Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  “The head and pelt,” Ridley said evenly.

  In the minds of the members of the wolf/moose study team, the island had been their personal domain for years, intruded on occasionally by the National Park Service and other ignorant bureaucrats but never conquered. Anna waited for Ridley to light into Menechinn.

  Ridley didn’t take his eyes off Bob for a good ten seconds, then he said to Robin: “Get a tarp from the snowmobile. I want to get it to the bunkhouse before the ravens find it.”

  ON THE FLOOR in the unused kitchen down the hall from Anna and Robin’s room, garbage bags were put down, then newspapers to soak up the fluids. The wolf was laid on this unglamorous bier to thaw.

  “It’ll be a few days before we can do the necropsy,” Ridley said as he handed a fine-tooth comb to Anna and another to Katherine, then set a box of small ziplock baggies, the size cheap jewelry is sold in, on the newspapers by the wolf’s spine.

  “I’ll be here to supervise,” Jonah said. “Keep an eye on young Ridley.”

  “You taught me everything I know,” Ridley said good-naturedly.

  “Any mistakes I make will be your fault.” It had taken Anna a while, but she’d eventually caught on; one of the many amusements they’d developed was the fiction that Jonah was all things: chef, scientist, philosopher and learned professor. Though he was a smart man, Anna doubted he’d gone any further than high school.

  “We’ll do the external exam now,” Ridley said for Anna’s benefit.

  “No smell, for one thing. Once the specimen starts thawing, it’ll stink pretty bad.”

  “At least we’ve got that to look forward to,” Jonah interjected.

  “We want to get the ectoparasites off. They are opportunistic and will jump to other hosts if they can. We’re the other hosts.”

  “Like this,” Katherine said, and Anna watched as she combed the fur from the roots of the hairs out, much like a mom looking for lice on a child’s head. Ridley moved to the kitchen counter and set out a rack of small vials he’d brought from the storeroom off the shared living area. The tubes were held upright by the rack, half filled with clear liquid and tightly stoppered.

  “Alcohol,” he said. “For preservation.”

  Anna began combing. She’d thought the fur would be like dog fur, but it wasn’t. Where a dog’s coat was relatively smooth, hairs all the same length, the wolf’s pelt was made of many lengths, and lengths of many textures and colors. From the distance of the dock, the animals had appeared to be rather plain. Up close, the rich color and lush texture of the coat was stunning. Midwinter, times were tough, the wolf hadn’t been shampooed or visited a doggie salon in his life, yet the descriptive that came to Anna’s mind was “regal,” a robe of royalty right down to the extra-long guard hairs around the throat that created a silvery ruff.

  The pelt’s loveliness was somewhat dimmed by the bloodsuckers it harbored. At least none were embedded. Wolves seemed to possess a natural deterrent to ticks that the moose did not enjoy. Anna didn’t have any particular fear of the world’s many-legged denizens, but there was something about ticks that had always made her queasy. She was not sorry to drop the little buggers into the certain death of the vials.

  The combs dredged moose ticks, lice and mange mites from the thick fur. The combing wouldn’t come close to cleaning the parasites from the body. They were sample takers, not exterminators, and Anna knew she wouldn’t sleep well for the feeling of crawly things in her sleeping bag.

  “That’s enough,” Ridley said finally. Anna had just culled a fat moose tick from a section of fur on the wolf’s belly and was trying to keep it from creeping off the comb till she could drop it in the alcohol.

  “Wolves are not at the top of the food chain on Isle Royale,” she said disgustedly. “Ticks are.”

  The alcohol vials were stowed in the kitchen cupboard next to a box of granola bars. Ridley brought in another rack of vials, the glass preservation tubes smaller than those used for ectoparasites. Using tweezers, Katherine plucked guard hairs, careful to get the follicles.

  “Ninety-five percent ethanol,” she said to Anna as she dropped them in fifteen-milliliter glass vials. “We use that instead of alcohol for the DNA. It keeps the sample from degrading. Well, keeps it from degrading longer. Eventually everything goes.”

