“Got them.”
The door slammed shut. Life had gone out of the cabin. Anna and Katherine and Bob wavered in the hissing light of the Coleman, ghosts left behind in an empty house.
“This study should be shut down,” Bob announced. “Border security for sure, but it’s run without any attention to the safety of the scientists. If they haven’t figured it out in fifty years, they’re not going to. Wolves eat moose; moose eat grass – how hard is that?”
“Moose don’t eat grass,” Anna said. “Moose eat trees.”
“New DNA,” Katherine said. “It might be a big deal, Bob.” This was the second time Katherine had stood up for herself. Anna liked it. Bob didn’t.
“They can’t shut the study down now,” Anna interjected to deflect whatever barb Menechinn was going to throw at his assistant. “New information. Maybe a hybrid.”
Bob dropped that line of conversation and launched into a lecture about how personal safety was number one with professional big game hunters. Anna didn’t hear it; she was listening for the radio.
She didn’t have long to wait. Robin radioed Ridley. Anna turned the volume up.
“I’m here,” the biotech said. She’d covered the miles in a startlingly brief time and didn’t even sound out of breath. Anna remembered she’d spent most of her life on skis, racing and shooting. Anna wished she had a rifle with her tonight.
“What have you got?” Ridley asked.
“Nothing.” Now she sounded breathless. “The trap and line have been torn all to hell. Whatever was in the foothold ripped free. The metal is bent and there’s blood everywhere.”
“Get out of there,” Anna whispered at the same moment Ridley said: “Get out of there.”
The radio went silent.
14
Bob talked. Anna listened for the radio. Katherine sat lost in thoughts Anna could only guess at. More than twice the time it had taken her to ski to the trap site elapsed. Robin did not return. Anna called on the radio and got no answer. The second time she radioed, the biotech’s voice came back. Robin was almost to the cabin. She did not say what had kept her.
Anna didn’t ask. The night was clear and full of stars. Robin was an excellent cross-country skier. Had it been Anna, she might have taken time to be free of others and in her natural element. Maybe Robin had done the same.
RIDLEY RECALLED THEM to Windigo. Robin skied out at first light and sprang the traps.
The next front had yet to arrive; the sky was clear and there was no wind. No one was sorry to be leaving Malone Bay. The meager comforts of the bunkhouse were palatial compared to the tiny cabin.
Anna had lost her mittens, her pack was ruined, the straps slashed and her clothing was still wet. Robin had lost one of her jab sticks and Katherine couldn’t find her scarf. Other than that, they were in one piece.
An hour after sunup, the warm buzz of the supercub rolled over the tin roof and they started down to the bay. Anna flew out first. She was still coughing and there was not a part of her that didn’t hurt, but she had walked to the airplane without falling over. She took that as a good sign.
ANNA’S TOUCHING NOSTALGIA for the bunkhouse vanished as soon as she opened the door and the reek of death slapped into her senses. The wolf had thawed.
By one o’clock, the team was reassembled, and Ridley declared the animal was ready for the necropsy.
“I’m going to miss this old boy,” Jonah said as the wolf was transported from the kitchen to the carpenter’s shop. “He was just beginning to smell good enough to drown out the smell of Ridley’s feet.” The pilot had to shout. The front had arrived with a vengeance. Snow was in a frenzy; naked branches of the trees creaked and whistled above them.
They carried the carcass on a tarp held at four corners by Ridley, Jonah, Katherine and Anna to the carpenter’s shop, a twenty-by-fifteen-foot building behind the trail crew’s bunkhouse. Designed for seasonal summer use, in January it was as cold as a deep freeze and used as such. Bones and bags of scat and urine, a half-eaten head of a young moose, the older moose head, with its windigo antlers and other delicacies, were wrapped in plastic and piled on the tool bench next to the wall.
A metal folding table, the kind used in church halls for potluck suppers, was in the middle of the room, samples from Robin’s last expedition piled on one end. The wolf was placed on the table and the five of them gathered around. They looked like a band of homeless people, worshipping a long-awaited meal. At Ridley’s suggestion, they’d all put on old clothes; at the suggestion of an icy Mother Nature, they’d donned many layers.
Ridley opened the wolf’s jaws. “They must have a good dental plan,” Anna said, startled by the clean, white, perfect teeth.
“Wolves’ mouths are amazingly clean,” Ridley said. “If a tooth gets broken, you’ll see some brown at the edges; otherwise, they’re like this guy’s.” He pinched the animal’s tongue between thumb and forefinger and pulled it out to do a sweep of the throat. Short of a giraffe’s, the wolf had the longest tongue Anna’d ever seen, cartoon long. Teeth, tongue and jaws: beautifully designed equipment for the work of staying alive.
“Let’s open him up,” Ridley said.
Anna was expecting a scalpel, but he pulled a steel knife with a six-inch blade and heavy hilt from one of his torn pockets. He smiled at Anna. “Vollwerth and Company, sausage makers over in Hancock. German made.”
Jonah and Anna rolled the wolf onto its back and held it steady while Ridley slit the skin from throat to anus, then began to peel back the hide.
“You can see bruising or wounds better on the underside of the skin,” he said. “They show up as dark red blotches or punctures.” He stood back and Robin photographed the denuded animal.
With its hide partly peeled away and the sinews and ribs exposed, it bore an uncanny resemblance to a werewolf in transition from man to animal. A scene from
“See there?” Ridley pointed with the business end of the knife. “You can see where a rib has been broken and healed. That’s fairly common. Moose will fling them against rocks, bash them against trees, anything to get them off.”
Robin moved around the table and took several pictures of the rib. No bruising was apparent. “No defensive wounds,” Anna said. She’d thought that once the hide was off, there would be evidence of damage incurred prior to the killing bite.
“Maybe our wog is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of wolves,” Adam said and laughed, but none of the rest of them did. Bob snorted to indicate he had not been given the creeps, but Anna noticed he glanced out the shop’s window as if concerned some inhuman force might hear his mockery and take against him.
“Governor Wolf,” Jonah said.
“Subcutaneous fat?” Katherine asked.
“Not enough to collect.” Ridley adjusted the shop light over the table, a light better suited to interrogating suspects than dissecting them. With the tip of his knife and his fingers, he pulled and pricked beneath the skin where it folded down over the paws and sides. “This time of year, with the moose population down, we don’t see much fat on these guys.”
Katherine cut out a sample of muscle tissue with a scalpel, the shiny, precise instrument looking delicate and civilized next to Ridley’s sausage knife. She put the tissue into a glass vial with alcohol.
Ridley inserted his knife into the hide at the throat to make a lateral cut.
“Hey,” Bob said, showing his first real interest in the proceeding.
“Don’t ruin it. And don’t peel the skin off the head.”
Ridley looked at him. His eyes went as dead as the wolf on the table. His hand tightened on the knife till the rubber glove he wore was pulled taut as a second skin over his knuckles. Anna thought he was going to cut Menechinn and she had no intention of trying to stop him – nothing against Bob Menechinn, just not a guy she
