Winter Study (23 page)

“The ice on Intermediate is good. You shouldn’t have broken through.”

“It happens,” Anna said. Then, to make Robin feel better: “I jumped.”

“I can’t figure out what made the ice break like that. It should have been fine. You were where I said to place the trap?”

Anna nodded and took another sip of Ovaltine.

“It makes no sense. I am so sorry. You could have died.”

“Nah,” Anna said. “Bob’s making it all up. We formed a polar bear club and he chickened out at the last minute.”

“Don’t joke,” Robin pleaded. “You really could have died.”

Robin
was obsessing and Anna didn’t know how to stop her. As a young woman
leading her first backcountry trips, Anna had felt the same way a few
times when people in her care, following her instructions, were
endangered. She hoped she hadn’t carried on as much as Robin was. The
biotech was three pews short of banging her heart with her fist and
crying,

“Mea culpa, mea culpa.”

“Lots of things don’t make sense,” Anna said reasonably.

“It
couldn’t have broken.” Robin shook her head, her hair swinging in the
silvery light from the window over the small dining table. The sun had
creaked out, making an appearance between fronts. They had been without
showers for days, during most of which they wore hats and hoods crammed
on their heads, yet Robin’s hair was shining, silken.

“Go
figure,” Anna said aloud. She didn’t bother to explain she was
remarking on the hair. “Go figure” was one of those contentless
statements that mean whatever the listener chooses to believe they mean.

During
Bob’s regaling, Robin’s breast-beating and Anna’s slurping of hot
drinks, Katherine had been unusually quiet. She was retiring by nature,
but since Anna had been dried, warmed and declared officially among the
living Katherine had not uttered a word. She’d not congratulated Bob on
his bravery or marveled at his Samson-like strength; she’d not asked
Anna what it was like to die or live. Like the Cheshire cat, she had
slowly disappeared, till all that remained was the reflection of the
window’s light on the rim of her spectacles. Wordlessly, making eye
contact with no one, she’d drifted from the stool by the door to the
straight-backed kitchen chair tucked next to the water heater to a
footlocker jammed into the space between the foot of the bunk beds and
the wall that was so narrow the locker had to be pulled out to be
opened. On this low bench, Katherine had drawn her back to the wall and
her feet up on the locker, a folded bit of woman tucked in a dark
corner.

“What
are you hiding from, Kathy?” Bob said in a voice loud enough that Anna
watched the liquid in her mug shiver as the aftershocks struck its
ceramic shores.

Katherine raised her head, her eyes invisible behind her glasses. “Just trying to stay out of the way,” she said.

“You’re not in the way,” Robin reassured her. In such cramped quarters, they all were in the way all the time.

“Bob
once carried me,” Katherine blurted out. “He carried me up five flights
of stairs.” Her voice had an edge, as if she was making a point.

“Hey, careful, my head will get too big,” Bob said with the first show of humility Anna’d seen.

“I don’t really remember it,” Katherine went on. “I was out cold.”

Bob laughed and Katherine shrank back into her self-made cave.

Anna’s
thoughts sank to the lake bottom, how deep the silence had been, how
like crystal the water, how the sand had seemed to go forever, never
disappearing in the distance but merging with it, the two becoming one,
how she had sensed she would be the lake when she breathed it, how she
had come to want to breathe it, not because she wanted to die, or
because she had to, but because she knew she teetered on the brink of
something vast and a part of her was excited to step off that brink and
experience the vastness.

ARRAYED
IN THE FRILLY APRON, Bob started dinner. Onions frying in butter
smelled of home and safety and warmth, but for once Anna wasn’t hungry.
Her fingers loosened around the mug she held, but it didn’t fall into
her lap, spilling the dregs of her drink. Other hands lifted it from
her. Robin. Anna hadn’t the energy to open her eyes, but she could
smell the biotech. Like onions and butter, Robin smelled of life and
rich earth, of young plants pushing up after the rain, meadow grass
when it’s crushed underfoot.

Soft hands touched her face, brushed the lank hair from her forehead.

Gray,

Anna
remembered: red and gray, salt and cinnamon. Robin stroked her cheek
and Anna felt the silky whisk of her ancient orange tiger cat
Piedmont’s tail, followed by the rasp of his tongue, a tongue designed
to abrade flesh from bone.

Robin,

she reminded herself,

calluses, hardworking hands.