  “We’ll have to wait on the teeth and throat,” Ridley said. His hands were around the wolf’s muzzle, pulling with a degree of force. “Frozen solid.”

  There was a wrongness in Ridley’s hands on the animal’s mouth that disturbed Anna on a rudimentary level, the way watching people put a car in gear without fastening their seat belts or wave an unloaded gun in the direction of living things did.

  “Rigor or frozen frozen?” she asked.

  Ridley rocked back on his heels. “When it’s this cold, it doesn’t make much difference. It takes longer for specimens to thaw out than it would for rigor to go off.”

  “How long does rigor last in a wolf?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said without curiosity. Ridley exhibited a disinterest in anything regarding research animals that wasn’t study specific. Maybe a narrow mind was a strength for a researcher; the ability to focus on one tiny thing for a very long time.

  “No gloves!” Anna blurted out suddenly. That was the wrongness; Ridley was handling the animal without wearing surgical gloves.

  “We’ll put them on for the necropsy,” he said. “That gets messy.”

  Anna nodded. There was no need for gloves except to keep one’s nails clean. No AIDS, no hepatitis B or other blood-borne diseases. The risk of contamination was nil. A bit of human DNA sprinkled here and there amid the wolf DNA wouldn’t interfere with the investigation.

  The research, Anna corrected herself.

  The wolf’s hide had softened in the relative heat of the bunkhouse, and Ridley pulled up the wolf’s right eyebrow with his thumb. The dull eyes were gold colored, closer together and more slanted than the eyes of domestic dogs.

  “Great eyes,” he said as he pulled up the lid of the left.

  “Yes,” Anna said. “He looks Slavic, as if he hunted the great plains of Russia from the beginning of time.”

  Ridley stared at her blankly. “They’re not eaten,” he explained. “Ravens get the eyes first thing, usually.” He looked back to the wolf. “No cataracts. Even without seeing the teeth, my guess is this guy is two, three at most. He must have tried to run the pack or gotten himself crosswise with the alpha some other way, then lost the fight,” he said, rocking back on his heels. “The rest is going to have to wait till he thaws.”

  Ridley rose gracefully, his elegant hands held out in front of him like a pianist about to perform. He would wash them immediately with hot water dippered from the stovetop into a basin. The Winter Study team was fastidious about hygiene. Gastrointestinal upsets took on a whole new meaning when the bathroom was a one-holer and the temperature minus twelve degrees.

  Anna squatted in the vacated place by the wolf’s head. She knew she was making a pest of herself, getting in the way of the scientists and asking what were, to them, foolish questions, but she didn’t much care.

  A wolf.

  She’d yet to get over the wonder of it.

  “Wine time,” Bob said, glancing at his watch, and followed Ridley toward the common room.

  “Generator time,” Jonah said. “Since the good Adam, first man on Earth and not on time even once in the ensuing millennia, has not yet returned, firing it up falls to me.”

  Anna’d not noticed the light going. Her nose was scarcely four inches from the slash in the wolf’s throat. She laughed. “I just figured I was going blind.”

  “Let there be light,” Jonah said and left.

  Five minutes later the lights came on. Since Katherine showed no indication she was finished, and Anna had nothing better to do, she stayed and watched.

  “I’ve got a new toy,” Katherine said, more at ease with the men gone. She lovingly removed a box about
the size of two toasters from a duffel bag stacked with other bags and boxes on the unused cot in the corner of the kitchen. “They’ve been around for a while, but this is of a new generation.” With obvious pride, she removed the top half of the Styrofoam packing to reveal a machine that looked like a cross between a computer and an adding machine.

  When no explanation was forthcoming, Anna asked: “What does it do?”

  “It’s a PCR,” Katherine said. “A polymerase chain reaction machine. It’s brand-new technology.” Katherine stroked its plastic face. “American University bought it for this trip. The wolf/moose study is a kind of rock star in animal research studies.”

  Anna’d known that. In a world where the denizens hyperventilated over the discovery of a new kind of fruit fly larva, wolves would be glamour on paws. It was also the longest-running project of its kind in America and, despite how it seemed at the dinner table, one of the touted examples of how scientists and the Park Service worked and played well together.

