Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  Not superstitious by nature, she considered taking it up, as she chewed, staring at the table. There was no harm in protecting oneself against things that didn’t exist. What could it hurt to carry a rabbit’s foot? Other than the rabbit.

  “I’m going to practice my cross-country skiing,” she announced as she dusted the crumbs from the table.

  “Take a radio,” Ridley said.

  Bob smiled, a half smile that said: I saw you naked.

  I Know What You Did Last Summer fluttered out of a box in Anna’s brain and she smiled back, not at Bob, at the silliness of the teen-scream B movie. A touch of the gory knife and the dripping hatchet must have shown. Bob stopped smiling and concentrated on eating.

  TEN YEARS OR MORE had passed since Anna’d been on skis and she hadn’t been much good then. Over rough patches where Robin would fly and Ridley power through, she would have to take her skis off and carry them; still, it would still be quicker than hiking. The only boots she had with her were the Sorels. There was no way the fat toes would fit into the bindings. Having learned from Robin’s ingenuity at Malone, she grabbed a butter knife and popped off the bindings and affixed the toe of each boot firmly around the ski with duct tape, leaving her heels free. Not ideal, but it would suffice. The remainder of the roll of tape she shoved in her pack.

  The gentle, curving slope where the road led down to the water gave her time to establish a relationship between feet and skis, hands and poles. By the time she passed the pier, she was moving with a modicum of confidence.

  Following the Feldtmann Trail to where she’d cut cross-country was easy. Snowmobile tracks cut deep. The trail from the Feldtmann to where Katherine had fallen was harder, but the drag of the Sked and the holes left by Anna’s boots had yet to be completely eroded by wind or filled by new snow. Ski tracks were mostly gone. Occasionally she’d see the stripe in the snow or a pock where a pole was driven in, but she would have been hard-pressed to stay on course if they’d been her only map.

  Adam had said it wasn’t too far to where she’d abandoned the Sked. It wasn’t. Unburdened, rested, on skis and in the light of day, the trip took less than an hour. The cheekiness of time irked, then disoriented, her. Déjà vu telescoped, collapsed into two dimensions, as if she’d walked out of the living room in her house in Rocky and into the bath, the connecting hall suddenly not there.

  The nose hill, the nose-hair tree, the refrigerator rock: Anna shed her skis and waded into the cedar swamp.

  The neon orange patches where animals had unearthed tasty bites of researcher were erased by snowfall, but the trees were still startling in their neon spatter. Anna pulled her balaclava off and stood quietly, sending her senses out to taste the forest. Wind blustered through the tops of the trees but without malice; a teasing shake of bare branches, a rattle of dead leaves that had refused to fall in autumn. The air smelled clean and new; there was no lingering odor of the windigo, to speak of unspeakable things. She felt only the amiable curiosity of red squirrels.

  Following the trail blazed so conveniently in blood, she worked her way out from the clearing.

  She’d learned to track in the desert. A land of snow was very like a desert, and she found she could read sign tolerably well. Working slowly, she followed the spatters and the now-almost-obliterated mark where Katherine had crawled – or been dragged – from the swamp. She found the hole she and Robin dug, excavating the backpack. The bottom had filled in till it was just a large dimple in the snow. Anna pulled a pasta server she’d lifted from a kitchen drawer out of her backpack and used it to rake around the area. Gloved hands packed snow rather than lifting it, and it was too cold to use bare fingers.

  Sieving turned up bits of blue canvas, one soaked with what Anna presumed was either wolf blood from the broken vials or human blood from the researcher. On fabric, there was none of the cheery traffic-cone orange; the blood had gone dark and hard. Anna had no idea of the chemistry involved, but, no doubt, one day an enterprising researcher would get a hundred-thousand-dollar grant to study the phenomenon.

  Near ground level, she found a blue canvas strap. One end was intact, the buckle still in place. The end that had originally attached to the backpack was ripped. Either it had been torn from Katherine’s back or been ripped in a game of tug-of-war between woman and wolf or wolf and wolf.

  Or woman and scary noneating thing.

