assignment, she would not be expected to have fun. “Fun” froze at about fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit.
With the front sitting on the island, Jonah couldn’t fly. Everything had to be packed in. A wolf trap, including transmitter and eight feet of kinkless chain, weighed ten pounds. Anna and Robin each carried four. Because of her small frame and lack of backwoods experience, Katherine was given only two; still, her pack weighed in at forty-two pounds, eleven more than was optimum for a woman her size. Bob carried six traps. With the tent and other supplies, his pack weighed seventy-five pounds. He swung it onto his back with a minimum of effort, and Anna was impressed. She was less impressed when it became clear he wasn’t accustomed to backpacking. Ridley had to adjust his buckles and straps. Neither man was comfortable with the process. Anna got the feeling that Ridley didn’t like to be that close to Menechinn and Menechinn didn’t like having his ignorance made public.
BECAUSE OF KATHERINE, they set a slow pace. Freed from the fear she would shame herself by huffing and gasping and throwing herself facedown, crying “I can’t go on” – all of which would have been distinct possibilities had she been trying to keep up with Robin – Anna took pleasure in the simple act of breathing out of doors, moving away from “civilization” and into the backcountry.
Ridley had mapped out five miles of trail west of Lake Siskiwit for the trapline. East and Chippewa both claimed the mapped section of the island as part of their territory. Several pack interactions had been recorded in the vicinity.
Ridley and Jonah had had the rare luck to watch one unfold. The photo sequence Ridley captured remained some of the study’s most compelling footage. For some reason, a female had been drummed out of East pack. Ridley and Jonah watched the lupine drama play out, with all the pathos of
East pack had pursued the female till they cornered her on a finger of land jutting into Siskiwit Bay. Too many to fight, she’d taken to the water. The pack paced her along the shore, twice driving her back in when she tried to reach land. Finally she no longer had the strength to swim and moved to land through the teeth of her former pack mates. They didn’t kill her immediately but dogged her, tearing at her back, neck and flanks as she tried to escape. More than once, Jonah and Ridley believed her dead, but then she would force herself up, repel her attackers and run again. Finally the pack, as if tiring of the game – or as a mob stoning a fallen woman will suddenly need a kill – surrounded and savaged her, then fled as if the law was on their tails.
After two more passes, Jonah and Ridley were sure this time she was dead. They were turning for home when they saw a lone male from East pack return. He nosed and pawed the downed female, and, after a while, she staggered to her feet.
On flights over the following days, they saw two bloody beds. The two wolves not only survived but started the island’s third pack: Chippewa Harbor pack.
Five years later, the winter of 2005, East pack caught that same female away from her Chippewa pack mates and killed her. The wolves remembered. Anna couldn’t help wondering what pack law the female had broken that had a statute of limitations that didn’t run out in half a lifetime.
Watching the photographs click up on Ridley’s computer screen, Anna had found it hard to believe these intelligent and phenomenally complex animals could be hunted down and butchered so that some fool could have the pelt and head for a hearth rug. But, then, human beings hunted down and butchered one another for stranger reasons.
Two miles up the trail, Robin turned the lead position over to Anna. The young biotech was finding it impossible to hike slowly enough not to kill her companions. Bob Menechinn, probably still smarting from having Ridley buckle him into his pack, pointing out he was the tallest and strongest and best able to protect and serve – an argument that basically boiled down to “has a penis” – wanted to go first. Anna stepped back, content to let him do whatever it was he needed to do.
The third time he led them off trail, she suggested he drop back. She added, “And make sure no one falls behind,” to keep the machinery of the team oiled. She then set a pace that would challenge Katherine – they had a lot of miles to cover before the light went south – but, she hoped, would not exhaust her. Katherine was from a sedentary background and carrying a pack too heavy for her. Anna could hear what it was costing her in the push of her breath, yet Katherine never complained. Anna admired her will to endure.
Anna didn’t complain either. Her body would complain enough in a day or so. Her pack weighed fifty-three pounds. She weighed one hundred eighteen. Muscle wasn’t enough to offset the blunt trauma her joints suffered as she lifted her feet and gravity put them down. Hips, ankles and knees were going to ache like crazy. In her thirties, the aching was gone in less than a week; in her early forties, two. Now she could look forward to nearly a month of groaning every time she stood up.
Since the alternative was to not backpack, Anna gave it no more than a passing thought. What she did think about was her nose. Her nose had become increasingly important. By closing one eye, she could see the tip of it, but, up close, out of focus and viewed through eyes rimmed in frosted eyelashes, she couldn’t tell if it was turning white and waxy or not. Frostbite could be gnawing her nose off her face and she wouldn’t know it. With increasing frequency, she slid her hand out of its mitten and touched her nose, trying to see if it was warm or cold, if it had feeling, but her fingers were cold and she could never be sure, not positively sure, that her nose wasn’t frozen. So, in one or five or ten minutes, she’d give in to the compulsion to go through the whole process again. She was driving herself nuts.
THEY HAD PASSED South Lake Desor and reached the halfway point between Windigo and Malone Bay when Anna suggested they set up camp. The short winter day was nearly gone, and Katherine was worn down to the point hypothermia could set in if she didn’t get rest and hot food.
Anna chose a hill where the Greenstone curved gently around what, in summer, would be a tiny meadow waist-deep in wildflowers. In January, it was a flat, white disk of land with white spruce nibbling one edge. Niggardly snowflakes, desiccated by the cold, left a dusting less than half an inch deep. Yellow-and-gray stalks of long-dead grasses poked up through winter’s thin skin like old men’s chin stubble. White spruce crowded the edges of the open space in a curtain of black, color leached from the boughs by the day’s eternal dusk.
Anna’s pack was too heavy to shrug out of without the torque twisting her skeleton from its natural state. A kindly rock waited by the side of the trail as if for that very purpose. Sitting on the edge, she let it take the weight, unbuckled hip belt and chest strap and stepped free of the shoulder straps.
Tempting as it was to let the instrument of her torture topple to the ground, she lowered it as carefully as she could, then stood with a groan. Apparently her grace period had grown significantly shorter since last she’d carried an overloaded pack.
Robin followed suit and leaned her pack against Anna’s. Bob and Katherine stood dumbly on the trail, two spavined nags asleep in the traces, too tired to think or move without direction. That Katherine did so didn’t surprise Anna. She was nearly to that point herself. Only pride and the promise of hot drinks kept her moving. That Bob had reached paralysis wasn’t what she’d expected.
Big game hunters were not known for long, arduous treks carrying heavy loads. There were native peoples for that, and ATVs to carry the carcasses and the conquerors back to the lodge and the wet bar.
She and Robin checked the camp area. As far as they could tell, the little meadow was devoid of hidden evils. Had it possessed a snake pit or hellmouth, Anna would have voted for stopping there anyway. Much as she would have loved feeling superior, she could identify with Katherine all too well. She doubted she had the where-withal to take up the fifty-three pounds again.
They headed back to spark enough life in Bob and Katherine to get camp set up.
“Stop that,” Robin said as they crunched south shoulder to shoulder.
“Stop what?” Not only was Anna not doing anything, she was too tired to think of doing anything.
“Stop touching your nose. You’ve been touching your nose all day. It’s not frozen.”
Sheepishly Anna put her hand back into her mitten.
“You’re obsessing, aren’t you?” Robin asked. The question wasn’t judgmental. She asked it like a physician familiar with the symptoms of poison ivy might ask: “You itch, don’t you?”
“I guess,” Anna admitted. “I keep thinking it might be frostbitten.”
“Mine’s here,” Robin said and tapped her mittened fingertips against her high cheekbones. “I can see them
