Winter Study (31 page)

“What’s with Ridley and Adam?” Anna asked.

“Who
knows,” Robin replied. Her voice was hollow, as if part of her said the
expected words while another, greater part of her was someplace else.
Someplace where nightmare was the special of the day.

“How are you doing?” Anna asked. “My strength of ten men is down to about eight-point-five,” she admitted. “Are you okay?”

“Bob took my light.”

The biotech was crying. Anna couldn’t see it but tears were breaking in her words.

“Let me pull the Sked for a while,” Anna said, wondering if she could make good on the offer.

“No.”

Maybe
it would be good for Robin to keep working, keep moving, so Anna didn’t
argue with her. She didn’t get up either. In a moment she would, she
promised herself.

The
wind stopped, the trees ceased their muttering and silence as cold and
deep as an ice cave poured down. Into that silence came the sound Anna
had heard before, stealthy movement in the trees to their left. Robin
heard it too. In the glow of the flashlight, Anna saw her head jerk as
if on a string; she uttered a strangled cry and began to swing the
light in erratic arcs across the landscape. Suddenly illuminated, and
as suddenly vanishing back into the dark, trunks and white and rocks
flashed by, and for a second Anna felt as if she were falling.

Whether
a curious moose, a band of squirrels or a slavering wog was with them,
they couldn’t stay where they were. Ridley and Bob were already out of
sight. Without light, Ridley couldn’t come back to help them; all he
could do was follow Bob’s flashlight the way a lost ship follows the
flashing of a buoy. Shaking her head to clear it, Anna blinked a few
times. “We better get going.”

Without
a word, Robin put her weight behind the harness and pulled. From her
kneeling position, Anna pushed on the back of the Sked, breaking it
free of where it had frozen to the snow while they’d stopped. A crack,
a lurch, and it was moving. A crack, a lurch, and Anna was on her feet
moving as well. Robin covered more ground than Ridley had, either not
so considerate of Anna slogging behind or more anxious to get back to
the main trail and then the bunkhouse.

Anna
lifted one foot, then the other, and stayed upright, but the Sked drew
away little by little. When the body, the biotech and the light source
were several yards ahead, and traveling ever faster, Anna swallowed her
pride and called out.

“Hold up. You’re killing me.”

The
light stopped. Anna’s breath sawed in her ears as she plowed through
the snow. Reaching the Sked, she fell to her knees. She hadn’t spent so
much time on her knees since she went to Catholic school. It crossed
her mind that a little praying might not hurt anything. With the wog
and the munched-up graduate student, the slithery noises and the
gigantic paw prints, all she could think of was the dyslexic who stayed
up all night worrying about whether or not there was a dog.

She
laughed shortly, and the bark of sound made the ensuing silence deeper.
Through the thick, black quiet came the distinct crack of a twig
snapping and a swish as of a tail sweeping over the snow. Not
squirrels; two ounces of rodent didn’t snap twigs. Not a moose; moose
were not subtle creatures.

“Stop
it!” Robin screamed. Anna squawked, scared half out of her wits by the
sudden cry. At first, she thought Robin was yelling at her — fatigue
and stretched nerves made the best of women into shrews — but she was
yelling at the dark and the trees, at the wog and the windigo, the ice
and the night.

The biotech, so seemingly strong and untiring, was breaking apart.

Delayed reaction,

Anna
thought. It had to be; the woman was cool efficiency itself first when
photographing the slaughtered wolf, then assisting with the packaging
of the slaughtered researcher. She’d held up till near the end. Then
she’d started unraveling.

“It’s
okay,” Anna said. “We’re going to be okay.” With a huge effort but no
grunt, she stood without using her hands to push herself up.

“Let’s go. It’s nothing. The wind plays tricks.”

“It
isn’t nothing,” Robin hissed at her. “It’s not fucking nothing!” she
yelled at the dark. She began thrusting the flashlight beam into the
trees, stabbing, as evil Nazis did with bayonets into haystacks in old
movies.

Anna made her way to the front of the sled, the

mush

of
her boots through the snow covering whatever sound the followers in the
woods might have been making. She pried the flashlight from Robin’s
fingers. “We’ll walk together,” she said. “If the Sked hangs up, I’ll
go back. Come on now.”

Robin’s tears metastasized; she sobbed, snot running from her nose, tears freezing in opaque droplets on her cheeks.

“Pull,” Anna said.

Through
thick down gloves, Anna felt her hand being taken. Robin had reached
out and taken it, two puffed, oversized hands, neither of which could
feel anything but the pressure of the other, clinging together in the
dark.

“Ridley!” Anna yelled. “We could use some help back here!”

