Winter Study (17 page)

Anna
intended to sit back down but realized she’d never made it to her feet.
The mere thought of it had tapped her last reserves. She hoped Robin
had the strength and patience to spoon-feed her the remainder of her
required five thousand calories. Lifting an eating utensil might be
beyond her powers.

Calflike
in the corral, she watched dumbly as Adam undid the frozen buckles on
Robin’s harness. There was definite byplay between the two of them,
secret looks and small, quickly extinguished smiles, and Anna wondered
if Robin’s boyfriend — Gavin or Galen or whatever — was on his way out.
Seasonal Park Service life was hard on relationships. Permanent Park
Service life wasn’t much better.

Life
in general was hell on relationships, Anna thought tiredly. She wished
Paul was there, wished she was in Natchez. How hard would it be? She
could give up rangering — all it seemed to get her was wrecked knee
joints and scars — and become a Mississippi housewife. Paul was an
Episcopal priest when he wasn’t being the sheriff of Adams County. Anna
could be a church lady. She liked hats. Anyway, she liked her NPS
Stetson well enough. If she believed in God, it would be doable.

Damn.

There was always a catch.

Jonah
excused himself to check on the weather. Adam and Robin left shortly
thereafter. Bob went out to bring firewood and stack it near the door.
Finally there was room to move. Anna roused herself to a little
housekeeping, the only kind she was much good at: setting up camp. She
began efficiently storing their mountains of gear. In summer,
extraneous items could be cached out of doors. In January, anything
they wanted the use of, including the wolf traps, had to be kept inside
the cabin. The traps had been designed for all weathers. It wouldn’t
have hurt their form or function to be tossed out in the snow, but
working with them would be harder if the metal was cold enough to burn
skin.

“Can I do anything to help?” Katherine asked.

Anna had forgotten she was there. “Can you even move after the last two days?” she asked.

Katherine laughed and shook her head. “Surely there’s something I can do.”

“There’s
not room to do it,” Anna said. She almost added “How are you doing? Are
you holding up?” but caught herself in time. Concern and condescension
were hard to tell apart, and Katherine’s brain was probably as tired as
her body. Instead she said: “We won’t have to pack like this again. We
couldn’t count on the weather breaking, so we hauled the traps in. If
the weather’s too bad for Jonah to pick us up, we’ll leave them here.”
She shot a malevolent glance at the internal-frame pack hanging on the
wall at the foot of the bunks. “I doubt if I could do it again. That
pack nearly killed me.”

She’d
said it to make Katherine feel better, but it might be true. She might
not be able to take that kind of weight again for a while. The previous
season, when she’d been on a twenty-one-day fire assignment in the
mountains east of Boise, Idaho, she’d noticed that the difference
between the old firefighters and the young ones wasn’t in strength or
endurance. It was in recovery time. The old guys, the firefighters over
forty, were as strong as the kids. She and the others could lift and
run and dig with the best of them. But they wore down. The kids were
stronger after three weeks of hard physical labor. The grown-ups were
just bone tired.

With much stomping, Jonah opened the door and leaned in. “Seen Adam?” he asked. “Weather’s souring. We’ve got to roll.”

“I thought he was with you,” Anna said.

“He’s
with Robin,” Jonah replied, sounding vaguely ominous. Anna couldn’t
tell if he was jealous or just worried about getting the supercub up
before they got weathered in.

Six bodies crammed in the tiny cabin overnight.

“I’ll
help you look,” she said, grabbed up her parka and shoved her feet in
her boots. She didn’t bother with balaclava and mittens. She had no
intention of being out that long.

The
light had dimmed from its paltry glory. A tidal wave of gray was
rolling toward shore from the northwest. Above it was the clear
silver-blue sky, but that was going to change. Wind was driving the
clouds; they would have snow.

“Adam!” Jonah yelled.

Anna
walked toward the outhouse. Bob met her carrying an armload of wood for
the stove. “Have you seen Adam and Robin?” she demanded.

“He’s old enough to be her father,” he said.

Anna gave him a hard look. “So are you. Have you seen them?”

Before
he could answer, the two missing persons emerged from behind the cabin.
They had the excited air of lovers, sharing secret trysts. Or, more
apt, a ragman and tinker, luring the lovely farm girl to sin and
degradation. Adam’s affectation of a parka and ski pants worn and
stained and patched with duct tape in half a dozen places leant his
otherwise-honest-looking self a disreputable air.

“God
dammit, Adam,” Jonah groused. “I’m taking off as soon as I get her
fired up. Either you’re buckled in or you’re staying here.” The pilot
strode off toward the lake and his lady. Adam started after him.

“Your
pack,” Anna called. She reached inside the cabin door and snatched up
the maintenance man’s day pack. “Jesus!” she exclaimed as the weight
hit her sore shoulders. “What have you got in here anyway?”

