ANNA SLEPT FITFULLY, wriggling like an uneasy larva in her down cocoon. The single bed was adequate most nights, but this night she kept waking to find she’d squashed herself against the wall or was perilously close to falling off.
Robin didn’t sleep much better. Anna could hear her thrashing about. Once she leaped from her bed, dug through her rucksack – at least that’s what Anna assumed; the dark was impenetrable – clunked a found object down on the desk at the bed’s foot and squirmed back into her sleeping bag. Or maybe Anna only dreamed she did.
Her dreams were thick and convoluted, dragging images from unrelated drawers and cobbling them together into stories Harlan Ellison couldn’t unravel. She woke, thinking she heard the howling of coyotes on her mother’s ranch. The call of a loon dragged her from sleep. She woke again to wretched disappointment, finding she was not in Paul’s arms but curled up like a sow bug on a strange bed.
The sun didn’t so much rise as the snow, still falling but with less vehemence, grew gray. There would be no search from the air. Breakfast was quick. Each person would take a radio and a different trail. Ridley attempted to call in to dispatch in Houghton, Michigan, to alert them to the situation, but radio contact, always sketchy, had been obliterated by the storm and the phone lines allowed more static than language. He e-mailed.
As they were dividing up the trails for the search, Adam dragged in. He had the body type Anna associated with the cowboys where she’d grown up and, later, the die-hard wildland firefighters: long muscles and bones, big knuckles, wide shoulders and skinny legs. The kind of men that can just keep on working, keep on digging firebreaks or building fence or riding line as if their lanky bodies were made of sterner stuff than mere flesh and didn’t burn as much fuel as other humans.
Adam looked like he’d finally run out of gas. No longer held at bay by the strength of his personality, age dragged down his cheeks and made pouches beneath his eyes.
“You look like hell,” Ridley said without sympathy.
“Yeah, well, freezing your butt off all night, then hiking nine miles in deep snow before breakfast, will do that to a guy,” Adam snapped, and shrugged out of his coat.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Ridley warned.
“Katherine’s gone missing,” Anna told him.
Adam put his coat back on.
“Grab some food,” Ridley said, “then search the Hugginin Trail loop. That’ll free Jonah up to stay near the airplane in case the weather breaks.”
Bob announced he would stay at the bunkhouse near the radio. In case Jonah flew and they needed to coordinate, he said. Given the missing woman was his graduate student and, at least on her end, there seemed to be a proprietary interest, he didn’t seem overly anxious to help find her. “Recheck the permanent-employee housing and check the maintenance buildings at least,” Ridley said. He didn’t bother to disguise the scorn in his voice. “She might have broken into one of the equipment sheds if she was upset enough.”
Bob turned his face slightly away. Maybe Katherine’s going missing had hit him harder than Anna’d given him credit for. Before this, Bob might have goldbricked out of fear of wild beasts or plain old sloth, but he wouldn’t have bothered to look guilty about it.
“What did you and Katherine fight about last night?” Anna asked bluntly.
His shame, or whatever it was, vanished, replaced by the tucked-back smile of false bonhomie. “We didn’t fight. I don’t fight with women.”
He didn’t wink. Anna was making progress.
There, snow was deep enough for skiing. The best skier, Robin, was given the Minong. It was the roughest trail on the island, running as it did along the broken crest of glacial ridges. Anna had skied a little, she’d seen others – people who were good at it – ski, but she’d never seen anything like Robin. It was as if the snow conspired with the skis to carry her effortlessly like Winged Victory into battle.
Ridley would cover the Greenstone Trail. Because of the shortcut from the housing area to the head of the trail, if Katherine had found a trail and not just stumbled off into the bushes the Greenstone would be it. He pushed off. Ridley’s style was more prosaic than Robin’s, but the power in his legs and his familiarity with wintry things was apparent.
Anna took Feldtmann Lake Trail. Adam had returned to Windigo that way, but he’d been traveling fast in bad light, not looking for a sign. She considered taking the one remaining pair of skis, but, in the end, she laced on her Sorels. She wasn’t proficient enough on skis not to wear herself out with them.
In full winter regalia, passing through a snowy landscape, her suit bulky and her face peeking out through a bucket, the wheeze of her breath and the squeak of her boots all that penetrated to her muffled ears, Anna felt cut off from the natural world.
Isolation exacerbated by a sense of being crowded. A neurotic wouldn’t know which way to flinch.
When she was a ranger on Isle Royale, she’d hiked the Feldtmann many times. It was easygoing, running over small hills and occasionally a basalt outcropping high enough to afford views of the lake.
Easy.
Except the cold was a wall. Sweat ran beneath the parka, while her toes, fingers and face burned like frost was gnawing on them. She unzipped her coat and pulled off one glove – the equivalent of sticking a foot out from under the covers to cool off. Taking Robin as her example, she tried to embrace winter but kept finding herself trudging along without thinking much and seeing even less. On a search and – it was still to be hoped – rescue, this was bad.
In frustration, she pulled off hat and balaclava. The cold hurt, and she wondered if Paul would still love her if the tips of her nose and ears turned black, but the sense of being bundled into helplessness diminished. At least she could hear the rat-tatting of the woodpeckers and the chittering of squirrels.
Life had come back while she wasn’t paying attention. She tilted her head back and looked at the sky. The snow had stopped. The clouds were still too low for Jonah to take the airplane up, but they looked like they might lift in an hour or more. The thought of backup – or an audience to witness her weakness – gave her usable energy and she pushed on in better spirits.
Another two hours elapsed before she reached Feldtmann Lake. It was too far. A woman running from a bad exchange with her mentor/ tormentor, or whatever Bob was to Katherine, didn’t run nine miles on the proverbial “dark and stormy night.” Either she didn’t want to be found or she’d gone off trail. Still, like the postman, Anna made her appointed rounds. When she got tired, she had to remind herself to drink. The body didn’t give the same clues in a Michigan winter as it did in summer in the south.
She didn’t have to remind herself to eat. The pathetic little peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich was gone before the morning was out. By noon, she was so famished she wondered if she could catch a squirrel and force it to give up the location of its stash.
She saw a red fox, woodpeckers, red squirrels, chickadees, wolf tracks, moose tracks and what looked to be martin tracks. Nothing to indicate Katherine had been this way.
Ridley radioed in. He’d skied ten miles up the Greenstone and seen nothing but two half-starved moose and more wolf prints.
Robin radioed in soon after. She, too, was turning back. She’d skied as far as Lake Desor, a brutal jaunt for a lesser person, and was still talking without gasping. Robin had seen nothing. Not so much as a fox.
Nobody could raise Adam.
“Battery must have gone dead,” Ridley said drily.
“Yeah.” For a man supposedly in charge of the physical plant, he seemed to be developing a penchant for being out of pocket and unreachable.
The sun didn’t show its face, but the wind dropped to nothing and the sky lightened. When Anna was halfway back to Washington Harbor, she heard the buzz of the supercub.