Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  “Hold up. You’re killing me.”

  The light stopped. Anna’s breath sawed in her ears as she plowed through the snow. Reaching the Sked, she fell to her knees. She hadn’t spent so much time on her knees since she went to Catholic school. It crossed her mind that a little praying might not hurt anything. With the wog and the munched-up graduate student, the slithery noises and the gigantic paw prints, all she could think of was the dyslexic who stayed up all night worrying about whether or not there was a dog.

  She laughed shortly, and the bark of sound made the ensuing silence deeper. Through the thick, black quiet came the distinct crack of a twig snapping and a swish as of a tail sweeping over the snow. Not squirrels; two ounces of rodent didn’t snap twigs. Not a moose; moose were not subtle creatures.

  “Stop it!” Robin screamed. Anna squawked, scared half out of her wits by the sudden cry. At first, she thought Robin was yelling at her – fatigue and stretched nerves made the best of women into shrews – but she was yelling at the dark and the trees, at the wog and the windigo, the ice and the night.

  The biotech, so seemingly strong and untiring, was breaking apart. Delayed reaction, Anna thought. It had to be; the woman was cool efficiency itself first when photographing the slaughtered wolf, then assisting with the packaging of the slaughtered researcher. She’d held up till near the end. Then she’d started unraveling.

  “It’s okay,” Anna said. “We’re going to be okay.” With a huge effort but no grunt, she stood without using her hands to push herself up.

  “Let’s go. It’s nothing. The wind plays tricks.”

  “It isn’t nothing,” Robin hissed at her. “It’s not fucking nothing!” she yelled at the dark. She began thrusting the flashlight beam into the trees, stabbing, as evil Nazis did with bayonets into haystacks in old movies.

  Anna made her way to the front of the sled, the mush of her boots through the snow covering whatever sound the followers in the woods might have been making. She pried the flashlight from Robin’s fingers. “We’ll walk together,” she said. “If the Sked hangs up, I’ll go back. Come on now.”

  Robin’s tears metastasized; she sobbed, snot running from her nose, tears freezing in opaque droplets on her cheeks.

  “Pull,” Anna said.

  Through thick down gloves, Anna felt her hand being taken. Robin had reached out and taken it, two puffed, oversized hands, neither of which could feel anything but the pressure of the other, clinging together in the dark.

  “Ridley!” Anna yelled. “We could use some help back here!”

  There was no answer. Like a will-o’-the-wisp, Bob’s stolen light had led Ridley astray. Ahead was only darkness and silence.

  “Fuck them,” she said cheerily. “We’re better off without them.” She squeezed Robin’s hand in what she hoped was a reassuring manner and tucked her other arm through the harness rope where it stretched down to the Sked. She could take some of the weight off the younger woman’s shoulders, literally if not metaphorically.

  For twenty minutes, they labored on without speaking. Twice the Sked caught on downed tree limbs and twice Anna trudged back to free it. The act of pretending to be stronger and braver than she was helped. How long she could run on this low-octane fuel, she didn’t know. Robin had stopped crying and went forward like a skiing machine. Her face, when Anna caught glimpses of it in the reflected light, was filled with such bleak hopelessness it was scary. Drawing breath, Anna was about to shout for Ridley again – not that she thought he’d answer but just to make a fierce noise against the darkness – when something beat her to it.

  The howl of a wolf ululated through the frigid night, leaving not a ripple; a round, perfect sound that too many stories and too many movies imbued with the absolute distillation of terror. Anna felt the hairs on her body stand on end as her skin tightened. Her mouth was suddenly dry, and she wanted nothing more than to run away, leave Robin and what was left of Katherine to appease whatever it was, wolf or wog or the ancient eater of flesh the Ojibwa told of.

  In the falling-apart arena, Robin beat her to the punch. She dropped like a stone, gloved hands over her ears, knees up under her chin, then rolled over into the fetal position. The flashlight hit the snow and disappeared into the powder, leaving only a glow where it had gone under.

  Anna retrieved the light and crouched down, one arm across Robin. “Shh, shhh,” she murmured automatically. “It’s just a howl. They howl to say hi. That’s all.” Without being aware she was doing so, Anna was talking to the very little part of Robin, the part that covered her ears and curled up and hid under the covers when the monster was in the room. The adult Robin knew more about wolves than Anna did.

