Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  “That’s your work tomorrow,” Ridley said. “I’ll give you the camera.”

  “How about you, Adam? Did you see tracks twice as big as a normal wolf’s?” Bob asked. He winked at Robin to show there were no hard feelings.

  “We’d split up, remember?” Adam said neutrally.

  “Why don’t you go out with Robin tomorrow,” Ridley suggested to Bob. “See for yourself. I’m sure Robin could use somebody to carry the camera.”

  Robin took a huge bite of toast to cover her smile. Given the chance, Anna guessed she could – and would – hike Menechinn into an early grave.

  “No.”

  Katherine was the one who spoke. Bob, neatly lifted off the hook, gave her a slow smile. She didn’t smile back. With everyone looking at her, Katherine lost her confidence. “I need some help,” she stammered. “I need Dr. Menechinn to help me with the PCR.”

  The last words were almost a whisper. “Excuse me,” she said and left the table abruptly.

  Adam broke the awkward silence that followed. “Mind if I tag along with Robin tomorrow or has somebody busted something I have to fix?”

  “Go,” Ridley said.

  Anna did the dishes alone. After the fit of jealousy, Katherine hadn’t come back. If it was jealousy. That didn’t feel quite right, but Anna had no better explanation. Whatever the reason, the researcher had hid out with her PCR. She’d identified the samples collected on the harbor ice, but there was all that terrific new poop Robin brought back.

  When the washing was done, Anna returned to the common room to find it empty. All six members of the Winter Study team were in the kitchen-cum-morgue crowded around Katherine’s PCR. With the thawing wolf, a spare cot and everybody’s luggage taking up most of the floor, the six of them were crowded two deep at the counter.

  “I don’t think this sample came from any ISRO wolf,” Katherine was saying as Anna slipped in to see what the show was about. “It doesn’t match up with any of the fingerprints Michigan downloaded onto the PCR.”

  “This year’s pup,” Bob said. “Not on the radar yet.”

  Anna weaseled past him. Ridley and Katherine, heads almost touching, were poring over a strip of paper.

  “There are other things,” Katherine said.

  “Every wolf on ISRO descended from the one breeding pair that came across the ice,” Ridley told Menechinn. “They’ve got distinct genetic markers. The obvious one is the mutation of the spine. About half of ISRO’s wolves have an extra vertebra. But their DNA marks them as members of a single family. Different from unrelated wolves. This isn’t an island wolf. It’s wolf DNA but weird.”

  Anna loved it when scientists talked technical.

  Ridley pressed the DNA readout flat on the counter; next to it, he placed another, a known DNA readout of an island wolf, and studied the two together. “It’s like wolf plus… something.”

  “The sample got tainted,” Bob said.

  “Maybe.” Katherine was looking not at the readout but out the window toward where they’d seen the pack cross the compound.

  She was thinking about the huge tracks Robin had seen, Anna would have bet on it.

  6

  The following day, the promised snow began to fall. Robin laced up her mukluks, shouldered her army-issue rucksack and headed out to photograph the track of the gigantic hound with Adam. The others slept late and dawdled over breakfast. The wolf pack on the ice had changed the daily habits of the researchers. Usually, when the sky was clear and there was little wind, Ridley would spend the day in the air with Jonah watching and photographing the wolves. When the weather was too bad to fly, there were chores, but not enough to keep them busy.

  For most of breakfast, they chewed over the DNA Katherine had identified as alien. The wolf that had left the scat wasn’t from the island. At first, Anna hadn’t grasped the magnitude of that revelation. Wolves had come across the ice once, had they not? It was only when Ridley reminded her that the lake hadn’t frozen over in nearly thirty years that she understood. A wolf in the wild had to be lucky and strong to live ten years. The wolf who’d left scat along the Greenstone Trail to Siskiwit Lake would have to have been the Methuselah of wolf kind to have traversed the last ice bridge.

  This wolf had come to the island in some other manner. Wolves could swim, but they could not swim eighteen miles. That left boat, ski plane, seaplane, canoe, kayak or Ski-Doo. A pup loosed by a misguided do-gooder? A wolf/dog hybrid bred in domesticity, the owner grows bored with it and lets it “go free” on the island? Had a wolf/dog hybrid been raised to be vicious, attacked somebody and, rather than kill it, the owner dumped it at a campground or in the bay?

