Winter Study

She’d learned to track in the desert. A land of snow was very like a desert, and she found she could read sign tolerably well. Working slowly, she followed the spatters and the now-almost-obliterated mark where Katherine had crawled – or been dragged – from the swamp. She found the hole she and Robin dug, excavating the backpack. The bottom had filled in till it was just a large dimple in the snow. Anna pulled a pasta server she’d lifted from a kitchen drawer out of her backpack and used it to rake around the area. Gloved hands packed snow rather than lifting it, and it was too cold to use bare fingers.

Sieving turned up bits of blue canvas, one soaked with what Anna presumed was either wolf blood from the broken vials or human blood from the researcher. On fabric, there was none of the cheery traffic-cone orange; the blood had gone dark and hard. Anna had no idea of the chemistry involved, but, no doubt, one day an enterprising researcher would get a hundred-thousand-dollar grant to study the phenomenon.

Near ground level, she found a blue canvas strap. One end was intact, the buckle still in place. The end that had originally attached to the backpack was ripped. Either it had been torn from Katherine’s back or been ripped in a game of tug-of-war between woman and wolf or wolf and wolf.

Or woman and scary noneating thing.

Anna rose to her feet and looked for the next spatter of orange. Snow humped over downed wood, and the swamp resembled a rumpled giant’s bed. Half the trees were alive, erect above the snow, and half in a deadly tangle beneath it. Contours and cave-ins could be the mark of human intervention or snow cover interacting with gravity, temperature and the various levels of piled trees.

Anna had been hoping for a bit more blood. She’d seen the wolves taking down a moose. There had been a lot of blood. Wolves and moose hearts pumping at top capacity, wolves slashing, moose fighting back with hooves and antlers. Blood had flown in every direction.

Here there was little for a tracker to go by. Maybe because Katherine hadn’t the physical strength to fight a predator that didn’t weigh much less than she did and her clothing soaked up fluids from her wounds.

Without its bizarre coloration, Anna might have missed the next spatter. Seven orange drops in a neat arc stood out at snow line against the pale bark of a downed cedar.

With careful steps and her pasta-serving spoon, Anna worked Katherine’s back trail. Fifty yards into the tangle of downed trees was a six-by-eight patch of snow that was sufficiently disturbed that the drifting had not completely concealed it. Digging was deepest in a crotch formed by two dead limbs. Around this patch was a wide area of lesser dimpling, the paw prints of wolves.

If they were paw prints. The windigo carried its victims so high and so fast, their feet burned away to stumps, and the prints they left in the snow were more like hoofprints than human tracks.

“Cut it out,” Anna said aloud. An “inner child” was all well and good, but the little buggers could be a real pain in the ass when it came to scary stories.

Starting at the outer perimeter of the circle, she began clearing snow away. Within a foot of where the branches came together in a natural snare, she found a patch of frozen urine. It was human; a fragment of wadded tissue paper lay next to it. Katherine had been trapped long enough to need to relieve herself, and her leg was not yet broken. The compound fracture would have rendered her too crippled and in too much pain to have squatted neatly.

On the same imaginary ring around ground zero – the foot trap – Anna found a flashlight, an unused emergency flare and a water bottle, half full and frozen solid as a brick, and a pack of Juicy Fruit. Katherine might have run madly into the woods, but she had returned to her room, or had this pack cached elsewhere, and come prepared.

Anna rocked back on her heels, wondering what a small, emotionally upset researcher from Washington, D.C., would rush out in the dark with a flare and a pack of gum to do. Did she plan to get lost to punish Bob but wanted to hedge her bets? Did she stage the fight with Bob to establish a reason to run off that wouldn’t incriminate her?

In what? And why didn’t she use the flare? Any late-night-movie viewer would know to strike the flare to keep wolves away. Whatever Katherine’s reasons, it was here that the rucksack was wrested from her.

