arm. “Leave it,” Anna snapped. “I don’t want the scene compromised.”
“Wolves killed her,” Bob said. He started in with the brushing again, and it bothered her that he was uncovering the arm.
The arm, for chrissake. It was cut off. It was hamburger. Anybody who wasn’t Bob would have brushed the snow from Katherine’s face.
“Wolves may have torn her apart,” Anna said in a tone she considered reasonable. “We don’t know what killed her. I need you to stop that.”
He looked up at her desperate or dangerous or scared. Anna didn’t think it was grief.
He was digging up her arm. Her fucking arm. Anna was having trouble getting past that.
“Another front is coming in,” Ridley said. “We’re going to lose the light in an hour or so.”
Another dark and stormy night. Anna was getting that clock-striking-midnight-as-the-power-goes-out feeling again. “Whatever we miss won’t be here tomorrow,” she said. “It’ll be somebody’s dinner.”
Robin took up photographic duties. The constant flash became a freakish punctuation to the finds, the pieces of what had once been a young woman.
A young woman murdered by her first love, the wolf; when the snow was swept from the body, it became clear she had been killed by a wolf or wolves. Her throat was torn out, her head connected to her body only by her spine. The damage was fierce but incomplete. The body had not been eviscerated, the face was intact, the coat, though badly torn, was not stripped from the meat.
“Odd,” Anna said, and: “Wolf.”
“Wog,” Ridley said.
“It was a pack of wolves,” Bob said, his voice as plummy and certain as if he were reporting the six o’clock news.
“If it was wolves – natural wolves, pure wolves – it’s the first time in recorded history it’s happened in America,” Ridley said. “What’s your take on this, Menechinn? If it was wolves, do you get to open the island year-round so Homeland Security can arm all the parkies and, between creel checks and wake-in-no-wake-zone citations, Ranger Rick can save us from the Canadians?”
Ridley asked as if it were a real question, as if he cared about Bob’s answer.
“Homeland Security can shut down your little pissant operation anytime,” Bob replied with the same big tucked-in smile he bestowed on everything, and Anna wondered if he liked making Ridley miserable or was simply incapable of empathy.
“Not if this is a wolf kill,” she said. “Led by a wog or not, every wildlife biologist in the world will be lobbying to keep the study going. Scientists can’t stand an anomaly.”
“Doggone it, where is Adam?” Ridley demanded. Apropos of nothing that Anna could follow, he transferred his anger from Menechinn to Adam Johansen. “Radio him again,” he ordered Robin and, turning his back on Anna and Bob, took the camera from the biotech and began photographing the scene.
Bit by bit, as it was recorded by the camera, they brought together what was left of Katherine Huff.
As they had at the necropsy, they worked as a team. This time Robin and Anna handled the corpse, carefully brushing away the snow, and Ridley photographed it in situ. Anna didn’t know what Bob Menechinn was doing other than wandering around, staring at the ground, digging here and there.
“Wolves don’t do this,” Ridley said when the body parts were uncovered and accounted for. “They just don’t. We were talking about this the other day. There’s upward of two thousand wolves in Minnesota. They eat moose and deer and sheep, when they can get them. They don’t hunt down and kill humans.”
Anna was studying the scene in an attempt to reconstruct the incident. “Look.” She took one of the flashlights Ridley brought. The sun must have been close to setting. The light was fading and sky, air and earth were a uniform gray. Holding the flashlight at ground level, she sent the beam across the surface of the snow. Ridley squatted on his heels and followed the line with his eyes.
“You can see where she crawled, trying to get away.” Anna played the beam across a faint but discernible trough that had been cut through old snow, then filled with new. “And there she tried to pull herself up on a tree; tried to save herself. Then she goes down again there.”
“Wolves don’t behave this way,” Ridley said doggedly.
“See where the bark is shredded on the downed trunk? She must have tried to crawl beneath it, and the wolves tore at it till they got her out. The marks are too big for anything else.”
“They don’t do this,” Ridley said but he sounded more confused than convinced. “They just don’t.”
Anna didn’t argue with him. She knew the wolf statistics. Western parks debated them endlessly as the subject of reintroducing wolves heated up.
“It’ll be dark before we get back,” Ridley said and stood. “Bob! Make yourself useful.” To Anna he said: “We’ll package the remains for transport. You and Robin look around a little more. We’ve got ten minutes, then we’ve got to move.”
A foot of new snow could hide a lot of sins. There was no point in searching any areas that hadn’t been disturbed by scavengers. The clearing where the body was found was not so much a clearing as a flat space where the trees had opted not to fall for one reason or another. It was scarcely six feet on a side. Beyond that, they were again in the giant’s game of pick-up-sticks.
Anna followed Katherine’s back trail. Five or six yards into the tangle of trees, she found a place where the snow had been dug down almost to bare earth. Shreds of fabric were scattered around the dig.
“Robin,” Anna called. “Bring your light.” Robin came lightly, gracefully, annoying Anna with her ease of movement in this hostile environment. “What do you think?” Anna asked, pointing out the fabric.
