“I’m Ridley Murray,” said the man who’d explained the twisted antlers. All Anna could see of him were his eyes, deep hazel, with thick dark lashes. His voice was alto rather than tenor, but he didn’t sound weak or womanish; he sounded gentle. Anna liked him instantly; always a red flag in her book. Judgment of character wasn’t one of her strong suits.
“I’m the lead researcher,” he told her. “This,” and he waved a mittened hand in the direction of the large man who’d evinced the desire to kill the windigo moose, “is Bob Menechinn, Homeland Security.” Ridley’s voice was bland almost to the point of insolence. Almost.
“Pleased to meet you,” Bob said and offered Anna his hand. He resembled the actor John Goodman. Even without down padding, he was a big man, well over six feet, and had the fleshy, plastic face Goodman was so deft at morphing from benevolent goodness to bloated evil, as a role required.
“Anna Pigeon, Rocky Mountain,” Anna said.
“It’s dead,” Robin called. While they’d introduced themselves, she’d scooted quickly and easily over the slippery surface to where the moose lay. The fourth Cro-Magnon was with her.
“Adam, would you get the camera and an ax?” Ridley asked a lanky individual wrapped in the most disreputable winter gear Anna had ever laid eyes on. His parka had at one time probably been a uniform khaki but had been smudged, drizzled, splashed and spotted by so many substances the original color showed only under the zipper flap. Ripstop nylon had proved unable to stop the incursions of sharp objects. Sleeves and body sported tears sprouting feathers, and his cuffs looked as if they had been caught in a paper shredder.
“Will do,” Adam said and loped off toward the snowmobile, joints loose, back straight, a scarecrow in an arctic Oz.
Anna, Bob and Ridley shuffled over the ice to join Robin and the remains of the windigo.
Robin was on hands and knees by the deceased animal. Ridley clapped a hand on the shoulder of the man Anna’d not yet met. “This is-”
“The only sane, and by far the handsomest, man on the island.” The man swept back his hood as if to show Anna the extent of his beauty. His hair was snow white. Awry from being smashed, it stuck out everywhere it wasn’t glued to his skull. His beard was close cropped and white to the point of iridescence. Reflections flashing off lenses in round wire-rimmed glasses obscured his eyes.
“Robin has been after me for two seasons,” the sane and handsome man went on, his smile showing small straight teeth that would have suited the face of a beatific child or a feral badger, “but the poor child has had to settle for – what’s his name, Robin?”
“Gavin,” Robin said. Anna couldn’t tell if she was flattered or simply bored by the pseudosexual attention. At any rate, she seemed used to it.
“That’s right, Gavin, a callow boy, and tall enough to be my father. Jonah Schumann at your service,” Jonah said to Anna.
Ridley Murray showed no irritation at Jonah’s interruption or at being relegated to, at best, the second-handsomest man on Isle Royale but watched with a slight affectionate smile on his face as one might watch a favorite uncle.
“You want to tell her about antlers, Jonah?” Ridley asked.
Jonah ducked his head in graceful declination. “Let’s see if I’ve taught you anything,” he said.
“Antlers are grown over the summer to impress females when mating season comes in the fall,” Ridley told Anna. “They’re expensive. Enormous amounts of food and minerals and energy go into growing them.”
“Size does matter,” Jonah interjected solemnly.
Ridley laughed. “Older moose, or animals that are too worn down – maybe the winter’s colder or there’s not much fodder – can spend the last of their reserves growing antlers. If they pull it off, they get the girl, but they usually die the next winter.”
Anna thought of old men and Corvettes but had the good sense to keep her mouth shut.
“The deformity is called a peruke, French for ‘wig.’ This is one for the record books. I’ve never seen one this extreme. Shoot, I’ve never seen one alive, just photographs.”
“Everything he knows is from my book on the crepuscular deviations of caddis flies in ungulates,” Jonah said gravely.
With a stiff-backed arrogance that could have indicated a big ego or chronic lower-back pain, Bob Menechinn squatted at the animal’s head. Momentarily he lost his balance and grabbed a twisted antler to steady himself. Ridley flinched.
“Careful of the antlers, Bob,” he said evenly.
