The Beaver was spotless. Anna’d never seen an airplane so clean. Sitting in its heated hangar in Ely, Minnesota, it fairly gleamed from its annual check. Only the deeply scarred floorboards stood witness to the old warhorse’s hard duty. Beavers hadn’t been manufactured since 1962, and the one the pilot was loading for its weekly provision and personnel trip to Isle Royale in Lake Superior was older than Anna.
But it had taken better care of itself, she thought, with a touch of icy realism. Suited up in brand-spanking-new, fresh-out-of-the-box, felt-lined Sorel boots, insulated socks, ski pants and parka, watching a woman half her age, with legs as long and strong as a yearling moose, move nimbly about in lightweight mukluks and an alarmingly thin winter jacket, Anna suffered a sensation neither familiar nor welcome.
She felt frail, insecure, out of her element. Isle Royale in Michigan had been one of her first duty stations, but that had been years ago. And in summer. A jaunt there in the arctic temperatures of January, when the island was closed to the outside world, wasn’t her idea of the perfect winter vacation. Too many years on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi, where a Levi jacket and knee socks were sufficient for a winter wardrobe, had thinned her blood. Her current tenure as District Ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park might bring back her limited tolerance for the cold, but she’d yet to spend a winter there.
She shifted uneasily from foot to foot, feeling the movement of her toes inside the huge boots, the way the many layers of down and fleece muffled her body and wrapped her limbs. New gear: Anna didn’t trust it. Nor did she like parties where she had to dress up. The invitation to participate in the long-running wolf/moose study on Isle Royale had come down from Rocky’s superintendent, couched in words no woman could resist: “How would you like to snowshoe over rough terrain, collecting blood-fat ticks and moose piss?”
Being a true romantic, Anna had said she would adore it. Rocky Mountain would soon be dealing with the prey/predator issue. Not through any sudden enlightenment of the state legislature, but because the recovery of the magnificent and much-maligned animals had been rapid. Wolves were reinhabiting territories they’d been extirpated from for a century or more.
Anna had reason to know the expected wolves were already in the park and no reason whatsoever to share the knowledge. At least not till the pups were old enough to fend for themselves. Wolf/moose management was about to top Rocky’s list of wildlife issues, and there was no better classroom for studying it than Isle Royale.
“We’re set,” the pilot said. Anna climbed the two paw-sized steps on the Beaver’s wheel pant to get into the high cockpit, no mean feat in boots the size of snowshoes.
“Need help with your safety belt?” The pilot was stiff and edgy, his United States Forest Service uniform so crisp that Anna, accustomed to the rumpled, sweat-stained versions she came across in the field, had, at first glance, mistaken it for a military uniform.
“No,” she said shortly. She’d flown on search and rescues, forest fires and animal surveys, more times than she could count before the pilot graduated from high school. Annoyed at herself for being annoyed, she fumbled at her safety harness. She was as awkward a bundle as an Iowa schoolboy waiting for the bus in January.
Pride cometh, she thought wryly as her mittened hands scrabbled on the webbing and her spiffy new balaclava interfered as she tried to bite her fingertips to pull the mittens off. Finally she sat as patiently and helplessly as the apocryphal Iowa lad and let the pilot string her shoulder harnesses through her lap belt and lock the whole mess down.
Then she thanked him politely.
Robin Adair, the long-legged research assistant, sprang gracefully into the left rear seat, settled herself like a pro, and the plane was pushed from the hangar.
The Forest Service seaplane operation was on the shore of Shagawa Lake, edging the small town of Ely. In summer, the runway was open water. Now it was a lane of hard-packed snow, running north-northeast, between gaudily painted ice-fishing houses put up helter-skelter till they resembled nothing so much as a 1940s trailer park dropped from a passing cargo plane.
