Walking up the bank from the lake, Anna felt like a one-woman band. What snow the wind had not scoured from the Earth was so desiccated it didn’t crunch beneath her boots, it squeaked as if she walked on beads of Styrofoam. Fur and fleece rasped over her ears, nylon ski pants whistled as they rubbed cricket-like with each step. The racket made her think of Robin Adair and her friendship with winter. She and Robin spent a couple of hours together, eating breakfast and killing time, till the Forest Service pilot got the call that the clouds over Isle Royale had lifted. Though Ely and Washington Harbor were on the same parallel and not more than one hundred fifty miles apart, the lake made its own weather, often completely unrelated to what the mainland was experiencing.
Over eggs and bacon, Anna learned Robin was born and raised on the St. Croix River in Minnesota, that she would have made the junior Olympics in cross-country skiing if she hadn’t been invalided out on a knee injury. Robin had been in love with winter her entire life. Winter was her favorite season. Either the woman had antifreeze in her veins or winter succumbed to her shy beauty and returned her affection. What else could explain the fact that she alone seemed comfortable in less than a walrus-sized amount of down blubber and moved as a wraith – or the apocryphal Indian – through the north woods?
All by herself, Anna constituted a public disturbance.
Where the dock met the shore, she stopped. The ranger station was gone. In its place was a picnic area designed with the inherent poetry of an RV-storage garage. The old, red rambling ranger station had been cramped and dirty and full of mice, but Anna missed it. The parks were never supposed to change; they were supposed to house memories of better days, keep them intact: nobody filled in the creek where one used to hunt crawdads or built a Wal-Mart in the field where the reading oak had grown.
An unpaved road curved to the west by the fuel dock and up to the seasonal employees’ housing area. That was as she remembered it, but four huge orange fuel tanks had been put at the turn.
Huge.
Orange.
She decided to take the trail through the woods.
Twenty yards in, she saw what had become of the old ranger station. It had been replaced by a much-larger structure that housed a Visitors Center as well. Cranky as the cold made her, she could find no fault with it; it was beautifully done, and, with a boatload of tourists arriving every day in the summer from Grand Marais, when it rained the poor wretches would now have a place to seek shelter rather than sitting along the edge of the dock making pathetic attempts to keep dry beneath unfolded island maps.
Above the new V.C. was the original concessionaire’s store: an unattractive brown wooden rectangle full of junk food, mosquito repellent and fishhooks. In the fall of her season on ISRO, two bull moose had fought in the picnic area by the door. Their antlers were so heavy, they could do little more than sway them at one another, rarely making serious contact. If moose felt the same about their antlers as old men did about their Corvettes, the windigo on the ice must have nearly died of shame.
A quarter of a mile farther uphill, she stepped out of the trees into the clearing where the seasonal employees were housed. The place she had lived in – fondly known as the “Mink Trail” due to its plethora of mice and the weasels that came to dine on them – was gone. Beyond it, trees had been cut down and earth disturbed. In preparation for the threatened winter resort? Anna wouldn’t put it past an overeager concessionaire to finagle it through NPS channels prematurely.
The bunkhouse where the Winter Study team would live for six weeks had smoke coming from the chimney. Anna hurried the last hundred feet. Designed for multiple occupants, the living space was laid out around a central room with a woodstove at the west end. Racks of drying socks and boots and shirts screened the heat from the fire. The three sofas, like in any self-respecting suburban home, were in a C shape around a television set. Along the back wall were computers and radio equipment. An old upright piano served as a bench for two laptops. To either side of the common room were small semiprivate apartments, with two bedrooms, a bath and a kitchen.
Trying not to look obvious, Anna headed for the nearest bathroom, shedding her parka as she went. The door was closed, and she knocked softly before pushing it open. A blast of icy air met her. The window over the commode was open six inches, and the toilet, shower and sink area were filled with milk, orange juice, potatoes, cheese, onions, butter and a dozen other perishable food items.
No electrical power; this was the Winter Study team’s refrigerator. She turned and started toward the bathroom in the mirror-image apartment on the other side. Halfway there, she could see three large, round plastic containers with spigots on the sink counter.
“Our well,” Jonah had said of the hole chopped in the lake ice. There was no running water.
No flush toilets.
“It’s by the woodstove,” a soft voice said, and Anna realized she was not alone. Hunched in front of a computer was a small woman in gray sweater and cargo pants, on her feet the indoor version of Mrs. Steger’s moose-hide mukluks, available only in Ely and only from the store owned by übermusher Will Steger’s wife. The woman’s bland face was pleasant enough, and the brown eyes, small behind the thick glasses of the truly nearsighted, moderately welcoming. “There.” She pointed toward the stove.