“Whoa! This is the mother lode. Lookie,” the biotech said as she deftly pulled a small ziplock bag out of the army rucksack she’d offloaded from the plane. “Ticks. This old guy was about drunk up. How many you figure?” she asked Ridley.
He surveyed the carcass. The moose’s ribs showed stark from starvation. The flanks were caved in, the hide patchy with bald places where he’d scraped against trees to free himself of the pestilence of winter ticks. “Jeez. At least fifty thousand, maybe sixty,” Ridley estimated. “This boy was a regular Red Cross blood bank.”
Robin plucked a thick tuft of hair. Half a dozen fat ticks clung to the roots. She put the little colony into the plastic bag, zipped it and put it back in her rucksack. Anna hoped the baggie was one of the fancy double-lock kind.
No one spoke for a moment and silence settled like snow. A sound, both distant and immediate, didn’t so much break the silence as join it, the call of a gray whale beneath fathoms of seawater. Anna looked to Robin to see if she’d heard it too. A reflex from the bad old days, when windowpane acid had slammed into her brain so hard for years she’d been careful not to remark on odd phenomena lest she be the only one experiencing them. She’d thought she’d left that particular paranoia behind. The retro twitch must have been triggered by the weird black-and-white world, with its windigo and Cro-Magnon tribe.
And cold so vicious and unrelenting, it felt personal.
She tried to shove her hands in her pockets, but they were too fat to fit.
“The ice is singing,” Robin said. “It’s always moving, shifting. Sometimes it cracks like a gunshot. All kinds of sounds.”
Anna blocked out the fact that Jack Frost was gnawing her bones and opened to the song: far off, underfoot, a murmur of instruments not yet invented, hollow lutes and soft drums, the warble of birds without throats just beyond the threshold of hearing, as if it came into the mind on some other wavelength. In Texas, the wind sang in that same way when the rock formations were just right. Music so deeply ingrained in the world, Anna felt if she could listen long enough and hard enough, she would learn a great truth.
Before enlightenment was achieved, the snowmobile came shrieking back down the hill from the bunkhouse. Dragging a trailer – a lidded aluminum box the size of a coffin set on skis – the machine raced over the lake and came to a stop beside the moose’s body.
“Adam Peck,” Ridley said as the driver turned off the engine. “He missed our meet and greet.”
“Hey,” Adam said affably. He looked to be in his forties, and, when he pulled down his muffler to speak, Anna noticed he hadn’t a beard but a lush mustache of the kind seldom seen anywhere but in pictures of Civil War heroes.
He sprang off the snowmobile with the sharp suddenness of a switchblade knife opening and lifted the trailer’s lid.
“Camera,” he said, like a surgical nurse might say “Scalpel.”
Robin began taking pictures of the moose from all angles. The buzz of a scientific find – or an audience at a freak show – began over the size and peculiarity of the antlers, the number of ticks, the marks of starvation on the body.
Due to moose predation, balsam fir, the favored food in winter, was almost gone from the island, and the once-thriving herd – nearly fifteen hundred when Anna had been a ranger on Isle Royale – was down to around three hundred animals.
“Will hunger make the wolves more aggressive?” Menechinn asked. He’d been watching the recording process, with his arms folded across his chest and his chin buried in his neck scarf.
“It will,” Robin said.
“I’ve never seen an increase in wolf aggression that was tied to food availability,” Ridley said. “Only to sex and turf.”
“There’s always a first time,” Adam sided with the biotech.
Ridley shrugged. “Are we ready for the ax?” he asked Robin. “We need to take the head,” he explained to Anna. “It’s a perfect example of the peruke deformity. If we leave it, the critters will get it.” Already ravens were calling the good news of the slaughter to each other and cutting up the pale sky with ink-stained wings.
“Here.” Bob Menechinn held out a hand for the ax. “I’ll do it. Man, it would be something to have that on your wall, wouldn’t it?”
“Step back,” Ridley warned them, ignoring the offer. “This is going to be messy.”
Ridley wasn’t much taller than Anna, five-eight maybe, and slight, but he swung the ax like a man long used to chopping his own wood. Hefting it back across his shoulder, he swung it in a clean arc, the strength of his legs in the blow.
The axhead buried itself in meat and bone behind the moose’s ears.
