“What’s wrong with it?” Anna was startled at the anger in her voice.
“It’s rare, but it happens when an old or malnourished bull hasn’t enough juice to grow a set of new antlers for breeding season,” replied the youngest looking of the beards. “At least we think that’s part of it. The Ojibwa thought these moose were taken by the windigo, possessed by evil.”
“We should put it out of its misery.” This from the tallest and bulkiest of the Cro-Magnons.
There was a note of excitement in his voice that bothered Anna almost as much as the crumpled monster on the ice.
2
“I’m Ridley Murray,” said the man who’d explained the twisted antlers. All Anna could see of him were his eyes, deep hazel, with thick dark lashes. His voice was alto rather than tenor, but he didn’t sound weak or womanish; he sounded gentle. Anna liked him instantly; always a red flag in her book. Judgment of character wasn’t one of her strong suits.
“I’m the lead researcher,” he told her. “This,” and he waved a mittened hand in the direction of the large man who’d evinced the desire to kill the windigo moose, “is Bob Menechinn, Homeland Security.” Ridley’s voice was bland almost to the point of insolence. Almost.
“Pleased to meet you,” Bob said and offered Anna his hand. He resembled the actor John Goodman. Even without down padding, he was a big man, well over six feet, and had the fleshy, plastic face Goodman was so deft at morphing from benevolent goodness to bloated evil, as a role required.
“Anna Pigeon, Rocky Mountain,” Anna said.
“It’s dead,” Robin called. While they’d introduced themselves, she’d scooted quickly and easily over the slippery surface to where the moose lay. The fourth Cro-Magnon was with her.
“Adam, would you get the camera and an ax?” Ridley asked a lanky individual wrapped in the most disreputable winter gear Anna had ever laid eyes on. His parka had at one time probably been a uniform khaki but had been smudged, drizzled, splashed and spotted by so many substances the original color showed only under the zipper flap. Ripstop nylon had proved unable to stop the incursions of sharp objects. Sleeves and body sported tears sprouting feathers, and his cuffs looked as if they had been caught in a paper shredder.
“Will do,” Adam said and loped off toward the snowmobile, joints loose, back straight, a scarecrow in an arctic Oz.
Anna, Bob and Ridley shuffled over the ice to join Robin and the remains of the windigo.
Robin was on hands and knees by the deceased animal. Ridley clapped a hand on the shoulder of the man Anna’d not yet met. “This is-”
“The only sane, and by far the handsomest, man on the island.” The man swept back his hood as if to show Anna the extent of his beauty. His hair was snow white. Awry from being smashed, it stuck out everywhere it wasn’t glued to his skull. His beard was close cropped and white to the point of iridescence. Reflections flashing off lenses in round wire-rimmed glasses obscured his eyes.
“Robin has been after me for two seasons,” the sane and handsome man went on, his smile showing small straight teeth that would have suited the face of a beatific child or a feral badger, “but the poor child has had to settle for – what’s his name, Robin?”
“Gavin,” Robin said. Anna couldn’t tell if she was flattered or simply bored by the pseudosexual attention. At any rate, she seemed used to it.
“That’s right, Gavin, a callow boy, and tall enough to be my father. Jonah Schumann at your service,” Jonah said to Anna.
Ridley Murray showed no irritation at Jonah’s interruption or at being relegated to, at best, the second-handsomest man on Isle Royale but watched with a slight affectionate smile on his face as one might watch a favorite uncle.
“You want to tell her about antlers, Jonah?” Ridley asked.
Jonah ducked his head in graceful declination. “Let’s see if I’ve taught you anything,” he said.
“Antlers are grown over the summer to impress females when mating season comes in the fall,” Ridley told Anna. “They’re expensive. Enormous amounts of food and minerals and energy go into growing them.”
“Size does matter,” Jonah interjected solemnly.
Ridley laughed. “Older moose, or animals that are too worn down – maybe the winter’s colder or there’s not much fodder – can spend the last of their reserves growing antlers. If they pull it off, they get the girl, but they usually die the next winter.”
Anna thought of old men and Corvettes but had the good sense to keep her mouth shut.
“The deformity is called a peruke, French for ‘wig.’ This is one for the record books. I’ve never seen one this extreme. Shoot, I’ve never seen one alive, just photographs.”
“Everything he knows is from my book on the crepuscular deviations of caddis flies in ungulates,” Jonah said gravely.
With a stiff-backed arrogance that could have indicated a big ego or chronic lower-back pain, Bob Menechinn squatted at the animal’s head. Momentarily he lost his balance and grabbed a twisted antler to steady himself. Ridley flinched.
“Careful of the antlers, Bob,” he said evenly.
“Whoa! This is the mother lode. Lookie,” the biotech said as she deftly pulled a small ziplock bag out of the army rucksack she’d offloaded from the plane. “Ticks. This old guy was about drunk up. How many you figure?” she asked Ridley.
He surveyed the carcass. The moose’s ribs showed stark from starvation. The flanks were caved in, the hide patchy with bald places where he’d scraped against trees to free himself of the pestilence of winter ticks. “Jeez. At least fifty thousand, maybe sixty,” Ridley estimated. “This boy was a regular Red Cross blood bank.”
Robin plucked a thick tuft of hair. Half a dozen fat ticks clung to the roots. She put the little colony into the plastic bag, zipped it and put it back in her rucksack. Anna hoped the baggie was one of the fancy double-lock kind.
No one spoke for a moment and silence settled like snow. A sound, both distant and immediate, didn’t so much break the silence as join it, the call of a gray whale beneath fathoms of seawater. Anna looked to Robin to see if she’d heard it too. A reflex from the bad old days, when windowpane acid had slammed into her brain so hard for years she’d been careful not to remark on odd phenomena lest she be the only one experiencing them. She’d thought she’d left that particular paranoia behind. The retro twitch must have been triggered by the weird black-and-white world, with its windigo and Cro-Magnon tribe.
And cold so vicious and unrelenting, it felt personal.
She tried to shove her hands in her pockets, but they were too fat to fit.
“The ice is singing,” Robin said. “It’s always moving, shifting. Sometimes it cracks like a gunshot. All kinds of sounds.”
Anna blocked out the fact that Jack Frost was gnawing her bones and opened to the song: far off, underfoot, a murmur of instruments not yet invented, hollow lutes and soft drums, the warble of birds without throats just beyond the threshold of hearing, as if it came into the mind on some other wavelength. In Texas, the wind sang in that same way when the rock formations were just right. Music so deeply ingrained in the world, Anna felt if she could listen long enough and hard enough, she would learn a great truth.
Before enlightenment was achieved, the snowmobile came shrieking back down the hill from the bunkhouse. Dragging a trailer – a lidded aluminum box the size of a coffin set on skis – the machine raced over the lake and came to a stop beside the moose’s body.
“Adam Peck,” Ridley said as the driver turned off the engine. “He missed our meet and greet.”
“Hey,” Adam said affably. He looked to be in his forties, and, when he pulled down his muffler to speak, Anna noticed he hadn’t a beard but a lush mustache of the kind seldom seen anywhere but in pictures of Civil War heroes.