“This could just as easily have been made by two passes of a real-sized wolf as one pass by a gigantic wolf,” she said repressively. Remembering the wild-eyed panic in Menechinn’s face the previous night, she scuffed the marks out with the toe of her boot.
“If something’s dangerous, don’t the others have a right to know?” Robin asked.
“No.”
HOT DRINKS AND INSTANT OATMEAL – cold as dirt by the last spoonful – duly consumed, they broke camp. It fell naturally to Anna to take the lead, but before she could set foot on the trail Bob shoved past her. His heavy pack clipped hers and she staggered as her center of gravity shifted. But for Robin’s supporting arm, she would have fallen.
He has to reassert his masculinity, she thought without a shred of sympathy. She didn’t challenge him; Anna never felt the need to reassert hers.
Despite being condemned to watching Menechinn’s butt, after a mile or so on the trail she felt immeasurably better. There was nothing like spending the night in a deep freeze with one’s food while unknown forces contemplated one for its own supper to make a woman appreciate the little things. It was good to be upright and moving. It was good to be hiking downhill instead of up. It was good to be carrying three more meals in her stomach instead of on her back. It was heaven to know she’d be spending the coming night in the cabin at Malone Bay, with a fire in the woodstove; an outhouse with a warmed seat, rather than a snow-covered log, for the less glamorous moments of life.
In an embarrassment of riches, the overcast cleared, and, though they paid for it with a drop in temperature, seeing the sun’s pale, cheerful face and the blue sky lightened everyone’s mood.
Everyone but Bob. Menechinn had returned to his customary jocularity, but there was a razor-edge to his comments: jokes that weren’t jokes and double entendres whose single meanings were hard to pretend missing. Katherine took the brunt of it, and Anna felt sorry for her. She was coming rather to like Katherine. It occurred to her to deflect Menechinn’s venom onto herself to give the researcher a rest, but she decided against it. Katherine didn’t let it roll off her back exactly, but she seemed accustomed to the abuse and handled it better than Anna would have. He made the occasional sideways gibe at Anna, but nothing she couldn’t ignore. Fortunately he left Robin alone.
The biotech was a woman of steel; Anna suspected that, if pressed, Robin might leap a tall building in a single bound. Yet her years on the road, competing in countries where she had no one but her coaches and teammates, had left her vulnerable and oddly innocent, a bit of a stranger in a strange land.
Robin might have been able to withstand Menechinn’s unsubtle retribution for what they’d witnessed, but Anna knew for a fact that she wouldn’t have been able to withstand watching it happen.
EMASCULATION RECOVERY wasn’t swift, but by lunch Bob seemed over the worst of it. He quit sniping at his graduate assistant and tied her sleeping bag to the top of his already-overloaded pack. Anna guessed it was his way of making amends and considered dumping hers and Robin’s on him as well; see how much the bastard could carry. Had the sun not been out, she might have done it. As it was, she was feeling magnanimous.
Katherine rallied somewhat with the lighter load, both on her back and her psyche, but it didn’t last. Anna could tell her joints were causing her pain by the way she pulled on the pack’s shoulder straps and tried to ease her steps. Anna’s pack was grinding her bones as well, but, like Lawrence of Arabia – at least in the version with Peter O’Toole – she felt the pain but had learned not to mind.
AT THREE THAT AFTERNOON, they reached the rise above Malone Bay. The sun was already close to the horizon and so far to the south that the bay was in shadow. Snow, deeper here by several inches than on the other side of the ridge, was dyed the same battleship gray as the water of Lake Superior, lying cold and still beyond the bay’s straitjacket of ice. The sky’s winter coat of pale blue had faded till it seemed but a thin sheet of tinted glass between the Earth and whatever lay beyond.
In this colorless stillness were two cacophonous spots of color. On the ice of the bay, a few hundred yards from the dock, was Jonah’s red-and-white airplane, her raucous orange down comforter wrapped around engine and cowling, and, on the tiny porch of the cabin, the bright red blade of a snow shovel leaning against the railing.
Blessed as it was by a thick curl of lavender smoke issuing from the stovepipe, the cabin, scarcely bigger and slightly less ornate than a closet in a 1950s tract house, struck Anna as utterly charming. As they started down the gentle grade, the figure of Jonah Schumann emerged from the door and started up the trail.
Jonah met up with them and gallantly offered to take Katherine’s pack for the last mile. Anna hoped Katherine would accept and was impressed when she didn’t. The old pilot further wormed his way into Anna’s affections by telling them he’d flown in canned food, a box of wine, pasta and other delicacies to round out what would have been a bleak diet had they had to subsist on what they’d been able to carry in on their backs.
Adam, who’d cadged a ride on this mission of mercy, had hot Ovaltine waiting when they reached the cabin.
Anna was wearier than she’d bargained on. The cold, she told herself as Adam helped her off with her pack.
“Jesus!” he exclaimed as the weight hit him. “Are you crazy or what? I don’t carry a pack this heavy. Holy smoke! Iron Woman.” He pinched her upper arm, and Anna was gratified.
“Fifty-three pounds,” she wanted to say, but boasting had a way of canceling out achievement, and, besides, she was too tired to talk.
“Help Katherine,” she managed. The cabin was so tiny, six people, four of them in backpacks, were like great Herefords in a pen made for lambs. She had to mill her way past Adam and Katherine to find a place to sit, then she was squeezed into a small straight-backed chair between a doll-sized table and a gas hot-water heater. Bob brushed his butt – a butt Anna had gotten to know far too well over the past nine miles – across her face to help Robin off with her pack. Anna might have taken petty revenge with a two-tined meat fork the summer ranger had left behind, but the offending portion of his anatomy was encased in too many layers for penetration.
Too tired to focus, she let her body sag and her mind slide inward. After Jonah and Adam departed, she would try to get her boots off. With them gone, there might be room enough to bend over.
Above her, the life of the herd went on. Bob was behind Robin, holding on to her shoulder straps as she fumbled with the buckles. “Here, let me help with those,” he said warmly and started to reach around her and the pack in a Kodiak-sized bear hug.
“Let me,” Anna said acidly and was about to contemplate the effort of rising when Adam turned from where he’d stowed Katherine’s pack against wall and bunk and stowed Katherine, as limp looking as Anna felt, on top of it.
“I got it,” he said.
Bob snorted.
“Bob, could you help me?” Katherine’s voice was plaintive, with a thread of something sharper running beneath – anger or love, maybe both. Bob shouldered his way to where his assistant sat, crumpled.
Anna intended to sit back down but realized she’d never made it to her feet. The mere thought of it had tapped her last reserves. She hoped Robin had the strength and patience to spoon-feed her the remainder of her required five thousand calories. Lifting an eating utensil might be beyond her powers.
Calflike in the corral, she watched dumbly as Adam undid the frozen buckles on Robin’s harness. There was definite byplay between the two of them, secret looks and small, quickly extinguished smiles, and Anna wondered if Robin’s boyfriend – Gavin or Galen or whatever – was on his way out. Seasonal Park Service life was hard on relationships. Permanent Park Service life wasn’t much better.