Winter Study (59 page)

Robin reached up a hand toward Gavin and he took it, his glove swallowing the slender fingers and palm.

“Put your gloves on,” Anna said.

“I’ll
try Ridley again,” Robin said and rose to her feet. “Dispatch has been
trying to raise him for half an hour,” she told Anna. “Gavin and I were
out skiing. We called in as soon as we heard.”

“Blew
your cover,” Anna said. She was too fog-brained to count how many laws
and park regulations the two of them had broken, but it was enough to
land them in jail or the poorhouse if the judge levied the full
penalties and fines.

“You were in trouble,” Robin said simply.

“Gloves,” Anna said so she wouldn’t cry and watched as the biotech obediently put her gloves back on before using the radio.

Gavin squatted beside Anna. He was graceful, the towering length of him folding neatly, effortlessly. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

“Dislocated
shoulder and broken or badly bruised ankle,” Anna replied. Said
succinctly, it didn’t sound all that bad, not like it should have. She
decided she’d keep the limping and weeping and whining parts to
herself. Why not? The witnesses were all dead.

Gavin began a proficient physical check, starting with her pulse and body temp.

“EMT?” Anna asked.

He shook his head. “Eldest of seven,” he said.

Robin interrupted: “Do you think you can survive a ride out on the Bearcat?”

“Out of gas,” Anna said, and Robin went back to the radio.

“Hot
packs. Tell him we need hot packs,” Gavin said. As with Robin, his
winter gear was worn and idiosyncratic. In place of a hood, he wore the
same woolen tasseled hat Robin sported. They were probably the only two
people in the world — other than the Lapps — who didn’t look silly with
reindeer on their earflaps and pointy tufts on their heads. “Who is the
president of the United States?” Gavin asked, to see if Anna was
oriented in time and space.

“The
blue rucksack,” Anna said suddenly. The old canvas day pack they’d
found shredded at the scene of Katherine’s death had bothered Anna.
Like Anna, both Bob and Katherine had all-new gear. It was out of
character for Katherine to carry a beat-up canvas bag. The affectation
fit with Robin’s boyfriend. “It was yours. You had scent lure, didn’t
you? To make the wolves go where you wanted them to.”

“It
was mine,” Gavin admitted. “I forgot I had the canisters of lure in it
when I left it with Katherine. I only meant her to have food and water
while she waited for help.”

“‘HELP ME,’” Anna said. “On the window.”

“Ski wax,” Gavin said. “It grows opaque as it cools.”

Anna said nothing.

If scribbling a magic message on the glass and vanishing into the night was his idea of rescue, he wasn’t worth accusing.

Gavin
read the thoughts she chose not to express in words. “Katherine said
she’d phoned Bob and he was arranging the rescue. She promised to keep
our secret. She wanted Bob to look the fool, be discredited. I didn’t
think anyone was still at the bunkhouse. It seemed a good time to
further the hoax,” he said.

Anna
closed her eyes so she needn’t see the misery on his face. She’d had
sufficient misery to last at least a few days if she was careful and
didn’t blow it all in one breakdown. Gavin’s confession exonerated the
wolves. Covered in scent lure, bleeding, running, flopping about in
true helpless-prey fashion, no self-respecting predator could have
resisted Katherine. Not and held its head up at the next carnivore
convention. The poet in Gavin would have him suffer the guilt of
Katherine’s death. Had she more energy, Anna would have reassured him
it was an accident, that Katherine had broken open the canisters in a
fall or opened one not knowing what it was. Instead, she just sat with
her eyes closed and listened to the crabbing of the radio as Robin
clicked and talked and then, finally, Ridley Murray answered.

Anna
roused herself to shout: “Ask him why in the hell he wasn’t answering
his radio!” That, at least, had been her intention. Instead, she heard
herself whisper “Why didn’t he come?” in the voice of a little girl,
the one Bob Menechinn said nobody cared about, nobody would rescue.
That little girl embarrassed Anna and she hoped her whisper went
unnoticed.

“Ask Ridley what’s kept him,” Gavin said.

Gavin
heard Anna’s little-girl plea. Him, she didn’t mind so much. He had the
same feel as Robin did, as if the two of them were not quite of this
world, raised in bubbles, maybe, or from another dimension where good
always won out, the cream rose to the top and the poor were not always
with you.

Undamaged,

Anna thought and wondered how damaged she was.

“Ridley and Jonah are just leaving Feldtmann. I’ll go back to Windigo and get gas. Enough to get you home,” Robin said to Anna.

“I’ll go,” Gavin said.

“I’m faster,” Robin said.