  The howl came again. This time it had a sorrowful, almost questioning tone. Anna would have been hard-pressed to describe it, but on the musical glissando, where the singer carried the notes skyward, there was a longing.

  “Wolves won’t hurt you,” Anna said, patting Robin. “Wolves don’t eat people.” Then she remembered what they pulled behind them in a trough of tin. “Anyway, they don’t eat when they’re full,” she muttered.

  “Come on,” she said, changing tactics. “Up. Get up. We’re moving.” She uncurled Robin and forced her hands away from her ears.

  “Stand while I untangle you.”

  When the harness and the pull ropes were straight, Anna gave the front of Robin’s parka a tug, much the way she used to give her horse Gideon back in Texas a tug to get him to go.

  Robin didn’t budge. She turned her head as if she heard something besides the howling, a call from the woods that was above the frequencies humans could hear. For a long time, she stood, staring, and a cold more severe than winter crept deep past Anna’s bones and into her brain.

  “We’ve got to go.” She’d meant to say the words in a normal way, a comforting, leaving-the-mall-before-traffic kind of way. What came out was a squeak that would have emasculated the tiniest vole. She said it again and had a better result.

  If Robin heard, she showed no sign. She showed no sign of knowing Anna was close, so close her fists were doubled in the front of her parka.

  “They’ve decided to kill,” Robin said.

  Her voice held the same note of sorrow as the howl.

  18

  Anna would have thought any self-respecting werewolf or wog would have taken Robin’s show of weakness as an invitation to come to dinner, but, after she’d cried out, the slithery, sneaky sounds of their uninvited escort ceased. Robin didn’t bounce back. Youth and strength and athleticism went out of her. Her skis tangled and tripped her as if she were the rankest novice. She stumbled and fell, and each time it was harder for Anna to get her up. Finally Anna removed Robin’s skis, stowed them on the Sked and put the harness on her own shoulders. To keep the biotech close, she insisted Robin keep one hand on the lead rope and help.

  Help was the word Anna used to try to break through the walls that had formed around the young woman’s brain and were suffocating her body. Robin had lost even the strength to close her fingers tightly enough to keep her hand from constantly falling away from the rope and her feet from slowing to a stop.

  The flashlight began to brown out. Ski tracks leading back to the main trail were filling with blowing snow, becoming harder and harder to follow. Wind carved up the storm and slung freezing snow at them from every direction. Anna’s eyes watered and the tears froze her lashes together. The drag of the Sked on her shoulders grew heavier. Her feet turned to chunks of concrete in leaden boots the size of canoes.

  Ridley never came back. Then Anna forgot she’d once hoped he would.

  There was a place in her about the size of a softball just behind her sternum. A surgeon or MRI or X-ray would never find it, but it was where her center of energy resided; the tiny machine that had to be kick-started at the beginning of every hike, revved up when the natural laziness of mankind wanted to crawl back into the hammock. Muscles could be tired or weak or cramping, and she could push on as long as
that motor kept running.

  Whatever it was – will, stubbornness, pride – ground to a stop.

  The Sked hit the back of her knees and she went down on all fours. Robin stopped beside her the way an old dog will stop when its master does.

  “Fucking Ridley,” Anna gasped. “Fucking Bob.” The fetal position Robin had adopted was looking pretty good. Being devoured by beasts wasn’t looking all that bad either.

  She tried to push herself up. Her arms buckled as if the bones had been boiled to the consistency of overcooked noodles and she fell face-first into the snow. She tried to find her feet and couldn’t. Her fingers, around the grip of the flashlight wouldn’t close.

  “Robin!” she yelled. “Help me.”

  Robin looked down into the sepia pool of light where Anna struggled. The biotech said nothing. Her face showed no emotion, not even recognition.

  “Help me up, God dammit!” Anna snarled. “Do it or we both die.”

  “Don’t die,” Robin whispered. Anna barely caught the sound under the sawing of the wind.

  “I will fucking die and so will you if you don’t help me.” Anna’s language was deteriorating. Fleetingly she wondered if she used it to shock Robin out of her trance or because she was just that fucking tired of the whole fucking mess.