Anna looked where she indicated. Beside the woodstove, half hidden behind a rack of worn dish towels and industrial-strength winter boots, a toilet seat leaned against the wall. It had been lovingly decorated with bright red kissing lips and holly, WINTER STUDY painted on it in what looked like crimson nail polish.
“Thanks,” Anna said, trying to look as if she’d not been foolish enough to hope for indoor plumbing.
“The outhouse is through the kitchen door a ways,” the woman said helpfully.
Anna caught up the ring of porcelain – or, more likely, plastic – on her way toward the northernmost kitchen, the one the study used. The toilet seat was warm from the stove. Evidently even the hardiest of souls required some few comforts.
JONAH FIRED UP THE GENERATOR and informed Anna they would have power each evening till lights out at ten. Anna bunked with Robin on the refrigerator side. She divested herself of her layers and dressed in Levi’s and one of Paul’s old sweatshirts. On her feet was the one luxury she permitted herself to stuff into the two small-to-medium soft-sided duffels she was allowed to bring, fuzzy slippers, a sedate black but frosted with yellow-and-white cat hair. She joined the others in the working kitchen.
Bob Menechinn was enthroned at the Formica-topped table in the chair nearest the wall, a glass of the boxed red wine, ISRO’s vin ordinaire, in his hand. Robin sat opposite him, quiet and smiling. The woman who had shown Anna where the bathroom facilities were hovered between Bob and the door to the outhouse as if, at any minute, she would make good an escape.
Menechinn smiled at Anna appreciatively. “You clean up nice, Miss Pigeon.” The woman behind him shot him a look of alarm, quickly quelled, and Anna wondered if the woman stood where she did to be ready to protect her turf, in the person of Bob Menechinn.
“Have you met my able assistant, Doctor Kathy Huff?” Bob said, affecting a drawl that made his words seem to linger in the air after he’d spoken. Smiling with a bonhomie that wrinkled his bulldog cheeks, he winked. Dr. Huff looked at her feet.
Maybe Menechinn was proud of his helper’s doctorate. Maybe she was shy. Maybe he mocked her and she was hurt. Maybe they were lovers. The undercurrents were lost on Anna. She was too hungry to care.
“What can I do to help?” she asked the kitchen in general.
Adam peeled and chopped. Ridley cooked. Robin was allowed to make a salad, but only after begging for the honor. Over five decades of tradition was squeezed into the small kitchen: jobs were not up for grabs; one had to be grandfathered in for every task. Realizing the study’s dinner rituals were as full of social land mines for the uninitiated as the kitchen of a kosher chef on the eve of Hanukkah, Anna sat down out of the way and watched.
It was the first time she’d seen her housemates divested of layers and hoods, gloves and down pants. Ridley was as she had envisioned him: a smallish man with wiry muscles and surprisingly broad shoulders. His hands and feet were small and would have suited a dancer, had he gone in a different direction. At thirty, he was a full professor at Michigan Tech, married and now the lead researcher on one of the country’s most prestigious studies. His hair was fine as a baby’s and curled down between his shoulder blades in a loose ponytail held by a rubber band. Ridley would have been beautiful but was saved by crooked teeth and a mouth too wide for his face. Had he gotten early orthodonture, he would have been a pedophile’s dream as a kid and a students’ heartthrob when he grew up.
Except for Robin, Ridley was the youngest member of the team, but his authority wasn’t questioned – at least not by the Winter Study people. On the ice, he and Bob had swayed what passed in Homo sapiens for antlers at each other. Neither seemed intimidated. Bob might have Homeland Security’s ax, but Ridley was at home on the island as Bob Menechinn was not. Like Anna, he seemed to suffer from the cold, and she got the feeling he was more comfortable with women than men.
Adam struck Anna as the natural alpha of the group, but he apparently didn’t mind taking orders from Ridley. He was younger than she’d first thought, in his late thirties. Like Ridley, he wore his hair long, keeping it in a braid. Silver was beginning to weave through the dark brown plait. Anna loved men with long hair, a hangover from her college days. It suggested a wildness that appealed to her. Adam’s suited him. His scarecrow body was ridged with muscle and his hands scarred from work. The nineteenth-century mustache gave his gaunt face a dramatic appeal, the hero of a western saga or a soldier making a last charge into the valley of death.
Adam maintained the machinery and the physical plants. From the talk, Anna guessed he was a perennial seasonal; one of the men and women who worked a northern park in summer and a southern park in winter. They had little in the way of material things, living with long-distance and commonly broken relationships, no children, no savings, no house. The lifestyle seemed glamorous till one hit forty; then, by the alchemy of age, it was touched with failure and sadness.
