Winter Study (11 page)

“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 casserole 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.

“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?