“There’s where we’re going,” she said as they packed up and pointed to a hump of land beyond which lay the triangular isthmus that marked where the next foothold trap was to be laid. Intermediate had not been blown clear of snow and the walking was easier. The ice was also considerably thinner than Siskiwit. Ice was often untrustworthy near shoreline and Intermediate was all shoreline.
Long habit of tracking kept Anna’s eyes on the ground as they worked their way across the western third of the lake. Fresh snow created a clean palette for the day’s news, but creatures were not doing a great deal of stirring. Gusting winds, flurries of snow and the promise of more to come kept them snug in nests and burrows. Anna saw the scratching of small birds and a litter of seed coverings from a cache that had been found or recovered by a squirrel. On a slope running down to the lake from a low rise, she noticed what looked to be the tracks of saucer sleds, the kind used by little kids. It took her a minute to refocus from the image of tots in pointed hoods. Then she laughed. “Otters,” she told Bob. “They like to slide in the snow. Look where they’ve run up the hill just for the fun of sliding down again.”
“In winter?” he asked.
“In winter,” she assured him. “The park heals in the winter, when people aren’t here.” She figured she might as well get in a plug for keeping ISRO closed from October to May.
Bob grunted.
The isthmus, comprised of volcanic rock surrounded in glacial rubble, rose from the ice in ragged chunks of stone dusted with white. Desperate earth-starved trees poked skeletal branches through the snow cover, black arthritic fingers reaching for a sky that was the same color as the grave they sank their roots in. Wind bared the rock in places, exposing the tops of granite-colored boulders, till the land resembled a boneyard for formless beasts that had come there to die. Out from the steep shore, ice piled up, six-inch slabs where the water of the lake had risen and receded, refreezing each time.
Using hands and feet, Anna scrambled toward what passed for dry land. Despite the lightened pack, it was hard to keep her balance. A moose had managed it; there were a tangle of hoofprints half filled in with snow. Anna found her center of gravity and a flat place to stand, then turned and watched Bob making his way over the broken ice field. “Take it slow,” she warned.
“Umph.”
“The next trap we set will be one of yours,” she promised as he tottered and fell to one knee.
“God damn!”
He stayed where he was, his backpack rounding up like the hump of a camel kneeling to let a rider mount.
“You okay?”
“My knee,” he huffed, but he got himself upright and crossed the rest of the broken ice without incident.
“You’re limping,” she accused. It was not good to let oneself get injured in the wilderness in the winter.
“It’s a bad knee,” he said. “How many more traps do we have to set?”
Bob sounded like a little boy who couldn’t add and was whining about it. So much for Dr. Jekyll.
“A couple more.” Anna started up through the rocks. Abruptly she stopped. In the lee of one of the boulders, half buried in the deeper tracks of the moose, was the print of a wolf’s paw.
Maybe.
With the snow drifted in, it was hard to tell, but it was larger than fox and smaller than moose. In spring, she might have assumed it was a calf. Not in January.
“We’re in the right neighborhood,” she said. Bob limped up and looked at the tracks. “The one on the left,” she said. “Wolf, I bet.”
“Big.” A trace of the fear she’d seen and heard the night they’d been called upon by the wild was in his voice.
The print was beyond big; it was monstrous. “Hard to tell,” Anna said, images of Bob, wild-eyed, lamp beam striping the tent walls, transposing over him, charging off through the falling snow, arms waving wildly, foot traps clattering. “Once the wind and snow and drift start, animal tracks can be made to look like almost anything.”
“It’s crazy to be out here without a rifle,” Bob said. He looked around like a virgin in a haunted house. What good humor survived the knee hitting the ice was gone from his face. Anna wished she had an apron or a spatula or some other homey kitchen utensil with which to comfort him. “What are you making us for supper?” she asked to keep his mind busy, then ignored him while he answered.
There hadn’t been any wolf tracks on the lake. She looked at the boulder head high to her left. A furrow cut the snow where something had slid or fallen. The wolf had come down off the rock, possibly following the moose. There was just the single print; it had been traveling alone. The animal that had come to their tent had traveled alone.
“Okay,” Anna said. “Let’s follow our boy here.”
“Are you nuts?” Bob swallowed his fear, but it soured him. “We’re losing the light. Let’s head back,” he said peremptorily.
“No we’re not. It’s one o’clock, the heat of the day.” She could have been more politic, but her mind was taken up with tracking. Moose prints were easy, dimples in the snow eight to ten inches across in two parallel lines. Paw prints were harder, especially without good light. Anna blinked at the unyielding sky, weeping snow static on a gray background. Rocks crowded in, sucking up what little illumination leaked through from a sun gone AWOL.
“It’s like living in an old black-and-white TV with bad reception,” she said. “I can’t see a damn thing.”
“Time to start back. We’re losing the light,” Bob insisted.
“No we’re not.” Anna found another partial print. The wolf was following the moose or they had used the same route within hours of one another.
“My knee,” Bob said. “It’s an old injury. I think I threw it out back there on the ice.”
Anna found another track. A good one this time, the edges blurred with snow and drift but the clear mark of the toe pads. “Whoa! Take a look at this.” She squatted, her back soldier straight to keep her center of balance over her heels.
Bob was following so close he bumped her pack and she pitched forward. “Watch it!” she said. “Look.” She’d managed to catch herself without damaging the print. It was immense, huge, beautiful, the track of a magnificent animal. “God, I wish we’d brought the camera.”
“We should go back. We need to report this to Ridley – the sooner, the better.”
“Radio him,” Anna said.
“I got to take a leak,” Bob said suddenly.
“Yeah, yeah. Go ahead.” Without rising, Anna squinted down the sloping bank. They had reached the far side of the finger of land in a matter of steps. The isthmus wasn’t more than thirty feet across. Tracks of wolf and moose, muted and strange with snow and wind, led across the narrow arm of the lake toward the far shore, crossing where Robin had said to set the next trap.
“Perfect.” Anna managed to stand without grabbing onto anything.
From her left came moose-sized crashing through what little shrubbery the place offered: Bob dumping his pack. The guy might be a while. Keeping to one side of the faint trail, Anna picked her way down the gentle slope and over the ridged ice where lake met land. Wolf and moose, traveling together or in tandem, the moose tracks close together as if meandering without concern, the wolf’s farther apart as if loping after prey.
Ten or eleven yards out – distance was hard to estimate in poor light and a monochromatic world – the tracks vanished as if wolf and moose had been snatched off the surface of the lake by a great carnivorous bird.
“Not possible,” she whispered and pulled her focus back to what was directly in front of her. “Hah!” The impossible had not occurred. The snow covering the ice had formed a slight depression. The tracks led into this irregular bowl, effectively vanishing from a distance.
Before coming to Winter Study, Anna had not given ice much thought. She’d seen pictures of arctic floes heaped into mountains, crinkled into badlands and shattered over a white-and-blue no-man’s-land. Yet in her mind it remained flat, evened out by God’s Zamboni.
On ISRO, she’d realized it was a living thing: changing, moody, struggling, resting, singing. Surrounding this shallow crater, water had oozed up through a circular crack and refrozen, creating a scar, a rugged ridge four and five inches high.
Moose and wolf tracks crossed in the center of the circle, where it looked as if they’d skirmished. “Hey, Bob, you’re missing this,” Anna called back as she hopped over the ridge.
She landed, and a rifle shot cracked through the silence that had wrapped them since leaving the cabin. Bob
