Winter Study (7 page)

“They
shouldn’t.” Ridley moved to the piano bench and began pulling on
high-waisted woolen ski pants, snapping the suspenders over his
shoulders.

“If
they do, it could get ugly,” Adam said, and Ridley shot him a look, a
widening of the eyes and downturn of the lips that Anna associated with
social conspiracies, like listening to your best friend lie her way out
of detention.

“Pack wars,” Robin said somberly. Anna figured it out. They were trying to scare the pants off the Homeland Security guy.

Pack
wars were not uncommon, but there was sufficient territory for East,
Middle and Chippewa Harbor packs so they didn’t clash too often. When
they did, it was hit-and-run, not the full-scale slaughter humans had
perfected.

Ridley
took mukluks from the drying rack beside the woodstove and sat down
again to put them on. The anesthetizing influence of a wolf sighting
wearing off, it dawned on the group what he was doing.

As
one, they scrambled for their boots and coats. Cursed with new gear,
Anna was last out the front door. The rest were halfway across the
housing complex. Uplifted by the excitement of watching a pack of wild
wolves devour a kill, she wasn’t bothered by the cutting wind from the
northwest as she duckwalked quickly down the slippery steps in her
ungainly boots and started across the clearing.

Suddenly
she stopped. A whiff, a hint of something freakishly bad, evil and
death and old fish distilled into a toxic perfume, was borne on the
wind. Tilting her head back, she sniffed. It was gone. She smelled
nothing but the clean, vicious perfection of winter.

The
Ojibwa’s windigo was heralded by the stench of rotting corpses, the
rotten stink of a cannibal’s breath, and the distillation of
hopelessness. The cannibal spirit came on the wind from the northwest.

For
someone who had eschewed the supernatural not ten minutes before, Anna
felt a distinctly unnatural chill along the back of her stomach and up
both sides of her spine.

She
waited and watched the black of the woods in the direction from which
the wind blew. The line of shadows that marked the trees hid anything
that might have been there.

4

Despite
the pack’s dramatic arrival, the wolves settled down in lupine
domesticity around the unexpected gift of the moose carcass. Anna could
have happily burned her calories just keeping warm and watching them,
but the second day of the pack’s visit Ridley put the team back to
work. Robin had gone cross-country with her rucksack and plastic
baggies to seek out ever-more-marvelous bits of frozen excretions and
effluvia. Adam was building a snowmobile shed. As far as Anna was
concerned, he had the worst of the work. Construction at seven above
zero struck her as a miserable way to make a living, but he’d acted as
if he was looking forward to it.

She
landed the plum job. Jonah was taking her up in the cub to see if they
could find Chippewa Harbor pack. Flights in the supercub were jealously
guarded. From the scuttlebutt, Anna knew there’d been guests of the
study who’d never managed an invite to fly. She doubted she’d have been
so lucky had Ridley not had so many wolves close to home to play with.

Four
hours immobile in a two-seat fabric airplane with a heater that did not
deserve the name was a recipe for misery, if not frostbite, and Anna
had not come prepared. In borrowed knee-high, insulated boots that
looked more like robot prosthetics than shoes — Ridley’s size nines —
and more layers than a winter onion, she watched uselessly as Jonah
walked around the airplane checking for damage, standard operation for
preflight. At first, to be companionable, she’d attempted to follow
him, but in the oversized boots she moved like an arctic clown on
Quaaludes. The characterization was completed, she suspected, by a
bright red nose.

On
the far side of the harbor, beyond the little airplane, wolves lounged
around the moose carcass like fat house dogs around a hearth. “Won’t we
scare them off?” she asked.

“There’s
not been a wolf on this island in three generations — that’s in dog
years; ten years old is an old wolf — that hasn’t had an airplane
buzzing around from the time he was a pup,” Jonah said and began
unwrapping an orange, oil-stained down comforter he kept around his
lady’s nose when she was earthbound so her engine wouldn’t turn into a
block of ice. “The sound doesn’t bother them. Most don’t even look up.
I think they live the simple life: food/no food, threat/no threat,
sex/no sex. In the no food, no threat, no sex category, the cub and I
aren’t worth a passing glance.

“Get the tie-down, if you will.”

Anna
clowned over to where the wing was tethered to the ice and was amused
momentarily by the image of the supercub taking off with the frozen
harbor dangling cartoonlike from the tie-down lines beneath the wings.
Loath to remove her gloves, she had barely loosed the knot by the time
Jonah had untied his side and come around. Because she’d learned to do
it on ISRO with boat lines, she carefully laid the rope in a coil.

The
cub had clamshell doors, a hexagon cut laterally and opening up and
down. Jonah let the lower part of the door down and held the upper
against the high wing. “Hop in. I fly from the rear seat.”

Hopping
was not an option. Anna clambered into the front seat and manually
arranged her great booted extremities so they wouldn’t interfere with
Jonah’s operation of the ailerons, then lay there helplessly gazing at
nothing. The supercub was a tail dragger and, on the ground, sat nose
high, the windscreen pointing at pale gray sky.

The
plane jounced. Jonah had gotten in. A prisoner of survival gear,
turning around to look was in the same category as hopping. “Here,”
Jonah said, and a headset was thrust over her right shoulder. “You know
how to use one of these things?”