  Anna rose to her feet and looked for the next spatter of orange. Snow humped over downed wood, and the swamp resembled a rumpled giant’s bed. Half the trees were alive, erect above the snow, and half in a deadly tangle beneath it. Contours and cave-ins could be the mark of human intervention or snow cover interacting with gravity, temperature and the various levels of piled trees.

  Anna had been hoping for a bit more blood. She’d seen the wolves taking down a moose. There had been a lot of blood. Wolves and moose hearts pumping at top capacity, wolves slashing, moose fighting back with hooves and antlers. Blood had flown in every direction.

  Here there was little for a tracker to go by. Maybe because Katherine hadn’t the physical strength to fight a predator that didn’t weigh much less than she did and her clothing soaked up fluids from her wounds.

  Without its bizarre coloration, Anna might have missed the next spatter. Seven orange drops in a neat arc stood out at snow line against the pale bark of a downed cedar.

  With careful steps and her pasta-serving spoon, Anna worked Katherine’s back trail. Fifty yards into the tangle of downed trees was a six-by-eight patch of snow that was sufficiently disturbed that the drifting had not completely concealed it. Digging was deepest in a crotch formed by two dead limbs. Around this patch was a wide area of lesser dimpling, the paw prints of wolves.

  If they were paw prints. The windigo carried its victims so high and so fast, their feet burned away to stumps, and the prints they left in the snow were more like hoofprints than human tracks.

  “Cut it out,” Anna said aloud. An “inner child” was all well and good, but the little buggers could be a real pain in the ass when it came to scary stories.

  Starting at the outer perimeter of the circle, she began clearing snow away. Within a foot of where the branches came together in a natural snare, she found a patch of frozen urine. It was human; a fragment of wadded tissue paper lay next to it. Katherine had been trapped long enough to need to relieve herself, and her leg was not yet broken. The compound fracture would have rendered her too crippled and in too much pain to have squatted neatly.

  On the same imaginary ring around ground zero – the foot trap – Anna found a flashlight, an unused emergency flare and a water bottle, half full and frozen solid as a brick, and a pack of Juicy Fruit. Katherine might have run madly into the woods, but she had returned to her room, or had this pack cached elsewhere, and come prepared.

  Anna rocked back on her heels, wondering what a small, emotionally upset researcher from Washington, D.C., would rush out in the dark with a flare and a pack of gum to do. Did she plan to get lost to punish Bob but wanted to hedge her bets? Did she stage the fight with Bob to establish a reason to run off that wouldn’t incriminate her?

  In what? And why didn’t she use the flare? Any late-night-movie viewer would know to strike the flare to keep wolves away. Whatever Katherine’s reasons, it was here that the rucksack was wrested from her.

  Not having evidence bags large enough to accommodate flashlight and flare, Anna stowed them in her backpack. A little more digging turned up the cell phone Bob worried about. Anna knew pretty close to nothing about cell phones. For much of her career, no one had such a thing, except for the crew of the Starship Enterprise. In the years since they’d become commonplace, she’d worked in places too isolated to get service. Paul bought her one, and, because she’d promised she would, she kept it in the car when she traveled between Colorado and Mississippi. A couple of times she’d gone so far as to turn it on. Once she’d even needed it, but the battery had gone dead and it had been demoted from glove compartment t
o trunk.

  This phone appeared to be a fancy machine, many buttons and symbols, all in Lilliputian scale. The viewing screen was black. Because her phone worked this way, Anna took off a glove, then pushed END to begin.

  Nothing.

  She pushed TALK.

  Nothing.

  When her fingers got cold enough to cause pain, she gave up and slipped the phone in her pocket. The batteries could be dead or frozen. Probably both. Menechinn wanted the phone to save the cost of replacing it. Whether he was being petty or not, Anna knew she would put it down the outhouse rather than give him a moment’s satisfaction. Since he’d saved her life, Bob had that effect on her.

  Sitting on one of the limbs that had captured and held Katherine till death came on night’s paws, Anna considered what she had found. Not much. And she didn’t have a lot more time. She’d gotten a late start and had no intention of reprising her long day’s journey into night, dragging a corpse and a zombie, not even with two flashlights and an emergency flare.

