“Get a grip,” she growled and looked around the rest of the clearing. Focusing past the mutilated arm, she began to see other disturbances in the snow. Over an area about five feet in diameter, animals had been digging. Where they’d dug were bright orange stains. She saw the foot, boot torn off and bones showing where the flesh had been eaten away. In another depression in the snow was a hank of light brown hair clotted with black. Mostly whatever had stained the snow – fingers, flesh, a toe – had been carted off and eaten elsewhere.
Little guys, foxes and ravens and rodents, had feasted. But the little guys had not torn a full-sized woman to pieces.
“Anna!”
She twitched so hard it hurt her neck. Being startled pissed her off and being pissed off was a lot better than being tired and scared.
“It’s about damn time you got here,” she hollered. “Where the hell have you been? What in God’s name could have held you up on this godforsaken island?”
Ridley, following her blasphemies, came through the tangle of downed trees with more grace than she had managed. Behind him was Robin and, beside her, Bob. That was what had held them up. Anna realized she was about to get out of line and scaled back her anger.
She thought to warn them, to say: “It’s bad” or “Pretty grim scene” or “Take the women and kids back to the house,” but instead she just waited till Robin and Ridley noticed the digging, the arm. Then, like a tour guide from hell, she pointed out the various pieces.
Bob waded in and started brushing snow away from the arm. “Leave it,” Anna snapped. “I don’t want the scene compromised.”
“Wolves killed her,” Bob said. He started in with the brushing again, and it bothered her that he was uncovering the arm.
The arm, for chrissake. It was cut off. It was hamburger. Anybody who wasn’t Bob would have brushed the snow from Katherine’s face.
“Wolves may have torn her apart,” Anna said in a tone she considered reasonable. “We don’t know what killed her. I need you to stop that.”
He looked up at her desperate or dangerous or scared. Anna didn’t think it was grief.
He was digging up her arm. Her fucking arm. Anna was having trouble getting past that.
“Another front is coming in,” Ridley said. “We’re going to lose the light in an hour or so.”
Another dark and stormy night. Anna was getting that clock-striking-midnight-as-the-power-goes-out feeling again. “Whatever we miss won’t be here tomorrow,” she said. “It’ll be somebody’s dinner.”
Robin took up photographic duties. The constant flash became a freakish punctuation to the finds, the pieces of what had once been a young woman.
A young woman murdered by her first love, the wolf; when the snow was swept from the body, it became clear she had been killed by a wolf or wolves. Her throat was torn out, her head connected to her body only by her spine. The damage was fierce but incomplete. The body had not been eviscerated, the face was intact, the coat, though badly torn, was not stripped from the meat.
“Odd,” Anna said, and: “Wolf.”
“Wog,” Ridley said.
“It was a pack of wolves,” Bob said, his voice as plummy and certain as if he were reporting the six o’clock news.
“If it was wolves – natural wolves, pure wolves – it’s the first time in recorded history it’s happened in America,” Ridley said. “What’s your take on this, Menechinn? If it was wolves, do you get to open the island year-round so Homeland Security can arm all the parkies and, between creel checks and wake-in-no-wake-zone citations, Ranger Rick can save us from the Canadians?”
Ridley asked as if it were a real question, as if he cared about Bob’s answer.
“Homeland Security can shut down your little pissant operation anytime,” Bob replied with the same big tucked-in smile he bestowed on everything, and Anna wondered if he liked making Ridley miserable or was simply incapable of empathy.
“Not if this is a wolf kill,” she said. “Led by a wog or not, every wildlife biologist in the world will be lobbying to keep the study going. Scientists can’t stand an anomaly.”
“Doggone it, where is Adam?” Ridley demanded. Apropos of nothing that Anna could follow, he transferred his anger from Menechinn to Adam Johansen. “Radio him again,” he ordered Robin and, turning his back on Anna and Bob, took the camera from the biotech and began photographing the scene.
Bit by bit, as it was recorded by the camera, they brought together what was left of Katherine Huff.
As they had at the necropsy, they worked as a team. This time Robin and Anna handled the corpse, carefully brushing away the snow, and Ridley photographed it in situ. Anna didn’t know what Bob Menechinn was doing other than wandering around, staring at the ground, digging here and there.
“Wolves don’t do this,” Ridley said when the body parts were uncovered and accounted for. “They just don’t. We were talking about this the other day. There’s upward of two thousand wolves in Minnesota. They eat moose and deer and sheep, when they can get them. They don’t hunt down and kill humans.”
Anna was studying the scene in an attempt to reconstruct the incident. “Look.” She took one of the flashlights Ridley brought. The sun must have been close to setting. The light was fading and sky, air and earth were a uniform gray. Holding the flashlight at ground level, she sent the beam across the surface of the snow. Ridley squatted on his heels and followed the line with his eyes.
“You can see where she crawled, trying to get away.” Anna played the beam across a faint but discernible trough that had been cut through old snow, then filled with new. “And there she tried to pull herself up on a tree; tried to save herself. Then she goes down again there.”
“Wolves don’t behave this way,” Ridley said doggedly.
“See where the bark is shredded on the downed trunk? She must have tried to crawl beneath it, and the wolves tore at it till they got her out. The marks are too big for anything else.”
“They don’t do this,” Ridley said but he sounded more confused than convinced. “They just don’t.”
Anna didn’t argue with him. She knew the wolf statistics. Western parks debated them endlessly as the subject of reintroducing wolves heated up.
“It’ll be dark before we get back,” Ridley said and stood. “Bob! Make yourself useful.” To Anna he said: “We’ll package the remains for transport. You and Robin look around a little more. We’ve got ten minutes, then we’ve got to move.”
A foot of new snow could hide a lot of sins. There was no point in searching any areas that hadn’t been disturbed by scavengers. The clearing where the body was found was not so much a clearing as a flat space where the trees had opted not to fall for one reason or another. It was scarcely six feet on a side. Beyond that, they were again in the giant’s game of pick-up-sticks.
Anna followed Katherine’s back trail. Five or six yards into the tangle of trees, she found a place where the snow had been dug down almost to bare earth. Shreds of fabric were scattered around the dig.
“Robin,” Anna called. “Bring your light.” Robin came lightly, gracefully, annoying Anna with her ease of movement in this hostile environment. “What do you think?” Anna asked, pointing out the fabric.
“Backpack? She must have gone back to the bunkhouse before she ran off. That changes things. To what, I haven’t a clue.”
The pack, what was left of it, was of dark blue canvas, a relic from before high tech went into the backcountry. The anachronism was jarring. Katherine was a state-of-the-art woman. The wolves had attacked the pack with a fury that struck Anna as almost personal, the way a deranged person will defile an object belonging to someone they hate.
Radios came to life; Adam calling from the base radio in the bunkhouse. “My batteries went dead,” came through a storm of static. “Where is everybody?”