of the way. We’ll make it.” As if in answer to his effrontery, a gust of wind, running ahead of the heavy weather, nudged the cub.
Jonah dropped the airplane down till they were flying two hundred feet above the Greenstone Ridge. They were traveling at airspeed of eighty-five miles per hour, slow for most airplanes but incredibly fast for humans, creatures designed to go no faster than a horse can canter. Trees and rock outcrops flashed by, their nearness enhancing the sense of speed. Anna enjoyed the rush.
They followed the trail for three miles but saw no tracks, then a fist of wind rocked the supercub and Jonah said: “This bird’s for home.”
Anna watched the ground. Jonah watched the sky. She saw a dark shape where dead grasses had been mashed. It looked like a moose bed, but, lying in the makeshift nest, partially hidden by the lower branches of a stunted spruce, a dark shape was curled up.
“Wait,” Anna almost yelled into the mike. “I think I saw something. Make another pass.”
“Not today,” crackled back over the headset. “Pilots are a dime a dozen. Old pilots are rare as hen’s teeth.”
Anna didn’t argue but she wanted to.
“What’d you spot?” Jonah asked.
“I don’t know what it was,” Anna said. She tried to look back but gear and seat belt trussed her as neatly as a straitjacket. “It looked like a great big dog.”
The shape, the black silhouette curled nose to tail, had looked like a wolf. A monstrous wolf, more than half again as big as the biggest alpha she’d ever seen.
5
That night, the bunkhouse ran out of water. Since Middle pack had come to Washington Harbor, Ridley had banned the use of the snowmobile for all tasks, including hauling water up from the well. Wolves might be impervious to Jonah’s supercub, but a snowmobile was an unknown quantity.
At first light, Anna positioned herself on the dock to get a final look. Robin was collecting along the Greenstone Trail. Adam had gone with her. Anna, Katherine, Jonah and Bob stood shoulder to shoulder, like cattle in the wind, watching the Middle pack as the angry whine of the snowmobile grew louder. The alpha female’s head came up first, then the others; not one by one but in concert.
Ridley on the snowmobile broke free of the trees and the pack was on its feet.
Then they were gone.
Anna found herself laughing. They didn’t turn tail and run the way Taco, her old dog, did when squirrels chirred at him. They dissipated like mist burning off a pond in autumn.
“Children of the night,” she said.
“Let’s go,” Katherine begged.
“Let’s do it.” With Bob’s permission, Katherine was off, trotting down the slippery dock and onto the lake, shuffle-sliding her way toward what remained of the moose.
“Mmm-mm.” Jonah smacked his lips. “Fresh steaming wolf scat and lots of it. For a wildlife biologist, it just doesn’t get any better.”
Apparently carnivore excreta being of little interest to him, Jonah stopped at the ice well to help Ridley refill the plastic water barrels. Anna and Bob joined the gnawed carcass and Katherine. “Will the wolves hang around?” Bob asked.
“They may come back tonight, but I doubt it,” Anna replied. “They got most of the meat.”
“I’m going to take a look at their trail,” Bob announced. “Want to come?”
Anna shook her head. Bob seemed nice enough, but he was too big. With his height, bulldog jowls and thickening middle, he made the bunkhouse feel cramped. Add six inches of cold-weather gear and he was huge, a yeti. It made her claustrophobic.
“Don’t get eaten,” she said to be personable. After a hard, lean winter, if a wolf ate Menechinn it would probably flounder and die like a horse in a granary.
“The axman never gets eaten by the wolf.” Bob grinned and turned away. The trees took him bite by bite.
For a while, Anna watched Katherine, absorbed in her work.
While convinced that wolf poop was a fine and desirable thing, without the actual furry beasts around it, Anna found her interest flagging. The front that had chased the supercub home had settled in. Wind gusted with malicious intent, and the weather site on Ridley’s computer predicted snow. On the hill behind the bunkhouse was a vintage wooden weather station, the kind that had served parks and mom-and-pop airports for eighty or more years. The slat-sided wooden box housed a barometer, minimum and maximum thermometers and a thermometer designed – with some dipping into water and spinning – to give windchill. The NPS had given Robin the task of checking it daily.
The scientists thought this the height of absurdity, one more example of Park Service ineptitude. The machinery for weather recording had moved on while the NPS clung to the old ways. Still, when the stations were gone, it would be one more link broken from when the world was a more mysterious – and less endangered – place.
“Think it’ll snow?” Anna asked to keep her mind off the hoarfrost forming on her eyelashes.
“I hope so,” Katherine replied. “It makes it easier to map the packs’ movements. You can follow their tracks from the air.”
Watching Katherine scooping frozen urine-soaked snow into ziplock baggies and packing up wolf scat, Anna was surprised to note she no longer looked mousey or hangdog at all. For the first time, Anna saw the fine bones in the nose and the delicately squared chin, the eyebrows, soft brown and perfectly shaped where they showed above her glasses. A flush touched her cheeks. Not the raw pink the wind scoured up or the dull brick of her blushes but a fresh rose hue.
“You’re in love with the wolves,” Anna blurted half accusingly. She suffered a totally illogical stab of jealousy, as if she alone had the privilege of intimate connection with wild things.
Katherine looked up shyly. A strand of hair escaped from her hood and curved around the swell of her cheek. “I saw one when I was little – three or four,” she said. “We had a cabin on a lake just north of the Boundary Waters.” She laughed. It was the first time Anna had heard it. “You know Minnesotans, they can live on Lake Superior, but they still have to have a ‘cabin on the lake’ somewhere.
“We were there one winter, and Momma bundled me out to play.” Katherine rocked back till she sat on her heels like an Arab, arms clasped around her knees, and looked through Anna. “The snow was a couple feet deep, but I was so light I could walk on top of it. I felt like I was flying, swooping along above the ground. Then there was this wolf.” She laughed again. It wasn’t musical but a series of puffs blown out through her nose with the barest of sound, as if she’d learned to laugh in a library with a bat-eared librarian.
“He was doing the same thing. Flying. That’s what I thought then. He was taller than me and couldn’t have been more than ten feet away. We just stared at each other for a long time. His ears twitched and he blinked. I blinked and tried to make my ears twitch under my hood. Then he turned and walked toward the woods. At the edge of the trees, he looked back over his shoulder, and I started to cry.” She sounded wistful enough to cry these many years later.
“I thought he was asking me to go with him and I couldn’t.”
“Why not?” Anna asked, caught up in the story.
Katherine smiled and went back to her scat gathering. “Momma told me not to leave the yard.”
Anna shifted from foot to foot. Her toes were getting numb. “No wolves in D.C. At least not the kind that will refrain from devouring children,” she said. Bob was a professor at American University in Bethesda, where Katherine worked on her doctorate.
Wistful beauty burned away in a flash, and, for a second, Anna thought Katherine was going to wrinkle back her upper lip and growl. Whatever soured the young woman nearly to the point of spitting might have been sufficiently interesting to take Anna’s mind off freezing to death for another few minutes, but they were interrupted by the squeaky