In an attempt to quell what was verging on internal whining, Anna focused on the beauty of the boreal forest as the Beaver left the ice and banked, turning east toward Michigan. The day was painfully bright and clear as it can only be in the north, where every particle of moisture is frozen from the air and the sun moves low in the south, feigning evening even at noon. Crystalline amber light honed the edges of the world till shadows of pines, long on the shores of snow-covered lakes, were as sharp and black as fangs drawn by children. Even from an altitude of twenty-two hundred feet and climbing, every track across the dazzle of white showed blue.
Static rattled in Anna’s headphones, and then the pilot’s voice: “Have you been to Isle Royale before?”
“Once.” Anna had the scar to prove it, a six-inch weal of shiny flesh across her abdomen. It still ached occasionally.
When it was cold.
“Did you work there?”
Altitude was making the man downright chatty. Anna preferred him in his martinet mode but dragged herself from the vista of black pine and white lakes to make conversation.
“Ten or fifteen years ago, I was a ranger in Windigo. Boat patrol.”
“Wow!” the pilot said. Before Anna could bask in his awe, he finished his thought: “I was in seventh grade then.”
So much for impressing the natives.
“Did you ferry the Homeland Security guys out?” she asked, to change the subject.
The “Homeland Security guys” had been sent by Washington to evaluate Winter Study. For fifty years, Isle Royale had been a lab for Michigan Tech, in cooperation with the National Park Service. The park provided money and physical support. In return, the wolf researchers added to the glamour of Isle Royale. Visitors followed the rise and fall in the pack populations as avidly as soap opera devotees. A sizable percentage of the world’s knowledge of wolves had been produced by the study.
To remain viable, the ISRO wolf/moose study had two requirements: fifty thousand dollars a year – peanuts as far as research money went – and that ISRO be closed to tourism from October to May, when the wolves mated and denned.
Homeland Security had put forth a resolution to beef up security in all border parks. To that end, they were exploring the possibility of opening the park year-round, to better protect the border from terrorists. If the wolf/moose study – running for over half a century – could be said to be effectively mined out as far as relevant data was concerned, Homeland Security was going to shut it down. ISRO would be opened to cross-country skiers and winter campers. Rock Harbor resort, on the east end, would be revamped for year-round usage, and a smaller hotel built on the east end in Windigo.
The wolf researchers – Anna, NPS seasonals and Homeland Security, in the persons of rented experts from American University – would share a bunkhouse for six weeks. Anna was surprised some enterprising young reality-TV-show producer hadn’t offered big money to film it.
The mike woke up, and the seventh-grader flying the plane said: “It was a man and a woman – Homeland Security – the guy was somebody Ridley Murray recommended. They were weathered in in Ely for nearly a week. Hung around the hangar all day, being mad because we wouldn’t move the ceiling up. Clouds were right down on the deck.”
“I can’t believe the park would do this to Rolf.” It was Robin from the backseat, her voice-activated mike crackling with more anger than static.
“Rolf Peterson retired,” the pilot said.
“The study is Rolf.” Robin again. From Robin’s fierceness, Anna guessed she, like a lot of other young outdoors people, was in love with the charismatic wolf researcher. Not sexual love but romantic love, in the sense that they wanted to grow up to be him, or at least have his life. To a woman Robin’s age – twenty-two or-three, at a guess – retirement could look a lot like desertion. Or death.
“Ridley wanted this guy,” the pilot said doggedly.
“Ridley Murray was Rolf’s student.” Robin’s voice came back on its bed of cracklings. “Lesser of evils: Ridley didn’t want any guy.”
The mike was live for another moment as if an unspoken thought prolonged its activation, then, noiselessly but unmistakably, it went dead again. Fleetingly Anna wondered what differentiated that quiet open line of communication and the quiet but utterly different isolation that followed. Maybe it was the difference between silence and deafness; some sense deeper than the stirrup and hammer that tells one she is alone.
