Maybe Menechinn was proud of his helper’s doctorate. Maybe she was shy. Maybe he mocked her and she was hurt. Maybe they were lovers. The undercurrents were lost on Anna. She was too hungry to care.
“What can I do to help?” she asked the kitchen in general.
Adam peeled and chopped. Ridley cooked. Robin was allowed to make a salad, but only after begging for the honor. Over five decades of tradition was squeezed into the small kitchen: jobs were not up for grabs; one had to be grandfathered in for every task. Realizing the study’s dinner rituals were as full of social land mines for the uninitiated as the kitchen of a kosher chef on the eve of Hanukkah, Anna sat down out of the way and watched.
It was the first time she’d seen her housemates divested of layers and hoods, gloves and down pants. Ridley was as she had envisioned him: a smallish man with wiry muscles and surprisingly broad shoulders. His hands and feet were small and would have suited a dancer, had he gone in a different direction. At thirty, he was a full professor at Michigan Tech, married and now the lead researcher on one of the country’s most prestigious studies. His hair was fine as a baby’s and curled down between his shoulder blades in a loose ponytail held by a rubber band. Ridley would have been beautiful but was saved by crooked teeth and a mouth too wide for his face. Had he gotten early orthodonture, he would have been a pedophile’s dream as a kid and a students’ heartthrob when he grew up.
Except for Robin, Ridley was the youngest member of the team, but his authority wasn’t questioned – at least not by the Winter Study people. On the ice, he and Bob had swayed what passed in Homo sapiens for antlers at each other. Neither seemed intimidated. Bob might have Homeland Security’s ax, but Ridley was at home on the island as Bob Menechinn was not. Like Anna, he seemed to suffer from the cold, and she got the feeling he was more comfortable with women than men.
Adam struck Anna as the natural alpha of the group, but he apparently didn’t mind taking orders from Ridley. He was younger than she’d first thought, in his late thirties. Like Ridley, he wore his hair long, keeping it in a braid. Silver was beginning to weave through the dark brown plait. Anna loved men with long hair, a hangover from her college days. It suggested a wildness that appealed to her. Adam’s suited him. His scarecrow body was ridged with muscle and his hands scarred from work. The nineteenth-century mustache gave his gaunt face a dramatic appeal, the hero of a western saga or a soldier making a last charge into the valley of death.
Adam maintained the machinery and the physical plants. From the talk, Anna guessed he was a perennial seasonal; one of the men and women who worked a northern park in summer and a southern park in winter. They had little in the way of material things, living with long-distance and commonly broken relationships, no children, no savings, no house. The lifestyle seemed glamorous till one hit forty; then, by the alchemy of age, it was touched with failure and sadness.
During the course of the meal, Anna began to be initiated into the rules and regulations of Winter Study. Rules written nowhere except in stone. She learned the red rag was for dishes, the gray for wiping countertops. One did not wash with the wiping cloth nor wipe with the washing cloth. It had “just evolved” that way, Jonah told her, and she understood that it had calcified into law and would remain thus until one or the other of the rags – or the team – disintegrated with age.
No one but the pilot could remove the cozy from the bowl containing brown sugar and then only with much discussion of “Mrs. Brown’s” disrobing and how that might or might not affect those attempting it.
She learned that the researchers had two modes of dinner conversation: mocking the Park Service, most particularly the law enforcement end of it, and talking nonsense, the ringleader of the nonsense being Jonah, the audience Ridley and Adam.
By the end of the meal, which was excellent – that or the calories one had to burn just to stay warm leant savor to it – Anna realized that this style of communication, or, more to the point, noncommunication, allowed them to live together in greater harmony than meaningful exchanges would have; an American backwoods version of the privacy once maintained in the Orient by elaborate ritual courtesy.