“I
do.” High-tech communications in an old supercub struck an odd note. It
seemed as if the small-plane industry had not kept pace with
electronics. But, then, nothing had kept pace with electronics. Anna
put on the earphones, adjusted the mike and then continued staring at a
blank sky while Jonah went through his checklist.

The
engine fired smoothly and the plane began to taxi, skis sliding over
the ice. The nose blocking the view forward, Anna looked out the side
window at the pack. Ravens inked the snow in ever-changing
kaleidoscopes of black and white. They ranted and teased, flying at the
wolves’ heads, then stopping in a sudden outthrust of wings inches out
of reach of the wolves’ jaws. Suddenly the radio-collared female
whipped out of feigned sleep, and where there’d been a bird there was
only a few feathers and new drops of blood, bright and jewel-like, on
the snow. Neither wolves nor ravens turned a head as the supercub
roared by.

The
engine revved up to a determined bellow and the cub picked up speed.
The tail lifted off the lake and the horizon came down; Beaver Island
was approaching with considerable speed, and Anna unconsciously braced
herself for collision. Then they were airborne, banking around Beaver
and flying down Washington Harbor. Forgetting the mike was
voice-activated, Anna laughed aloud with the gust of pure expanding
freedom.

“I feel it every time,” Jonah said.

The
NPS was Anna’s favorite bureaucracy, but a bureaucracy all the same,
and it had endless safety regulations. Aviation safety experts had come
up with the mind-boggling discovery that many crashes were caused by
the airplane colliding with the ground and passed rules about how low
and slow was acceptable. Jonah Schumann exhibited a fine indifference
to the rules. Anna could almost feel the treetops tickling the
airplane’s canvas belly.

She loved it. Except for the cold and the racket, it was like flying in dreams.

“East pack has been hanging around Mott Island, but we haven’t found Chippewa Harbor pack yet,” Jonah said in her ears.

Isle
Royale was forty-two miles long and no more than twelve across at its
widest point. It was hard to believe a group of seven or eight big
animals could stay out of sight from air surveillance, but they did.
Wolves traveled long distances, and slept a lot during the day. It
wasn’t unusual to “lose” a pack for a week or more.

“We’ll
head up toward Malone Bay, see if we can scare anything up,” he said.
Malone Bay was about halfway between Windigo at the west end of the
island and Rock Harbor at the east. Malone Bay was one of the
backcountry outposts; the ranger was inevitably dubbed the “Malone
Ranger” because of the isolation.

Anna
settled into the joy of flight, of being up where there was air to
breathe instead of sequestered in a smoky bunkhouse, of seeing the
island in a glory of white and black.

The
bed of Lake Superior had been gouged out by glaciers. Isle Royale, made
of tougher material, was scored and slashed but remained above water.
From the air, the colossal shredding was evident; ridges ran the length
of the island, and smaller islands, long and thin as scratches, stood
offshore separated from the main island by deep channels. Hikers
unfamiliar with the topography frequently underestimated the difficulty
of traveling through country boned with sharp stone ridges and
crosshatched with swampy valleys.

As they flew toward Malone Bay, Anna caught glimpses of the Greenstone Trail, a ribbon of white weaving in and out of the trees.

“This
goes any lower or we get any wind, we’ll have to head back,” came
Jonah’s voice in Anna’s ears. She looked from the trail to the sky. The
cloud ceiling, high and solid looking in Windigo, was lower, the clouds
darker. Situated in a cold basin of water, the island’s microclimates
were pronounced and unpredictable.

Anna didn’t want to go back; like Peter Pan, she wanted to fly to the first star to the right, then straight on till morning.

An
expanse of white unfurled inland from Lake Superior between the
airplane and the cloud mass. “Siskiwit Lake?” she asked. Siskiwit was
the largest lake on Isle Royale.

“Siskiwit,”
Jonah confirmed. “Hey!” He banked the cub so suddenly that Anna lurched
to one side and banged her elbow on the Plexiglas window.

On
the clear expanse of ice, seven black figures made a fan-shaped pattern
like the wake of a boat behind a larger dot. A pack of wolves had
chased a moose out of the trees and onto the open area of the lake, an
old bull by the look of it. Jonah closed the distance quickly and flew
low and to the side so Anna could get pictures.

“Chippewa
pack, I think. I guess it could be East. Holy moly, look at the blood!
You’d have thought the ticks would have drunk so much there’d be hardly
enough left to fill a thermos,” Jonah said with more glee than Anna
thought seemly. “Looks like what you’d get if you crossed Jackson
Pollock with Bloody Mary.”

Channeling
the Pillsbury Doughboy, she lifted the camera and pushed her body
closer to the window as the plane banked and circled for another pass.
The wolves had been on the moose for a while, harrying it in hopes it
would die of a thousand cuts or exhaustion. Reading the tracks, Anna
could see how the battle had unfolded: the line of hoofprints from the
northern shore of the lake to dead center; behind, the single-track
wolf paw prints spread out among the trees — the pack pushing the moose
to open country. Once on the lake, the wolves’ tracks fell into close
formation behind the hoofprints, keeping back from the sharp hooves and
bone-breaking antlers.