“No.”
Katherine was the one who spoke. Bob, neatly lifted off the hook, gave her a slow smile. She didn’t smile back. With everyone looking at her, Katherine lost her confidence. “I need some help,” she stammered. “I need Dr. Menechinn to help me with the PCR.”
The last words were almost a whisper. “Excuse me,” she said and left the table abruptly.
Adam broke the awkward silence that followed. “Mind if I tag along with Robin tomorrow or has somebody busted something I have to fix?”
“Go,” Ridley said.
Anna did the dishes alone. After the fit of jealousy, Katherine hadn’t come back. If it was jealousy. That didn’t feel quite right, but Anna had no better explanation. Whatever the reason, the researcher had hid out with her PCR. She’d identified the samples collected on the harbor ice, but there was all that terrific new poop Robin brought back.
When the washing was done, Anna returned to the common room to find it empty. All six members of the Winter Study team were in the kitchen-cum-morgue crowded around Katherine’s PCR. With the thawing wolf, a spare cot and everybody’s luggage taking up most of the floor, the six of them were crowded two deep at the counter.
“I don’t think this sample came from any ISRO wolf,” Katherine was saying as Anna slipped in to see what the show was about. “It doesn’t match up with any of the fingerprints Michigan downloaded onto the PCR.”
“This year’s pup,” Bob said. “Not on the radar yet.”
Anna weaseled past him. Ridley and Katherine, heads almost touching, were poring over a strip of paper.
“There are other things,” Katherine said.
“Every wolf on ISRO descended from the one breeding pair that came across the ice,” Ridley told Menechinn. “They’ve got distinct genetic markers. The obvious one is the mutation of the spine. About half of ISRO’s wolves have an extra vertebra. But their DNA marks them as members of a single family. Different from unrelated wolves. This isn’t an island wolf. It’s wolf DNA but weird.”
Anna loved it when scientists talked technical.
Ridley pressed the DNA readout flat on the counter; next to it, he placed another, a known DNA readout of an island wolf, and studied the two together. “It’s like wolf plus… something.”
“The sample got tainted,” Bob said.
“Maybe.” Katherine was looking not at the readout but out the window toward where they’d seen the pack cross the compound.
She was thinking about the huge tracks Robin had seen, Anna would have bet on it.
6
The following day, the promised snow began to fall. Robin laced up her mukluks, shouldered her army-issue rucksack and headed out to photograph the track of the gigantic hound with Adam. The others slept late and dawdled over breakfast. The wolf pack on the ice had changed the daily habits of the researchers. Usually, when the sky was clear and there was little wind, Ridley would spend the day in the air with Jonah watching and photographing the wolves. When the weather was too bad to fly, there were chores, but not enough to keep them busy.
For most of breakfast, they chewed over the DNA Katherine had identified as alien. The wolf that had left the scat wasn’t from the island. At first, Anna hadn’t grasped the magnitude of that revelation. Wolves had come across the ice once, had they not? It was only when Ridley reminded her that the lake hadn’t frozen over in nearly thirty years that she understood. A wolf in the wild had to be lucky and strong to live ten years. The wolf who’d left scat along the Greenstone Trail to Siskiwit Lake would have to have been the Methuselah of wolf kind to have traversed the last ice bridge.
This wolf had come to the island in some other manner. Wolves could swim, but they could not swim eighteen miles. That left boat, ski plane, seaplane, canoe, kayak or Ski-Doo. A pup loosed by a misguided do-gooder? A wolf/dog hybrid bred in domesticity, the owner grows bored with it and lets it “go free” on the island? Had a wolf/dog hybrid been raised to be vicious, attacked somebody and, rather than kill it, the owner dumped it at a campground or in the bay?
This last was the most probable. Wolves’ reputation as cold-blooded killers of little girls in red capes was unearned. No one around the breakfast table could think of a single recorded incident in their lifetimes or that of their parents. In 2005, a presumed wolf/ human killing had been reported, but the attack animal turned out to be a bear.
What there had been were attacks on people by wolf/dog hybrids, kept and bred by dog owners. Like any animal that cannot be fully domesticated, these breeds were volatile. The owners weren’t any better. Most obtained wolf/dog hybrids because they wanted a big, scary, mean dog or, worse – illegal but available in all fifty states – a fighting dog. Brutal attacks by these animals had stirred up public opinion to the point that, in many urban areas, it was illegal to own or keep a wolf/dog hybrid.
Jonah tired of saying “wolf/dog hybrid” first and dubbed the speculative animal a “wog.”
A wog could have been dumped on the island at any time, but most likely in the last six or seven months. Had the creature been in the park the previous winter, Ridley believed there would have been sign of it, a sighting or scat or the outsized paw prints Robin had reported.
Most domesticated – or even partially domesticated – animals couldn’t survive in the wilderness for long, but if the wog was as big as the tracks Robin found suggested, and trained to kill, it might have joined – or taken over – a pack. This could explain why the pack had apparently lost its fear of humans and sauntered through the bunkhouse area. If the wog were big enough and fierce enough, it could have killed the wolf now decomposing in the kitchen, dispatched it so quickly there were no signs of a fight.
“Any alien wolf or wolf/dog hybrid,” Bob declared, pointedly refusing to use Jonah’s word, “would be killed by any pack that came across it.”
“What if it was big, really big?” Katherine said.
“It’s not one-on-one in a fair fight, Kathy,” Bob said with a smile that pushed his cheeks up till his eyes were crescent moons. The smile notwithstanding, the “Kathy” was a clear rebuke. “The pack would kill it.”
“Maybe not,” Ridley said. “If there was a breeding slot open, the wolf might be assimilated.”
Bob snorted. “Pretty hard to arrange,” he said.
“It could happen by chance,” Ridley said. Anna wasn’t sure whether he believed it or was just baiting the other man. “Chance is the only reason we have wolves here at all. A big enough, aggressive enough wog might pull it off.”
The breakfast club finally broke up: Ridley to his laptop to work on reports, Jonah to wander the bunkhouse looking for somebody to pester and Bob to the chair closest to the woodstove to read through the daily log, a thick, three-ring binder full of the forms provided for record keeping. The park service was full of such information-gathering tools. For the most part, they were a tedium of pages hurriedly filled in by the lowest-ranking member of any team. On the island, the biotech did it each day. Temperature at sunrise, at sunset, snowfall, comments; office closets were full of these binders, detailing one study or another. As far as Anna knew, Bob was the first person to actually look at one.
For a while, she amused herself in the DNA lab kitchen, watching Katherine pore over her alien sample, running and rerunning it only to get the same answer. When that palled and looking at the wolf, who was beginning to smell, lost its edge, Anna began drifting back toward the common room.
“Anna?”
It was the first time Katherine had spoken in a quarter of an hour and her voice was so low Anna barely caught it. She looked back. The researcher was still bent over her PCR, her back to the room.