During the course of the meal, Anna began to be initiated into the rules and regulations of Winter Study. Rules written nowhere except in stone. She learned the red rag was for dishes, the gray for wiping countertops. One did not wash with the wiping cloth nor wipe with the washing cloth. It had “just evolved” that way, Jonah told her, and she understood that it had calcified into law and would remain thus until one or the other of the rags – or the team – disintegrated with age.
No one but the pilot could remove the cozy from the bowl containing brown sugar and then only with much discussion of “Mrs. Brown’s” disrobing and how that might or might not affect those attempting it.
She learned that the researchers had two modes of dinner conversation: mocking the Park Service, most particularly the law enforcement end of it, and talking nonsense, the ringleader of the nonsense being Jonah, the audience Ridley and Adam.
By the end of the meal, which was excellent – that or the calories one had to burn just to stay warm leant savor to it – Anna realized that this style of communication, or, more to the point, noncommunication, allowed them to live together in greater harmony than meaningful exchanges would have; an American backwoods version of the privacy once maintained in the Orient by elaborate ritual courtesy.
In another setting, Anna might have taken offense at the scorn heaped on the rangers and management of Isle Royale. Being law enforcement and, with her new position at Rocky Mountain, at least nominally management, the mean-spirited gossip should have offended her. In principle, it did and, like the ongoing sexual teasing of Robin, grew tiresome, but it didn’t hurt her feelings. There was a habitualness about it that transcended insensitivity or insult. Like the other rituals, it had evolved over the years, and they carped with much the same lack of devotion as illiterate Catholics mouthing a Latin mass.
Anna was happy to sit without speaking and let it wash around her. She couldn’t remember being so hungry. The helpings she was given – and the seconds she took – were double what she was accustomed to, yet she was as excited about the dessert as any of the men and had to restrain herself from asking for more ice cream.
When the meal was finished, Ridley and Adam thanked Jonah for a fine dinner. Anna hadn’t seen the old pilot do anything, but, not wanting to be rude, she thanked him as well. Jonah hauled one of the two large metal containers of hot water that lived on the woodstove and poured the double sinks full. He and Ridley began pulling on yellow rubber gloves as Jonah joked about his favorite subject; this time it was Ridley he pretended was madly in love with him and was lecturing him about unwelcome visits to his room in the night. Neither was gay – Anna would have bet on it – it was simply another game that had taken root so long ago no one was sure why they still played it.
She offered to do the dishes, which she thought was mighty big of her, but was met with uncomprehending and none-too-friendly stares. Precisely what custom dictated who a chief bottle washer was, she didn’t know, but, wanting to help, to thank them for the meal, to ingratiate herself – or whatever it was she felt a need to do – she insisted.
Confused rather than appreciative, they abandoned her to it. The only one who remained to help or keep her company was Dr. Huff.
“Do you want to wash or rinse, Kathy?”
“Katherine. Rinse.” That speech brought the sum total of words the woman had uttered since the toilet seat introduction to about twelve. She made Robin seem like a motormouth.
As the steam rose and the pile of dirty dishes diminished, to make conversation Anna asked Katherine what her doctorate was in. Again, there was the odd ducking flinch and the furious blush. Katherine wasn’t much older than Robin, not yet thirty, yet her skin had the opacity associated with women considerably past menopause. The blush didn’t prettily pink her cheeks but dyed them the color of new brick.
“I haven’t got it quite yet,” Katherine admitted. Moisture blanked her glasses, and Anna couldn’t read her eyes. “I’m all-but-dissertation. Bob – Dr. Menechinn – has my thesis. Then it goes to committee. It’s on the wolves in Wyoming. The alphas have started mating with more than one female in the pack.”
“They must be becoming habituated to humans,” Anna said.
They had progressed to the flatware, washed last, and dumped into a long-handled deep-fat fryer set in the rinse water for that purpose – another rule, and one Anna would have bent had not Jonah appeared behind her and Katherine with the implement and the instructions at the proper moment – when Katherine whispered:
“God’s nightgown.”
The archaic oath made Anna laugh. The look on Katherine’s face made her stop. Religious awe or deep-seated horror drew the skin around her eyes tight. Her jaw had gone slack.
“What is it?” Anna demanded.
Katherine pointed at the small window over the sink. Her hand was shaking so bad tiny bubbles from the dish soap floated free and rose on the warm air. When Anna tossed the flatware into the rinse, steam had blanked the window. Undoubtedly shattering half a dozen traditions, she wiped it clear with the red dishrag.
