Winter Study (5 page)

“Very
broad-minded of you, Ranger Pigeon. Wait till you’ve had café au fox
piss.” Grumbling, he began using the tip of the shovel like a
gargantuan scalpel, incising spots of yellow. Anna looked back to where
the moose with its cloak of ravens lay on the ice. Blood spatter from
the ax formed three lines out from the pool where the animal’s head had
lain. The sight was not gruesome, not ugly. Ravens were so black they
seemed cut from construction paper and pasted on the reflective white
of the snow. Blood was still the bright cheery red of life. The
composition was set off by the inky lines of leafless trees against the
blue of the sky. Stunning in its simplicity, the tableau put Anna in
mind of a Japanese painting she’d seen:

Death of a Samurai.

“What are you going to do with the body?” she asked.

Jonah
jammed the shovel back into the snow pile. “Nothing. There’s nothing we
could do even if we wanted. Used to, before the warm-and-cuddlies got
up in arms, we’d shoot a moose once a winter. Middle pack always knew
and always showed up. One year, the rules were changed, but Middle pack
showed up right on schedule anyway, like they had a watch that read:
MOOSE TIME. No free moose meat. They never came again. I don’t know how
they know things, but they do.”

“Think they know this is here?” Anna asked.

“See
that raven?” Jonah pointed to a sharp cut of black flying toward the
western shore of the harbor. “He’s going to tell the pack supper’s on.”

Anna
believed him. She’d been around animals enough to know humans might
know how much Jupiter weighs and where stars come from, but they remain
in total ignorance about what the cat in their lap is thinking or who
their dog tells their secrets to.

They
heard the snowmobile returning and, stiff in their bundling, rotated
toward it. “We’ll load up on water, then head back up,” Jonah said.
“You sure you don’t want a ride?”

“I’m
sure.” Without the distractions of dead ungulates and fox piss, she
remembered how cold she was. If she didn’t move soon, she would freeze
where she stood.

“Stay away from the dock,” Jonah called after her. “Ice is always rotten around docks.”

Anna
waved an arm to let him know she’d heard. Though she’d been hypnotized
by its singing and delighted in the canvas it created for the
blood-and-bird painting, she wouldn’t be sorry to be on solid ground.
The thought of getting wet, when the temperature was near zero and the
wind brisk, scared her.

There was no negotiating with thermodynamics.

3

Walking
up the bank from the lake, Anna felt like a one-woman band. What snow
the wind had not scoured from the Earth was so desiccated it didn’t
crunch beneath her boots, it squeaked as if she walked on beads of
Styrofoam. Fur and fleece rasped over her ears, nylon ski pants
whistled as they rubbed cricket-like with each step. The racket made
her think of Robin Adair and her friendship with winter. She and Robin
spent a couple of hours together, eating breakfast and killing time,
till the Forest Service pilot got the call that the clouds over Isle
Royale had lifted. Though Ely and Washington Harbor were on the same
parallel and not more than one hundred fifty miles apart, the lake made
its own weather, often completely unrelated to what the mainland was
experiencing.

Over
eggs and bacon, Anna learned Robin was born and raised on the St. Croix
River in Minnesota, that she would have made the junior Olympics in
cross-country skiing if she hadn’t been invalided out on a knee injury.
Robin had been in love with winter her entire life. Winter was her
favorite season. Either the woman had antifreeze in her veins or winter
succumbed to her shy beauty and returned her affection. What else could
explain the fact that she alone seemed comfortable in less than a
walrus-sized amount of down blubber and moved as a wraith — or the
apocryphal Indian — through the north woods?

All by herself, Anna constituted a public disturbance.

Where
the dock met the shore, she stopped. The ranger station was gone. In
its place was a picnic area designed with the inherent poetry of an
RV-storage garage. The old, red rambling ranger station had been
cramped and dirty and full of mice, but Anna missed it. The parks were
never supposed to change; they were supposed to house memories of
better days, keep them intact: nobody filled in the creek where one
used to hunt crawdads or built a Wal-Mart in the field where the
reading oak had grown.

An
unpaved road curved to the west by the fuel dock and up to the seasonal
employees’ housing area. That was as she remembered it, but four huge
orange fuel tanks had been put at the turn.

Huge.

Orange.

She decided to take the trail through the woods.

Twenty
yards in, she saw what had become of the old ranger station. It had
been replaced by a much-larger structure that housed a Visitors Center
as well. Cranky as the cold made her, she could find no fault with it;
it was beautifully done, and, with a boatload of tourists arriving
every day in the summer from Grand Marais, when it rained the poor
wretches would now have a place to seek shelter rather than sitting
along the edge of the dock making pathetic attempts to keep dry beneath
unfolded island maps.

Above
the new V.C. was the original concessionaire’s store: an unattractive
brown wooden rectangle full of junk food, mosquito repellent and
fishhooks. In the fall of her season on ISRO, two bull moose had fought
in the picnic area by the door. Their antlers were so heavy, they could
do little more than sway them at one another, rarely making serious
contact. If moose felt the same about their antlers as old men did
about their Corvettes, the windigo on the ice must have nearly died of
shame.

