balaclava and mittens. She had no intention of being out that long.
The light had dimmed from its paltry glory. A tidal wave of gray was rolling toward shore from the northwest. Above it was the clear silver-blue sky, but that was going to change. Wind was driving the clouds; they would have snow.
“Adam!” Jonah yelled.
Anna walked toward the outhouse. Bob met her carrying an armload of wood for the stove. “Have you seen Adam and Robin?” she demanded.
“He’s old enough to be her father,” he said.
Anna gave him a hard look. “So are you. Have you seen them?”
Before he could answer, the two missing persons emerged from behind the cabin. They had the excited air of lovers, sharing secret trysts. Or, more apt, a ragman and tinker, luring the lovely farm girl to sin and degradation. Adam’s affectation of a parka and ski pants worn and stained and patched with duct tape in half a dozen places leant his otherwise-honest-looking self a disreputable air.
“God dammit, Adam,” Jonah groused. “I’m taking off as soon as I get her fired up. Either you’re buckled in or you’re staying here.” The pilot strode off toward the lake and his lady. Adam started after him.
“Your pack,” Anna called. She reached inside the cabin door and snatched up the maintenance man’s day pack. “Jesus!” she exclaimed as the weight hit her sore shoulders. “What have you got in here anyway?”
“Give that to me,” he demanded harshly.
Wordlessly, Anna handed it over.
“Books,” he said and smiled sheepishly. “We’ll make another run with goodies if we can,” he said. “Hang in there.”
With those reassuring words, he started down the slight grade. The supercub’s engine purred to life, and he broke into a run, his long legs eating up the distance. Feeling abandoned in an arctic wilderness, Anna watched till he climbed through the clamshell doors.
Adam was up to something. Maybe that something was a twenty-four-year-old biotech. Whatever it was, it bore watching.
10
Despite the tight quarters and the snapping and snarling of animals and humans over the past twenty-four hours, once Adam and Jonah were gone Anna, Katherine, Robin and even Bob began to enjoy one another’s company. A night of shared danger – or perceived danger – a hard hike well done, and the reward of heat and food at the end, bonded them as nights in a bunkhouse could never do.
Adding to the general sense of well-being was what Anna’s District Ranger in Mesa Verde had liked to call the idiot’s delight aspect of camping: after hitting oneself over the head with a two-by-four, it felt so good to stop.
Bob cooked. The big bearish man put on an apron left by a summer seasonal with a taste for frills and bows. Ruffled pinafore straps over his thick shoulders, he began cutting the onions Jonah had brought. His size dwarfed the two-burner stove, his hands made the knife look like a toy and the sash of the apron barely reached around him, but he looked more at ease than Anna had ever seen him. It was as if in a kitchen – even such a kitchen as the backcountry cabin afforded – he felt completely in control, full of confidence, the genuine kind that allows a man generosity of spirit because he needn’t constantly put others down or puff himself up to guarantee his place in the pecking order.
As he changed, Katherine changed. She let down her guard. If Bob’s armor was arrogance, Katherine’s was meekness. Without it hiding her like a translucent burka, she shined. Not a lot, not a shooting star, but she exhibited a sense of humor with a black streak Anna enjoyed. Almost, almost, if she squinted and tilted her head to one side, Anna could see what brought graduate student and professor into a relationship. There was no doubt in her mind that they were in a relationship – or had been – and it was more than merely academics.
By the time they turned out the hurricane lantern to sleep – Anna on the top bunk, Katherine on the bottom, Robin and Bob on the floor – Anna was feeling downright warm and fuzzy.
Maintained by coffee and a breakfast that didn’t ice up on the spoon, the camaraderie survived the morning.
Carrying four traps – forty pounds – Anna felt strong and ready as she shouldered her pack after breakfast. Bob offered to carry Katherine’s traps for her, but apparently Katherine felt the joy of not being crippled from the day before as well and insisted on taking her share.
The storm Jonah and the supercub fled the previous afternoon squatted on Malone Bay, settling slate-colored skirts in the hollows and down the hillsides. Three inches of snow had fallen during the night, and more whirled on a scouring wind that erased the track of the cub’s skis across the harbor ice and the footprints of the Winter Study team. In the isolated places of the world, nature still retained the power to erase human lives as easily as she did the prints of their shoes. The feeling gave Anna hope that mankind wouldn’t sound the earth’s death knell quite yet, that Mother Nature wouldn’t go quietly and she would take as many of the enemy with her as she could.
Ice on Siskiwit Lake was eight to nine inches thick and blown clear of snow in many places. Wind from the northwest scudded over the surface of the lake with razor-blade cold. The snow had stopped, but the clouds looked heavy with more. A renegade flurry of fat flakes leaped and soared on the gusts of wind, in no hurry to reach the earth. These were not the mean-spirited snowflakes, fine as beach sand in the teeth, that scathed the east end of the island but the lacy flakes that adorned Christmas cards. Their playful beauty made the cold seem less personal. Less deadly. It was a comforting illusion.
Where the wind cleared it, the ice was slick and black. Anna could see bubbles and cracks that ran like zigzagging white cliffs beneath the surface.
“Leave your nose alone,” Robin said.
“What about the cracks?” Anna asked, slipping her hand back in its mitten. She thought she’d gotten past the nose thing.
“There are always cracks,” Robin said. “It usually doesn’t mean anything. Ice is in flux, expanding and contracting. The cracks are stress fractures.”
Halfway to Ryan Island, famous for being the biggest island in the biggest lake on the biggest island in the biggest lake in the world but still only a froth of evergreens and rocks, they came to the remains of the moose kill that Jonah and Anna had watched from the air several days before. The carcass had been picked clean. What scraps of meat still clung to the ripped hide were being worked on by two ravens. They eyed the human interlopers critically, then, unimpressed, turned back to their work.
The skeleton had been gnawed. One femur and both front leg bones were gone entirely. Skull and antlers had been dragged away from the body and cleaned of meat. Anna two-stepped over to take a closer look. Robin slid gracefully up beside her.
“Hard winter for everybody. Lookie.” The biotech pointed, her mittened hand bright and indicative like a Lilliputian tetrahedron indicating wind direction. “The antlers have been nibbled. There’s little nutritional value in an antler. Eating it is the animal world’s equivalent of boiling shoe leather for supper. Or eating fried pork rinds.”
Bob and Katherine caught up with them. Katherine’s oversized glasses, perennially steamed, gave her a blind and helpless aspect, but she was a natural on the ice. Her shuffling skate was a match for Robin’s. Bob had more trouble. “Pig on roller skates” came to mind, but, still pleasantly full of the breakfast he’d cooked, Anna said nothing.
“Are we going to set traps here?” he asked, looking around as if another area of ice would be different, better, than the one on which they stood.
“Not here,” Robin said, and her mouth crimped in a tight line.
Anna didn’t so much read her thoughts as share them. Bob knew nothing about trapping, or about wolves. He knew nothing about Isle Royale. Yet he would decide if the study would continue. Only FEMA had proven more inept and corrupt than Homeland Security.
“George W. Bush is the Antichrist,” Anna said, apparently apropos of nothing. Leaving her companions to think she suffered from political Tourette’s syndrome, she shuffled off.