Embracing the solitude, she watched the frozen miles pass beneath the Beaver’s wings and thought of Paul. It wasn’t only the Mississippi heat that had thinned her blood. Paul Davidson was the source of the living heat in her life. After her first husband, Zack, had died, Anna had, without even knowing she’d done so, chosen a chill and lonely place to stow her heart, a limbo where it continued to beat, like the heart of a frog frozen in winter mud, to thaw to new life come spring. Paul had been her spring.
There was no warmth like the warmth of Paul’s arms around her, no sleep like the sleep she enjoyed when she had her head on his shoulder. He made her feel safe, and, until she’d known him, she’d not realized she felt any other way. Love lent her a dangerous and delicious fragility.
They’d been married four months. They’d been together ten days of it.
Sitting in the right seat of the Beaver, watching the landscape scroll by, she wanted to be with him with a fierceness that bordered on panic. Being a park ranger was a job, not a life; loneliness a choice, not a necessity anymore. It was all she could do not to scream at the pilot to turn the plane around. For a gut-wrenching minute, her career seemed a foolish exercise, a pointless labor for little pay, a cruel hoax that had lured her from her marriage. Being with Paul was the only thing that mattered. She tried to clench her fists, to concentrate her mind, but they only balled into soft paws in the thick down mittens.
A breaking sound in her ears let her know relief was coming, in the form of distraction, and she welcomed it. Robin spoke again, the edge of anger in her voice a refreshing antidote to Anna’s weakness.
“Ridley recommended the Homeland Security guy from this list they sent the park, but nobody who knows anything made up the list.”
Nobody who knows anything. Anna’d been around research projects enough to know that meant an NPS person. There was a strange and mutually hostile love affair between scientists and the parks. Years back, the Park Service abdicated the role of science in the parks and opened it up to outside researchers. Researchers tended to look on the parks as their private laboratories and the Park Service as an annoying necessity at best and interfering ignoramuses at worst. A professional hazard of research was the tendency to narrow-mindedness. Often researchers lived for the one thing they studied. Anything that did not serve that study was viewed with scorn. The wolf/moose study on Isle Royale had decades of homesteading by researchers, most of whom came back year after year, six weeks in winter, six months in summer.
“Word came down from Washington. Terrorists.” Robin snorted, and Anna was surprised such a delicate sculpted nose could produce such an excellent snort. “If they’re from the Middle East, creeping across the Canadian border in the dead of winter to paddle to the island, they’re going to freeze their little terrorist butts off.”
Word had come down from Washington.
After 9/11, Homeland Security dumped money on the NPS. Everybody loved it. It was like Christmas, till they noticed the money was earmarked for law enforcement. Like Popeye’s arms, the LE divisions were puffed up in classic steroidal fashion, the interpretive programs relegated to the leavings.
Now D.C. sent down the “Interpretive Theme” for the year, and campfire programs – from the Everglades to Death Valley to the Kenai Peninsula – had to focus on pollution or endangered species or bioterrorism – whatever the folk in Washington thought was important at the moment. Never mind that the public wasn’t interested, or that the theme didn’t suit the park.
Free money was never free.
“ Lake ’s wide open,” the pilot said.
Anna looked at what she’d thought was the gleam of ice on the approaching shore of Lake Superior. Open water. In a colder winter, a pair of wolves had crossed an ice bridge from Canada and set up housekeeping on the island. The lake freezing solid from Isle Royale to the Canadian shore was rare; it hadn’t happened in over thirty years. She watched as water replaced land beneath the wings and Isle Royale began to take shape on the horizon. In the joy of seeing the island from the air, she forgot about Paul, the cold and the antagonisms of mere mortals.
Washington Harbor reached out a welcoming arm, and the airplane flew in low and slow. Water, catching the iridescent blue and amber of the sky, riffled between narrowing banks of evergreens, black with shadow. Blue turned to white as ice formed in the shallower water, ringing Beaver Island in a necklace of diamonds. At the level of the treetops, and hugging the bank to avoid the worst of the crosswind, the pilot lined up on the expanse of white between the tiny harbor island and the docks at Windigo.