  This last was the most probable. Wolves’ reputation as cold-blooded killers of little girls in red capes was unearned. No one around the breakfast table could think of a single recorded incident in their lifetimes or that of their parents. In 2005, a presumed wolf/ human killing had been reported, but the attack animal turned out to be a bear.

  What there had been were attacks on people by wolf/dog hybrids, kept and bred by dog owners. Like any animal that cannot be fully domesticated, these breeds were volatile. The owners weren’t any better. Most obtained wolf/dog hybrids because they wanted a big, scary, mean dog or, worse – illegal but available in all fifty states – a fighting dog. Brutal attacks by these animals had stirred up public opinion to the point that, in many urban areas, it was illegal to own or keep a wolf/dog hybrid.

  Jonah tired of saying “wolf/dog hybrid” first and dubbed the speculative animal a “wog.”

  A wog could have been dumped on the island at any time, but most likely in the last six or seven months. Had the creature been in the park the previous winter, Ridley believed there would have been sign of it, a sighting or scat or the outsized paw prints Robin had reported.

  Most domesticated – or even partially domesticated – animals couldn’t survive in the wilderness for long, but if the wog was as big as the tracks Robin found suggested, and trained to kill, it might have joined – or taken over – a pack. This could explain why the pack had apparently lost its fear of humans and sauntered through the bunkhouse area. If the wog were big enough and fierce enough, it could have killed the wolf now decomposing in the kitchen, dispatched it so quickly there were no signs of a fight.

  “Any alien wolf or wolf/dog hybrid,” Bob declared, pointedly refusing to use Jonah’s word, “would be killed by any pack that came across it.”

  “What if it was big, really big?” Katherine said.

  “It’s not one-on-one in a fair fight, Kathy,” Bob said with a smile that pushed his cheeks up till his eyes were crescent moons. The smile notwithstanding, the “Kathy” was a clear rebuke. “The pack would kill it.”

  “Maybe not,” Ridley said. “If there was a breeding slot open, the wolf might be assimilated.”

  Bob snorted. “Pretty hard to arrange,” he said.

  “It could happen by chance,” Ridley said. Anna wasn’t sure whether he believed it or was just baiting the other man. “Chance is the only reason we have wolves here at all. A big enough, aggressive enough wog might pull it off.”

  The breakfast club finally broke up: Ridley to his laptop to work on reports, Jonah to wander the bunkhouse looking for somebody to pester and Bob to the chair closest to the woodstove to read through the daily log, a thick, three-ring binder full of the forms provided for record keeping. The park service was full of such information-gathering tools. For the most part, they were a tedium of pages hurriedly filled in by the lowest-ranking member of any team. On the island, the biotech did it each day. Temperature at sunrise, at sunset, snowfall, comments; office closets were full of these binders, detailing one study or another. As far as Anna knew, Bob was the first person to actually look at one.

  For a while, she amused herself in the DNA lab kitchen, watching Katherine pore over her alien sample, running and rerunning it only to get the same answer. When that palled and looking at the wolf, who was beginning to s
mell, lost its edge, Anna began drifting back toward the common room.

  “Anna?”

  It was the first time Katherine had spoken in a quarter of an hour and her voice was so low Anna barely caught it. She looked back. The researcher was still bent over her PCR, her back to the room.

  “I’m here,” Anna said. She, too, whispered though she’d not meant to.

  “Tell Robin to stay away from Bob,” Katherine said quietly and without turning. Anna waited for further illumination on the subject, but it was not forthcoming.

  “Sure,” she said. Then, in hopes it would ease Katherine’s mind: “She’s got a boyfriend.”

  Katherine acted as if she’d not heard. After a moment, Anna left the kitchen and wandered into the common room. Standing between the door and the stove, she stared at Bob, trying to figure out why anybody would defend that particular chunk of turf.

  “Looks like a Christmas card, doesn’t it?” he said genially.

  She looked out the picture widow. The bunkhouse had a wide deck with a railing. She remembered potluck suppers there the summer she’d worked boat patrol. Now it was three-quarters covered with wood cut by the NPS and stacked there for the use of the Winter Study. The sky was lost in the falling flakes, birch and spruce trees surrounding the cleared area veiled in drifting snow, a muted study in black and white.

