“Listen!”
Robin; it was Robin. Panic subsided. The biotech had hold of her shoulder. She was pressed so close Anna felt her breath on her cheek. It was warm. Anna remembered warm. “What-”
“Shh. Listen,” came into her ear on a balmy breeze.
Anna listened.
Beyond the tent walls, the preternatural stillness of a night, frozen into a timeless instant, creaked in her ears. With a mittened paw, she shoved her hat up the better to hear. Silence, thick as an ice floe, pressed against her eardrums.
“There it is again.”
Now Anna heard it. Into this concrete quiet came the pad of a soft-footed animal, an animal heavy enough that the snow squeaked under its weight. Faint and ethereal, the sound moved around the tent, then stopped. Anna’s ears rang with the emptiness and she tried to sit up, but Robin was on Anna’s left arm and the detritus of Anna’s life was tangled around her body.
A thin skritching sound scratched through the black air, clogging Anna’s ears. Whatever it was pawed at the rain fly. “Fox,” Anna whispered.
“No.” Robin’s hands clutched and her voice shook. The woman was terrified.
In her short life, Robin had probably hiked nearly as many miles as Anna had in her significantly longer existence. Robin had camped out in all seasons and all weathers. That this night she suddenly got the megrims chilled Anna as surely as the flatlined mercury. She tried to pat Robin reassuringly but ended up hitting her in the face with a great mittened hand. “Sorry,” she murmured.
Robin caught her hand and held it. The pawing stopped. There was no
They waited.
From the huge paw prints Robin had seen and the great curled beast Anna had glimpsed from the supercub, Anna’s mind formed a vision, and a jolt of primitive fear shot through her as this monster of the id bared teeth the size of daggers and lunged for her throat. Anna shook the thought off. Claustrophobia and cold were getting to her.
“Shh. Shh. There!” Robin hissed.
Slightly above them came short, sharp whuffing breaths of a creature tasting the air the way a bear might, lips pulled back, nostrils flared, scenting danger or prey. Anna had never heard a canine do it; not fox or coyote or her old dog Taco. The whuffing stopped. The silence was deafening.
Anna pulled off her mittens and fumbled through the jetsam that had been extruded from her sleeping bag until her hand closed around her headlamp. With fingers already clumsy from their short sojourn away from her armpits, she pushed the ON button.
Bob and Katherine were as the dead; so worn out, neither the external noises nor the light woke them. Anna switched the lamp off. Instinct warned her not to make a magic lantern of the tent, with the four of them the shadow players.
Sudden and loud, clawing erupted near the tent flap and Anna squawked, not just at the noise but because Robin had shrieked in her ear.
“What is it?” came a frightened voice. Katherine had woken.
“Nothing,” Anna lied. “Probably a squirrel. We may have pitched our tent on top of his dinner cache.”
“Too big to be a squirrel,” Robin murmured, and her grip on Anna’s shoulder became painful. Fear is the most contagious of emotions, and Anna flashed on nights in high school, girls in their pajamas, tales of the escaped lunatic with a hook, the sudden frenzies of fear.
“Would you stop?” she snapped. “We’re not doing
As if to deny the unflattering characterization, the snuffling came into the black of the tent followed by a low growl that brought up Anna’s nape hairs.
“Oh my God,” Katherine whispered. “Wolf.”
A light beam, sudden and harsh, smacked Anna between the eyes, and a bear-sized shadow raked up toward the tent dome. She screamed like a teenager. So did Katherine and Robin.
Bob had regained consciousness.
“Shh,” Robin hissed.
“Kill the light,” Anna said. He didn’t, but he turned its lens down in his lap.
“What-”
“Be quiet,” Katherine said, the first show of rebellion against her professor Anna had noticed. “You’ll scare it away.”
Robin made a soft sound in her throat, a groan or muted cry. Anna tried to read her face in the dim light of Bob’s smothered lamp, but the shadows of hat, scarf and long hair effectively screened her.
Bob was easy to read. His head probably wasn’t any bigger than a normal human being’s – unless one was speaking metaphorically – but his face appeared immense, meaty, slabs of cheek and jowl dwarfing eyes, nose and mouth. On this wide canvas, fear was clearly writ. The big game hunter didn’t like being hunted.
“What’s it after?” he asked. He’d meant to whisper, but the words came out in a squeak.
“Food,” Robin replied succinctly.
Anna couldn’t argue. The chocolate and cheese and other high-fat, high-sugar, high-protein items they’d tucked into bed with them might have been rendered odorless to human noses, but to a wolf they would smell like a deli at lunchtime. For decades, humans and wolves had lived separate lives on the small island. Though ISRO was only forty-two miles long, and trails raked down both sides of her spine and crisscrossed the many lakes and coves, wolf sightings weren’t common. Wolves were a private people, a quiet, watchful people. Undoubtedly the frequency of wolves seeing visitors vastly outnumbered that of visitors seeing wolves.
In recent years, that had begun to change. A wolf had been seen hanging around a campground in Rock Harbor on several occasions. A dead wolf washed up on shore in Robinson Bay, apparently drowned. People reported seeing wolves near the lean-tos in Washington Harbor. The wonder of this was that it hadn’t happened long ago. Wild animals quickly became habituated to humans when food was involved.
“We’re food,” Robin said, as if reading Anna’s thoughts.
Anna could have smacked her. “Don’t be an idiot. When was the last time a wolf ate anybody?” she demanded.
Robin looked slightly cowed, but she said: “Maybe this isn’t a regular wolf.”
The animal, quiet since Bob had come to life, began frenzied digging, claws scraping loud against the fabric of the tent and the frozen earth.
Bob yelped. Robin, still pressed to Anna’s side, screamed. Bob jerked his lamp from his down bag and shined it frantically around the tent walls, a wild, dizzying rush of light. Anna felt as if she was falling into a vortex of hysteria.
“My God,” Katherine cried. She grabbed Bob’s wrist and steadied the light on a section of tent opposite the entrance flap. The fabric was pounding in and out as the animal’s claws raked against it. Big paws. Bigger than a man’s fist, and high up the tent wall. The urgent whine of a carnivore closing on its quarry cut through the rapid clawing, then a growl from deep in the chest; the growl of a dog who does not bark but bites.
“God damn,” Anna breathed. Her heart thudded against her rib cage, skin prickled, adrenaline poured into her till she was strung out with it.
The pawing stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Paws padded away.
Then nothing.
Silence was so complete, Anna realized, not only had the nocturnal intruder ceased its onslaught but the four of them had pretty much stopped breathing. Her hand was cramping. She was hanging on to Robin as tightly as Robin was holding on to her.