Anna’d thought it would be the way the guillotine was depicted in the movies; a single chop and the moose’s head would roll free of its body. Except, with the antlers, it couldn’t roll. With the long, bulbous nose, it couldn’t roll. Moose were not beasts designed for a beautiful life or a dignified death.
Ridley put his mukluk on the thick neck and yanked on the ax. With a sucking crunch, it jerked loose, and blood flew like a flock of cardinals over the ice.
The head lolled. Great, dark eyes stared upward; the executed watching the executioner botch the job.
“He looks stoned.” Bob laughed. “Or is it a she?”
Ridley’s ax hit the animal between the eyes.
“God dammit,” he whispered, took a deep breath and swung the ax again, severing the head but for an eight-inch strip of hide that Adam quickly cut with a mat knife he produced from somewhere in his ragtag clothing.
Ravens were landing before they’d finished wrapping the moose’s head in a tarp. They hopped and scolded; their feast was growing cold. Bolder birds dashed in to snatch bits of flesh from the open neck wound; easy pickings, with no tough hide to tear through. By the time the carcass was consumed, all manner of smaller creatures would have had a good dinner; maybe the meal that would give them the strength to make it until summer, when the island provided in plenty.
With the severed head wrapped in black plastic and stowed in the snowmobile trailer, Anna and the others shuffled back to the Beaver and finished transferring gear and food into the trailer around the moose head. Because of the size and awkward shape of the antlers, the trailer’s lid had to be propped partly open. Adam driving, Bob behind him, and Ridley, boots planted wide on the rear runners like a musher with a mechanized pack of dogs, headed up to the bunkhouse.
The Forest Service plane took off, leaving the ground in a surprisingly short time and disappearing around Beaver Island as the pilot used the length of Washington Harbor to get up to altitude for the flight back to Ely.
The sounds of internal combustion machines, simultaneously anachronistic and a reassuring reminder that Winter Study team was not marooned on an icebound island in the time of the mastodons, grew fainter. Anna wanted to hear the ice singing again, but there was nothing but the quarreling of ravens.
For a moment, she, Robin and Jonah stood without speaking, eyes on the sky where the USFS plane had gone. Then, as if moved by the same impulse, the way a flock of birds will suddenly change directions, they turned and followed the track left by the snowmobile. Ungainly in bulky clothes, boots unsure on the slippery surface, Anna felt like a toddler. Robin, doing a kind of Texas two-step, the soles of her soft mukluks never leaving the surface of the lake, shuffled expertly along.
Partway back to the dock, a supercub was tied down, a tandem-seat fabric airplane used since before World War II for air reconnaissance, search and rescue, hunting – any job that called for flying low and slow and being able to land anywhere the pilot had the guts to set it down. This one was a classic, down to the fat brown teddy bear painted on the tail, and skis where wheels would be in summer. Lines, dropped through holes cut in the ice and held there by lengths of two-by-four, were gripped by the ice when the hole froze again, making as firm a tie-down as any hook set in concrete.
“That’s my airplane you’re admiring,” Jonah said. “She’ll let you pet her if you kiss her on the nose first.”
Jonah was the team’s pilot. Old, Anna thought. Moon, was her second thought as she realized that when the Beaver was coming in on final approach it was Jonah’s pale old behind that dared the frigid air to welcome them in proper style.
The glare went off the lenses of his eyeglasses and showed Anna eyes the palest blue she’d ever seen, the color of the sky with a high, thin overcast. They’d probably taken on the tint from too many years staring through the windscreens of airplanes. Jonah Schumann had to be seventy. Seventy-five, maybe.
Jonah looked as if he could see her doing math in her head and said: “I normally don’t offer my lady’s favors to strangers such as yourself, but she may have been traumatized by recent events. The old gal is pushing fifty, and it would be a comfort to her to have the company of a contemporary.” His eyes twinkled through the deadpan seriousness of his words.
Anna laughed and realized she’d not introduced herself. “Anna Pigeon, Rocky Mountain.” Reflexively they both thrust out their hands to shake in the approved manner, but with the mittens and gloves they were more like two old declawed bears pawing at each other.
“Nice butt,” Anna said.
