Winter Study (2 page)

“Need
help with your safety belt?” The pilot was stiff and edgy, his United
States Forest Service uniform so crisp that Anna, accustomed to the
rumpled, sweat-stained versions she came across in the field, had, at
first glance, mistaken it for a military uniform.

“No,”
she said shortly. She’d flown on search and rescues, forest fires and
animal surveys, more times than she could count before the pilot
graduated from high school. Annoyed at herself for being annoyed, she
fumbled at her safety harness. She was as awkward a bundle as an Iowa
schoolboy waiting for the bus in January.

Pride cometh,

she
thought wryly as her mittened hands scrabbled on the webbing and her
spiffy new balaclava interfered as she tried to bite her fingertips to
pull the mittens off. Finally she sat as patiently and helplessly as
the apocryphal Iowa lad and let the pilot string her shoulder harnesses
through her lap belt and lock the whole mess down.

Then she thanked him politely.

Robin
Adair, the long-legged research assistant, sprang gracefully into the
left rear seat, settled herself like a pro, and the plane was pushed
from the hangar.

The
Forest Service seaplane operation was on the shore of Shagawa Lake,
edging the small town of Ely. In summer, the runway was open water. Now
it was a lane of hard-packed snow, running north-northeast, between
gaudily painted ice-fishing houses put up helter-skelter till they
resembled nothing so much as a 1940s trailer park dropped from a
passing cargo plane.

In
an attempt to quell what was verging on internal whining, Anna focused
on the beauty of the boreal forest as the Beaver left the ice and
banked, turning east toward Michigan. The day was painfully bright and
clear as it can only be in the north, where every particle of moisture
is frozen from the air and the sun moves low in the south, feigning
evening even at noon. Crystalline amber light honed the edges of the
world till shadows of pines, long on the shores of snow-covered lakes,
were as sharp and black as fangs drawn by children. Even from an
altitude of twenty-two hundred feet and climbing, every track across
the dazzle of white showed blue.

Static rattled in Anna’s headphones, and then the pilot’s voice: “Have you been to Isle Royale before?”

“Once.” Anna had the scar to prove it, a six-inch weal of shiny flesh across her abdomen. It still ached occasionally.

When it was cold.

“Did you work there?”

Altitude
was making the man downright chatty. Anna preferred him in his martinet
mode but dragged herself from the vista of black pine and white lakes
to make conversation.

“Ten or fifteen years ago, I was a ranger in Windigo. Boat patrol.”

“Wow!” the pilot said. Before Anna could bask in his awe, he finished his thought: “I was in seventh grade then.”

So much for impressing the natives.

“Did you ferry the Homeland Security guys out?” she asked, to change the subject.

The
“Homeland Security guys” had been sent by Washington to evaluate Winter
Study. For fifty years, Isle Royale had been a lab for Michigan Tech,
in cooperation with the National Park Service. The park provided money
and physical support. In return, the wolf researchers added to the
glamour of Isle Royale. Visitors followed the rise and fall in the pack
populations as avidly as soap opera devotees. A sizable percentage of
the world’s knowledge of wolves had been produced by the study.

To
remain viable, the ISRO wolf/moose study had two requirements: fifty
thousand dollars a year — peanuts as far as research money went — and
that ISRO be closed to tourism from October to May, when the wolves
mated and denned.

Homeland
Security had put forth a resolution to beef up security in all border
parks. To that end, they were exploring the possibility of opening the
park year-round, to better protect the border from terrorists. If the
wolf/moose study — running for over half a century — could be said to
be effectively mined out as far as relevant data was concerned,
Homeland Security was going to shut it down. ISRO would be opened to
cross-country skiers and winter campers. Rock Harbor resort, on the
east end, would be revamped for year-round usage, and a smaller hotel
built on the east end in Windigo.

The
wolf researchers — Anna, NPS seasonals and Homeland Security, in the
persons of rented experts from American University — would share a
bunkhouse for six weeks. Anna was surprised some enterprising young
reality-TV-show producer hadn’t offered big money to film it.

The
mike woke up, and the seventh-grader flying the plane said: “It was a
man and a woman — Homeland Security — the guy was somebody Ridley
Murray recommended. They were weathered in in Ely for nearly a week.
Hung around the hangar all day, being mad because we wouldn’t move the
ceiling up. Clouds were right down on the deck.”

“I
can’t believe the park would do this to Rolf.” It was Robin from the
backseat, her voice-activated mike crackling with more anger than
static.

“Rolf Peterson retired,” the pilot said.

“The study

is

Rolf.”
Robin again. From Robin’s fierceness, Anna guessed she, like a lot of
other young outdoors people, was in love with the charismatic wolf
researcher. Not sexual love but romantic love, in the sense that they
wanted to grow up to be him, or at least have his life. To a woman
Robin’s age — twenty-two or-three, at a guess — retirement could look a
lot like desertion. Or death.