  Anna pulled on a sweater, stepped into her clogs and went outside. In Rocky Mountain, even in the backcountry, there was sound: a jet high overhead, birds singing, water running, wind through the pine trees, squirrels scuffling in the duff. In Mississippi, life buzzed and chirped year-round. Even Texas wasn’t silent; when all else failed, the wind howled and whispered and suggested angry things.

  Here, in the thick fall of snow, the silence was absolute. In an indefinable way, even silence was muffled by the slow white flakes.

  Anna hated to think of these winters being peopled by lodges, snowmobiles and skiers and beer. Though she’d never come to the island in January again if she could help it, she wanted to know there was a place where silence lived.

  Opening the park in winter would effectively shut the study down. The noise and humanity attendant on a winter resort destination would disrupt the wolves to the point the study would no longer be viable.

  There was no reason for Homeland Security to send one of their own to evaluate it. The NPS had debated every salient point regarding the study, first with David Mech, then Rolf Peterson and now Ridley Murray. The research was prestigious, high-profile and cheap. People loved the wolves, loved knowing they were around. At every campfire talk, regardless of the subject, the first question was always, “How many wolves are there?”

  Pursuing its mandate to keep America’s borders safe, Homeland Security needed to plug up corridors used by unsavory aliens. Big Bend in Texas bordered on Mexico, as did Organ Pipe. Glacier, Isle Royale and Voyageurs national parks shared a border with Canada. Many national parks had stretches of seacoast within their boundaries. If Anna squinted and tilted her head, she could vaguely see the logic of souping up security in these areas, but the border parks were a drop in the bucket when one looked at the landmass of the USA. That which was cynical in her suggested the war on terror had gone after the parks because they were high-profile. “Protecting Our Parks” made a much better headline than “Taking Away Your Civil Rights.”

  But why bring in anybody? And why Bob Menechinn? He was more interested in collecting trophy heads than doing science. Unless he was here to rubber-stamp what Homeland Security wanted stamped. Yet when the agency contacted the park and Winter Study team with a list of possible evaluators, Ridley recommended Menechinn. Was it because Menechinn could be bought? Bought with what money? Professors weren’t exactly overpaid. The NPS wouldn’t touch a deal like that. Maybe Michigan Tech. Maybe an angel who loved the park had ponied up.

  ROBIN RETURNED EARLY. Adam wasn’t with her. So dull was the day, Robin’s return was heralded with great excitement. She had pictures of the track of the gigantic hound. The camera was plugged into Ridley’s laptop, and they gathered around to see if the paw prints were all they’d been advertised to be.

  Robin had traveled fast, but there’d been at least a half an inch of snowfall before she’d reached her destination. The light was lousy for photographing tracks, directionless and muted. Tracking was best in the morning and at sundown, when the light was low enough it caught the minute contours of the prints. She’d used a pen for scale – the proper tool was a small ruler, but a pen or a dime was often as good as it got.

  Shouldering Jonah aside, Anna leaned in for a better view.

  The paw prints did appear significantly larger than those of the other wolves, but, in the diffuse light and with the snow obliterating the edges, it was hard to be sure they had actually been made by as large an animal as they suggested.

  “They could have been made when a normal-sized wolf was running. Or this one here.” Robin leaned in, and her long hair fell across Ridley’s shoulder. He didn’t seem aware of it. For all Bob’s covert flirting and Jonah’s overt silliness, Ridley, the young alpha of this pack, had evidently mated for life. Robin put the tip of a well-shaped finger with cracked skin and a broken nail on the screen. “It could even have been made by a second wolf stepping almost but not exactly in the first one’s track. It seemed clearer before, but now I don’t know.”

  “Anna saw something,” Jonah said.

  Anna’d been thinking the same thing but didn’t want to commit herself. “Thought being the key word,” she said, but all eyes were on her. “On the way back from Siskiwit, I saw what looked like a huge wolf curled under the branches of a tree. It could have been anything, but it looked like a wolf.”

  “Huge?” Ridley questioned the word.

  “Half to twice the size of a normal alpha.”

  “Wolves here run seventy to eighty-five pounds. Are you talking a hundred-and-sixty-pound wolf?” Ridley asked skeptically.

  “Like I said, thought is the key word.”

