Winter Study (37 page)

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 to 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.