“Fuck!” she whispered. Then with more vehemence: “Fucking fool!”
None of it mattered: there was no electricity, no power. She couldn’t turn the machine on. A detail she’d overlooked in her mad dash down the hill.
Modern conveniences were as air: expected.
“Damn!”
She turned and ran from the office, down the hall and up the hill through the snow. By the time she reached the carpenter’s shop, she was puffing and sweating. Without waiting to catch her breath, she began pawing through the plastic-wrapped packages of wolf parts on the table. “Okay, Katherine,” she muttered to the corpse at her feet. “Give me a hand here. What was it set you off? I can’t test the blood. Maybe you could with your fancy PCR, but I can’t, I made a royal fool of myself in the V.C. If a tree falling in the forest can be a fool. So what was it? What did I hand you? You squeaked like a rat. Skull? No. Paws? No. Bigger.
“This.” Anna laid her hands on the square package that contained the excised flesh from the wolf’s throat, the meat Ridley had preserved because of the size of the bite pattern that killed the wolf.
“Hey, it’s all coming back to me,” Anna told the dead woman. “Bob mouths off. Ridley cuts his hand. I pass this gob off to you. I’m examining the knife wound. You squeak. I turn. You look like shit. It’s this, isn’t it?”
Without waiting for a reply, she set the package on the counter beneath the window and began prying the stiff plastic away where it had frozen to the tissue sample underneath. “Okay,” she said when she’d peeled the cube of wolf and set it on the counter where the light was strongest. Like any frozen meat, the excised neck flesh had become featureless, pale, the folds and hollows settled while the meat was warm, then frozen in a chunk. “If the dead speak to the dead, do your stuff,” Anna said to the corpse. “Otherwise, I don’t think this guy is going to tell me anything.”
Neither Katherine nor the bit of deceased wolf spoke.
What Anna was looking for wouldn’t be in the bite marks. Those had been probed and examined by Ridley and photographed by Robin. It was what they missed that gave Katherine the squeaky pallor. Bending close over the rock-hard neck muscle, Anna turned it slowly between her gloved hands, examining every inch of the flayed neck. On the back, near what would have been the wolf’s left side, halfway between ear and shoulder, was a tiny dot of silver metal, the broken-off end of a needle.
“Got it,” Anna said to Katherine. She found needle-nose pliers in a drawer beneath the counter and pulled the metal from the neck. It wasn’t a needle; it was the dart used when an animal is shot with a tranquilizer gun. Katherine had stood up to Bob after the necropsy for the same reasons she’d found the courage to do it the other two times. He was endangering her beloved wolves.
“Darted it, then opened its throat and it bled out. The wounds made to look like a huge bite pattern,” Anna said. “The wolf was murdered.” Lost in thought, she turned the splinter of metal in the gray light. Bob had said to Katherine: “We’ve used ketamine before.” Bob had found the animal and he had stomped around it so much there was no hope of finding any tracks. Then he’d claimed the body for “research.”
“You thought Bob did it, didn’t you? Killed the wolf so the big game hunter could have the head and pelt for his wall. You knew Bob used ketamine; you knew because he’d used it on you.”
29
Having cached the broken tip of the tranquilizer dart with the rest of her Nancy Drew collection in the rusted toolbox under the floorboards, Anna walked back toward the bunkhouse. Stillness was absolute. Air and cold melded to form a quantifiable mass, a solid that could be moved through without disturbing a single atom, a vacuum that held matter inside. Anna’s steps grew shorter until finally she, too, was stilclass="underline" a rock, a tree, a single mote of ice.
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. The words fell into the motionless universe, leaving no ripple. “Katherine, if Bob killed the wolf, why would he make the neck wound interesting? ‘Interesting’ doesn’t get the study shut down. It goes against his interests. Bob never goes against his interests.” Momentary sadness drifted across Anna’s mind; she wished she hadn’t voiced her doubts out loud, intimated Katherine had run to her death for nothing. Except that Bob had made her life intolerable.
“Talking to dead people,” she said to the gray that knitted branches together above her head. “At least I’m not seeing dead people.” Still, she didn’t move.
Whoever had shot the wolf had made the bite marks so it would appear as if it was killed by a giant beast. It was possible that the animal was tranquilized by one person, then another person happened along in the dark with a pointed object and thought, “Boy, wouldn’t it be funny if…” But Anna doubted it.
Flying back from Intermediate Lake the day she and Jonah saw Chippewa Harbor pack kill the old bull, she had seen a wolfish shape in black, a neat circling of nose to tail, as if a monstrous dog slept in the snow beneath the boughs of an evergreen, just the shape viewed from the air. She thought of the great deception in World War II when the British had salted England with cutouts of Spitfires and barracks without walls so that, seen from the air by German planes, they would look to be an army amassing for an invasion at Calais, while the Allies moved ahead with plans to land on the beaches of Normandy.
Huge paw prints in all the right places, never perfectly clear and always accompanied by moose prints, as if Bullwinkle had been adopted along with Romulus and Remus. A hard object shaped like the hoof of a moose and affixed to the bottom of snowshoes would work. Each step would leave the mark of the hoof; no sign of the human above it. Giant paw prints were easy enough, pawlike shapes on the end of ski poles. With the wind and the drifting snow, even an experienced tracker wouldn’t be able to tell they weren’t made by a genuine wolf.
Anna hadn’t been able to.
The marauding animal that had terrorized their camp up by Lake Desor had snuffled like a bear, pawed at the nylon walls like a dog and left no paw prints. When Katherine hadn’t been scared, Robin had snorted – almost a laugh. Because she had known the “wolf” wasn’t a wolf? It was Robin who sent Anna and Bob to the side of Intermediate Lake, where there were giant paw prints neatly laid in to lure the unwary trappers to the center of the weird ring in the ice where Anna had fallen through. Then Robin had apologized repeatedly. “I’m so sorry,” she’d said. “It shouldn’t have happened.”
Anna’s dream of the night before came back; her naked chest scraping over the serrated-ice edge. She remembered, as she’d slid under the lake, how the ice had been striated vertical marks of white against the gray of older ice, and she remembered grabbing Adam’s day pack before he ran for the supercub to leave Malone Bay with Jonah, how heavy it was.
“What’s in this?” she’d asked.
“Books,” Adam said.
Not books. A drill and spare battery packs and bits. The ring in the ice had been made by a drill, holes weakening the layer, water oozing up through them creating the ridge.
The trapline torn up by an animal so powerful, the metal of the foothold trap was bent; Robin had reported seeing that. She’d gone to check the line by herself and she hadn’t brought the trap back with her.
The wog was a hoax. The hoax had turned deadly. First Anna had gone through the ice, then Katherine had been killed.
As always, that was where Anna came to a walclass="underline" Katherine had not been killed by a human being; she’d been savaged by a pack of wolves.
“Damn,” Anna said and mentally set aside the researcher’s death.
Robin with her love of the island – what was it her boyfriend had said? The last hope for the soul of civilization? Ridley with the most to lose: vocation, avocation and summer cabin at one blow; Jonah, with his loyalty to Ridley; Adam, for whatever reason, maybe just the hell of it – were all of them in on it? Would one of them kill a wolf, a ranger and a researcher to make the island sufficiently interesting that the Park Service and the Michigan Tech would fight Homeland Security over the issue of opening it in the winter months? Anyone in Winter Study could have darted the wolf. The pack was on the ice for several days, and everyone was proficient with the use of tranquilizer guns.