In another setting, Anna might have taken offense at the scorn heaped on the rangers and management of Isle Royale. Being law enforcement and, with her new position at Rocky Mountain, at least nominally management, the mean-spirited gossip should have offended her. In principle, it did and, like the ongoing sexual teasing of Robin, grew tiresome, but it didn’t hurt her feelings. There was a habitualness about it that transcended insensitivity or insult. Like the other rituals, it had evolved over the years, and they carped with much the same lack of devotion as illiterate Catholics mouthing a Latin mass.
Anna was happy to sit without speaking and let it wash around her. She couldn’t remember being so hungry. The helpings she was given – and the seconds she took – were double what she was accustomed to, yet she was as excited about the dessert as any of the men and had to restrain herself from asking for more ice cream.
When the meal was finished, Ridley and Adam thanked Jonah for a fine dinner. Anna hadn’t seen the old pilot do anything, but, not wanting to be rude, she thanked him as well. Jonah hauled one of the two large metal containers of hot water that lived on the woodstove and poured the double sinks full. He and Ridley began pulling on yellow rubber gloves as Jonah joked about his favorite subject; this time it was Ridley he pretended was madly in love with him and was lecturing him about unwelcome visits to his room in the night. Neither was gay – Anna would have bet on it – it was simply another game that had taken root so long ago no one was sure why they still played it.
She offered to do the dishes, which she thought was mighty big of her, but was met with uncomprehending and none-too-friendly stares. Precisely what custom dictated who a chief bottle washer was, she didn’t know, but, wanting to help, to thank them for the meal, to ingratiate herself – or whatever it was she felt a need to do – she insisted.
Confused rather than appreciative, they abandoned her to it. The only one who remained to help or keep her company was Dr. Huff.
“Do you want to wash or rinse, Kathy?”
“
As the steam rose and the pile of dirty dishes diminished, to make conversation Anna asked Katherine what her doctorate was in. Again, there was the odd ducking flinch and the furious blush. Katherine wasn’t much older than Robin, not yet thirty, yet her skin had the opacity associated with women considerably past menopause. The blush didn’t prettily pink her cheeks but dyed them the color of new brick.
“I haven’t got it quite yet,” Katherine admitted. Moisture blanked her glasses, and Anna couldn’t read her eyes. “I’m all-but-dissertation. Bob – Dr. Menechinn – has my thesis. Then it goes to committee. It’s on the wolves in Wyoming. The alphas have started mating with more than one female in the pack.”
“They must be becoming habituated to humans,” Anna said.
They had progressed to the flatware, washed last, and dumped into a long-handled deep-fat fryer set in the rinse water for that purpose – another rule, and one Anna would have bent had not Jonah appeared behind her and Katherine with the implement and the instructions at the proper moment – when Katherine whispered:
“God’s nightgown.”
The archaic oath made Anna laugh. The look on Katherine’s face made her stop. Religious awe or deep-seated horror drew the skin around her eyes tight. Her jaw had gone slack.
“What is it?” Anna demanded.
Katherine pointed at the small window over the sink. Her hand was shaking so bad tiny bubbles from the dish soap floated free and rose on the warm air. When Anna tossed the flatware into the rinse, steam had blanked the window. Undoubtedly shattering half a dozen traditions, she wiped it clear with the red dishrag.
Silver light from a three-quarter moon caught ice crystals on the snow and rime on pine needles and tree branches. In the superdried air, the light was so pure the world beyond the glass glowed with it, and Anna could see with surreal clarity. Whatever Katherine had seen was gone. Or had been imaginary.
Hands dripping, Katherine turned and ran to the common room.
Anna ran after her, drying her hands on her trousers. Katherine squeezed behind the television set, cupped her hands against the glass of the picture window and pressed her face to the glass. Anna did the same.
Delineated by moonlight and snow, seven wolves trotted across the compound. Heads low, they came single file, long legs and big paws carrying them effortlessly over the patchy snow. Anna’d seen wolves in captivity, seen wolf pups, but to see seven adult wolves in the moonlight, wolves that moved through the night the way they were meant to, the moon catching their fur until they were frosted with silver, their shadows black on the ground, was
