Robin made a soft sound in her throat, a groan or muted cry. Anna tried to read her face in the dim light of Bob’s smothered lamp, but the shadows of hat, scarf and long hair effectively screened her.
Bob was easy to read. His head probably wasn’t any bigger than a normal human being’s – unless one was speaking metaphorically – but his face appeared immense, meaty, slabs of cheek and jowl dwarfing eyes, nose and mouth. On this wide canvas, fear was clearly writ. The big game hunter didn’t like being hunted.
“What’s it after?” he asked. He’d meant to whisper, but the words came out in a squeak.
“Food,” Robin replied succinctly.
Anna couldn’t argue. The chocolate and cheese and other high-fat, high-sugar, high-protein items they’d tucked into bed with them might have been rendered odorless to human noses, but to a wolf they would smell like a deli at lunchtime. For decades, humans and wolves had lived separate lives on the small island. Though ISRO was only forty-two miles long, and trails raked down both sides of her spine and crisscrossed the many lakes and coves, wolf sightings weren’t common. Wolves were a private people, a quiet, watchful people. Undoubtedly the frequency of wolves seeing visitors vastly outnumbered that of visitors seeing wolves.
In recent years, that had begun to change. A wolf had been seen hanging around a campground in Rock Harbor on several occasions. A dead wolf washed up on shore in Robinson Bay, apparently drowned. People reported seeing wolves near the lean-tos in Washington Harbor. The wonder of this was that it hadn’t happened long ago. Wild animals quickly became habituated to humans when food was involved.
“We’re food,” Robin said, as if reading Anna’s thoughts.
Anna could have smacked her. “Don’t be an idiot. When was the last time a wolf ate anybody?” she demanded.
Robin looked slightly cowed, but she said: “Maybe this isn’t a regular wolf.”
The animal, quiet since Bob had come to life, began frenzied digging, claws scraping loud against the fabric of the tent and the frozen earth.
Bob yelped. Robin, still pressed to Anna’s side, screamed. Bob jerked his lamp from his down bag and shined it frantically around the tent walls, a wild, dizzying rush of light. Anna felt as if she was falling into a vortex of hysteria.
“My God,” Katherine cried. She grabbed Bob’s wrist and steadied the light on a section of tent opposite the entrance flap. The fabric was pounding in and out as the animal’s claws raked against it. Big paws. Bigger than a man’s fist, and high up the tent wall. The urgent whine of a carnivore closing on its quarry cut through the rapid clawing, then a growl from deep in the chest; the growl of a dog who does not bark but bites.
“God damn,” Anna breathed. Her heart thudded against her rib cage, skin prickled, adrenaline poured into her till she was strung out with it. Night of the Grizzly no longer seemed so far-fetched. Neither did The Haunting of Hill House.
The pawing stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Paws padded away.
Then nothing.
Silence was so complete, Anna realized, not only had the nocturnal intruder ceased its onslaught but the four of them had pretty much stopped breathing. Her hand was cramping. She was hanging on to Robin as tightly as Robin was holding on to her.
She laughed shakily. “Whoa! That was-”
“Shut up,” Bob cried and began swinging the headlamp, clutched in both hands, in crazy patterns, as if the circle of light was an eye through which he could see outside the tent. Shadows rushed and retreated till the space seemed full not only of human bodies and gear but a host of unquiet spirits.
“Stop it!” Anna ordered.
“It’s gone, Bob,” Katherine said softly.
“Shut up,” Bob snarled.
“It’s gone,” Anna said, forcing her voice to the light and conversational. She found her lamp, turned it on and shined it in Bob’s eyes to get his attention. White showed around the irises, and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his upper lip. His fear was phobic; pure terror. The kind that runs amok. “We’re okay,” Anna said, not sure it was true. She, too, was scared, but she wasn’t sure whether it was of the creature outside or that Bob would begin throwing himself around like a panicked bull in a china shop, where her bones took the place of the porcelain.
“Let’s all settle down,” she said reasonably.
“You fucking settle down,” Bob snarled. “You fucking settle down! Ridley sends us out to fucking freeze to death because he’s bred some freak wolf/dog hybrid that’s ripping the shit out of our goddam tent-”
“It’s okay, Bob. There’s nothing to be scared-” Katherine was begging, reaching out to touch the back of his hand.
He batted her away and yelled: “Keep your hands off me, you fucking cunt.”
“That’s enough,” Anna ordered sharply. “It’s gone. We’re all right. Now we sleep.” Anger had taken up the space where fear had been.
Bob’s eyes cleared marginally. He was coming back to himself from a hunt where he was the trophy animal, but the bone-deep horror remained. Anna saw it and she snorted; a stiff sniff of air through nostrils pinched with cold. Had she been less tired, less chilled, less freaked out by the bizarre behavior of the animal, she would have been able to stop herself. As it was, she saw his fear, and he saw her contempt for it. They all saw it.
As she lay down and turned off her lamp, she knew that was something a guy like Bob Menechinn would never forgive them for. Lying in the frigid dark, she could feel the others listening. She could smell the fear sweat from Bob.
The animal did not come back. And none of them slept.
9
Morning did not come until eight twenty-seven a.m. By then, Anna was desperate to get out of the sack she shared with groceries and laundry. The tent had become intolerable. If she didn’t slip out through the zippered fly, she knew she’d claw her way out with greater determination than the wolf had tried to claw his way in. With the first bare hint of gray, she was pulling on socks and boots and layers, not much caring who she jostled or kicked in the process. Their combined respirations had rimed the inside of the tent with ice. Anna’s thrashing loosed a tiny avalanche down on her tent mates. She was not sorry.
Quick as Anna was, Robin was quicker. Before Anna’d laced up, the biotech was outside, her mukluks squeaking on the snow as she retraced the path of their visitor. Like a grouchy bear, Anna lumbered from the tent and stood on her hind legs to join her. The light was lousy: dreary, gray-white and gritty; a carbon copy of the day before.
The light would be lousy till it was gone, and lousy the day after that and the week after that, till she got back to the high-country winter in the Rockies or the sweet attempt at winter in Paul’s backyard in Mississippi.
“Think happy little thoughts,” she sang mockingly under her breath. Discipline would have to take the place of optimism till her body temperature was a few degrees above that of the average corpse.
“Oh, goodie!” Anna heard Robin exclaim.
Scat. The woman had found scat. There was only one sample, and it was not particularly impressive in size or texture that Anna could see, but Robin bagged it happily.
“Not much for tracks,” the biotech said as she casually stuck the baggie into her jacket pocket.
They tried the trick of shining their headlamps low and laterally to create a false sun, but Robin and Bob had done a terrific job of stomping around when they’d pitched the tent, and the four of them had continued the stomping with jumping jacks, cavorting to warm up before bed and trips later to answer the call of nature.
If there were wolf prints, they were lost in the crusted mishmash of snow and dead grasses. No prints led in or out of the clearing across the unmarked snow. The animal had probably come into the camp from the trail as they had. Given the choice, wild animals – bears, cougars, foxes, wolves, deer – preferred improved trails just as people did, and for the same reasons.