  Something got through. Robin leaned down and extended a hand. Using the woman’s strength, Anna pulled herself upright, then began fumbling at the harness buckles. “Let the dead bury the dead,” she said. “Or eat them. I don’t” – she was going to say “fucking” again, but it wouldn’t afford the anger she needed, just indicate how desperate she felt – “much care,” she finished.

  Without the Sked dragging her down, Anna felt almost strong for several yards, then exhaustion slammed back so hard it shut down her mind. She held tenaciously to three things: the faint tracks in the dimming circle of light, what it would do to Paul if she froze to death and the cuff of Robin’s sleeve. Anna could abandon the dead, and, once or twice, she’d turned her back on the living. Leaving Robin would be tough to get over.

  The world shrank till even Paul could not fit in it. Only the circle of light and her hand clamped on Robin’s parka. Soon, Anna knew, one or the other of these would go; she would lose Robin or they’d lose their light. Anna managed to slide her hand up and close it around Robin’s wrist. If she was lucky, it would freeze there.

  “Keep walking,” she whispered to the biotech. “Help me out here.”

  Help me. The words that had formed on the window glass of the bunkhouse. They’d not saved Katherine. Had her spirit come and written them with the cold fingertip of the dead after the wolves had savaged her?

  Help me. Help me. Help me. Anna let the chant move her feet. Lift on Help. Down on me. Lift on Help.

  “The walking dead.”

  Anna had not said that. She’d not said it in her mind and she’d sure as hell not said it aloud. Jerking Robin’s arm, she stopped and shined their pitiful light into the younger woman’s face.

  Robin hadn’t said it. Robin was the walking dead.

  A groan pushed through the dark and the wind. The beam of the flashlight wasn’t strong enough to penetrate more than a few feet, but it was strong enough to pinpoint her and Robin. Anna clicked it off.

  “At first, I saw, but now am blind,” came the voice. Then: “Don’t tell me your batteries are dead.” Then an “Uff!” and “I sound like an old man.”

  “Ridley?” Anna tried.

  “Did your batteries go dead?”

  Anna clicked the light back on and shined it down the trail. First the tips of skis, then the man came into the circle of illumination.

  “Why are you here?” she asked. She would have shouted at him but hadn’t the energy for anything more than mild curiosity.

  “Bob got ahead of me. It was too dark to catch him. Without a flashlight, I’d have killed myself trying to stay on the trail. So I waited for you.”

  The flashlight fell from fingers gone suddenly numb. The butt of it stuck in the snow, sending the light up beneath Anna’s and Robin’s chins.

  “Holy moly!” Ridley said. “You okay?”

  “Is this the Feldtmann?” Anna asked.

  “Yeah. What happened to the Sked?”

  Anna had to chip each thought out of the ice of her brain. Putting them in words took even longer. A thousand years ago, Jonah had led her off the Feldtmann Trail. She’d been on her way back, about three miles from the bunkhouse.

  Three miles. Ridley had on his skis.

  “Here.” Anna picked up the light and gave it to him. “Ski back. Fast. Bring the snowmobile.”

  “The Park Service…” he began, then stopped, undoubtedly realizing it would be easier to explain using an engine in the wilderness than the death by negligence of a visiting District Ranger.

  “Sit tight,” he said.

  “Don’t stop to kill Bob,” Anna managed. She put her arms around Robin and together they sank to the ground. Anna could have propped her back against a tree and unfolded her aching legs, but she chose to sit up straight in the middle of the trail. This was not the place to get too comfortable.

  ROUGH PAWS WERE SCRAPING at Anna, pushing her back and forth, dragging her from the first warm, light, pleasant place she’d been in what was beginning to seem like forever. She’d been in front of the fireplace in Paul’s house in Natchez. There’d been a huge blaze and her husband’s arms were around her, and she was just settling down to a wonderful rest. Then the paws.

  “Come on, sleeping beauties. Don’t want to wake up dead, do you? Wakey-wakey – well, I don’t have eggs and bacon, but I’ve got coffee. Hot coffee.”

