Ice on Siskiwit Lake was eight to nine inches thick and blown clear of snow in many places. Wind from the northwest scudded over the surface of the lake with razor-blade cold. The snow had stopped, but the clouds looked heavy with more. A renegade flurry of fat flakes leaped and soared on the gusts of wind, in no hurry to reach the earth. These were not the mean-spirited snowflakes, fine as beach sand in the teeth, that scathed the east end of the island but the lacy flakes that adorned Christmas cards. Their playful beauty made the cold seem less personal. Less deadly. It was a comforting illusion.
Where the wind cleared it, the ice was slick and black. Anna could see bubbles and cracks that ran like zigzagging white cliffs beneath the surface.
“Leave your nose alone,” Robin said.
“What about the cracks?” Anna asked, slipping her hand back in its mitten. She thought she’d gotten past the nose thing.
“There are always cracks,” Robin said. “It usually doesn’t mean anything. Ice is in flux, expanding and contracting. The cracks are stress fractures.”
Usually doesn’t mean anything. Anna was only slightly reassured.
Halfway to Ryan Island, famous for being the biggest island in the biggest lake on the biggest island in the biggest lake in the world but still only a froth of evergreens and rocks, they came to the remains of the moose kill that Jonah and Anna had watched from the air several days before. The carcass had been picked clean. What scraps of meat still clung to the ripped hide were being worked on by two ravens. They eyed the human interlopers critically, then, unimpressed, turned back to their work.
The skeleton had been gnawed. One femur and both front leg bones were gone entirely. Skull and antlers had been dragged away from the body and cleaned of meat. Anna two-stepped over to take a closer look. Robin slid gracefully up beside her.
“Hard winter for everybody. Lookie.” The biotech pointed, her mittened hand bright and indicative like a Lilliputian tetrahedron indicating wind direction. “The antlers have been nibbled. There’s little nutritional value in an antler. Eating it is the animal world’s equivalent of boiling shoe leather for supper. Or eating fried pork rinds.”
Bob and Katherine caught up with them. Katherine’s oversized glasses, perennially steamed, gave her a blind and helpless aspect, but she was a natural on the ice. Her shuffling skate was a match for Robin’s. Bob had more trouble. “Pig on roller skates” came to mind, but, still pleasantly full of the breakfast he’d cooked, Anna said nothing.
“Are we going to set traps here?” he asked, looking around as if another area of ice would be different, better, than the one on which they stood.
“Not here,” Robin said, and her mouth crimped in a tight line.
Anna didn’t so much read her thoughts as share them. Bob knew nothing about trapping, or about wolves. He knew nothing about Isle Royale. Yet he would decide if the study would continue. Only FEMA had proven more inept and corrupt than Homeland Security.
“George W. Bush is the Antichrist,” Anna said, apparently apropos of nothing. Leaving her companions to think she suffered from political Tourette’s syndrome, she shuffled off.
At the east end of Siskiwit, where the short section of trail from Siskiwit to Intermediate Lake began, Robin stopped. “We start here,” she said.
The trapline Ridley had outlined ran from the western shore of Siskiwit, embraced Intermediate, then ran on to Lake Richie and ended at Moskey Basin, about five miles total. The lakes between Siskiwit and Moskey Basin were small, part of a scattering of puddles that dribbled across the island, from north to south, where the retreating glacier had gouged more deeply. The trapline would cover lakes, land, developed trails and open runs. Used by both East and Chippewa packs, they would have a shot at trapping wolves from more than one pack.
Two wolves in East pack and three of the known seven in Chippewa pack had been radio-collared previously. Unless there was a force on the island so powerful it could alter existing DNA in a living wolf, they could be ruled out as carriers of the foreign DNA. If they were caught again, the opportunity would be taken to check them for parvovirus, weight, general health issues and statistical information. One of the inestimable values of the wolf/moose study was that it had collected mammoth amounts of such data over a long period. Longevity had been important in earlier times, but, with the advent of computers, massive quantities of information could be processed in ever-more-illuminating ways.
Anna had experience with foothold traps but hadn’t used one in years. Katherine was familiar only with old barrel-type live traps. Bob knew nothing about either.
In her quiet, pleasant voice, Robin explained each step of the process as she set the first trap. Foothold traps resembled old-fashioned leghold traps, the spring-loaded steel jaws with jagged teeth that were famous for causing animals to chew their feet off to free themselves. The foothold was designed to avoid harming the wolves. The jaws were shallower and had small steel knobs in place of the teeth. The knobs were placed so that when the animal stepped down on the plate and sprung the trap, they would clamp above and between the toe joints to hold the foot fast without tearing the skin or breaking bones. Each trap was supplied with a tranquilizer device, a black rubber nipple two inches long and loaded with oral tranquilizer. The drug was to calm them, to keep them from harming themselves or the trappers, but it was an inexact science. It was impossible to tell how much of the sedative would actually get into the animal’s system.
“What drug do you use?” Bob asked.
“Propriopromazine,” Robin replied. “It usually keeps them sedated till we get to them. Then we give a mix of ketamine and xylazine to knock them out.”
“Ketamine. That’s the hallucinogenic that can cause amnesia,” Bob said.
“You’ve worked with ketamine?” Robin asked.
“Have we ever used ketamine?” he asked Katherine.
She turned away as if the question brought up a shameful failure.
“I can’t remember,” she mumbled, and Bob laughed.
“That’s what the stuff is known for.”
He winked at his assistant. Her face was blank, dead, as if at a secret joke between old lovers, a joke only one of them still thinks is funny. A moment of awkward silence followed, Anna and Robin feeling there’d been too much sharing, even if they had no idea what had been shared.
“Ketamine doesn’t depress the central nervous system,” Robin started again. “That’s why it’s good with animals. They’re pretty fragile. The xylazine works as well and wears off quicker, something you need to pay attention to when you’re letting them go again.”
“Are the trap tranquilizing devices already charged or do we need to charge them?” Anna asked.
“The TTDs are filled with six hundred milligrams of the propriopromazine. All you have to do is clamp it on one side of the jaws. First thing a wolf will do is try and bite the trap. I’ve never seen a TTD that wasn’t destroyed. They always get some tranquilizer into them, but we’ve found them both out cold and awake and alert. Depends.”
Attached to each trap was eight feet of kinkless chain with a vegetation drag on the end that looked like a miniature boat anchor. The drag was amazingly efficient at catching on any bit of vegetation to keep the animal from getting very far while giving it freedom of motion, another stress reducer. Near the drag, affixed to the chain, was a seven-inch-long silver cylinder with a rubber-coated antenna. This was a motion-activated radio transmitter. The metal cylinder protected it from being chewed. When the wolf – or occasionally a marauding fox – pulled on the chain, a receiver in the cabin at Malone Bay would beep to let the trappers know something was on their line and where. In summer, this allowed the researchers to find the wolf before a hapless tourist did – and before the sedative wore off. In winter, it served a more important purpose; sedated, the wolf could lose toes to frostbite or even freeze to death if left too long in a trap.