  Putting all of the “not much” together, she fleshed out a story. Katherine had run from the housing area for reasons of her own. Maybe to conduct an activity she wanted kept secret or to make Bob sorry for whatever he had done. The flare in the pack suggested the activity might have something to do with signaling. Homeland Security had sent Bob to ISRO presumably because it was a hole in the border through which anything could leak, especially in winter when it was deserted.

  Signaling offshore smugglers? Terrorists?

  Anna laughed, surprising herself with the noise. Evildoers deciding to do evil in Lake Superior in January were a self-culling gene pool. Based out of a city, Homeland Security personnel might not know that. Provincialism wasn’t just for the provinces anymore.

  The facts were: Katherine had left Windigo, then intentionally or accidentally gotten lost. She’d gotten caught in the cedar swamp. Wolves found her. Contrary to natural behavior patterns, they decided to devour her. At some point, she remembered her cell phone and tried to call out. She fought to free her foot and her ankle snapped. That might also have been when the vials were broken. Blood from the compound fracture, blood from a dead wolf, frenetic noise and preylike thrashings: hard for any self-respecting wolf to resist. The foot comes free. Katherine drags herself or is dragged by wolves to the killing ground.

  Then her ghost flits to Windigo and writes “HELP ME” on the window glass.

  “I guess we solved this one,” Anna said to a red squirrel, who, thinking her a bump on a log, had settled nearby to munch on a ration of fall’s harvest. The little rodent squawked, scurried up the nearest tree and disappeared around the bole. Two seconds later, it reappeared on the other side and scolded Anna for her impertinence.

  “I’m sorry I scared you. I thought you knew it was me. Hey, thanks.” Looking at the squirrel, she noticed a set of tracks coming in at an angle on the far side of the tree. They looked like boot prints. Had she not been half expecting them, Anna would have written them off to the vagaries of tracking and weather. Overlapping moose prints often resembled a human track. Wolf tracks scoured out with the wind fooled the eye in the same way.

  Most of the tracks had been obliterated. All she could tell was, they came from the west, the direction of the bunkhouse, which meant nothing. In rough country, only the crows fly as the crow flies. Creeping and climbing and scooting on her butt, she worked her way through the swamp in concentric circles out from the existing prints.

  Nearer where the body was found, at the foot of an evergreen tree, branches full of needles and keeping out much of the snow, the tracks ended. The owner of the boots had stood, back to the tree, and watched the slaying or the body or both.

  It was the watcher who had frightened the wolves from their kill.

  22

  Anna skied home in the last of the afternoon. By the time she’d stowed the items she’d collected beneath the shop floor, the last of the light had gone. The cell phone she kept. If the battery warmed, it might have enough power to at least let her see to whom Katherine made her last call.

  Though it was after dark when she returned to the bunkhouse, no one had radioed to see if she were alive or dead. No one seemed to have the spirit to care. Cabin fever had become epidemic. Ridley worked at his desk in the room he and Jonah shared. Adam lay on the sofa, sleeping or pretending to. Bob’s door was closed, and Jonah, for once uninterested in company, sat in the dim light of the common room’s overhead light, dividing his time between watching Adam, as if trying to guess his weight, and staring at a well-thumbed Newsweek. On the table by the magazine was a mason jar with an inch of red wine in it. Number 2787, Anna knew. Ridley, Jonah and, before he retired, Rolf Peterson drank their evening libation – served by Jonah – from mason jars. Each knew which was his personal jar from the number stamped in the glass. Wolves were not the only creatures whose evolution was affected by isolation.

  Divested of her many layers and dressed in dry, if not clean, clothes, Anna stood in front of the woodstove amid racks of drying underpants and socks. The fever was upon her as well; she didn’t know what to do with herself. She wished she could call Paul, but she’d have to do it from the public phone in the common room and, since the storm moved in, the connection was so bad it was exhausting to try and converse. E-mail was a possibility, but Internet connection was patchy at best.

  “Did Ridley get through to report Katherine’s death?” she asked of the room in general.

