Winter Study

wall, wouldn’t it?”

“Step back,” Ridley warned them, ignoring the offer. “This is going to be messy.”

Ridley wasn’t much taller than Anna, five-eight maybe, and slight, but he swung the ax like a man long used to chopping his own wood. Hefting it back across his shoulder, he swung it in a clean arc, the strength of his legs in the blow.

The axhead buried itself in meat and bone behind the moose’s ears.

Anna’d thought it would be the way the guillotine was depicted in the movies; a single chop and the moose’s head would roll free of its body. Except, with the antlers, it couldn’t roll. With the long, bulbous nose, it couldn’t roll. Moose were not beasts designed for a beautiful life or a dignified death.

Ridley put his mukluk on the thick neck and yanked on the ax. With a sucking crunch, it jerked loose, and blood flew like a flock of cardinals over the ice.

The head lolled. Great, dark eyes stared upward; the executed watching the executioner botch the job.

“He looks stoned.” Bob laughed. “Or is it a she?”

Ridley’s ax hit the animal between the eyes.

“God dammit,” he whispered, took a deep breath and swung the ax again, severing the head but for an eight- inch strip of hide that Adam quickly cut with a mat knife he produced from somewhere in his ragtag clothing.

Ravens were landing before they’d finished wrapping the moose’s head in a tarp. They hopped and scolded; their feast was growing cold. Bolder birds dashed in to snatch bits of flesh from the open neck wound; easy pickings, with no tough hide to tear through. By the time the carcass was consumed, all manner of smaller creatures would have had a good dinner; maybe the meal that would give them the strength to make it until summer, when the island provided in plenty.

With the severed head wrapped in black plastic and stowed in the snowmobile trailer, Anna and the others shuffled back to the Beaver and finished transferring gear and food into the trailer around the moose head. Because of the size and awkward shape of the antlers, the trailer’s lid had to be propped partly open. Adam driving, Bob behind him, and Ridley, boots planted wide on the rear runners like a musher with a mechanized pack of dogs, headed up to the bunkhouse.

The Forest Service plane took off, leaving the ground in a surprisingly short time and disappearing around Beaver Island as the pilot used the length of Washington Harbor to get up to altitude for the flight back to Ely.

The sounds of internal combustion machines, simultaneously anachronistic and a reassuring reminder that Winter Study team was not marooned on an icebound island in the time of the mastodons, grew fainter. Anna wanted to hear the ice singing again, but there was nothing but the quarreling of ravens.

For a moment, she, Robin and Jonah stood without speaking, eyes on the sky where the USFS plane had gone. Then, as if moved by the same impulse, the way a flock of birds will suddenly change directions, they turned and followed the track left by the snowmobile. Ungainly in bulky clothes, boots unsure on the slippery surface, Anna felt like a toddler. Robin, doing a kind of Texas two-step, the soles of her soft mukluks never leaving the surface of the lake, shuffled expertly along.

Partway back to the dock, a supercub was tied down, a tandem-seat fabric airplane used since before World War II for air reconnaissance, search and rescue, hunting – any job that called for flying low and slow and being able to land anywhere the pilot had the guts to set it down. This one was a classic, down to the fat brown teddy bear painted on the tail, and skis where wheels would be in summer. Lines, dropped through holes cut in the ice and held there by lengths of two-by-four, were gripped by the ice when the hole froze again, making as firm a tie- down as any hook set in concrete.

“That’s my airplane you’re admiring,” Jonah said. “She’ll let you pet her if you kiss her on the nose first.”

Jonah was the team’s pilot. Old, Anna thought. Moon, was her second thought as she realized that when the Beaver was coming in on final approach it was Jonah’s pale old behind that dared the frigid air to welcome them in proper style.

The glare went off the lenses of his eyeglasses and showed Anna eyes the palest blue she’d ever seen, the color of the sky with a high, thin overcast. They’d probably taken on the tint from too many years staring through the windscreens of airplanes. Jonah Schumann had to be seventy. Seventy-five, maybe.