  Anna pushed the hands from her. A jolt of fear woke her up completely and she began shaking Robin. “Jesus. Right out of the textbooks,” she said when she saw Robin open her eyes.

  Saw it.

  There was light. Adam was hunched over them, his skis making him awkward, a bright light on a band around his head and another on each arm.

  “Where’s Ridley?” The question sounded so pathetic it embarrassed Anna, but she couldn’t make sense of anything: how long they’d slept, if it was tonight or tomorrow night, who, if anybody, had been eaten by wolves or wogs or Jack Frost.

  “I passed him coming out,” Adam said. “Soon as Bob showed up back at the bunkhouse all by himself with a cock-and-bull story about ‘getting things ready’ for when the rest of you arrived, I knew something stunk.”

  With a couple of expert movements, he unlatched his skis and stepped out of them, then swung his backpack down and began rustling around in it.

  “Ho, ho, ho,” Anna said stupidly.

  Adam smiled. “Like Santa with a bag of toys,” he said.

  That wasn’t it at all. Tall and covered with lights, he reminded Anna of a Christmas tree. Or the spaceship coming down in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Her mind would not track; she had the attention span of a gnat; inside her cranium, things made a degree of sense, but when she tried to put that sense into words it didn’t work anymore.

  Adam took out a thermos and Anna remembered he’d said “coffee.” To drink coffee would be as close to heaven as a woman with a checkered past would get. Hot coffee. Anna could almost feel it in her mouth, pouring heat into her.

  “This’ll help,” Adam said and handed Robin a steaming cup. Anna wished he’d given her the first cup; she wished she was evil enough to snatch Robin’s from her. She would have given a year’s salary just to smell it but the wind took the steam and the perfume. Robin raised her hand to take the cup. Her fingers wouldn’t move and the cup fell into the snow. Anna wanted to cry.

  The next cup he held to their mouths for them. A sip for Robin, a sip for Anna, just like the old days when nobody was afraid of catching diseases, when the offer of a swig out of one’s water bottle wasn’t considered creepy. The coffee was as good as Anna had known it would be. Her body was too far gone for a small infusion of heat and caffeine to do much for it, but her mind shar
pened. Even Robin’s face took on a bit of life. When they could hold the cups without endangering themselves, Adam went again into the pack and brought out a box of six Hershey bars.

  Dormant hunger raged through Anna and she took half of one in a single bite. It was beyond good. The gods didn’t dine on nectar; they ate Hershey’s chocolate, milk chocolate with almonds. “Canonize Hershey,” she said sincerely through a third bite.

  By the time Ridley roared back into their night following the beam of the snowmobile’s headlight, Anna and Robin had enough strength to climb on behind him. The seat was designed for only two riders. The chocolate had raised Anna’s spirits to such an extent, she offered to wait for the second trip. Ridley and Adam saw something in her and the biotech that made them veto the suggestion. Robin was squeezed in the middle and Anna on the back of the seat. Using bungee cords he carried in his pack, Adam lashed both of them to Ridley.

  Little of the ride back registered with Anna. The life of the candy bars and the coffee was short-lived. The trail wasn’t made for machinery and the ride was bumpy. Ridley seemed to waver back and forth between the need for speed and the need for safety, and each waver carried a bump at one end or the other. Mostly Anna hung on and tried to keep her face behind Robin’s shoulder so the cold wouldn’t scour it off.

  Finally they drove out of the woods and onto the graded road. Anna was too tired to be grateful. When they reached the bunkhouse, she couldn’t get off the snowmobile. Jonah was out as soon as he heard the machine coming up the hill, bare-handed, in his old ragged flannel shirt, his boots unlaced. He hadn’t taken time to more than grab his wool cap and shove his feet into his mukluks.

  “Ovaltine is on,” he called. “We’ll get you warmed up. I fired up the sauna. Food, heat, hot drinks. We’ll make new women of you. Not that I’m complaining about the old women, not to suggest you are old, Ranger Pigeon. I doubt you are much older than I am.” While he chattered, he helped take the bungee cords from around the three of them. Ridley let him. He wasn’t as spent as Anna and he hadn’t been hit emotionally as Robin had, but the man had skied over thirty miles among other things and he didn’t seem anxious to take on any unnecessary tasks.