Lighting her way with a battery-powered headlamp secured around her brow with an elastic strap – the preferred headgear of the Winter Study team from ten p.m. till sunup – Anna found the kit Katherine had used to extract blood from the wolf. Two of the eight vacuum tubes remained. She took them both, returned to the bedroom and put the headlamp on the table, facing away from Robin.
The biotech was deeply asleep, but her breathing was even and twelve breaths per minute so Anna wasn’t unduly worried. In fact, she hoped the girl was far enough out she wouldn’t wake up when the needle plunged into a vein in her antecubital site. Robin did flinch, but she didn’t wake. Anna watched as first one vial, then the second, filled with rich, dark blood. She’d neglected to bring a bandage, so when she’d finished she folded Robin’s arm over the ruined sweater.
The blood should have been drawn hours before, but Anna had other things on her mind. Tomorrow morning, when she could get Robin’s permission, would be too late. She hoped it wasn’t too late already. Pocketing her purloined hemoglobin, she left the bedroom. The door locked only from the inside, and she locked it before she closed herself out. If need be, she’d bang until Robin woke to let her in.
In the faint glow from the fire, Anna donned the necessary layers of clothing and then laced up the Sorels. Her body felt heavy and tired, but she ignored it. Till she could shut down her mind, her body was going to have to lump it. Another wolf’s howl threaded beneath the doors and around the window glass, and she stopped to listen. This call sounded closer, and she wondered if she was a fool to be heading out into the woods alone. Even having seen Katherine’s body, Anna harbored a belief that the wolves would not attack her. She felt that way about mountain lions and bears as well – about most wild animals in parks where she’d worked. The major exception was the alligators of Mississippi. They, she was sure, would like nothing better than a bite of Pigeon meat.
Her sense of safety with other carnivores was based on nothing factual. It was a powerful and totally illogical feeling that they knew she loved them and would leave her untouched. Aware it was irrational, and probably born from watching too many animated Disney films as a kid, Anna was careful never to test this notion. She wasn’t testing it tonight. Given a choice, she would have waited till daylight, but she wasn’t sure how long the blood sample would be viable.
Trudging along in tracks – hers and half a dozen others, several of them being moose – she reached the head of the trail to the V.C. A shape shifted beyond the tree line; not a visual shape, a sound, the squeaking the snow made when crushed, the peculiar, dry Styrofoam sound.
Moose, she told herself. Moose, like deer, were curious and would come to see what was happening. Hunted only by the wolves, moose on ISRO had little fear of people and often wandered through housing areas, campgrounds and by the sundries store.
Anna walked into the woods. Trees, naked with winter, closed around her like a barbed-wire fence. The flashlight cut swaths through the black: tunnels of white tangled with twisted branches and gray-scaled tree trunks. The fear that had been with her earlier on her first ill-fated trip down this hill returned.
“Damn!” she whispered.
At each step, she began to think she heard the faint echo of snow being compressed in the trees alongside the path. She stopped. The echo stopped. Hard as she listened, as far as she tried to push her senses and her flashlight beam into the darkness, it was impossible to tell whether she was being stalked, followed or was hearing things. Panic stirred beneath her sternum, not the fear that motivates action or caution but the unreasoning whine of buzz saws in childhood nightmares.
Turning out the light, she let the fear have her, let the panic throb on violin strings out of tune, sirens and screeching tires on concrete. When the first wave had passed, leaving her feeling light-headed and breathless, she spoke to the darkness, within and without.
“Being scared is beginning to bore me. Do what you have to do and I’ll do the same.” Speaking aloud in the frigid darkness was oddly daring; a wild act of sanity enacted in a classically insane way. It reminded her many things were a choice. Fear, to a great extent, was a choice.
“I’m headed to the Visitors Center,” she said to her monstrous, malevolent or imaginary friend. “If you need to devour me, or whatever, I’ll be in the back offices.”
She thought she heard a snuffle or a smothered laugh trickle back through the thick underbrush. It was so faint and quickly aborted she couldn’t be sure it was anything more than the scrabble of a raven’s claw on a branch.
The building housing the V.C. and the ranger station was not locked. The key was on the chest of drawers that served her and Robin as bed table. Stopping before the double glass doors, she stomped the snow off her boots so the first seasonals to arrive in summer wouldn’t have too great a mess to clean up. Once inside, she closed the doors behind her. The mindless fear was gone, but if a wog did wander the island seeking human flesh there was no sense in tempting furry fate.
She went to the District Ranger’s office, stopped in the open door and automatically swept the light switch into the ON position. No illumination was forthcoming. In the second it had taken her hand to push the switch, she’d remembered it wouldn’t work. Finishing the sequence made no sense, due to lack of electricity, but she pushed the switch down again in the OFF position anyway.
Searching by flashlight had its advantages. Able only to see the three-foot-by-three-foot spotlighted area, the eye was not distracted. Occasionally Anna’d turned the lights out when there was electricity to burn and used a flashlight to concentrate her mind on details.
The box of merlot was on the floor where they’d left it, the overturned mason jar nearby. Anna shined her light on the bottom: number 4427. Adam’s. Robin did well in the largely male world of wolf research by keeping as much under the radar as a beautiful young woman can hope to. In the days Anna had known her, she was careful not to call attention to herself and did her best to fade into the woodwork when others did. Breaking the tradition of the mason jars was out of character. If she’d been sufficiently drunk, she might not have noticed she was taking Adam’s jar – or noticed but been beyond worrying about consequences. Robin might have taken Adam’s glass for spite. Had she been a silly young woman, Anna would have considered that she could have taken it for love, the island equivalent of wearing the boy’s letterman’s jacket, but Robin wasn’t silly.
Fingerprints could be lifted from the jar. Several were apparent in the beam of the flashlight. Robin’s would be on it; Bob’s, probably. Maybe Adam’s. The only print that would be telling would be the print of the human version of the wog; someone on Isle Royale who shouldn’t be. Anna bagged it. At the rate she was collecting evidence of crimes that might or might not have been committed, the crawl space under the carpenter’s shop would soon fill up.
Taking her time, she followed the yellow circle of light around the office. A few items had been left on the desktop when the island was closed to the public in October and the District Ranger went back to Houghton: a stapler, a plastic box with a magnetized opening half full of paper clips, an empty in-basket and a bright pink pad of Post-it notes. These were lined up neatly beside the many-buttoned phone.
Robin hadn’t done the bulk of her drinking in this room. Not even a naturally graceful bi-athlete could get that totally pissed without disarranging a few things, spilling a few drops.