She laughed shakily. “Whoa! That was-”
“Shut up,” Bob cried and began swinging the headlamp, clutched in both hands, in crazy patterns, as if the circle of light was an eye through which he could see outside the tent. Shadows rushed and retreated till the space seemed full not only of human bodies and gear but a host of unquiet spirits.
“Stop it!” Anna ordered.
“It’s gone, Bob,” Katherine said softly.
“Shut up,” Bob snarled.
“It’s gone,” Anna said, forcing her voice to the light and conversational. She found her lamp, turned it on and shined it in Bob’s eyes to get his attention. White showed around the irises, and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his upper lip. His fear was phobic; pure terror. The kind that runs amok. “We’re okay,” Anna said, not sure it was true. She, too, was scared, but she wasn’t sure whether it was of the creature outside or that Bob would begin throwing himself around like a panicked bull in a china shop, where her bones took the place of the porcelain.
“Let’s all settle down,” she said reasonably.
“You fucking settle down,” Bob snarled. “You fucking
“It’s okay, Bob. There’s nothing to be scared-” Katherine was begging, reaching out to touch the back of his hand.
He batted her away and yelled: “Keep your hands off me, you fucking cunt.”
“That’s enough,” Anna ordered sharply. “It’s gone. We’re all right. Now we sleep.” Anger had taken up the space where fear had been.
Bob’s eyes cleared marginally. He was coming back to himself from a hunt where he was the trophy animal, but the bone-deep horror remained. Anna saw it and she snorted; a stiff sniff of air through nostrils pinched with cold. Had she been less tired, less chilled, less freaked out by the bizarre behavior of the animal, she would have been able to stop herself. As it was, she saw his fear, and he saw her contempt for it. They all saw it.
As she lay down and turned off her lamp, she knew that was something a guy like Bob Menechinn would never forgive them for. Lying in the frigid dark, she could feel the others listening. She could smell the fear sweat from Bob.
The animal did not come back. And none of them slept.
9
Morning did not come until eight twenty-seven a.m. By then, Anna was desperate to get out of the sack she shared with groceries and laundry. The tent had become intolerable. If she didn’t slip out through the zippered fly, she knew she’d claw her way out with greater determination than the wolf had tried to claw his way in. With the first bare hint of gray, she was pulling on socks and boots and layers, not much caring who she jostled or kicked in the process. Their combined respirations had rimed the inside of the tent with ice. Anna’s thrashing loosed a tiny avalanche down on her tent mates. She was not sorry.
Quick as Anna was, Robin was quicker. Before Anna’d laced up, the biotech was outside, her mukluks squeaking on the snow as she retraced the path of their visitor. Like a grouchy bear, Anna lumbered from the tent and stood on her hind legs to join her. The light was lousy: dreary, gray-white and gritty; a carbon copy of the day before.
The light would be lousy till it was gone, and lousy the day after that and the week after that, till she got back to the high-country winter in the Rockies or the sweet attempt at winter in Paul’s backyard in Mississippi.
“Think happy little thoughts,” she sang mockingly under her breath. Discipline would have to take the place of optimism till her body temperature was a few degrees above that of the average corpse.
“Oh, goodie!” Anna heard Robin exclaim.
Scat. The woman had found scat. There was only one sample, and it was not particularly impressive in size or texture that Anna could see, but Robin bagged it happily.
“Not much for tracks,” the biotech said as she casually stuck the baggie into her jacket pocket.
They tried the trick of shining their headlamps low and laterally to create a false sun, but Robin and Bob had done a terrific job of stomping around when they’d pitched the tent, and the four of them had continued the stomping with jumping jacks, cavorting to warm up before bed and trips later to answer the call of nature.
If there were wolf prints, they were lost in the crusted mishmash of snow and dead grasses. No prints led in or out of the clearing across the unmarked snow. The animal had probably come into the camp from the trail as they had. Given the choice, wild animals – bears, cougars, foxes, wolves, deer – preferred improved trails just as people did, and for the same reasons.
In the area where the digging had occurred, they found a partial print. Had they not already ruled out foxes in their minds, the print would have. Foxes had tiny catlike feet. The snow and earth had been scored, and the wall of the tent had stress lines running through the fabric where claws had raked it repeatedly.
“Look at that,” Robin said. There was no fear in her this morning; she was all business and curiosity. In this competent woman, Anna had trouble finding the squeaky, shrieky teenager of the previous night. “Look at these marks.” Robin pointed with her lamp. The light was dirty gold on the gray snow.
Anna squatted down and looked where Robin indicated. To one side of the digging were two clear claw marks, probably made by the first and second digits of the animal’s left front paw. The marks were parallel and two inches apart.
“The thing must have been a monster,” Robin said. There was a quality to the biotech’s voice Anna couldn’t place, self-consciousness maybe, like a bad actor pretending to be brave or a brave person trying to empathize with the fear of others. Anna didn’t like it.
“This could just as easily have been made by two passes of a real-sized wolf as one pass by a gigantic wolf,” she said repressively. Remembering the wild-eyed panic in Menechinn’s face the previous night, she scuffed the marks out with the toe of her boot.
“If something’s dangerous, don’t the others have a right to know?” Robin asked.
“No.”
HOT DRINKS AND INSTANT OATMEAL – cold as dirt by the last spoonful – duly consumed, they broke camp. It fell naturally to Anna to take the lead, but before she could set foot on the trail Bob shoved past her. His heavy pack clipped hers and she staggered as her center of gravity shifted. But for Robin’s supporting arm, she would have fallen.
Despite being condemned to watching Menechinn’s butt, after a mile or so on the trail she felt immeasurably better. There was nothing like spending the night in a deep freeze with one’s food while unknown forces contemplated one for its own supper to make a woman appreciate the little things. It was good to be upright and moving. It was good to be hiking downhill instead of up. It was good to be carrying three more meals in her stomach instead of on her back. It was heaven to know she’d be spending the coming night in the cabin at Malone Bay, with a fire in the woodstove; an outhouse with a warmed seat, rather than a snow-covered log, for the less glamorous moments of life.
In an embarrassment of riches, the overcast cleared, and, though they paid for it with a drop in temperature, seeing the sun’s pale, cheerful face and the blue sky lightened everyone’s mood.
Everyone but Bob. Menechinn had returned to his customary jocularity, but there was a razor-edge to his comments: jokes that weren’t jokes and double entendres whose single meanings were hard to pretend missing. Katherine took the brunt of it, and Anna felt sorry for her. She was coming rather to like Katherine. It occurred to her to deflect Menechinn’s venom onto herself to give the researcher a rest, but she decided against it. Katherine didn’t let it roll off her back exactly, but she seemed accustomed to the abuse and handled it better than Anna would have. He made the occasional sideways gibe at Anna, but nothing she couldn’t ignore. Fortunately he left Robin alone.
