Winter Study

“It makes no sense. I am so sorry. You could have died.”

“Nah,” Anna said. “Bob’s making it all up. We formed a polar bear club and he chickened out at the last minute.”

“Don’t joke,” Robin pleaded. “You really could have died.”

Robin was obsessing and Anna didn’t know how to stop her. As a young woman leading her first backcountry trips, Anna had felt the same way a few times when people in her care, following her instructions, were endangered. She hoped she hadn’t carried on as much as Robin was. The biotech was three pews short of banging her heart with her fist and crying, “Mea culpa, mea culpa.”

“Lots of things don’t make sense,” Anna said reasonably.

“It couldn’t have broken.” Robin shook her head, her hair swinging in the silvery light from the window over the small dining table. The sun had creaked out, making an appearance between fronts. They had been without showers for days, during most of which they wore hats and hoods crammed on their heads, yet Robin’s hair was shining, silken.

“Go figure,” Anna said aloud. She didn’t bother to explain she was remarking on the hair. “Go figure” was one of those contentless statements that mean whatever the listener chooses to believe they mean.

During Bob’s regaling, Robin’s breast-beating and Anna’s slurping of hot drinks, Katherine had been unusually quiet. She was retiring by nature, but since Anna had been dried, warmed and declared officially among the living Katherine had not uttered a word. She’d not congratulated Bob on his bravery or marveled at his Samson-like strength; she’d not asked Anna what it was like to die or live. Like the Cheshire cat, she had slowly disappeared, till all that remained was the reflection of the window’s light on the rim of her spectacles. Wordlessly, making eye contact with no one, she’d drifted from the stool by the door to the straight-backed kitchen chair tucked next to the water heater to a footlocker jammed into the space between the foot of the bunk beds and the wall that was so narrow the locker had to be pulled out to be opened. On this low bench, Katherine had drawn her back to the wall and her feet up on the locker, a folded bit of woman tucked in a dark corner.

“What are you hiding from, Kathy?” Bob said in a voice loud enough that Anna watched the liquid in her mug shiver as the aftershocks struck its ceramic shores.

Katherine raised her head, her eyes invisible behind her glasses. “Just trying to stay out of the way,” she said.

“You’re not in the way,” Robin reassured her. In such cramped quarters, they all were in the way all the time.

“Bob once carried me,” Katherine blurted out. “He carried me up five flights of stairs.” Her voice had an edge, as if she was making a point.

“Hey, careful, my head will get too big,” Bob said with the first show of humility Anna’d seen.

“I don’t really remember it,” Katherine went on. “I was out cold.”

Bob laughed and Katherine shrank back into her self-made cave.

Anna’s thoughts sank to the lake bottom, how deep the silence had been, how like crystal the water, how the sand had seemed to go forever, never disappearing in the distance but merging with it, the two becoming one, how she had sensed she would be the lake when she breathed it, how she had come to want to breathe it, not because she wanted to die, or because she had to, but because she knew she teetered on the brink of something vast and a part of her was excited to step off that brink and experience the vastness.

ARRAYED IN THE FRILLY APRON, Bob started dinner. Onions frying in butter smelled of home and safety and warmth, but for once Anna wasn’t hungry. Her fingers loosened around the mug she held, but it didn’t fall into her lap, spilling the dregs of her drink. Other hands lifted it from her. Robin. Anna hadn’t the energy to open her eyes, but she could smell the biotech. Like onions and butter, Robin smelled of life and rich earth, of young plants pushing up after the rain, meadow grass when it’s crushed underfoot.

Soft hands touched her face, brushed the lank hair from her forehead. Gray, Anna remembered: red and gray, salt and cinnamon. Robin stroked her cheek and Anna felt the silky whisk of her ancient orange tiger cat Piedmont’s tail, followed by the rasp of his tongue, a tongue designed to abrade flesh from bone. Robin, she reminded herself, calluses, hardworking hands.

“I am so sorry,” Robin whispered. A kiss or a tear settled on Anna’s cheekbone.

“De nada.” Anna’s lips moved, but if they made a sound she was asleep before she heard it.

ANNA SHOULD HAVE slept like the dead – or the very nearly dead – but she was troubled by dreams and the revenge of muscles she’d abused. Her legs flinched and quivered and sent mixed messages to her brain, unable to decide whether they were hurting or bored. She wasn’t asleep when the beeping started.

Either Robin shared Anna’s insomnia or was a light sleeper. She wriggled out of her sleeping bag and went to the radio receiver on the table.

“Which one?” Robin whispered.

“Between Intermediate and Richie, about a quarter of a mile from where you went in.” She clicked on her headlamp. Using its light, she began pumping the Coleman lantern. Colemans worked. They’d worked forever, lighting places electricity would not. But they were noisy machines, clanking in the preparation and hissing like a thousand angry snakes when lit. Katherine and Bob woke up.

“What is it?” Katherine asked, her voice fogged with sleep.

“We’ve trapped a wolf,” Robin told her. She was already pulling on her ski pants.

Anna swung her legs, bag and all, over the edge of the bottom bunk and sat up.

“You’re not going,” Robin said.

“I’m going,” Anna replied. She stood up and fell down. “I’m not going,” she admitted from the floor. “You’re not going alone,” she insisted.

They both looked at Bob. He stared back at them. The Coleman was not a cosmetic light, and he looked pasty and scared. “I’m not Superman,” he said in a tone just short of surly. “I’ve already saved one of you today. Leave the fucking wolf in the trap till morning.”

“It could die,” Robin said and sat in the straight-backed kitchen chair to put on her mukluks.

“I’ll go.” This was from the top bunk. Anna, who had stayed on the floor rather than risk the humiliation of collapsing again, looked up at the researcher. The angle was bizarre; she was looking through Katherine’s stocking feet up between her knees where they bent over the edge of the mattress to a head small with distance. Katherine was as frightened as Bob, and probably nearly as tired, but she meant to go.

Courage and bravado, Anna thought. It sounded like a TV cop duo. Anna sucked it up and tried again to rise. She made it to hands and knees, but the room spun, and she coughed till her chest ached with the spasms.

“Get in bed,” Robin said. She picked up a radio from the table and called Ridley. He radioed back immediately. Robin told him about the motion detector going off.

“If Anna’s not up to it, take Bob with you,” Ridley said.

Bob moved back, legs still in his sleeping bag, and leaned against the wall, folding his arms over his chest.

“It’s a fool’s errand,” he said.

“Bob’s done in,” Robin said into the mike.

There was a long moment of crackling silence, then Ridley said:

“I think there’s an old pair of skis in the cabin. You go, take the jab stick. If we’ve got a wolf, just put him out and set him free. He should wake up and get moving before he freezes to death. You can reset the trap tomorrow. Keep me posted.”

The jab stick was what it sounded like, a long stick with a syringe on the end, loaded with ketamine and xylazine. A trapped wolf was jabbed with it. In five minutes or so, the animal would go down long enough for the study team to do their work.

The skis and poles were stowed in the rafters. Robin had them down in a minute and was prying off the bindings with a butter knife. “No boots,” she said when Anna asked. She dug in her backpack and pulled out a roll of silver duct tape. “Voila!” She began taping the toes of her mukluks to the skis.

“Radio and flashlight,” Anna reminded her as she jerked open the cabin door, skis with the unfilled boots over her shoulder.