When they’d done, he shined his light over the harness and the Sked, checking that the lines were still secure. “Where’s your light?” he demanded suddenly.
“Bob took it. He wanted to go first.”
“Bob took it,” Ridley said. “God damn him. Here, take mine. God damn him. God damn Adam,” he said and pushed into the darkness toward the wavering speck of light that was the purloined flashlight.
“What’s with Ridley and Adam?” Anna asked.
“Who knows,” Robin replied. Her voice was hollow, as if part of her said the expected words while another, greater part of her was someplace else. Someplace where nightmare was the special of the day.
“How are you doing?” Anna asked. “My strength of ten men is down to about eight-point-five,” she admitted. “Are you okay?”
“Bob took my light.”
The biotech was crying. Anna couldn’t see it but tears were breaking in her words.
“Let me pull the Sked for a while,” Anna said, wondering if she could make good on the offer.
“No.”
Maybe it would be good for Robin to keep working, keep moving, so Anna didn’t argue with her. She didn’t get up either. In a moment she would, she promised herself.
The wind stopped, the trees ceased their muttering and silence as cold and deep as an ice cave poured down. Into that silence came the sound Anna had heard before, stealthy movement in the trees to their left. Robin heard it too. In the glow of the flashlight, Anna saw her head jerk as if on a string; she uttered a strangled cry and began to swing the light in erratic arcs across the landscape. Suddenly illuminated, and as suddenly vanishing back into the dark, trunks and white and rocks flashed by, and for a second Anna felt as if she were falling.
Whether a curious moose, a band of squirrels or a slavering wog was with them, they couldn’t stay where they were. Ridley and Bob were already out of sight. Without light, Ridley couldn’t come back to help them; all he could do was follow Bob’s flashlight the way a lost ship follows the flashing of a buoy. Shaking her head to clear it, Anna blinked a few times. “We better get going.”
Without a word, Robin put her weight behind the harness and pulled. From her kneeling position, Anna pushed on the back of the Sked, breaking it free of where it had frozen to the snow while they’d stopped. A crack, a lurch, and it was moving. A crack, a lurch, and Anna was on her feet moving as well. Robin covered more ground than Ridley had, either not so considerate of Anna slogging behind or more anxious to get back to the main trail and then the bunkhouse.
Anna lifted one foot, then the other, and stayed upright, but the Sked drew away little by little. When the body, the biotech and the light source were several yards ahead, and traveling ever faster, Anna swallowed her pride and called out.
“Hold up. You’re killing me.”
The light stopped. Anna’s breath sawed in her ears as she plowed through the snow. Reaching the Sked, she fell to her knees. She hadn’t spent so much time on her knees since she went to Catholic school. It crossed her mind that a little praying might not hurt anything. With the wog and the munched-up graduate student, the slithery noises and the gigantic paw prints, all she could think of was the dyslexic who stayed up all night worrying about whether or not there was a dog.
She laughed shortly, and the bark of sound made the ensuing silence deeper. Through the thick, black quiet came the distinct crack of a twig snapping and a swish as of a tail sweeping over the snow. Not squirrels; two ounces of rodent didn’t snap twigs. Not a moose; moose were not subtle creatures.
“Stop it!” Robin screamed. Anna squawked, scared half out of her wits by the sudden cry. At first, she thought Robin was yelling at her – fatigue and stretched nerves made the best of women into shrews – but she was yelling at the dark and the trees, at the wog and the windigo, the ice and the night.
The biotech, so seemingly strong and untiring, was breaking apart. Delayed reaction, Anna thought. It had to be; the woman was cool efficiency itself first when photographing the slaughtered wolf, then assisting with the packaging of the slaughtered researcher. She’d held up till near the end. Then she’d started unraveling.
“It’s okay,” Anna said. “We’re going to be okay.” With a huge effort but no grunt, she stood without using her hands to push herself up.
“Let’s go. It’s nothing. The wind plays tricks.”
“It isn’t nothing,” Robin hissed at her. “It’s not fucking nothing!” she yelled at the dark. She began thrusting the flashlight beam into the trees, stabbing, as evil Nazis did with bayonets into haystacks in old movies.
Anna made her way to the front of the sled, the mush of her boots through the snow covering whatever sound the followers in the woods might have been making. She pried the flashlight from Robin’s fingers. “We’ll walk together,” she said. “If the Sked hangs up, I’ll go back. Come on now.”
Robin’s tears metastasized; she sobbed, snot running from her nose, tears freezing in opaque droplets on her cheeks.
“Pull,” Anna said.
Through thick down gloves, Anna felt her hand being taken. Robin had reached out and taken it, two puffed, oversized hands, neither of which could feel anything but the pressure of the other, clinging together in the dark.
“Ridley!” Anna yelled. “We could use some help back here!”
There was no answer. Like a will-o’-the-wisp, Bob’s stolen light had led Ridley astray. Ahead was only darkness and silence.
“Fuck them,” she said cheerily. “We’re better off without them.” She squeezed Robin’s hand in what she hoped was a reassuring manner and tucked her other arm through the harness rope where it stretched down to the Sked. She could take some of the weight off the younger woman’s shoulders, literally if not metaphorically.
For twenty minutes, they labored on without speaking. Twice the Sked caught on downed tree limbs and twice Anna trudged back to free it. The act of pretending to be stronger and braver than she was helped. How long she could run on this low-octane fuel, she didn’t know. Robin had stopped crying and went forward like a skiing machine. Her face, when Anna caught glimpses of it in the reflected light, was filled with such bleak hopelessness it was scary. Drawing breath, Anna was about to shout for Ridley again – not that she thought he’d answer but just to make a fierce noise against the darkness – when something beat her to it.
The howl of a wolf ululated through the frigid night, leaving not a ripple; a round, perfect sound that too many stories and too many movies imbued with the absolute distillation of terror. Anna felt the hairs on her body stand on end as her skin tightened. Her mouth was suddenly dry, and she wanted nothing more than to run away, leave Robin and what was left of Katherine to appease whatever it was, wolf or wog or the ancient eater of flesh the Ojibwa told of.
In the falling-apart arena, Robin beat her to the punch. She dropped like a stone, gloved hands over her ears, knees up under her chin, then rolled over into the fetal position. The flashlight hit the snow and disappeared into the powder, leaving only a glow where it had gone under.
Anna retrieved the light and crouched down, one arm across Robin. “Shh, shhh,” she murmured automatically. “It’s just a howl. They howl to say hi. That’s all.” Without being aware she was doing so, Anna was talking to the very little part of Robin, the part that covered her ears and curled up and hid under the covers when the monster was in the room. The adult Robin knew more about wolves than Anna did.
The howl came again. This time it had a sorrowful, almost questioning tone. Anna would have been hard-pressed to describe it, but on the musical glissando, where the singer carried the notes skyward, there was a longing.
“Wolves won’t hurt you,” Anna said, patting Robin. “Wolves don’t eat people.” Then she remembered what they pulled behind them in a trough of tin. “Anyway, they don’t eat when they’re full,” she muttered.