Silver light from a three-quarter moon caught ice crystals on the snow and rime on pine needles and tree branches. In the superdried air, the light was so pure the world beyond the glass glowed with it, and Anna could see with surreal clarity. Whatever Katherine had seen was gone. Or had been imaginary.
Hands dripping, Katherine turned and ran to the common room.
Anna ran after her, drying her hands on her trousers. Katherine squeezed behind the television set, cupped her hands against the glass of the picture window and pressed her face to the glass. Anna did the same.
Delineated by moonlight and snow, seven wolves trotted across the compound. Heads low, they came single file, long legs and big paws carrying them effortlessly over the patchy snow. Anna’d seen wolves in captivity, seen wolf pups, but to see seven adult wolves in the moonlight, wolves that moved through the night the way they were meant to, the moon catching their fur until they were frosted with silver, their shadows black on the ground, was pure magic.
Then they were gone, the last tail swallowed up by the shaggy line of birch trunks at the edge of the clearing.
“Wow!” Anna whispered inadequately.
“They’ve never done this. Never. Not even close,” Ridley said.
“Something’s got them stirred up.” He’d crowded so close behind Anna, she felt his breath on her hair. He must have noticed the moment she did. He backed away awkwardly.
The others began to move and talk. Katherine remained immobile. Her face had the same rapt look that had scared Anna over the dirty dishes. In a child, she would have termed it awe. In a woman grown, it was the aspect of true love beholding the object of adoration.
“I didn’t think they came around people,” Bob said.
“They don’t,” Ridley replied. “Three times in the last fifty years, we’ve found wolf tracks in the housing area. Not a pack, tracks of a single wolf. Every time, there was a dead wolf in the carpentry shop, either dissected or about to be. They stay away from us and we stay away from them. We try and keep it that way. In wolf/tourist run-ins, wolves always come out the losers. The island is too small to destroy or transport a wolf without damaging the population and screwing up the study. Something stirred them up,” he repeated.
“The windigo,” Robin said. It sounded as if she wanted to believe in a windigo more than moose meat. People loved their ghosts, demons, fairies and angels. Anna didn’t. For her, stark reality was magical, mysterious and sufficiently deadly. She didn’t need to put monstrous faces on starvation and cruelty, or wings and feathers on hope.
“I thought windigos were strict humanitarians,” she said. “Don’t they just eat people?”
“Everybody loves junk food,” Jonah said.
“They smell the blood of the moose,” Bob said. “Their sense of smell is acute.”
“Exactly.” Ridley’s word was agreeable but the tone was not. The lead researcher evidently didn’t like an axman from Homeland Security educating him on wolf traits. “They can smell over a thousand times more efficiently than humans. And they can smell humans. We must reek like a paper mill to them. There is any number of ways the pack could get to the moose. Why come so near us?”
“Do you think the other packs will come?” Robin asked.
“They shouldn’t.” Ridley moved to the piano bench and began pulling on high-waisted woolen ski pants, snapping the suspenders over his shoulders.
“If they do, it could get ugly,” Adam said, and Ridley shot him a look, a widening of the eyes and downturn of the lips that Anna associated with social conspiracies, like listening to your best friend lie her way out of detention.
“Pack wars,” Robin said somberly. Anna figured it out. They were trying to scare the pants off the Homeland Security guy.
Pack wars were not uncommon, but there was sufficient territory for East, Middle and Chippewa Harbor packs so they didn’t clash too often. When they did, it was hit-and-run, not the full-scale slaughter humans had perfected.
Ridley took mukluks from the drying rack beside the woodstove and sat down again to put them on. The anesthetizing influence of a wolf sighting wearing off, it dawned on the group what he was doing.
As one, they scrambled for their boots and coats. Cursed with new gear, Anna was last out the front door. The rest were halfway across the housing complex. Uplifted by the excitement of watching a pack of wild wolves devour a kill, she wasn’t bothered by the cutting wind from the northwest as she duckwalked quickly down the slippery steps in her ungainly boots and started across the clearing.
Suddenly she stopped. A whiff, a hint of something freakishly bad, evil and death and old fish distilled into a toxic perfume, was borne on the wind. Tilting her head back, she sniffed. It was gone. She smelled nothing but the clean, vicious perfection of winter.
The Ojibwa’s windigo was heralded by the stench of rotting corpses, the rotten stink of a cannibal’s breath, and the distillation of hopelessness. The cannibal spirit came on the wind from the northwest.
For someone who had eschewed the supernatural not ten minutes before, Anna felt a distinctly unnatural chill along the back of her stomach and up both sides of her spine.
She waited and watched the black of the woods in the direction from which the wind blew. The line of shadows that marked the trees hid anything that might have been there.