A
quarter of a mile farther uphill, she stepped out of the trees into the
clearing where the seasonal employees were housed. The place she had
lived in — fondly known as the “Mink Trail” due to its plethora of mice
and the weasels that came to dine on them — was gone. Beyond it, trees
had been cut down and earth disturbed. In preparation for the
threatened winter resort? Anna wouldn’t put it past an overeager
concessionaire to finagle it through NPS channels prematurely.

The
bunkhouse where the Winter Study team would live for six weeks had
smoke coming from the chimney. Anna hurried the last hundred feet.
Designed for multiple occupants, the living space was laid out around a
central room with a woodstove at the west end. Racks of drying socks
and boots and shirts screened the heat from the fire. The three sofas,
like in any self-respecting suburban home, were in a C shape around a
television set. Along the back wall were computers and radio equipment.
An old upright piano served as a bench for two laptops. To either side
of the common room were small semiprivate apartments, with two
bedrooms, a bath and a kitchen.

Trying
not to look obvious, Anna headed for the nearest bathroom, shedding her
parka as she went. The door was closed, and she knocked softly before
pushing it open. A blast of icy air met her. The window over the
commode was open six inches, and the toilet, shower and sink area were
filled with milk, orange juice, potatoes, cheese, onions, butter and a
dozen other perishable food items.

No
electrical power; this was the Winter Study team’s refrigerator. She
turned and started toward the bathroom in the mirror-image apartment on
the other side. Halfway there, she could see three large, round plastic
containers with spigots on the sink counter.

“Our well,” Jonah had said of the hole chopped in the lake ice. There was no running water.

No flush toilets.

“It’s
by the woodstove,” a soft voice said, and Anna realized she was not
alone. Hunched in front of a computer was a small woman in gray sweater
and cargo pants, on her feet the indoor version of Mrs. Steger’s
moose-hide mukluks, available only in Ely and only from the store owned
by übermusher Will Steger’s wife. The woman’s bland face was pleasant
enough, and the brown eyes, small behind the thick glasses of the truly
nearsighted, moderately welcoming. “There.” She pointed toward the
stove.

Anna
looked where she indicated. Beside the woodstove, half hidden behind a
rack of worn dish towels and industrial-strength winter boots, a toilet
seat leaned against the wall. It had been lovingly decorated with
bright red kissing lips and holly, WINTER STUDY painted on it in what
looked like crimson nail polish.

“Thanks,” Anna said, trying to look as if she’d not been foolish enough to hope for indoor plumbing.

“The outhouse is through the kitchen door a ways,” the woman said helpfully.

Anna
caught up the ring of porcelain — or, more likely, plastic — on her way
toward the northernmost kitchen, the one the study used. The toilet
seat was warm from the stove. Evidently even the hardiest of souls
required some few comforts.

JONAH
FIRED UP THE GENERATOR and informed Anna they would have power each
evening till lights out at ten. Anna bunked with Robin on the
refrigerator side. She divested herself of her layers and dressed in
Levi’s and one of Paul’s old sweatshirts. On her feet was the one
luxury she permitted herself to stuff into the two small-to-medium
soft-sided duffels she was allowed to bring, fuzzy slippers, a sedate
black but frosted with yellow-and-white cat hair. She joined the others
in the working kitchen.

Bob Menechinn was enthroned at the Formica-topped table in the chair nearest the wall, a glass of the boxed red wine, ISRO’s

vin ordinaire,

in
his hand. Robin sat opposite him, quiet and smiling. The woman who had
shown Anna where the bathroom facilities were hovered between Bob and
the door to the outhouse as if, at any minute, she would make good an
escape.

Menechinn
smiled at Anna appreciatively. “You clean up nice, Miss Pigeon.” The
woman behind him shot him a look of alarm, quickly quelled, and Anna
wondered if the woman stood where she did to be ready to protect her
turf, in the person of Bob Menechinn.

“Have you met my able assistant,

Doctor

Kathy
Huff?” Bob said, affecting a drawl that made his words seem to linger
in the air after he’d spoken. Smiling with a bonhomie that wrinkled his
bulldog cheeks, he winked. Dr. Huff looked at her feet.

Maybe
Menechinn was proud of his helper’s doctorate. Maybe she was shy. Maybe
he mocked her and she was hurt. Maybe they were lovers. The
undercurrents were lost on Anna. She was too hungry to care.

“What can I do to help?” she asked the kitchen in general.

Adam
peeled and chopped. Ridley cooked. Robin was allowed to make a salad,
but only after begging for the honor. Over five decades of tradition
was squeezed into the small kitchen: jobs were not up for grabs; one
had to be grandfathered in for every task. Realizing the study’s dinner
rituals were as full of social land mines for the uninitiated as the
kitchen of a kosher chef on the eve of Hanukkah, Anna sat down out of
the way and watched.