  Jonah answered. “E-mailed. Got one back. As soon as it clears, the Forest Service will be here with the Beaver. Everybody goes.”

  Bob had gotten his way, to a degree. That was the reason for the spiritual collapse of the Winter Study team. This season’s work was over unless Ridley could talk the Superintendent into relenting. Given the manner of Katherine’s death, it would be easy for the NPS to simply never reinstate the study. The high-profile nature of the research cut both ways. An ISRO researcher’s death by wolf would be big news.

  “When do they think the weather will break?” Anna tried to keep the note of longing from her voice, but getting off the island was looking like a reprieve from a life sentence in a refrigerated lunatic asylum.

  “Another front’s coming down from Canada. Three days, maybe a week. We’ve been here as much as two weeks without the Beaver getting in to bring us provisions,” Jonah said. “Too dangerous to fly in this stuff.”

  Adam opened his eyes. “Three days?” he said. There was a note of alarm in his voice, as if three days was either not enough or too much to bear.

  To Anna, seventy-two hours seemed an eternity. A week, a death sentence.

  Adam closed his eyes again.

  Silence descended again, punctuated by sneaky pops and hisses as fire consumed wood. Jonah went back to reading and watching Adam. The easy camaraderie was breaking down. Ridley didn’t laugh at Jonah’s antics and Jonah seldom indulged in them. Ridley distanced himself from Adam; Jonah watched him, and Adam took every chance he could to go off by himself.

  Another week of this and Anna was going to get seriously cranky. In the twenty-first century, people assumed that nothing could stop rescuers, but, as advanced as technology had become, weather could shut it down. She thought of the climbers who died on Mount Hood in 2006. Storms were too severe for the search-and-rescue teams to do their work.

  Mother Nature had sold them out and Old Man Winter held them hostage. No risks would be taken for a body recovery of a woman killed in an accident.

  Anna wished she were in Natchez, Mississippi, cutting back the roses in Paul’s front yard.

  Paul’s front yard. Anna had been on her own so long she wondered if she would ever lose the mental habit of thinking of “Paul’s” and “hers,” never “ours.” When she referred to “his” house, he would invariably take her in his arms and say “our house.” When they married, Paul truly did give “all that he had and all that he was” to her. Much as she would have liked to do the same, Anna was not made that way. A core
of her remained unshared, a fortress she retreated to when she needed to marshal her internal forces.

  The outer shell of her parka was dry to the touch. She lifted it off the rack. Turning the coat inside out to dry the lining, she felt a lump in the pocket. The vial of wolf’s blood; she’d forgotten to put it in the toolbox evidence locker. By now, it would have thawed. Stowing it beneath the carpenter’s shop would only serve to refreeze it and what little value it might have would be lost. She left it where it was.

  The blood samples Katherine had carried with her to the cedar swamp stuck in Anna’s brain: burrs under her saddle, stones in her shoe. Crimes – or accidents – told a story. The protagonist did something for a reason and the result was the incident. When an action occurred that didn’t fit in the logical unfolding of the story, Anna couldn’t leave it alone. People who lied were invariably caught eventually because the lie never completely worked with the rest of the story.

  It was possible that the blood samples didn’t fit into the story because they had no relevance. Katherine might have pocketed them with the intention of doing tests when she returned to her kitchen/ lab.

  Katherine had fiddled with wolf parts nonstop for the better part of two days. The kitchen was filled with racks of vials containing samples of tissue, blood, bone, stomach contents, hair, ticks, mites and other marvelous things. What tests could be left to do? Why not use the blood she’d taken before the wolf was moved to the carpenter’s shop?

  Leaving the heat of the stove and the oppressive peopled emptiness of the common room, Anna went to Katherine’s makeshift DNA lab. With its single bed shoved in a corner and the haphazard piles of a storeroom used by many and organized by none, the kitchen was bleak.

  The PCR was in its travel case on the counter, the record book beside it. Anna opened the log and read what she could understand of Katherine’s notes. The researcher had not written anything she’d not discussed with the rest of them, no illuminating secrets.