Being a true romantic, Anna had said she would adore it. Rocky Mountain would soon be dealing with the prey/predator issue. Not through any sudden enlightenment of the state legislature, but because the recovery of the magnificent and much-maligned animals had been rapid. Wolves were reinhabiting territories they’d been extirpated from for a century or more.
Anna had reason to know the expected wolves were already in the park and no reason whatsoever to share the knowledge. At least not till the pups were old enough to fend for themselves. Wolf/moose management was about to top Rocky’s list of wildlife issues, and there was no better classroom for studying it than Isle Royale.
“We’re set,” the pilot said. Anna climbed the two paw-sized steps on the Beaver’s wheel pant to get into the high cockpit, no mean feat in boots the size of snowshoes.
“Need help with your safety belt?” The pilot was stiff and edgy, his United States Forest Service uniform so crisp that Anna, accustomed to the rumpled, sweat-stained versions she came across in the field, had, at first glance, mistaken it for a military uniform.
“No,” she said shortly. She’d flown on search and rescues, forest fires and animal surveys, more times than she could count before the pilot graduated from high school. Annoyed at herself for being annoyed, she fumbled at her safety harness. She was as awkward a bundle as an Iowa schoolboy waiting for the bus in January.
Pride cometh, she thought wryly as her mittened hands scrabbled on the webbing and her spiffy new balaclava interfered as she tried to bite her fingertips to pull the mittens off. Finally she sat as patiently and helplessly as the apocryphal Iowa lad and let the pilot string her shoulder harnesses through her lap belt and lock the whole mess down.
Then she thanked him politely.
Robin Adair, the long-legged research assistant, sprang gracefully into the left rear seat, settled herself like a pro, and the plane was pushed from the hangar.
The Forest Service seaplane operation was on the shore of Shagawa Lake, edging the small town of Ely. In summer, the runway was open water. Now it was a lane of hard-packed snow, running north-northeast, between gaudily painted ice-fishing houses put up helter-skelter till they resembled nothing so much as a 1940s trailer park dropped from a passing cargo plane.
In an attempt to quell what was verging on internal whining, Anna focused on the beauty of the boreal forest as the Beaver left the ice and banked, turning east toward Michigan. The day was painfully bright and clear as it can only be in the north, where every particle of moisture is frozen from the air and the sun moves low in the south, feigning evening even at noon. Crystalline amber light honed the edges of the world till shadows of pines, long on the shores of snow-covered lakes, were as sharp and black as fangs drawn by children. Even from an altitude of twenty-two hundred feet and climbing, every track across the dazzle of white showed blue.
Static rattled in Anna’s headphones, and then the pilot’s voice: “Have you been to Isle Royale before?”
“Once.” Anna had the scar to prove it, a six-inch weal of shiny flesh across her abdomen. It still ached occasionally.
When it was cold.
“Did you work there?”
Altitude was making the man downright chatty. Anna preferred him in his martinet mode but dragged herself from the vista of black pine and white lakes to make conversation.
“Ten or fifteen years ago, I was a ranger in Windigo. Boat patrol.”
“Wow!” the pilot said. Before Anna could bask in his awe, he finished his thought: “I was in seventh grade then.”
So much for impressing the natives.
“Did you ferry the Homeland Security guys out?” she asked, to change the subject.
The “Homeland Security guys” had been sent by Washington to evaluate Winter Study. For fifty years, Isle Royale had been a lab for Michigan Tech, in cooperation with the National Park Service. The park provided money and physical support. In return, the wolf researchers added to the glamour of Isle Royale. Visitors followed the rise and fall in the pack populations as avidly as soap opera devotees. A sizable percentage of the world’s knowledge of wolves had been produced by the study.
To remain viable, the ISRO wolf/moose study had two requirements: fifty thousand dollars a year – peanuts as far as research money went – and that ISRO be closed to tourism from October to May, when the wolves mated and denned.
Homeland Security had put forth a resolution to beef up security in all border parks. To that end, they were exploring the possibility of opening the park year-round, to better protect the border from terrorists. If the wolf/moose study – running for over half a century – could be said to be effectively mined out as far as relevant data was concerned, Homeland Security was going to shut it down. ISRO would be opened to cross-country skiers and winter campers. Rock Harbor resort, on the east end, would be revamped for year-round usage, and a smaller hotel built on the east end in Windigo.
The wolf researchers – Anna, NPS seasonals and Homeland Security, in the persons of rented experts from American University – would share a bunkhouse for six weeks. Anna was surprised some enterprising young reality-TV-show producer hadn’t offered big money to film it.
The mike woke up, and the seventh-grader flying the plane said: “It was a man and a woman – Homeland Security – the guy was somebody Ridley Murray recommended. They were weathered in in Ely for nearly a week. Hung around the hangar all day, being mad because we wouldn’t move the ceiling up. Clouds were right down on the deck.”
“I can’t believe the park would do this to Rolf.” It was Robin from the backseat, her voice-activated mike crackling with more anger than static.
“Rolf Peterson retired,” the pilot said.
“The study is Rolf.” Robin again. From Robin’s fierceness, Anna guessed she, like a lot of other young outdoors people, was in love with the charismatic wolf researcher. Not sexual love but romantic love, in the sense that they wanted to grow up to be him, or at least have his life. To a woman Robin’s age – twenty-two or-three, at a guess – retirement could look a lot like desertion. Or death.
“Ridley wanted this guy,” the pilot said doggedly.
“Ridley Murray was Rolf’s student.” Robin’s voice came back on its bed of cracklings. “Lesser of evils: Ridley didn’t want any guy.”
The mike was live for another moment as if an unspoken thought prolonged its activation, then, noiselessly but unmistakably, it went dead again. Fleetingly Anna wondered what differentiated that quiet open line of communication and the quiet but utterly different isolation that followed. Maybe it was the difference between silence and deafness; some sense deeper than the stirrup and hammer that tells one she is alone.
Embracing the solitude, she watched the frozen miles pass beneath the Beaver’s wings and thought of Paul. It wasn’t only the Mississippi heat that had thinned her blood. Paul Davidson was the source of the living heat in her life. After her first husband, Zack, had died, Anna had, without even knowing she’d done so, chosen a chill and lonely place to stow her heart, a limbo where it continued to beat, like the heart of a frog frozen in winter mud, to thaw to new life come spring. Paul had been her spring.