The combs dredged moose ticks, lice and mange mites from the thick fur. The combing wouldn’t come close to cleaning the parasites from the body. They were sample takers, not exterminators, and Anna knew she wouldn’t sleep well for the feeling of crawly things in her sleeping bag.
“That’s enough,” Ridley said finally. Anna had just culled a fat moose tick from a section of fur on the wolf’s belly and was trying to keep it from creeping off the comb till she could drop it in the alcohol.
“Wolves are not at the top of the food chain on Isle Royale,” she said disgustedly. “Ticks are.”
The alcohol vials were stowed in the kitchen cupboard next to a box of granola bars. Ridley brought in another rack of vials, the glass preservation tubes smaller than those used for ectoparasites. Using tweezers, Katherine plucked guard hairs, careful to get the follicles.
“Ninety-five percent ethanol,” she said to Anna as she dropped them in fifteen-milliliter glass vials. “We use that instead of alcohol for the DNA. It keeps the sample from degrading. Well, keeps it from degrading longer. Eventually everything goes.”
“We’ll have to wait on the teeth and throat,” Ridley said. His hands were around the wolf’s muzzle, pulling with a degree of force. “Frozen solid.”
There was a wrongness in Ridley’s hands on the animal’s mouth that disturbed Anna on a rudimentary level, the way watching people put a car in gear without fastening their seat belts or wave an unloaded gun in the direction of living things did.
“Rigor or frozen frozen?” she asked.
Ridley rocked back on his heels. “When it’s this cold, it doesn’t make much difference. It takes longer for specimens to thaw out than it would for rigor to go off.”
“How long does rigor last in a wolf?” Anna asked.
“I don’t know,” he said without curiosity. Ridley exhibited a disinterest in anything regarding research animals that wasn’t study specific. Maybe a narrow mind was a strength for a researcher; the ability to focus on one tiny thing for a very long time.
“No gloves!” Anna blurted out suddenly. That was the wrongness; Ridley was handling the animal without wearing surgical gloves.
“We’ll put them on for the necropsy,” he said. “That gets messy.”
Anna nodded. There was no need for gloves except to keep one’s nails clean. No AIDS, no hepatitis B or other blood-borne diseases. The risk of contamination was nil. A bit of human DNA sprinkled here and there amid the wolf DNA wouldn’t interfere with the investigation.
The research, Anna corrected herself.
The wolf’s hide had softened in the relative heat of the bunkhouse, and Ridley pulled up the wolf’s right eyebrow with his thumb. The dull eyes were gold colored, closer together and more slanted than the eyes of domestic dogs.
“Great eyes,” he said as he pulled up the lid of the left.
“Yes,” Anna said. “He looks Slavic, as if he hunted the great plains of Russia from the beginning of time.”
Ridley stared at her blankly. “They’re not eaten,” he explained. “Ravens get the eyes first thing, usually.” He looked back to the wolf. “No cataracts. Even without seeing the teeth, my guess is this guy is two, three at most. He must have tried to run the pack or gotten himself crosswise with the alpha some other way, then lost the fight,” he said, rocking back on his heels. “The rest is going to have to wait till he thaws.”
Ridley rose gracefully, his elegant hands held out in front of him like a pianist about to perform. He would wash them immediately with hot water dippered from the stovetop into a basin. The Winter Study team was fastidious about hygiene. Gastrointestinal upsets took on a whole new meaning when the bathroom was a one-holer and the temperature minus twelve degrees.
Anna squatted in the vacated place by the wolf’s head. She knew she was making a pest of herself, getting in the way of the scientists and asking what were, to them, foolish questions, but she didn’t much care.
A wolf.
She’d yet to get over the wonder of it.
“Wine time,” Bob said, glancing at his watch, and followed Ridley toward the common room.
“Generator time,” Jonah said. “Since the good Adam, first man on Earth and not on time even once in the ensuing millennia, has not yet returned, firing it up falls to me.”
Anna’d not noticed the light going. Her nose was scarcely four inches from the slash in the wolf’s throat. She laughed. “I just figured I was going blind.”
“Let there be light,” Jonah said and left.
Five minutes later the lights came on. Since Katherine showed no indication she was finished, and Anna had nothing better to do, she stayed and watched.
“I’ve got a new toy,” Katherine said, more at ease with the men gone. She lovingly removed a box about the size of two toasters from a duffel bag stacked with other bags and boxes on the unused cot in the corner of the kitchen. “They’ve been around for a while, but this is of a new generation.” With obvious pride, she removed the top half of the Styrofoam packing to reveal a machine that looked like a cross between a computer and an adding machine.
When no explanation was forthcoming, Anna asked: “What does it do?”
“It’s a PCR,” Katherine said. “A polymerase chain reaction machine. It’s brand-new technology.” Katherine stroked its plastic face. “American University bought it for this trip. The wolf/moose study is a kind of rock star in animal research studies.”
Anna’d known that. In a world where the denizens hyperventilated over the discovery of a new kind of fruit fly larva, wolves would be glamour on paws. It was also the longest-running project of its kind in America and, despite how it seemed at the dinner table, one of the touted examples of how scientists and the Park Service worked and played well together.
“The lab at Michigan Tech does the original fingerprinting,” Katherine went on as she set the PCR on the counter. “ISRO’s samples are sent there. They extract DNA using a Qiagen extraction kit. Then the sample is visualized, using a Beckman-Coul fragment analyzer. They do it at a bunch of different microsatellite loci in the genome.”
It would have fallen to Katherine, as Menechinn’s graduate student, to teach the basic classes. Anna felt a twinge of pity for her students. Katherine’s mind moved in higher stratospheres of science, and it sounded as if her trips back to Earth had been infrequent.
“You lost me at ‘Qiagen,’” Anna said.
Katherine looked sheepish, oddly juxtapositional to the technically precise language she’d been spouting. “Sorry.” She bobbed her head in the birdlike way Anna’d noticed her first night on the island, the ducking-under-the-wing gesture when Bob had praised her graduate work.
Katherine took a deep breath and looked into the corner behind Anna’s head. “Okay. The Qiagen… Okay. No. Okay, let’s go to the gel. No. Not yet…”
Anna waited patiently as she struggled her way back to total ignorance so she might begin to help Anna understand.
“Tiny fragments of the DNA are taken,” Katherine finally said, and her gaze came back to eye level. “From a lot of different places – not on the sample; from different places on the genome from the sample. All these tiny pieces have different weights. The fragments are… uh… squirted… into tubes of gel… like Jell-O, you know?”
“I know Jell-O,” Anna said gravely.
“Good. Good. So each little piece of DNA is in its own tube, and the tubes are all in a line like…” She groped mentally, probably through a bag of metaphors that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody without at least a master’s degree.
“Like a bowling alley?”
“Yes!” she said gratefully. “Like a bowling alley, but tiny. Very, very small. Small. Smaller than small-”