“Ridley wanted this guy,” the pilot said doggedly.

“Ridley
Murray was Rolf’s student.” Robin’s voice came back on its bed of
cracklings. “Lesser of evils: Ridley didn’t want any guy.”

The
mike was live for another moment as if an unspoken thought prolonged
its activation, then, noiselessly but unmistakably, it went dead again.
Fleetingly Anna wondered what differentiated that quiet open line of
communication and the quiet but utterly different isolation that
followed. Maybe it was the difference between silence and deafness;
some sense deeper than the stirrup and hammer that tells one she is
alone.

Embracing
the solitude, she watched the frozen miles pass beneath the Beaver’s
wings and thought of Paul. It wasn’t only the Mississippi heat that had
thinned her blood. Paul Davidson was the source of the living heat in
her life. After her first husband, Zack, had died, Anna had, without
even knowing she’d done so, chosen a chill and lonely place to stow her
heart, a limbo where it continued to beat, like the heart of a frog
frozen in winter mud, to thaw to new life come spring. Paul had been
her spring.

There
was no warmth like the warmth of Paul’s arms around her, no sleep like
the sleep she enjoyed when she had her head on his shoulder. He made
her feel safe, and, until she’d known him, she’d not realized she felt
any other way. Love lent her a dangerous and delicious fragility.

They’d been married four months. They’d been together ten days of it.

Sitting
in the right seat of the Beaver, watching the landscape scroll by, she
wanted to be with him with a fierceness that bordered on panic. Being a
park ranger was a job, not a life; loneliness a choice, not a necessity
anymore. It was all she could do not to scream at the pilot to turn the
plane around. For a gut-wrenching minute, her career seemed a foolish
exercise, a pointless labor for little pay, a cruel hoax that had lured
her from her marriage. Being with Paul was the only thing that
mattered. She tried to clench her fists, to concentrate her mind, but
they only balled into soft paws in the thick down mittens.

A
breaking sound in her ears let her know relief was coming, in the form
of distraction, and she welcomed it. Robin spoke again, the edge of
anger in her voice a refreshing antidote to Anna’s weakness.

“Ridley
recommended the Homeland Security guy from this list they sent the
park, but nobody who knows anything made up the list.”

Nobody who knows anything.

Anna’d
been around research projects enough to know that meant an NPS person.
There was a strange and mutually hostile love affair between scientists
and the parks. Years back, the Park Service abdicated the role of
science in the parks and opened it up to outside researchers.
Researchers tended to look on the parks as their private laboratories
and the Park Service as an annoying necessity at best and interfering
ignoramuses at worst. A professional hazard of research was the
tendency to narrow-mindedness. Often researchers lived for the one
thing they studied. Anything that did not serve that study was viewed
with scorn. The wolf/moose study on Isle Royale had decades of
homesteading by researchers, most of whom came back year after year,
six weeks in winter, six months in summer.

“Word
came down from Washington. Terrorists.” Robin snorted, and Anna was
surprised such a delicate sculpted nose could produce such an excellent
snort. “If they’re from the Middle East, creeping across the Canadian
border in the dead of winter to paddle to the island, they’re going to
freeze their little terrorist butts off.”

Word had come down from Washington.

After
9/11, Homeland Security dumped money on the NPS. Everybody loved it. It
was like Christmas, till they noticed the money was earmarked for law
enforcement. Like Popeye’s arms, the LE divisions were puffed up in
classic steroidal fashion, the interpretive programs relegated to the
leavings.

Now
D.C. sent down the “Interpretive Theme” for the year, and campfire
programs — from the Everglades to Death Valley to the Kenai Peninsula —
had to focus on pollution or endangered species or bioterrorism —
whatever the folk in Washington thought was important at the moment.
Never mind that the public wasn’t interested, or that the theme didn’t
suit the park.

Free money was never free.

“Lake’s wide open,” the pilot said.

Anna
looked at what she’d thought was the gleam of ice on the approaching
shore of Lake Superior. Open water. In a colder winter, a pair of
wolves had crossed an ice bridge from Canada and set up housekeeping on
the island. The lake freezing solid from Isle Royale to the Canadian
shore was rare; it hadn’t happened in over thirty years. She watched as
water replaced land beneath the wings and Isle Royale began to take
shape on the horizon. In the joy of seeing the island from the air, she
forgot about Paul, the cold and the antagonisms of mere mortals.

Washington
Harbor reached out a welcoming arm, and the airplane flew in low and
slow. Water, catching the iridescent blue and amber of the sky, riffled
between narrowing banks of evergreens, black with shadow. Blue turned
to white as ice formed in the shallower water, ringing Beaver Island in
a necklace of diamonds. At the level of the treetops, and hugging the
bank to avoid the worst of the crosswind, the pilot lined up on the
expanse of white between the tiny harbor island and the docks at
Windigo.