  “The lab at Michigan Tech does the original fingerprinting,” Katherine went on as she set the PCR on the counter. “ISRO’s samples are sent there. They extract DNA using a Qiagen extraction kit. Then the sample is visualized, using a Beckman-Coul fragment analyzer. They do it at a bunch of different microsatellite loci in the genome.”

  It would have fallen to Katherine, as Menechinn’s graduate student, to teach the basic classes. Anna felt a twinge of pity for her students. Katherine’s mind moved in higher stratospheres of science, and it sounded as if her trips back to Earth had been infrequent.

  “You lost me at ‘Qiagen,’” Anna said.

  Katherine looked sheepish, oddly juxtapositional to the technically precise language she’d been spouting. “Sorry.” She bobbed her head in the birdlike way Anna’d noticed her first night on the island, the ducking-under-the-wing gesture when Bob had praised her graduate work.

  Katherine took a deep breath and looked into the corner behind Anna’s head. “Okay. The Qiagen… Okay. No. Okay, let’s go to the gel. No. Not yet…”

  Anna waited patiently as she struggled her way back to total ignorance so she might begin to help Anna understand.

  “Tiny fragments of the DNA are taken,” Katherine finally said, and her gaze came back to eye level. “From a lot of different places – not on the sample; from different places on the genome from the sample. All these tiny pieces have different weights. The fragments are… uh… squirted… into tubes of gel… like Jell-O, you know?”

  “I know Jell-O,” Anna said gravely.

  “Good. Good. So each little piece of DNA is in its own tube, and the tubes are all in a line like…” She groped mentally, probably through a bag of metaphors that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody without at least a master’s degree.

  “Like a bowling alley?”

  “Yes!” she said gratefully. “Like a bowling alley, but tiny. Very, very small. Small. Smaller than small-”

  “Tiny,” Anna helped her out.

  “Tiny. So each tiny bit is in its own tiny tube of gel in the tiny bowling alley. All in a line like the lanes.” She was warming up to the bowling alley and waited till Anna nodded her understanding before she went on. “Then the little bits are pushed down the tube full of gel – the lane – with the same amount of pressure. I mean it’s not pressure, it’s electricity. It’s called gel electrophoresis…”

  “I get the idea,” Anna said. “All the DNA bowling balls are rolled down their individual lanes with the same amount of force.”

  “Okay. That will work. The lighter ones go farther along the gel tubes than the heavier ones. When they all stop, you look at a readout; it looks sort of like a shadowy version of the old computer punch cards. A series of marks. Like on television when they lay one DNA readout over the other and all the marks are exactly the same and – Bingo! – you’ve got the criminal.

  “The lab at Michigan Tech has the DNA fingerprints for all of the wolves on Isle Royale. Whenever there’s a kill, a biotech or one of the Winter Study guys collects samples from the scat. Over time, they’ve built up a database on each of the wolves. Those ‘fingerprints’ are now in this smaller computer. When I put in the sample from the blood or the follicles that we took today,” she nodded toward the wolf melting into the newspapers at their feet, “I’ll be able to tell where he’s been – at what kills – which pack he belonged to, if he’d ever been at another pack’s kill, things like that.”

  In law enforcement, Anna often had to wait weeks for DNA tests to come back, and the kind of detail Katherine was talking about was exorbitantly expensive. Often, up to fifty separate tests had to be run.

  “Interesting,” she said noncommittally.

  Katherine heard the skepticism and cast back over her words to see where she’d gone wrong. When she wasn’t guarding, which she did whenever a member of the opposite sex was in the room, she was easy to read. Emotions passed just under the skin the way they do on the faces of very young children, leaving ripples in the eyes and mouth.

  “The PCR is a portable DNA fingerprinting device,” she said.

  The machines Anna had seen that tested for DNA markers were huge, computers and other paraphernalia taking up entire walls.