The weekly arrival of food and people from the outside world was apparently quite an event. A snowmobile, surrounded by four figures so muffled in layers of clothing that they looked like bags of dirty laundry, was parked on the ice east of the dock. As the airplane slid gracefully from the sky, one of the bundles turned its back, dropped its insulated trousers and mooned them; a pale butt exposed to the elements. Anna laughed. The pilot ignored it.
As the propeller came to a stop, bearded faces with fur-rimmed hoods peered up at them, and Anna was put in mind of Cro-Magnons first sighting a metal bird from the gods. The pilot shut down the engine, unbuckled his harness and slid from the left seat. Robin Adair, light as a snowflake in a Christmas globe, drifted from the rear seat to the harbor ice. Anna pawed open her harness buckles and maneuvered her oversized boots out one at a time, thrust her down-padded rear end through the door and clambered awkwardly down the itsy-bitsy steps on the wheel pant. Ninety minutes sitting in the cold had done nothing to add to her natural grace and she clumped to the ground with all the dignity of a garbage bag tossed into a Dumpster.
Wind, razor-sharp and just as cruel, cut across her cheek as she turned to the troglodyte welcoming committee. A wall of parka-puffed backs greeted her.
Robin’s voice cut through the whistling silence: “Holy smoke!” She spoke in the hollow whisper of a celluloid citizen seeing the mother ship. Anna toddled to the end of the wall of flesh and goose feathers. Through the dense night of trees on the ragged shore, a huge dark shape moved erratically.
“A windigo,” Robin breathed.
The Algernon Blackwood story of the Ojibwa legend that rangers told around the campfire to scare the pants off park visitors flooded Anna’s mind. The windigo was a voracious and monstrous cannibal that feasted on human flesh and souls on the shores of northern lakes, where no one could hear the crying of its tortured victims.
Anna was not given to superstition, but the summer she worked on the island the story had given her the creeps for a few nights. Robin’s pale, pinched face and hollow voice brought them back.
The creature in the trees was immense, larger than a horse, and moved in painful lurches. It appeared to shrink and expand in an unnatural way, and it took Anna a tense moment to realize the animal was not drifting in and out of supernatural realms but falling to its knees and fighting its way up again. It stumbled clear of the masking trees and onto the lake ice, hooves ringing loud against the rimed stones.
“Watch out,” one of the bearded men said. “Not all moose are Bullwinkle.”
Anna shaded her eyes against the glare. Where the moose’s antlers should have been were freakishly twisted horns with gobbets of diseased-looking flesh, pustules the size of hens’ eggs, six or more inches long, and dependent from a bony structure grown wild as coral, cancerous and out of control.
Head swaying in wide, low arcs, as if the deformed antlers tugged at its sanity and drove spikes deep into its brain, the animal lurched toward them. In the harsh light reflecting from the ice, the grotesque growths looked pink and alive. Sixty yards from where they stood, the moose went to its knees. Dark eyes, full of anguish; it raised its massive head and cried, a tiny bleat like that of a newborn lamb. Then its chin fell to the ice and it didn’t move again.
In sci-fi movies, when a plague was loosed on mankind, it invariably produced a growth unfettered by gravity or plan; warts and goiters to cause a makeup artist to wriggle with delight. This windigo was as cursed as any Hollywood extra, dying for eighty dollars a day.
“What’s wrong with it?” Anna was startled at the anger in her voice.
“It’s rare, but it happens when an old or malnourished bull hasn’t enough juice to grow a set of new antlers for breeding season,” replied the youngest looking of the beards. “At least we think that’s part of it. The Ojibwa thought these moose were taken by the windigo, possessed by evil.”
“We should put it out of its misery.” This from the tallest and bulkiest of the Cro-Magnons.
There was a note of excitement in his voice that bothered Anna almost as much as the crumpled monster on the ice.