pure magic.
Then they were gone, the last tail swallowed up by the shaggy line of birch trunks at the edge of the clearing.
“Wow!” Anna whispered inadequately.
“They’ve never done this. Never. Not even close,” Ridley said.
“Something’s got them stirred up.” He’d crowded so close behind Anna, she felt his breath on her hair. He must have noticed the moment she did. He backed away awkwardly.
The others began to move and talk. Katherine remained immobile. Her face had the same rapt look that had scared Anna over the dirty dishes. In a child, she would have termed it awe. In a woman grown, it was the aspect of true love beholding the object of adoration.
“I didn’t think they came around people,” Bob said.
“They don’t,” Ridley replied. “Three times in the last fifty years, we’ve found wolf tracks in the housing area. Not a pack, tracks of a single wolf. Every time, there was a dead wolf in the carpentry shop, either dissected or about to be. They stay away from us and we stay away from them. We try and keep it that way. In wolf/tourist run-ins, wolves always come out the losers. The island is too small to destroy or transport a wolf without damaging the population and screwing up the study. Something stirred them up,” he repeated.
“The windigo,” Robin said. It sounded as if she wanted to believe in a windigo more than moose meat. People loved their ghosts, demons, fairies and angels. Anna didn’t. For her, stark reality was magical, mysterious and sufficiently deadly. She didn’t need to put monstrous faces on starvation and cruelty, or wings and feathers on hope.
“I thought windigos were strict humanitarians,” she said. “Don’t they just eat people?”
“Everybody loves junk food,” Jonah said.
“They smell the blood of the moose,” Bob said. “Their sense of smell is acute.”
“Exactly.” Ridley’s word was agreeable but the tone was not. The lead researcher evidently didn’t like an axman from Homeland Security educating him on wolf traits. “They can smell over a thousand times more efficiently than humans. And they can smell humans. We must reek like a paper mill to them. There is any number of ways the pack could get to the moose. Why come so near us?”
“Do you think the other packs will come?” Robin asked.
“They shouldn’t.” Ridley moved to the piano bench and began pulling on high-waisted woolen ski pants, snapping the suspenders over his shoulders.
“If they do, it could get ugly,” Adam said, and Ridley shot him a look, a widening of the eyes and downturn of the lips that Anna associated with social conspiracies, like listening to your best friend lie her way out of detention.
“Pack wars,” Robin said somberly. Anna figured it out. They were trying to scare the pants off the Homeland Security guy.
Pack wars were not uncommon, but there was sufficient territory for East, Middle and Chippewa Harbor packs so they didn’t clash too often. When they did, it was hit-and-run, not the full-scale slaughter humans had perfected.
Ridley took mukluks from the drying rack beside the woodstove and sat down again to put them on. The anesthetizing influence of a wolf sighting wearing off, it dawned on the group what he was doing.
As one, they scrambled for their boots and coats. Cursed with new gear, Anna was last out the front door. The rest were halfway across the housing complex. Uplifted by the excitement of watching a pack of wild wolves devour a kill, she wasn’t bothered by the cutting wind from the northwest as she duckwalked quickly down the slippery steps in her ungainly boots and started across the clearing.
Suddenly she stopped. A whiff, a hint of something freakishly bad, evil and death and old fish distilled into a toxic perfume, was borne on the wind. Tilting her head back, she sniffed. It was gone. She smelled nothing but the clean, vicious perfection of winter.
The Ojibwa’s windigo was heralded by the stench of rotting corpses, the rotten stink of a cannibal’s breath, and the distillation of hopelessness. The cannibal spirit came on the wind from the northwest.
For someone who had eschewed the supernatural not ten minutes before, Anna felt a distinctly unnatural chill along the back of her stomach and up both sides of her spine.
She waited and watched the black of the woods in the direction from which the wind blew. The line of shadows that marked the trees hid anything that might have been there.
4
Despite the pack’s dramatic arrival, the wolves settled down in lupine domesticity around the unexpected gift of the moose carcass. Anna could have happily burned her calories just keeping warm and watching them, but the second day of the pack’s visit Ridley put the team back to work. Robin had gone cross-country with her rucksack and plastic baggies to seek out ever-more-marvelous bits of frozen excretions and effluvia. Adam was building a snowmobile shed. As far as Anna was concerned, he had the worst of the work. Construction at seven above zero struck her as a miserable way to make a living, but he’d acted as if he was looking forward to it.
She landed the plum job. Jonah was taking her up in the cub to see if they could find Chippewa Harbor pack. Flights in the supercub were jealously guarded. From the scuttlebutt, Anna knew there’d been guests of the study who’d never managed an invite to fly. She doubted she’d have been so lucky had Ridley not had so many wolves close to home to play with.
Four hours immobile in a two-seat fabric airplane with a heater that did not deserve the name was a recipe for misery, if not frostbite, and Anna had not come prepared. In borrowed knee-high, insulated boots that looked more like robot prosthetics than shoes – Ridley’s size nines – and more layers than a winter onion, she watched uselessly as Jonah walked around the airplane checking for damage, standard operation for preflight. At first, to be companionable, she’d attempted to follow him, but in the oversized boots she moved like an arctic clown on Quaaludes. The characterization was completed, she suspected, by a bright red nose.
On the far side of the harbor, beyond the little airplane, wolves lounged around the moose carcass like fat house dogs around a hearth. “Won’t we scare them off?” she asked.
“There’s not been a wolf on this island in three generations – that’s in dog years; ten years old is an old wolf – that hasn’t had an airplane buzzing around from the time he was a pup,” Jonah said and began unwrapping an orange, oil-stained down comforter he kept around his lady’s nose when she was earthbound so her engine wouldn’t turn into a block of ice. “The sound doesn’t bother them. Most don’t even look up. I think they live the simple life: food/no food, threat/no threat, sex/no sex. In the no food, no threat, no sex category, the cub and I aren’t worth a passing glance.
“Get the tie-down, if you will.”
Anna clowned over to where the wing was tethered to the ice and was amused momentarily by the image of the supercub taking off with the frozen harbor dangling cartoonlike from the tie-down lines beneath the wings. Loath to remove her gloves, she had barely loosed the knot by the time Jonah had untied his side and come around. Because she’d learned to do it on ISRO with boat lines, she carefully laid the rope in a coil.
The cub had clamshell doors, a hexagon cut laterally and opening up and down. Jonah let the lower part of the door down and held the upper against the high wing. “Hop in. I fly from the rear seat.”
Hopping was not an option. Anna clambered into the front seat and manually arranged her great booted extremities so they wouldn’t interfere with Jonah’s operation of the ailerons, then lay there helplessly gazing at nothing. The supercub was a tail dragger and, on the ground, sat nose high, the windscreen pointing at pale gray sky.
The plane jounced. Jonah had gotten in. A prisoner of survival gear, turning around to look was in the same category as hopping. “Here,” Jonah said, and a headset was thrust over her right shoulder. “You know how to use one of these things?”
“I do.” High-tech communications in an old supercub struck an odd note. It seemed as if the small-plane industry had not kept pace with electronics. But, then, nothing had kept pace with electronics. Anna put on the earphones, adjusted the mike and then continued staring at a blank sky while Jonah went through his