There was no answer. Like a will-o’-the-wisp, Bob’s stolen light had led Ridley astray. Ahead was only darkness and silence.

“Fuck
them,” she said cheerily. “We’re better off without them.” She squeezed
Robin’s hand in what she hoped was a reassuring manner and tucked her
other arm through the harness rope where it stretched down to the Sked.
She could take some of the weight off the younger woman’s shoulders,
literally if not metaphorically.

For
twenty minutes, they labored on without speaking. Twice the Sked caught
on downed tree limbs and twice Anna trudged back to free it. The act of
pretending to be stronger and braver than she was helped. How long she
could run on this low-octane fuel, she didn’t know. Robin had stopped
crying and went forward like a skiing machine. Her face, when Anna
caught glimpses of it in the reflected light, was filled with such
bleak hopelessness it was scary. Drawing breath, Anna was about to
shout for Ridley again — not that she thought he’d answer but just to
make a fierce noise against the darkness — when something beat her to
it.

The
howl of a wolf ululated through the frigid night, leaving not a ripple;
a round, perfect sound that too many stories and too many movies imbued
with the absolute distillation of terror. Anna felt the hairs on her
body stand on end as her skin tightened. Her mouth was suddenly dry,
and she wanted nothing more than to run away, leave Robin and what was
left of Katherine to appease whatever it was, wolf or wog or the
ancient eater of flesh the Ojibwa told of.

In
the falling-apart arena, Robin beat her to the punch. She dropped like
a stone, gloved hands over her ears, knees up under her chin, then
rolled over into the fetal position. The flashlight hit the snow and
disappeared into the powder, leaving only a glow where it had gone
under.

Anna
retrieved the light and crouched down, one arm across Robin. “Shh,
shhh,” she murmured automatically. “It’s just a howl. They howl to say
hi. That’s all.” Without being aware she was doing so, Anna was talking
to the very little part of Robin, the part that covered her ears and
curled up and hid under the covers when the monster was in the room.
The adult Robin knew more about wolves than Anna did.

The
howl came again. This time it had a sorrowful, almost questioning tone.
Anna would have been hard-pressed to describe it, but on the musical
glissando, where the singer carried the notes skyward, there was a
longing.

“Wolves
won’t hurt you,” Anna said, patting Robin. “Wolves don’t eat people.”
Then she remembered what they pulled behind them in a trough of tin.
“Anyway, they don’t eat when they’re full,” she muttered.

“Come on,” she said, changing tactics. “Up. Get up. We’re moving.” She uncurled Robin and forced her hands away from her ears.

“Stand while I untangle you.”

When
the harness and the pull ropes were straight, Anna gave the front of
Robin’s parka a tug, much the way she used to give her horse Gideon
back in Texas a tug to get him to go.

Robin
didn’t budge. She turned her head as if she heard something besides the
howling, a call from the woods that was above the frequencies humans
could hear. For a long time, she stood, staring, and a cold more severe
than winter crept deep past Anna’s bones and into her brain.

“We’ve
got to go.” She’d meant to say the words in a normal way, a comforting,
leaving-the-mall-before-traffic kind of way. What came out was a squeak
that would have emasculated the tiniest vole. She said it again and had
a better result.

If
Robin heard, she showed no sign. She showed no sign of knowing Anna was
close, so close her fists were doubled in the front of her parka.

“They’ve decided to kill,” Robin said.

Her voice held the same note of sorrow as the howl.

18

Anna
would have thought any self-respecting werewolf or wog would have taken
Robin’s show of weakness as an invitation to come to dinner, but, after
she’d cried out, the slithery, sneaky sounds of their uninvited escort
ceased. Robin didn’t bounce back. Youth and strength and athleticism
went out of her. Her skis tangled and tripped her as if she were the
rankest novice. She stumbled and fell, and each time it was harder for
Anna to get her up. Finally Anna removed Robin’s skis, stowed them on
the Sked and put the harness on her own shoulders. To keep the biotech
close, she insisted Robin keep one hand on the lead rope and help.

Help

was
the word Anna used to try to break through the walls that had formed
around the young woman’s brain and were suffocating her body. Robin had
lost even the strength to close her fingers tightly enough to keep her
hand from constantly falling away from the rope and her feet from
slowing to a stop.

The
flashlight began to brown out. Ski tracks leading back to the main
trail were filling with blowing snow, becoming harder and harder to
follow. Wind carved up the storm and slung freezing snow at them from
every direction. Anna’s eyes watered and the tears froze her lashes
together. The drag of the Sked on her shoulders grew heavier. Her feet
turned to chunks of concrete in leaden boots the size of canoes.

Ridley never came back. Then Anna forgot she’d once hoped he would.