  “I first worked with one in the Northwest. Salmon. The fishermen can take only one kind and not the other, but you can’t tell which fish is which by looking at them. We used an earlier version of the PCR. The reason it can work is that it doesn’t do much. You set it to figure out just one or two things. Like the DNA for the two species of fish. Both fingerprints are known quantities and are already loaded in the PCR’s computer. So when you feed it the new sample, all it has to do is compare it with those already on file; it doesn’t have to figure out anything.

  “What this PCR does is simply show me the readout, what kind of line the balls make; that’s that wolf’s ‘fingerprint.’ All the ISRO wolves’ fingerprints are in this machine, so the fingerprint I get is compared to the existing fingerprints. Each existing fingerprint represents a wolf and each wolf has been assigned a number. I can look at my readout and see that number such and such left my sample. Or, in this case, is my sample. Then I e-mail the lab at Michigan Tech and add my data to theirs. Then they can look back in their files and see that my wolf – this wolf – ate a moose, say, at Rock Harbor in the winter of 2005 because somebody collected scat there at that time and its DNA matched the DNA I collected. Do you see?”

  She looked so desperate Anna might have said she understood even if she didn’t. “I get it,” Anna said. “We do it with regular fingerprints. They’re run through a national database and, if they match up, we know where our guy was when he left his print behind.”

  Relieved, Katherine went back to her machine. Anna watched for a while, but it was a one-woman show. Returning to the wolf, she crouched near its head. Fluids were beginning to seep from the corpse as it thawed. Before the animal was anywhere close to room temperature, the bunkhouse was going to smell like roadkill on a hot afternoon.

  Until the blood matted and the fur at the throat could be separated, the killing wound – or wounds – was impossible to see. Anna guessed the other wolf got in a lucky hit and punctured the carotid artery early in the fight. That would account for the fact that there were no lesser or defensive wounds – at least none she could see.

  The door to the front room banged and Anna rose. “Robin and Adam,” she said. Without being aware she was doing it, Anna had been listening for their return. Unconsciously she’d been gauging the level of light, the cold, the freshening wind and listening for the radio. Suddenly angry, she demanded of Katherine, “Did you hear Robin radio in?”

  “I don’t think Robin carries a radio,” Katherine said distractedly.

  The woman’s interest was gone to scat. Anna left her.

  SCAT WAS THE TOPIC OF CONVERSATION at the dinner table. Robin and Adam had not seen Middle pack as it fled Washington Harbor, but they’d come across their tracks. Over dinner – a cassero
le Ridley had concocted with pasta, frozen peas and chicken – Robin outlined her path.

  “We hiked toward Malone Bay. We got as far as the last ridge before you go down to Siskiwit,” Robin said in her soft cheery voice.

  Eight or nine miles, if Anna remembered correctly.

  “Then we split up, and I came back cross-country. Lots of swamps. Downed stuff. I saw moose tracks, then I came across the wolves’ trail and followed them back. What scared them off the harbor?”

  “We ran out of water,” Ridley said in the shorthand of the island.

  Anna was still doing the math. Came back cross-country. Add a couple of miles to the return trip. Nine miles out, eleven or twelve back.

  “We got tons of samples. They’re in the kitchen with the wolf.”

  Twenty miles of rough country, freezing temperatures, carrying a backpack full of shit.

  Comforting herself with the knowledge that Robin was nearly a quarter century younger than she and an Olympic contender, Anna submerged her consciousness in the food. She was just short of shoveling it in, minding her table manners only by an act of will. Calories being units of heat, a concept she’d learned in high school chemistry class, was finally making sense.

  “I wish I’d had a camera,” Robin said around a mouthful of toast with peanut butter and jam – a side dish served with every meal.

  “One of the wolves had huge feet. Like twice as big as the others. Then, about halfway between Siskiwit and Windigo, they aren’t there anymore. It must have joined the pack on a rocky place. I looked for its tracks all the way back but couldn’t find where it had caught up with the others.”

  “Twice as big?” Bob said with a lifted eyebrow and an avuncular smile.

  Katherine ducked her head, letting her hair fall over her face in a screen. Robin stared straight into Menechinn’s eyes. “Twice as big,” she said without a hint of defensiveness. Anna smiled. Olympic training had toughened more than the girl’s body.