Winter Study (24 page)

Bob
dropped that line of conversation and launched into a lecture about how
personal safety was number one with professional big game hunters. Anna
didn’t hear it; she was listening for the radio.

She didn’t have long to wait. Robin radioed Ridley. Anna turned the volume up.

“I’m
here,” the biotech said. She’d covered the miles in a startlingly brief
time and didn’t even sound out of breath. Anna remembered she’d spent
most of her life on skis, racing and shooting. Anna wished she had a
rifle with her tonight.

“What have you got?” Ridley asked.

“Nothing.”
Now she sounded breathless. “The trap and line have been torn all to
hell. Whatever was in the foothold ripped free. The metal is bent and
there’s blood everywhere.”

“Get out of there,” Anna whispered at the same moment Ridley said: “Get out of there.”

The radio went silent.

14

Bob
talked. Anna listened for the radio. Katherine sat lost in thoughts
Anna could only guess at. More than twice the time it had taken her to
ski to the trap site elapsed. Robin did not return. Anna called on the
radio and got no answer. The second time she radioed, the biotech’s
voice came back. Robin was almost to the cabin. She did not say what
had kept her.

Anna
didn’t ask. The night was clear and full of stars. Robin was an
excellent cross-country skier. Had it been Anna, she might have taken
time to be free of others and in her natural element. Maybe Robin had
done the same.

RIDLEY RECALLED THEM to Windigo. Robin skied out at first light and sprang the traps.

The
next front had yet to arrive; the sky was clear and there was no wind.
No one was sorry to be leaving Malone Bay. The meager comforts of the
bunkhouse were palatial compared to the tiny cabin.

Anna
had lost her mittens, her pack was ruined, the straps slashed and her
clothing was still wet. Robin had lost one of her jab sticks and
Katherine couldn’t find her scarf. Other than that, they were in one
piece.

An
hour after sunup, the warm buzz of the supercub rolled over the tin
roof and they started down to the bay. Anna flew out first. She was
still coughing and there was not a part of her that didn’t hurt, but
she had walked to the airplane without falling over. She took that as a
good sign.

ANNA’S
TOUCHING NOSTALGIA for the bunkhouse vanished as soon as she opened the
door and the reek of death slapped into her senses. The wolf had thawed.

By one o’clock, the team was reassembled, and Ridley declared the animal was ready for the necropsy.

“I’m
going to miss this old boy,” Jonah said as the wolf was transported
from the kitchen to the carpenter’s shop. “He was just beginning to
smell good enough to drown out the smell of Ridley’s feet.” The pilot
had to shout. The front had arrived with a vengeance. Snow was in a
frenzy; naked branches of the trees creaked and whistled above them.

They
carried the carcass on a tarp held at four corners by Ridley, Jonah,
Katherine and Anna to the carpenter’s shop, a twenty-by-fifteen-foot
building behind the trail crew’s bunkhouse. Designed for seasonal
summer use, in January it was as cold as a deep freeze and used as
such. Bones and bags of scat and urine, a half-eaten head of a young
moose, the older moose head, with its windigo antlers and other
delicacies, were wrapped in plastic and piled on the tool bench next to
the wall.

A
metal folding table, the kind used in church halls for potluck suppers,
was in the middle of the room, samples from Robin’s last expedition
piled on one end. The wolf was placed on the table and the five of them
gathered around. They looked like a band of homeless people,
worshipping a long-awaited meal. At Ridley’s suggestion, they’d all put
on old clothes; at the suggestion of an icy Mother Nature, they’d
donned many layers.

Ridley opened the wolf’s jaws. “They must have a good dental plan,” Anna said, startled by the clean, white, perfect teeth.

“Wolves’
mouths are amazingly clean,” Ridley said. “If a tooth gets broken,
you’ll see some brown at the edges; otherwise, they’re like this
guy’s.” He pinched the animal’s tongue between thumb and forefinger and
pulled it out to do a sweep of the throat. Short of a giraffe’s, the
wolf had the longest tongue Anna’d ever seen, cartoon long. Teeth,
tongue and jaws: beautifully designed equipment for the work of staying
alive.

“Let’s open him up,” Ridley said.

Anna
was expecting a scalpel, but he pulled a steel knife with a six-inch
blade and heavy hilt from one of his torn pockets. He smiled at Anna.
“Vollwerth and Company, sausage makers over in Hancock. German made.”

Jonah
and Anna rolled the wolf onto its back and held it steady while Ridley
slit the skin from throat to anus, then began to peel back the hide.

“You
can see bruising or wounds better on the underside of the skin,” he
said. “They show up as dark red blotches or punctures.” He stood back
and Robin photographed the denuded animal.