“Thank you,” Jonah replied gravely. “Many women and some men have told me that. You have already met my fiancée.” He was looking at Robin, with her sweet, unblemished face perfectly framed by long, straight brown hair. Anna had a balaclava with the drawstring pulled till only her eyes and nose showed and, around that, to keep the cold from creeping down the collar of her parka, a wide thick scarf. The only concession to the cold Robin had made was a wool Laplander’s hat, the kind with a pointy top and silly earflaps.
“In your dreams, Jonah,” Robin said.
“She’s shy,” he confided. “It embarrasses her that she would marry me just for the sex.”
Robin ducked her head and looked inland. “I’ll walk back by the Nature Trail,” she said. “I need to stop and take a look at the weather.” With that, she was two-stepping toward shore, slender and graceful in her minimalist wear.
Anna’s twenties came back in a hot flash: the flattering but endless and, finally, exhausting sexual references and jokes, the mentioning of body parts, the sly looks, the double entendres. She’d thought that sort of thing had gone down beneath the nineties tsunami of lawsuits and political correctness. Maybe it had just gone underground, or, maybe, it would not be dead till every man of her generation and the generation before her was rotting in his grave.
She and Jonah shuffled on toward the dock and his little airplane. On the ice to the right was a waist-high pile of snow with a shovel stuck in it. “Ice fishing?” Anna asked. “Pretty grim pastime without an ice-fishing house. I hope it’s voluntary.”
“That’s our well,” Jonah said. Then: “Doggone it!” He hurried over to the hole chopped in the ice. “The little bastard is trying to poison us. He’s done it before.” Jonah snatched up the shovel. On the side of the excavated snow and ice was a patch of yellow. “Fox,” Jonah said. “A pesky, pissy little red fox whose mother was no better than she should have been.” Shoveling up the tainted snow carefully, he tossed it as far from the well as he could. “I tell you, this little fur ball is potent. One drop of his urine got in the well a while back. One drop and our water reeked of fox for two days.”
“Reclaiming his territory,” Anna said.
“Very broad-minded of you, Ranger Pigeon. Wait till you’ve had café au fox piss.” Grumbling, he began using the tip of the shovel like a gargantuan scalpel, incising spots of yellow. Anna looked back to where the moose with its cloak of ravens lay on the ice. Blood spatter from the ax formed three lines out from the pool where the animal’s head had lain. The sight was not gruesome, not ugly. Ravens were so black they seemed cut from construction paper and pasted on the reflective white of the snow. Blood was still the bright cheery red of life. The composition was set off by the inky lines of leafless trees against the blue of the sky. Stunning in its simplicity, the tableau put Anna in mind of a Japanese painting she’d seen: Death of a Samurai.
“What are you going to do with the body?” she asked.
Jonah jammed the shovel back into the snow pile. “Nothing. There’s nothing we could do even if we wanted. Used to, before the warm-and-cuddlies got up in arms, we’d shoot a moose once a winter. Middle pack always knew and always showed up. One year, the rules were changed, but Middle pack showed up right on schedule anyway, like they had a watch that read: MOOSE TIME. No free moose meat. They never came again. I don’t know how they know things, but they do.”
“Think they know this is here?” Anna asked.
“See that raven?” Jonah pointed to a sharp cut of black flying toward the western shore of the harbor. “He’s going to tell the pack supper’s on.”
Anna believed him. She’d been around animals enough to know humans might know how much Jupiter weighs and where stars come from, but they remain in total ignorance about what the cat in their lap is thinking or who their dog tells their secrets to.
They heard the snowmobile returning and, stiff in their bundling, rotated toward it. “We’ll load up on water, then head back up,” Jonah said. “You sure you don’t want a ride?”
“I’m sure.” Without the distractions of dead ungulates and fox piss, she remembered how cold she was. If she didn’t move soon, she would freeze where she stood.
“Stay away from the dock,” Jonah called after her. “Ice is always rotten around docks.”
Anna waved an arm to let him know she’d heard. Though she’d been hypnotized by its singing and delighted in the canvas it created for the blood-and-bird painting, she wouldn’t be sorry to be on solid ground. The thought of getting wet, when the temperature was near zero and the wind brisk, scared her.
There was no negotiating with thermodynamics.