“I am so sorry,” Robin whispered. A kiss or a tear settled on Anna’s cheekbone.

“De nada.”

Anna’s lips moved, but if they made a sound she was asleep before she heard it.

ANNA
SHOULD HAVE slept like the dead — or the very nearly dead — but she was
troubled by dreams and the revenge of muscles she’d abused. Her legs
flinched and quivered and sent mixed messages to her brain, unable to
decide whether they were hurting or bored. She wasn’t asleep when the
beeping started.

Either
Robin shared Anna’s insomnia or was a light sleeper. She wriggled out
of her sleeping bag and went to the radio receiver on the table.

“Which one?” Robin whispered.

“Between
Intermediate and Richie, about a quarter of a mile from where you went
in.” She clicked on her headlamp. Using its light, she began pumping
the Coleman lantern. Colemans worked. They’d worked forever, lighting
places electricity would not. But they were noisy machines, clanking in
the preparation and hissing like a thousand angry snakes when lit.
Katherine and Bob woke up.

“What is it?” Katherine asked, her voice fogged with sleep.

“We’ve trapped a wolf,” Robin told her. She was already pulling on her ski pants.

Anna swung her legs, bag and all, over the edge of the bottom bunk and sat up.

“You’re not going,” Robin said.

“I’m going,” Anna replied. She stood up and fell down. “I’m

not

going,” she admitted from the floor. “You’re not going alone,” she insisted.

They
both looked at Bob. He stared back at them. The Coleman was not a
cosmetic light, and he looked pasty and scared. “I’m not Superman,” he
said in a tone just short of surly. “I’ve already saved one of you
today. Leave the fucking wolf in the trap till morning.”

“It could die,” Robin said and sat in the straight-backed kitchen chair to put on her mukluks.

“I’ll
go.” This was from the top bunk. Anna, who had stayed on the floor
rather than risk the humiliation of collapsing again, looked up at the
researcher. The angle was bizarre; she was looking through Katherine’s
stocking feet up between her knees where they bent over the edge of the
mattress to a head small with distance. Katherine was as frightened as
Bob, and probably nearly as tired, but she meant to go.

Courage and bravado,

Anna
thought. It sounded like a TV cop duo. Anna sucked it up and tried
again to rise. She made it to hands and knees, but the room spun, and
she coughed till her chest ached with the spasms.

“Get
in bed,” Robin said. She picked up a radio from the table and called
Ridley. He radioed back immediately. Robin told him about the motion
detector going off.

“If Anna’s not up to it, take Bob with you,” Ridley said.

Bob moved back, legs still in his sleeping bag, and leaned against the wall, folding his arms over his chest.

“It’s a fool’s errand,” he said.

“Bob’s done in,” Robin said into the mike.

There was a long moment of crackling silence, then Ridley said:

“I
think there’s an old pair of skis in the cabin. You go, take the jab
stick. If we’ve got a wolf, just put him out and set him free. He
should wake up and get moving before he freezes to death. You can reset
the trap tomorrow. Keep me posted.”

The
jab stick was what it sounded like, a long stick with a syringe on the
end, loaded with ketamine and xylazine. A trapped wolf was jabbed with
it. In five minutes or so, the animal would go down long enough for the
study team to do their work.

The
skis and poles were stowed in the rafters. Robin had them down in a
minute and was prying off the bindings with a butter knife. “No boots,”
she said when Anna asked. She dug in her backpack and pulled out a roll
of silver duct tape. “Voilà!” She began taping the toes of her mukluks
to the skis.

“Radio and flashlight,” Anna reminded her as she jerked open the cabin door, skis with the unfilled boots over her shoulder.

“Got them.”

The
door slammed shut. Life had gone out of the cabin. Anna and Katherine
and Bob wavered in the hissing light of the Coleman, ghosts left behind
in an empty house.

“This
study should be shut down,” Bob announced. “Border security for sure,
but it’s run without any attention to the safety of the scientists. If
they haven’t figured it out in fifty years, they’re not going to.
Wolves eat moose; moose eat grass — how hard is that?”

“Moose don’t eat grass,” Anna said. “Moose eat trees.”

“New
DNA,” Katherine said. “It might be a big deal, Bob.” This was the
second time Katherine had stood up for herself. Anna liked it. Bob
didn’t.

“They
can’t shut the study down now,” Anna interjected to deflect whatever
barb Menechinn was going to throw at his assistant. “New information.
Maybe a hybrid.”