“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.
“The pluck,” Ridley said, the business of dismemberment apparently cleansing him of residual heebie-jeebies from the initial wound discovery. Reaching up under the ribs, he plucked out lungs and heart as a single unit.
Other than the bite on the throat, they found no other cause of death.
They completed the necropsy: salvaging bones, chopping off paws to preserve the small tarsals and metatarsals, breaking the rib cage to wrestle it free of the cavity. Bones would be macerated by boiling or, the preferred method, because it didn’t dry the bones out, buried in soil in screen envelopes for slow decomposition of tissue.
This scientific butchering was grim work and Anna wasn’t accustomed to it. Mated with the ambient weirdness of the throat wound, the oversized tracks and, most nerve-racking of all, being forever in the company of people in a small space, she found the necropsy depressing. And unsettling. A knot formed in her chest, and she wanted little more than to get away, get out into the woods. Caves and closets weren’t the only threats for claustrophobes.
Ridley excised the muscle mass with the puncture marks. “Usually we don’t need to do this,” he said as he handed Anna the bloody chunk. “The wog bite – or whatever – makes it interesting. The lab in Michigan might be able to make something of it. My wife works there.” A hint of pride touched his voice, warming it past the merely clinical. “She specializes in animal forensics.”
Anna hadn’t known such a discipline existed, but it made sense. There were animal DNA labs – she’d used one in Oregon, when she was working a case in Glacier.
“Bite patterns, tracks, fur – just like CSI,” Ridley said.
But without criminals. However vicious an animal attack, it was neither a sin nor a crime, to Anna’s way of thinking. Even when done with malice, it was without evil. One had to know what the taking of life meant before taking it could be elevated to the status of true evil.
“A married man,” Bob said. “Any kids?”
“Not yet,” Ridley said.
“Maybe when you stick closer to the den in winter she’ll pop out a litter every spring. More fun than cutting up wolves.” Bob grinned and winked at Anna. Having saved her life, he seemed to think he owned it. She wondered what he would look like with a plastic bag tied tightly over his head.
“Fuck!” Ridley jerked his hands out of the wolf and held his left cupped in his right, the knife trapped between them. The palm of his rubber glove was filling with bright, new arterial blood.
“I’m an EMT. Can I help?” Anna said, instantly forgetting Bob. Over the years, she’d said it so many times it was as instantaneous as “God bless you” after a sneeze.
Ridley kept his head down, his eyes on the blood welling in his glove.
Face averted in the growing dimness, hidden behind beard and mustache, he could have been thinking of anything from killing to Captain Kangaroo and Anna wouldn’t have been able to see it. “Ridley, are you okay?”
He nodded without looking up and held out his hand. The gesture put Anna in mind of the pen-and-ink drawing in her childhood book of Androcles and the lion, the great beast’s paw held up so that the thorn might be removed.
Anna handed the chunk of wolf neck to Katherine, peeled off the surgical gloves and pulled on a clean pair, then bent to examine the damage to Ridley’s hand. A squeak, a tiny sound like that of a newborn kitten fighting for a nipple or the last sound of a mouse meeting a trap, distracted her. Hands dripping gore in front of her like a zombie in a B movie, Katherine looked the cliché of someone who’s seen a ghost: her skin had paled and her lips gone slack. Behind the oversized lenses, her gentle eyes were so wide that white showed beneath the irises.
Having spent the afternoon elbow-deep in flesh and bone, Anna had a hard time believing Katherine was going faint at the sight of a little fresh blood. She wasn’t. She was looking past Ridley, his wound beginning to drip human DNA into the carcass of the wolf, at Bob Menechinn. His heavy face had gone from flab to granite.
Frozen meat, Anna thought. The image jarred her.
Whatever was communicated with that stare was over in a heartbeat. Bob was all amiability again; Katherine’s head was bent industriously over her collection equipment. Jonah started a long involved joke about the Sisters of St. Regis’s Convent and House of Prostitution. Anna looked down at Ridley’s hand in hers. An odd feeling of being once removed from the world came over her, the way it did when she had a bad cold, and, though she could hear perfectly well, she felt deaf; the way she felt in dreams when she needed to cross a busy street and her legs were lead.
“May I?” she said and carefully took the German knife from Ridley’s hand. Despite the wound, he’d not let it fall. Using it, she cut his glove away. He’d gashed his palm, a bad cut, but blood had welled into the gash and she couldn’t tell how bad; she couldn’t see clearly.
The way she felt when the optometrist put belladonna in her eyes.
The room hadn’t filled with fog; it was four o’clock and the sun was almost down. The white that had blinded the window when they arrived had turned to gray. The work light over the table created more shadows than illumination.
“We need to go inside,” she said. “I need more light.”
“We’re about done anyway.” Ridley finally raised his head. His skin wasn’t pale but flushed, and, rather than having the vague alarm of shock, his eyes were so alive he looked feverish or half mad.