“I’m faster,” Robin said.
To Anna, Gavin said: “She is. Like the wind.” He seemed proud of her, and Anna liked him for that too.
“It’s too far,” Anna said, thinking of how far Robin had already come that day.
Robin smiled. Ten miles on easy trails had probably not been “too far” since she was nine years old. “I won’t be long,” she said and pushed off with the sudden grace of a bird taking flight.
“I’m guessing an hour or a little more. Downhill with no pack, she’ll make good time. Coming back with the gas can will take longer, but she doesn’t need to bring more than a gallon at the most. Eight pounds. That’s nothing for Robin,” Gavin said reassuringly.
The blanket and tarp Anna had wrapped around herself for warmth were beginning to feel like a shroud and one that was shrinking noticeably. They had done their job, she was found alive, now she wanted out. “Unwrap me,” Anna said.
Gavin looked alarmed, and she knew he was remembering the tales of finding people naked and dead of the cold. A rare but not too rare hypothermic reaction was to feel hot. In late stages, victims would sometimes take off their clothes and lie naked in the snow.
“I’m okay,” Anna said. “No running naked for me. I’ve got to move. I’m getting crazy. Crazier. Can you reduce a dislocated shoulder?”
“I’ve never done it,” Gavin admitted.
“Me neither. I learned it in EMT training. It looked easy enough. Align the arm, pull, snick back into place. One… two… three.”
“Two sounds like it would be pretty painful,” Gavin said.
“We’ll numb the shoulder with ice first,” Anna said, then: “Oh, hey, that’s already taken care of.”
Gavin laughed.
Unwrapping her was more of a job than she’d anticipated. Expecting to stay in her blue-and-brown cocoon for the foreseeable future, Anna’d rolled herself in the fabric more concerned with putting as many layers between herself and the elements as possible than with eventually getting free.
“Help me stand,” she said, pushing away the last of the tarp. “I have to get up. Help me. Then we can reduce the shoulder.”
Gavin put one arm around her back and gave her his other to brace herself against, so she could control how much pressure was on her shoulder and ankle, and began to draw her to a standing position beside the snowmobile. “Anna, maybe you should-”
“No,” Anna interrupted him. “My arm is useless, numb. I’ve got to reduce it. I can wedge myself against the seat. You’ll have something to brace against-”
“Anna, you’d have to take off your coat,” Gavin said reasonably.
“No. Why would I?” Confusion was clouding Anna’s brain. Instead of making her cautious, it made her desperate, angry.
“I couldn’t see what I was doing. Where the lump was. Which way to pull to make it go back into the socket,” Gavin said.
“I’ll take the damn thing off,” Anna snapped.
“You’d lose too much body heat, and it would hurt you too much unless we cut the coat off. It won’t be long. Robin’s fast.”
“I can wait,” Anna said after a time. Gavin looked relieved.
“Let’s keep you warm,” he said kindly. He helped her to the seat of the Bearcat and wrapped her legs in the army blanket, then sat behind her and put his long arms around her. “Lean back,” he said.
“Consider me your sofa.”
Menechinn was dead wrong. The girl did get rescued.
37
Gavin stayed at the bunkhouse. Crude as it was, it had amenities that put his camp in the abandoned fire tower to shame. He’d come to the island from Grand Portage, seventeen miles in a kayak, and had been living at Feldtmann for thirteen days, his only heat a camping stove and a cooking stove. Food and supplies had been cached there over the summer. The plan had been hatched by the biotechs when they heard Homeland Security was to evaluate the study.
They had stolen scent lure from a team of martin researchers to effect the wolves’ movements. The props, the black silhouette of the gigantic wolf, the moose and wolf prosthetics to make prints in the snow, had been created by Gavin. The alien DNA was procured by Robin. A friend and fellow researcher in Canada had mailed her a box of wolf scat. Robin simply bagged it up with the ISRO samples and delivered it to Katherine.
The simplicity of the plan impressed Anna. It would have worked, created a tidy little mystery, had Adam not joined the conspiracy. He’d discovered what they were up to on a trip past Feldtmann in late summer and was mildly amused. It was only when, at his urging, Ridley had requested Bob Menechinn for the evaluation that he had taken an active part.
Ridley had known nothing of the plot, a fact Anna could tell both annoyed and embarrassed him. He’d not even suspected until he and Jonah had gone to Feldtmann tower and noticed fresh tracks and turned off their radios, the better to sneak up on whoever was within.
ANNA WAS LYING on the sofa closest to the stove, enjoying being warm and relatively pain free. Jonah had expertly reduced the dislocated shoulder. Forty years of flying hunters into the Alaskan wilderness had made him a de facto combat medic. Her ankle was elevated, but she’d refused to put ice on it. Enough was, occasionally, enough. She was fairly certain it wasn’t broken, the bone merely chipped and bruised. The result was the same: it hurt and she couldn’t walk on it.
The bodies had been recovered by Robin, Gavin and Ridley and lay in the carpenter’s shop with Katherine’s. There’d been no more body bags and they were wrapped in cheery blue tarps.
Three dead, not counting the wolf. The surviving five members of the Winter Study team shared the warm darkness of the common room, the sun long gone, the only light from the fire in the woodstove. Jonah had turned on the generator, but no one, it seemed, wished to see clearly and the lights had been left off.
Those who remained alive on ISRO were all in the room. No one was talking. Anna was glad for the silence, for the heat, for the companionship and for the life that coursed through her veins. Never in her career has she been so close to dying and never before had she such magnificent reasons to resent it: Paul, a wonderful job, her sister, Paul.
The hopeless tangle of human relationships would have depressed her had she not been in a mood of gratitude. Menechinn had destroyed Cynthia and, in the process, Adam. Menechinn had destroyed Katherine and, Anna didn’t doubt, her mother.
Robin and Gavin, in their heroic desire to save the wolf/moose study, might very well have ruined their lives and those of their families. Despite the ruination on her mind, Anna found herself smiling in the dark. The mental picture of them stomping about with moose hooves strapped to their boots, sprinkling trails of stink to manipulate the movements of the wolves, cutting out and placing decoys to be seen from the air, planting alien scat and generally sewing the seeds of a wonderful mystery delighted her.
She would love telling the story to Paul. Soon, a week at most, she would be with him, sitting in front of a fire, snuggled close, her life in front of her. A life she was determined not to lose to any fool that happened by with a penchant for evil and the will to carry it through. Soon Ridley would be back with his Honey, eating hot dish and preparing class lectures. Jonah would be up north, hauling wood and waiting for the next round of hunters. Life would go on. What happened at ISRO would become a legend to amuse visitors around the campfire.
Blue skies would be there again.