“Backpack? She must have gone back to the bunkhouse before she ran off. That changes things. To what, I haven’t a clue.”
The pack, what was left of it, was of dark blue canvas, a relic from before high tech went into the backcountry. The anachronism was jarring. Katherine was a state-of-the-art woman. The wolves had attacked the pack with a fury that struck Anna as almost personal, the way a deranged person will defile an object belonging to someone they hate.
Radios came to life; Adam calling from the base radio in the bunkhouse. “My batteries went dead,” came through a storm of static. “Where is everybody?”
Ridley was the one who answered. He told him briefly of the body. “You may as well stay where you are,” he said. “There’s not much you can do now.” Ridley’s tone made it clear that there had been a good deal he could have done earlier if he hadn’t been AWOL.
“Ten-four,” Adam said. The Park Service had gone to plain speech years before, but people clung to the codes.
Handing Robin her flashlight, Anna carefully widened the dig. Shards of black plastic were embedded in the snow. “Film canister?” Anna wondered aloud as she collected them into a baggie and handed it to the biotech. She swept the snow clear of a broken glass vial, the snow around it dark with blood.
“Jonah said Katherine pocketed vials of wolf blood before she left the carpenter’s shop,” Anna mused. “Maybe that was a factor in the attack.” Shading her eyes from the flashlight, she looked up at Robin.
The biotech’s face was puckering the way a small child’s will as it readies for tears. Her eyes had dilated more than the coming dusk could account for.
“Get me something to bag this in,” Anna said to distract her from whatever thoughts were breaking her down. Robin did as she was told, but she didn’t speak, and her movements lost their fluidity. Twice she stumbled over downed trees. The second time, she fell. When she regained her feet, she stood where she was as if she’d lost her way.
Delayed shock at the grisly scene and hypothermia would both account for the behavior. Maybe winter had finally turned on Robin. Anna left the hole she was excavating. There was no need to go on collecting “evidence.” The wolves would never get their day in court. Anna’d been doing it out of habit. She left the scraps and buckles and took Robin’s arm.
“Come on,” she said quietly. “Help me get the Sked ready.” Holding on to Robin, Anna clambered through the obstacle course of the swamp to the sled Ridley had towed from Windigo. Robin’s knees buckled and she went down on all fours, head drooping, hair painting the snow.
“What happened?” Anna asked as she pulled her to her feet.
Robin didn’t answer and Anna didn’t push it. Opening wounds was best done in a controlled environment.
“Did you find a cell phone?” Bob called. “They belong to the university and I’ll have to pay for it.”
That’s what he’d been doing, digging here and there. He was looking to save himself a few bucks. The callousness struck Anna like a snowball hitting ice. Too tired to bother turning her head in his direction, “No phone,” she said.
By the time they got Katherine’s remains stowed in garbage bags-if the park had a body bag, Ridley didn’t know where it was – and strapped into the rescue Sked, it was full dark. Wind from the northeast, bringing the promised front, had picked up and the temperature was falling.
Anna had to help Robin on with her skis. In the morning, the woman had worn them as if they were an extension of her body. Now she fumbled with the locks, unsure of how they worked.
“Hang on,” Anna said and patted her leg awkwardly. “We’ll be home in no time. Don’t think too much.” Robin said nothing.
Anna held the light for the others as they strapped on their skis, then helped Ridley into the harness attached to the Sked. The only one without skis, she would follow behind to free it if it got hung up on anything.
Now that the distraction of the corpse and its attendant parts was over, Anna was feeling every mile and minute of the day as well as the day before’s fight to get clear of the ice of Intermediate. Fatigue pressed on her till it was all she could do to keep her head up.
Robin went first, carrying one of the flashlights. Anna didn’t like her leading, but she didn’t want her bringing up the rear either. At least in front, if she went down, they’d see her.
Bob followed in Robin’s tracks. Anna was surprised how good he was on skis till she remembered he’d been born and raised in Canada. Ridley was third, carrying the other light and pulling the body. Anna fell into place at the tail of the train.
They’d not been on the move for fifteen minutes when the Sked tipped between two stones at the base of the outcropping with the stone nose. Anna was grateful. She was at the end of her strength and needed the short rest. “Hold up,” Ridley called to the others, then stood silently in his traces like an old horse. None of them spoke. Anything that came to mind to say was too grim to share.
The narrow metal sled had ridden up on the right side over a rock beneath the snow until it was close to tipping over. Anna caught up the few yards she’d fallen behind and knelt to right it. Both knees cracked as she went down and she wondered if she’d have to push on the ground like an old woman to get up again. Bracing herself, she lifted and pulled on the left edge of the aluminum sled, sliding it back onto level ground.
“You’re good to go,” she said.
“Go, Robin,” Ridley called.
Anna stayed where she was, the energy to rise eluding her for a moment. She’d heard about people wanting to lie down and sleep in the snow but had never understood the allure of it till now. She was gathering her strength to rise when she heard something in the trees to the left of the trail. Intermixed with the sighing of the wind was the sound of stealthy movement, whispering over the snow purposeful and stealthy, keeping pace with Ridley and the others.
They were being stalked.