To Anna, Gavin said: “She is. Like the wind.” He seemed proud of her, and Anna liked him for that too.

“It’s too far,” Anna said, thinking of how far Robin had already come that day.

Robin
smiled. Ten miles on easy trails had probably not been “too far” since
she was nine years old. “I won’t be long,” she said and pushed off with
the sudden grace of a bird taking flight.

“I’m
guessing an hour or a little more. Downhill with no pack, she’ll make
good time. Coming back with the gas can will take longer, but she
doesn’t need to bring more than a gallon at the most. Eight pounds.
That’s nothing for Robin,” Gavin said reassuringly.

The
blanket and tarp Anna had wrapped around herself for warmth were
beginning to feel like a shroud and one that was shrinking noticeably.
They had done their job, she was found alive, now she wanted out.
“Unwrap me,” Anna said.

Gavin
looked alarmed, and she knew he was remembering the tales of finding
people naked and dead of the cold. A rare but not too rare hypothermic
reaction was to feel hot. In late stages, victims would sometimes take
off their clothes and lie naked in the snow.

“I’m
okay,” Anna said. “No running naked for me. I’ve got to move. I’m
getting crazy. Crazier. Can you reduce a dislocated shoulder?”

“I’ve never done it,” Gavin admitted.

“Me neither. I learned it in EMT training. It looked easy enough. Align the arm, pull, snick back into place. One… two… three.”

“Two sounds like it would be pretty painful,” Gavin said.

“We’ll numb the shoulder with ice first,” Anna said, then: “Oh, hey, that’s already taken care of.”

Gavin laughed.

Unwrapping
her was more of a job than she’d anticipated. Expecting to stay in her
blue-and-brown cocoon for the foreseeable future, Anna’d rolled herself
in the fabric more concerned with putting as many layers between
herself and the elements as possible than with eventually getting free.

“Help me stand,” she said, pushing away the last of the tarp. “I have to get up. Help me. Then we can reduce the shoulder.”

Gavin
put one arm around her back and gave her his other to brace herself
against, so she could control how much pressure was on her shoulder and
ankle, and began to draw her to a standing position beside the
snowmobile. “Anna, maybe you should—”

“No,”
Anna interrupted him. “My arm is useless, numb. I’ve got to reduce it.
I can wedge myself against the seat. You’ll have something to brace
against—”

“Anna, you’d have to take off your coat,” Gavin said reasonably.

“No. Why would I?” Confusion was clouding Anna’s brain. Instead of making her cautious, it made her desperate, angry.

“I couldn’t see what I was doing. Where the lump was. Which way to pull to make it go back into the socket,” Gavin said.

“I’ll take the damn thing off,” Anna snapped.

“You’d lose too much body heat, and it would hurt you too much unless we cut the coat off. It won’t be long. Robin’s fast.”

Hysteria.

Most
of Anna wanted to give in to it, go with it. Breathing slowly through
her nose, she gained enough rationality to wonder what made the human
mind want to spin over the edge, what evolutionary genius thought this
would ensure the survival of the species. Maybe it was the flip side of
being self-aware. Dachshunds had bad backs because of the long spine.
People had craziness because of the big brain.

“I can wait,” Anna said after a time. Gavin looked relieved.

“Let’s
keep you warm,” he said kindly. He helped her to the seat of the
Bearcat and wrapped her legs in the army blanket, then sat behind her
and put his long arms around her. “Lean back,” he said.

“Consider me your sofa.”

Menechinn was dead wrong. The girl did get rescued.

37

Gavin
stayed at the bunkhouse. Crude as it was, it had amenities that put his
camp in the abandoned fire tower to shame. He’d come to the island from
Grand Portage, seventeen miles in a kayak, and had been living at
Feldtmann for thirteen days, his only heat a camping stove and a
cooking stove. Food and supplies had been cached there over the summer.
The plan had been hatched by the biotechs when they heard Homeland
Security was to evaluate the study.

They
had stolen scent lure from a team of martin researchers to effect the
wolves’ movements. The props, the black silhouette of the gigantic
wolf, the moose and wolf prosthetics to make prints in the snow, had
been created by Gavin. The alien DNA was procured by Robin. A friend
and fellow researcher in Canada had mailed her a box of wolf scat.
Robin simply bagged it up with the ISRO samples and delivered it to
Katherine.

The
simplicity of the plan impressed Anna. It would have worked, created a
tidy little mystery, had Adam not joined the conspiracy. He’d
discovered what they were up to on a trip past Feldtmann in late summer
and was mildly amused. It was only when, at his urging, Ridley had
requested Bob Menechinn for the evaluation that he had taken an active
part.