“Give that to me,” he demanded harshly.

Wordlessly, Anna handed it over.

“Books,” he said and smiled sheepishly. “We’ll make another run with goodies if we can,” he said. “Hang in there.”

With
those reassuring words, he started down the slight grade. The
supercub’s engine purred to life, and he broke into a run, his long
legs eating up the distance. Feeling abandoned in an arctic wilderness,
Anna watched till he climbed through the clamshell doors.

Adam was up to something. Maybe that something was a twenty-four-year-old biotech. Whatever it was, it bore watching.

10

Despite
the tight quarters and the snapping and snarling of animals and humans
over the past twenty-four hours, once Adam and Jonah were gone Anna,
Katherine, Robin and even Bob began to enjoy one another’s company. A
night of shared danger — or perceived danger — a hard hike well done,
and the reward of heat and food at the end, bonded them as nights in a
bunkhouse could never do.

Adding
to the general sense of well-being was what Anna’s District Ranger in
Mesa Verde had liked to call the idiot’s delight aspect of camping:
after hitting oneself over the head with a two-by-four, it felt so good
to stop.

Bob
cooked. The big bearish man put on an apron left by a summer seasonal
with a taste for frills and bows. Ruffled pinafore straps over his
thick shoulders, he began cutting the onions Jonah had brought. His
size dwarfed the two-burner stove, his hands made the knife look like a
toy and the sash of the apron barely reached around him, but he looked
more at ease than Anna had ever seen him. It was as if in a kitchen —
even such a kitchen as the backcountry cabin afforded — he felt
completely in control, full of confidence, the genuine kind that allows
a man generosity of spirit because he needn’t constantly put others
down or puff himself up to guarantee his place in the pecking order.

As
he changed, Katherine changed. She let down her guard. If Bob’s armor
was arrogance, Katherine’s was meekness. Without it hiding her like a
translucent burka, she shined. Not a lot, not a shooting star, but she
exhibited a sense of humor with a black streak Anna enjoyed. Almost,
almost, if she squinted and tilted her head to one side, Anna could see
what brought graduate student and professor into a relationship. There
was no doubt in her mind that they were in a relationship — or had been
— and it was more than merely academics.

By
the time they turned out the hurricane lantern to sleep — Anna on the
top bunk, Katherine on the bottom, Robin and Bob on the floor — Anna
was feeling downright warm and fuzzy.

Maintained by coffee and a breakfast that didn’t ice up on the spoon, the camaraderie survived the morning.

Carrying
four traps — forty pounds — Anna felt strong and ready as she
shouldered her pack after breakfast. Bob offered to carry Katherine’s
traps for her, but apparently Katherine felt the joy of not being
crippled from the day before as well and insisted on taking her share.

The
storm Jonah and the supercub fled the previous afternoon squatted on
Malone Bay, settling slate-colored skirts in the hollows and down the
hillsides. Three inches of snow had fallen during the night, and more
whirled on a scouring wind that erased the track of the cub’s skis
across the harbor ice and the footprints of the Winter Study team. In
the isolated places of the world, nature still retained the power to
erase human lives as easily as she did the prints of their shoes. The
feeling gave Anna hope that mankind wouldn’t sound the earth’s death
knell quite yet, that Mother Nature wouldn’t go quietly and she would
take as many of the enemy with her as she could.

Ice
on Siskiwit Lake was eight to nine inches thick and blown clear of snow
in many places. Wind from the northwest scudded over the surface of the
lake with razor-blade cold. The snow had stopped, but the clouds looked
heavy with more. A renegade flurry of fat flakes leaped and soared on
the gusts of wind, in no hurry to reach the earth. These were not the
mean-spirited snowflakes, fine as beach sand in the teeth, that scathed
the east end of the island but the lacy flakes that adorned Christmas
cards. Their playful beauty made the cold seem less personal. Less
deadly. It was a comforting illusion.

Where
the wind cleared it, the ice was slick and black. Anna could see
bubbles and cracks that ran like zigzagging white cliffs beneath the
surface.

“Leave your nose alone,” Robin said.

“What about the cracks?” Anna asked, slipping her hand back in its mitten. She thought she’d gotten past the nose thing.

“There
are always cracks,” Robin said. “It usually doesn’t mean anything. Ice
is in flux, expanding and contracting. The cracks are stress fractures.”

Usually doesn’t mean anything

. Anna was only slightly reassured.

Halfway
to Ryan Island, famous for being the biggest island in the biggest lake
on the biggest island in the biggest lake in the world but still only a
froth of evergreens and rocks, they came to the remains of the moose
kill that Jonah and Anna had watched from the air several days before.
The carcass had been picked clean. What scraps of meat still clung to
the ripped hide were being worked on by two ravens. They eyed the human
interlopers critically, then, unimpressed, turned back to their work.