Jonah looked as if he could see her doing math in her head and said: “I normally don’t offer my lady’s favors to strangers such as yourself, but she may have been traumatized by recent events. The old gal is pushing fifty, and it would be a comfort to her to have the company of a contemporary.” His eyes twinkled through the deadpan seriousness of his words.

Anna laughed and realized she’d not introduced herself. “Anna Pigeon, Rocky Mountain.” Reflexively they both thrust out their hands to shake in the approved manner, but with the mittens and gloves they were more like two old declawed bears pawing at each other.

“Nice butt,” Anna said.

“Thank you,” Jonah replied gravely. “Many women and some men have told me that. You have already met my fiancee.” He was looking at Robin, with her sweet, unblemished face perfectly framed by long, straight brown hair. Anna had a balaclava with the drawstring pulled till only her eyes and nose showed and, around that, to keep the cold from creeping down the collar of her parka, a wide thick scarf. The only concession to the cold Robin had made was a wool Laplander’s hat, the kind with a pointy top and silly earflaps.

“In your dreams, Jonah,” Robin said.

“She’s shy,” he confided. “It embarrasses her that she would marry me just for the sex.”

Robin ducked her head and looked inland. “I’ll walk back by the Nature Trail,” she said. “I need to stop and take a look at the weather.” With that, she was two-stepping toward shore, slender and graceful in her minimalist wear.

Anna’s twenties came back in a hot flash: the flattering but endless and, finally, exhausting sexual references and jokes, the mentioning of body parts, the sly looks, the double entendres. She’d thought that sort of thing had gone down beneath the nineties tsunami of lawsuits and political correctness. Maybe it had just gone underground, or, maybe, it would not be dead till every man of her generation and the generation before her was rotting in his grave.

She and Jonah shuffled on toward the dock and his little airplane. On the ice to the right was a waist-high pile of snow with a shovel stuck in it. “Ice fishing?” Anna asked. “Pretty grim pastime without an ice-fishing house. I hope it’s voluntary.”

“That’s our well,” Jonah said. Then: “Doggone it!” He hurried over to the hole chopped in the ice. “The little bastard is trying to poison us. He’s done it before.” Jonah snatched up the shovel. On the side of the excavated snow and ice was a patch of yellow. “Fox,” Jonah said. “A pesky, pissy little red fox whose mother was no better than she should have been.” Shoveling up the tainted snow carefully, he tossed it as far from the well as he could. “I tell you, this little fur ball is potent. One drop of his urine got in the well a while back. One drop and our water reeked of fox for two days.”

“Reclaiming his territory,” Anna said.

“Very broad-minded of you, Ranger Pigeon. Wait till you’ve had cafe au fox piss.” Grumbling, he began using the tip of the shovel like a gargantuan scalpel, incising spots of yellow. Anna looked back to where the moose with its cloak of ravens lay on the ice. Blood spatter from the ax formed three lines out from the pool where the animal’s head had lain. The sight was not gruesome, not ugly. Ravens were so black they seemed cut from construction paper and pasted on the reflective white of the snow. Blood was still the bright cheery red of life. The composition was set off by the inky lines of leafless trees against the blue of the sky. Stunning in its simplicity, the tableau put Anna in mind of a Japanese painting she’d seen: Death of a Samurai.

“What are you going to do with the body?” she asked.

Jonah jammed the shovel back into the snow pile. “Nothing. There’s nothing we could do even if we wanted. Used to, before the warm-and-cuddlies got up in arms, we’d shoot a moose once a winter. Middle pack always knew and always showed up. One year, the rules were changed, but Middle pack showed up right on schedule anyway, like they had a watch that read: MOOSE TIME. No free moose meat. They never came again. I don’t know how they know things, but they do.”

“Think they know this is here?” Anna asked.

“See that raven?” Jonah pointed to a sharp cut of black flying toward the western shore of the harbor. “He’s going to tell the pack supper’s on.”

Anna believed him. She’d been around animals enough to know humans might know how much Jupiter weighs