“We’re in the right neighborhood,” she said. Bob limped up and looked at the tracks. “The one on the left,” she said. “Wolf, I bet.”
“Big.” A trace of the fear she’d seen and heard the night they’d been called upon by the wild was in his voice.
The print was beyond big; it was monstrous. “Hard to tell,” Anna said, images of Bob, wild-eyed, lamp beam striping the tent walls, transposing over him, charging off through the falling snow, arms waving wildly, foot traps clattering. “Once the wind and snow and drift start, animal tracks can be made to look like almost anything.”
“It’s crazy to be out here without a rifle,” Bob said. He looked around like a virgin in a haunted house. What good humor survived the knee hitting the ice was gone from his face. Anna wished she had an apron or a spatula or some other homey kitchen utensil with which to comfort him. “What are you making us for supper?” she asked to keep his mind busy, then ignored him while he answered.
There hadn’t been any wolf tracks on the lake. She looked at the boulder head high to her left. A furrow cut the snow where something had slid or fallen. The wolf had come down off the rock, possibly following the moose. There was just the single print; it had been traveling alone. The animal that had come to their tent had traveled alone.
“Okay,” Anna said. “Let’s follow our boy here.”
“Are you nuts?” Bob swallowed his fear, but it soured him. “We’re losing the light. Let’s head back,” he said peremptorily.
“No we’re not. It’s one o’clock, the heat of the day.” She could have been more politic, but her mind was taken up with tracking. Moose prints were easy, dimples in the snow eight to ten inches across in two parallel lines. Paw prints were harder, especially without good light. Anna blinked at the unyielding sky, weeping snow static on a gray background. Rocks crowded in, sucking up what little illumination leaked through from a sun gone AWOL.
“It’s like living in an old black-and-white TV with bad reception,” she said. “I can’t see a damn thing.”
“Time to start back. We’re losing the light,” Bob insisted.
“No we’re not.” Anna found another partial print. The wolf was following the moose or they had used the same route within hours of one another.
“My knee,” Bob said. “It’s an old injury. I think I threw it out back there on the ice.”
Anna found another track. A good one this time, the edges blurred with snow and drift but the clear mark of the toe pads. “Whoa! Take a look at this.” She squatted, her back soldier straight to keep her center of balance over her heels.
Bob was following so close he bumped her pack and she pitched forward. “Watch it!” she said. “Look.” She’d managed to catch herself without damaging the print. It was immense, huge, beautiful, the track of a magnificent animal. “God, I wish we’d brought the camera.”
“We should go back. We need to report this to Ridley – the sooner, the better.”
“Radio him,” Anna said.
“I got to take a leak,” Bob said suddenly.
“Yeah, yeah. Go ahead.” Without rising, Anna squinted down the sloping bank. They had reached the far side of the finger of land in a matter of steps. The isthmus wasn’t more than thirty feet across. Tracks of wolf and moose, muted and strange with snow and wind, led across the narrow arm of the lake toward the far shore, crossing where Robin had said to set the next trap.
“Perfect.” Anna managed to stand without grabbing onto anything.
From her left came moose-sized crashing through what little shrubbery the place offered: Bob dumping his pack. The guy might be a while. Keeping to one side of the faint trail, Anna picked her way down the gentle slope and over the ridged ice where lake met land. Wolf and moose, traveling together or in tandem, the moose tracks close together as if meandering without concern, the wolf’s farther apart as if loping after prey.
Ten or eleven yards out – distance was hard to estimate in poor light and a monochromatic world – the tracks vanished as if wolf and moose had been snatched off the surface of the lake by a great carnivorous bird.
“Not possible,” she whispered and pulled her focus back to what was directly in front of her. “Hah!” The impossible had not occurred. The snow covering the ice had formed a slight depression. The tracks led into this irregular bowl, effectively vanishing from a distance.
Before coming to Winter Study, Anna had not given ice much thought. She’d seen pictures of arctic floes heaped into mountains, crinkled into badlands and shattered over a white-and-blue no-man’s-land. Yet in her mind it remained flat, evened out by God’s Zamboni.
On ISRO, she’d realized it was a living thing: changing, moody, struggling, resting, singing. Surrounding this shallow crater, water had oozed up through a circular crack and refrozen, creating a scar, a rugged ridge four and five inches high.
Moose and wolf tracks crossed in the center of the circle, where it looked as if they’d skirmished. “Hey, Bob, you’re missing this,” Anna called back as she hopped over the ridge.
She landed, and a rifle shot cracked through the silence that had wrapped them since leaving the cabin. Bob was a big game hunter. Bob had wanted his rifle. Rifles could be broken down and carried in a day pack. Bob had slipped away, letting her go, alone and exposed, onto the ice. All this flashed through her mind in an instant of acute paranoia.
She started to look back to where she’d left Menechinn. Another crack, a noise like a baseball bat being snapped in half, then the ice began to shift beneath her feet.
11
The sound Anna had mistaken for a rifle report was ice breaking. She felt the shift beneath her boots and engaged all her muscles in the act of remaining motionless. She hadn’t punched through a thin place caused by an underwater spring or a rock near the surface; the ice in the depressed area had broken free. If she’d been quicker, she might have jumped to safety after the first crack. The second had created an island of ice no more than eight feet in diameter, with her in the center. Around the perimeter, the scar from the old ooze had opened, like the movement of tectonic plates the ice sheared. Water welled up, pouring into the snow in a flush of gray.
If she moved, the free-floating island would tilt and she would slide into the lake. Under the lake. The land spit stretched thirty feet behind her. Another thirty or forty lay between her and the shore in front of her. Possibly the water was no deeper than her waist. Then again, glacial lakes could drop off fifty feet a yard from the shore.
Depth probably wouldn’t matter, she thought.
The cold would kill her before she had a chance to drown. Stories of kids revived after forty-five minutes beneath the ice were legend in the north. The shock of the stunning cold produced a phenomenon called a mammalian reflex, causing the body to shut down without dying, the way a bear shuts down to hibernate or a frog to sleep under the mud. Anna was too old to qualify. The courtesy of mammalian reflex wasn’t extended to adults.
“Bob!” she called. Tried to call; his name came out on a whisper of air so faint she wasn’t sure she’d managed to speak aloud.
“Bob!”
Audible, but only to her ears. The part of her that believed the vibrations of her voice against the air would be enough to tip the balance had shut down her voice box.
For a dizzying second, she saw the ice patch flipping like a coin, her feet going from under her, hands scrabbling uselessly, as she slid into the black death waiting below the ice, the patch of ice rocking back level, shutting her away from the promise of life and light. Iron-clawed terror gripped her insides. Courage drained out as blood from a severed artery.