With
its hide partly peeled away and the sinews and ribs exposed, it bore an
uncanny resemblance to a werewolf in transition from man to animal. A
scene from

An American Werewolf in London

exploded in Anna’s brain.

“See
there?” Ridley pointed with the business end of the knife. “You can see
where a rib has been broken and healed. That’s fairly common. Moose
will fling them against rocks, bash them against trees, anything to get
them off.”

Robin
moved around the table and took several pictures of the rib. No
bruising was apparent. “No defensive wounds,” Anna said. She’d thought
that once the hide was off, there would be evidence of damage incurred
prior to the killing bite.

“Maybe
our wog is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of wolves,” Adam said and laughed,
but none of the rest of them did. Bob snorted to indicate he had not
been given the creeps, but Anna noticed he glanced out the shop’s
window as if concerned some inhuman force might hear his mockery and
take against him.

“Governor Wolf,” Jonah said.

“Subcutaneous fat?” Katherine asked.

“Not
enough to collect.” Ridley adjusted the shop light over the table, a
light better suited to interrogating suspects than dissecting them.
With the tip of his knife and his fingers, he pulled and pricked
beneath the skin where it folded down over the paws and sides. “This
time of year, with the moose population down, we don’t see much fat on
these guys.”

Katherine
cut out a sample of muscle tissue with a scalpel, the shiny, precise
instrument looking delicate and civilized next to Ridley’s sausage
knife. She put the tissue into a glass vial with alcohol.

Ridley inserted his knife into the hide at the throat to make a lateral cut.

“Hey,” Bob said, showing his first real interest in the proceeding.

“Don’t ruin it. And don’t peel the skin off the head.”

Ridley
looked at him. His eyes went as dead as the wolf on the table. His hand
tightened on the knife till the rubber glove he wore was pulled taut as
a second skin over his knuckles. Anna thought he was going to cut
Menechinn and she had no intention of trying to stop him — nothing
against Bob Menechinn, just not a guy she wanted to get in the way of a
knife for.

“I’ll
be careful,” Ridley said and smiled. Anna got the feeling the smile was
not a good sign. He turned his attention back to the wolf and made the
lateral cuts in the hide. As good as his word, he did it conservatively
and with precision, doing as little damage to the pelt as he could.
When the cut was complete, he took two of the four corners in the X he
had made and opened them like the pages of a book.

The
wolf’s throat wasn’t shredded by repeated attacks from different angles
the way most wolf-on-wolf kills were; it was ripped deeply four times.
The tears went through an inch of hide and muscle. Two cut across the
wolf’s aorta, and two were near the carotid, in a distorted mirror
image of the killing punctures.

“We
got any tigers on this island?” Jonah asked. Nobody said anything.
Whatever had attacked the wolf had a bite pattern close to twice the
usual size wolf’s.

“Any number of scenarios could have led to these marks,” Ridley said. “Let’s move on.”

They
did but a sense of the eerie, of the windigo screaming down out of the
north woods to devour human flesh, remained. A hybrid, Jonah’s wog,
causing havoc in the wolf population wasn’t impossible. Gray wolves
mated with red wolves, red wolves mated with coyotes. There’d been a
case in California of a seal/sea lion hybrid suffocating the female
seals he tried to mate with because of his size. On the sunny summer
beaches of California, dealing with creatures of the sea when one was
on dry land didn’t carry the psychological impact of a slaughtered wolf
on an abandoned island in winter.

One
of the reasons humans tended toward insanity was the weight of fear
they carried. The blessings of storytelling, the handing down of
knowledge and warnings, had a flip side. People carried the collective
fears of their history, the biases of those long dead, the paranoias of
other ages.

Anna
flashed back to her college days. It had been raining hard; she’d been
sitting in her sister Molly’s kitchen, doing something or other. There
was a horrific clap of thunder, the lights went out and the grandfather
clock in the living room began striking midnight. Without bothering
with coat or umbrella, she rose from the table, slipped out the back
door and ran to a friend’s house. She wasn’t so much scared as wary;
the setup was there, the cues were in place, she’d seen the movie half
a dozen times. Should life mirror art, she didn’t want to be in the
kitchen in the dark when whatever was coming for her arrived.

She shrugged off that same feeling now and concentrated on the necropsy.

Ridley
cut through the thin wall muscles covering the abdomen and exposed the
internal organs. Since the wolf was fresh, the organs were identified
and preserved for histological work. When an animal was partially
decomposed, the organs turned to mush and the thin tissue samples
required were unusable. Ridley lifted out the intestines and stomach.
Small pieces of the liver and spleen were taken for DNA work.

Anna
served as surgical nurse, handing the organs to Katherine, who
identified, preserved and labeled them. Robin photographed each step.
Jonah made wisecracks, and Bob watched.