Not having evidence bags large enough to accommodate flashlight and flare, Anna stowed them in her backpack. A little more digging turned up the cell phone Bob worried about. Anna knew pretty close to nothing about cell phones. For much of her career, no one had such a thing, except for the crew of the Starship Enterprise. In the years since they’d become commonplace, she’d worked in places too isolated to get service. Paul bought her one, and, because she’d promised she would, she kept it in the car when she traveled between Colorado and Mississippi. A couple of times she’d gone so far as to turn it on. Once she’d even needed it, but the battery had gone dead and it had been demoted from glove compartment to trunk.

This phone appeared to be a fancy machine, many buttons and symbols, all in Lilliputian scale. The viewing screen was black. Because her phone worked this way, Anna took off a glove, then pushed END to begin.

Nothing.

She pushed TALK.

Nothing.

When her fingers got cold enough to cause pain, she gave up and slipped the phone in her pocket. The batteries could be dead or frozen. Probably both. Menechinn wanted the phone to save the cost of replacing it. Whether he was being petty or not, Anna knew she would put it down the outhouse rather than give him a moment’s satisfaction. Since he’d saved her life, Bob had that effect on her.

Sitting on one of the limbs that had captured and held Katherine till death came on night’s paws, Anna considered what she had found. Not much. And she didn’t have a lot more time. She’d gotten a late start and had no intention of reprising her long day’s journey into night, dragging a corpse and a zombie, not even with two flashlights and an emergency flare.

Putting all of the “not much” together, she fleshed out a story. Katherine had run from the housing area for reasons of her own. Maybe to conduct an activity she wanted kept secret or to make Bob sorry for whatever he had done. The flare in the pack suggested the activity might have something to do with signaling. Homeland Security had sent Bob to ISRO presumably because it was a hole in the border through which anything could leak, especially in winter when it was deserted.

Signaling offshore smugglers? Terrorists?

Anna laughed, surprising herself with the noise. Evildoers deciding to do evil in Lake Superior in January were a self-culling gene pool. Based out of a city, Homeland Security personnel might not know that. Provincialism wasn’t just for the provinces anymore.

The facts were: Katherine had left Windigo, then intentionally or accidentally gotten lost. She’d gotten caught in the cedar swamp. Wolves found her. Contrary to natural behavior patterns, they decided to devour her. At some point, she remembered her cell phone and tried to call out. She fought to free her foot and her ankle snapped. That might also have been when the vials were broken. Blood from the compound fracture, blood from a dead wolf, frenetic noise and preylike thrashings: hard for any self-respecting wolf to resist. The foot comes free. Katherine drags herself or is dragged by wolves to the killing ground.

Then her ghost flits to Windigo and writes “HELP ME” on the window glass.

“I guess we solved this one,” Anna said to a red squirrel, who, thinking her a bump on a log, had settled nearby to munch on a ration of fall’s harvest. The little rodent squawked, scurried up the nearest tree and disappeared around the bole. Two seconds later, it reappeared on the other side and scolded Anna for her impertinence.

“I’m sorry I scared you. I thought you knew it was me. Hey, thanks.” Looking at the squirrel, she noticed a set of tracks coming in at an angle on the far side of the tree. They looked like boot prints. Had she not been half expecting them, Anna would have written them off to the vagaries of tracking and weather. Overlapping moose prints often resembled a human track. Wolf tracks scoured out with the wind fooled the eye in the same way.

Most of the tracks had been obliterated. All she could tell was, they came from the west, the direction of the bunkhouse, which meant nothing. In rough country, only the crows fly as the crow flies. Creeping and climbing and scooting on her butt, she worked her way through the swamp in concentric circles out from the existing prints.

Nearer where the body was found, at the foot of an evergreen tree, branches full of needles and keeping out much of the snow, the tracks ended. The owner of the boots had stood, back to the tree, and watched the slaying or the body or both.

It was the watcher who had frightened the wolves from their kill.