  “And you thought you saw huge tracks.” This was to Robin, and Anna couldn’t tell if Ridley believed them or not. He’d donned his scientist’s mien and she couldn’t read past it.

  “I saw them,” Robin said firmly, abandoning her earlier wavering.

  “Okay,” Ridley said, and: “Okay.” The second okay was more to himself than the others, and Anna wondered what he was giving himself permission to do.

  7

  “Good morning, campers!” Ridley said as they settled down to their oatmeal the following morning. Anna got a bad feeling and shoveled more of the thick porridge into her mouth.

  “Normally we don’t trap wolves in winter – too great a danger of a foot freezing off in the trap before we get there,” Ridley said to the group.

  “Not to mention people’s feet freezing off,” Adam put in.

  “But we’ve done it before,” Ridley went on, ignoring the aside.

  “Two years ago, we thought we had a virus threatening the population and couldn’t wait till summer to check it out, and we’ve had to do it a time or two when we couldn’t get what we needed to do finished in the summer.” He took a topographical map of the island he had folded at his elbow and spread it out, shoving jam and peanut butter and milk aside. Anna held on to her bowl and spoon lest it be removed in the sweep.

  “I don’t know what we’ve got going this winter, but I don’t think it can wait till summer. If somebody dumped an animal here, chances are it won’t survive the winter, but it might live to reproduce or just screw up the wolves’ patterns. Worst case, it will reinfect them with parvo or some other virus. ISRO wolves have isolation for protection, but they’ve not been exposed to mainland diseases and have little tolerance for that kind of exposure.”

  Ridley was rather enjoying the lecture, but Anna sensed beneath it he was nervous about the decision. Customarily there were four experienced wolf researchers on Winter Study. With Rolf Peterson retiring and the extra beds taken up by Homeland
Security and Anna, Ridley was having to deal with greenhorns. Ignorant greenhorns.

  “You,” he said to Robin, “and you,” looking at Anna, “and Bob and you, Katherine, will hike up to the Malone Bay area. There’s a cabin there you can base yourselves out of, but plan on a couple nights of winter camping.” He traced a finger up the Greenstone toward Malone.

  Sending Robin made sense: she was an experienced trapper and winter camper. He’d included Anna to assist Robin and further her education in prey/predator relationships. Anna suspected he was sending Bob and Katherine just to get rid of them.

  Malone Bay was fourteen or fifteen miles over ridges. The trail was only moderately difficult and stunningly beautiful, with a canopy of trees that suddenly opened to frame views of Lake Superior. Robin could make it in a day even under January conditions. Anna wasn’t sure she could, not if she had to carry any significant weight. Katherine would be the slowest and for that Anna was grateful. It was a far better thing to be graciously considerate of a weak link than to have to admit to being one. They would need to overnight on the Greenstone Trail.

  Camping in the glow of long summer evenings in the mountains, waking on the shores of a lake to the crisp bite of autumn on the air, sleeping away a hot afternoon beneath an overhang of sculpted rock in a desert creek bed: this was the stuff of heaven. Anna would – and had – walked days, carrying a heavy pack on her back, to enjoy these fragments of paradise.

  Dragging oneself out of an always-inadequate down bag, hoarfrost on the tent ceiling shattering into a thousand needles of ice stinging one’s cheeks, struck her as a pastime slightly more attractive than wearing a hair shirt, yet still not as much fun as self-flagellation. The only upside she could think of was that, since it was a work assignment, she would not be expected to have fun. “Fun” froze at about fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit.

  With the front sitting on the island, Jonah couldn’t fly. Everything had to be packed in. A wolf trap, including transmitter and eight feet of kinkless chain, weighed ten pounds. Anna and Robin each carried four. Because of her small frame and lack of backwoods experience, Katherine was given only two; still, her pack weighed in at forty-two pounds, eleven more than was optimum for a woman her size. Bob carried six traps. With the tent and other supplies, his pack weighed seventy-five pounds. He swung it onto his back with a minimum of effort, and Anna was impressed. She was less impressed when it became clear he wasn’t accustomed to backpacking. Ridley had to adjust his buckles and straps. Neither man was comfortable with the process. Anna got the feeling that Ridley didn’t like to be that close to Menechinn and Menechinn didn’t like having his ignorance made public.