Finally Anna headed off toward the woods where Bob’s tracks tore up the bank. Katherine pushed up from the scat-dotted ice to come with her.
“Hang on, you two.” Bob sounded like a schoolmaster dealing with overeager children. “I don’t want you tracking up the area before Ridley gets there.”
Idiot, Anna thought charitably as she pretended not to hear him.
Menechinn’s find was no more than a hundred yards from shore, near where the Feldtmann Trail joined the Nature Trail that led up to the permanent-employee housing. In a three-foot radius around the body, duff, dirt and snow were plowed up by Menechinn’s size thirteens. Mud and blood churned the snow to the unsettling brownish pink Anna associated with wallpaper in old ladies’ bathrooms.
“Idiot,” she reiterated as she studied the radically compromised scene.
A wolf.
There was no scene. Dead animals did not constitute murder.
Pet Sematary.
“Right,” she said, and, careless of where she stepped, she walked up to the animal and squatted on her haunches. It lay on its side, eyes open, tongue – pink and silly looking like a goofball dog’s – lolling out of its mouth. Anna pulled off a mitten and touched the tongue. Frozen solid. Scavengers had been at it but not a lot. The animal had been there long enough to freeze but not so long that the body had been torn up. Five or six hours, maybe less. Ridley could make a more educated guess. He knew the island food chain better than she did.
The blood was from the throat. A wolf-on-wolf killing; on ISRO, nothing else was big enough to take out a wolf. The wolves were isolated by miles of open water for decades at a stretch, and no other large predators had migrated to the island: no puma, no bears, no coyotes, not even a badger. The other wolf – the one who’d left the fray alive – was either very big or very lucky. This animal was a good-sized male, yet he hadn’t had time to put up much of a fight. Fur, matted with blood and frozen solid, masked the wound, but it had to have been severe. The wolf looked as if he bled out fast. There was little sign of movement after the neck was slashed.
Anna laid her bare hand on the fur. In the Western world’s collective unconscious, wolves symbolized hunger, danger, vicious cunning and cold-blooded slaughter. The flip side was, they were the embodiment of the wild; like the wind, they went where they would, did as they pleased, then vanished into the woods. Touching a wolf – even a dead wolf – Anna thrilled to the echo of primitive, amoral freedom.
“What killed it?” Ridley had come. Everybody had come. Anna stood and moved back.
“Neck wound,” Anna said.
“Interpack rivalry,” Bob said.
“Could be,” Ridley replied noncommittally.
“What else?” Bob demanded.
Anna leaned against the bole of a birch. She loved a good pissing contest when she wasn’t on the wrong end of it. Ridley said nothing but crouched over the wolf much as she had. Menechinn gave Anna a conspiratorial grin as if they shared a joke on Ridley. He winked at Anna, then said to Ridley: “You wanted a dead wolf. Now you’ve got it.”
“Now I’ve got it,” Ridley echoed absently. He took off his left glove. With long, sensitive fingers, he pulled back the eyelids, then the lips. Ridley Murray was unmoved by the wolf’s death per se. Wolves were not wolves to him, Anna realized. They were subjects of study.
Katherine was not quite so clinical, but she was detached and professional. After the story of her first wolf and love torn asunder by parental decree, Anna thought she’d show more emotion.
“Let’s get it to the bunkhouse,” Ridley said, rising effortlessly to his feet. “It’ll need to thaw before we can do much.”
“I’ll take the pelt and head,” Bob said. “I’ll have it shipped to American University. You know, for research, a research tool. Our students don’t get much of a chance for the hands-on like you folks do.” He smiled, turning it on each of them in turn.
Katherine’s head twitched up, in a gesture oddly reminiscent of the alpha female’s, on hearing the approaching snowmobile. A shadow passed behind her eyes, and she turned away as if from something obscene. Maybe she wasn’t as unmoved as Anna had thought.
Ridley pulled his glove on, his eyes blank under the glare of Menechinn’s grin. He looked the way Robin did when she came in at the end of the day; her face frozen – not figuratively, literally – cold paralyzing surface muscles and skin, as unable to show any expression as a Botox junkie.
“The head and pelt,” Ridley said evenly.
In the minds of the members of the wolf/moose study team, the island had been their personal domain for years, intruded on occasionally by the National Park Service and other ignorant bureaucrats but never conquered. Anna waited for Ridley to light into Menechinn.
Ridley didn’t take his eyes off Bob for a good ten seconds, then he said to Robin: “Get a tarp from the snowmobile. I want to get it to the bunkhouse before the ravens find it.”
ON THE FLOOR in the unused kitchen down the hall from Anna and Robin’s room, garbage bags were put down, then newspapers to soak up the fluids. The wolf was laid on this unglamorous bier to thaw.
“It’ll be a few days before we can do the necropsy,” Ridley said as he handed a fine-tooth comb to Anna and another to Katherine, then set a box of small ziplock baggies, the size cheap jewelry is sold in, on the newspapers by the wolf’s spine.
“I’ll be here to supervise,” Jonah said. “Keep an eye on young Ridley.”
“You taught me everything I know,” Ridley said good-naturedly.
“Any mistakes I make will be your fault.” It had taken Anna a while, but she’d eventually caught on; one of the many amusements they’d developed was the fiction that Jonah was all things: chef, scientist, philosopher and learned professor. Though he was a smart man, Anna doubted he’d gone any further than high school.
“We’ll do the external exam now,” Ridley said for Anna’s benefit.
“No smell, for one thing. Once the specimen starts thawing, it’ll stink pretty bad.”
“At least we’ve got that to look forward to,” Jonah interjected.
“We want to get the ectoparasites off. They are opportunistic and will jump to other hosts if they can. We’re the other hosts.”
“Like this,” Katherine said, and Anna watched as she combed the fur from the roots of the hairs out, much like a mom looking for lice on a child’s head. Ridley moved to the kitchen counter and set out a rack of small vials he’d brought from the storeroom off the shared living area. The tubes were held upright by the rack, half filled with clear liquid and tightly stoppered.
“Alcohol,” he said. “For preservation.”
Anna began combing. She’d thought the fur would be like dog fur, but it wasn’t. Where a dog’s coat was relatively smooth, hairs all the same length, the wolf’s pelt was made of many lengths, and lengths of many textures and colors. From the distance of the dock, the animals had appeared to be rather plain. Up close, the rich color and lush texture of the coat was stunning. Midwinter, times were tough, the wolf hadn’t been shampooed or visited a doggie salon in his life, yet the descriptive that came to Anna’s mind was “regal,” a robe of royalty right down to the extra-long guard hairs around the throat that created a silvery ruff.
The pelt’s loveliness was somewhat dimmed by the bloodsuckers it harbored. At least none were embedded. Wolves seemed to possess a natural deterrent to ticks that the moose did not enjoy. Anna didn’t have any particular fear of the world’s many-legged denizens, but there was something about ticks that had always made her queasy. She was not sorry to drop the little buggers into the certain death of the vials.