As one, they scrambled for their boots and coats. Cursed with new gear, Anna was last out the front door. The rest were halfway across the housing complex. Uplifted by the excitement of watching a pack of wild wolves devour a kill, she wasn’t bothered by the cutting wind from the northwest as she duckwalked quickly down the slippery steps in her ungainly boots and started across the clearing.
Suddenly she stopped. A whiff, a hint of something freakishly bad, evil and death and old fish distilled into a toxic perfume, was borne on the wind. Tilting her head back, she sniffed. It was gone. She smelled nothing but the clean, vicious perfection of winter.
The Ojibwa’s windigo was heralded by the stench of rotting corpses, the rotten stink of a cannibal’s breath, and the distillation of hopelessness. The cannibal spirit came on the wind from the northwest.
For someone who had eschewed the supernatural not ten minutes before, Anna felt a distinctly unnatural chill along the back of her stomach and up both sides of her spine.
She waited and watched the black of the woods in the direction from which the wind blew. The line of shadows that marked the trees hid anything that might have been there.
4
Despite the pack’s dramatic arrival, the wolves settled down in lupine domesticity around the unexpected gift of the moose carcass. Anna could have happily burned her calories just keeping warm and watching them, but the second day of the pack’s visit Ridley put the team back to work. Robin had gone cross-country with her rucksack and plastic baggies to seek out ever-more-marvelous bits of frozen excretions and effluvia. Adam was building a snowmobile shed. As far as Anna was concerned, he had the worst of the work. Construction at seven above zero struck her as a miserable way to make a living, but he’d acted as if he was looking forward to it.
She landed the plum job. Jonah was taking her up in the cub to see if they could find Chippewa Harbor pack. Flights in the supercub were jealously guarded. From the scuttlebutt, Anna knew there’d been guests of the study who’d never managed an invite to fly. She doubted she’d have been so lucky had Ridley not had so many wolves close to home to play with.
Four hours immobile in a two-seat fabric airplane with a heater that did not deserve the name was a recipe for misery, if not frostbite, and Anna had not come prepared. In borrowed knee-high, insulated boots that looked more like robot prosthetics than shoes – Ridley’s size nines – and more layers than a winter onion, she watched uselessly as Jonah walked around the airplane checking for damage, standard operation for preflight. At first, to be companionable, she’d attempted to follow him, but in the oversized boots she moved like an arctic clown on Quaaludes. The characterization was completed, she suspected, by a bright red nose.
On the far side of the harbor, beyond the little airplane, wolves lounged around the moose carcass like fat house dogs around a hearth. “Won’t we scare them off?” she asked.
“There’s not been a wolf on this island in three generations – that’s in dog years; ten years old is an old wolf – that hasn’t had an airplane buzzing around from the time he was a pup,” Jonah said and began unwrapping an orange, oil-stained down comforter he kept around his lady’s nose when she was earthbound so her engine wouldn’t turn into a block of ice. “The sound doesn’t bother them. Most don’t even look up. I think they live the simple life: food/no food, threat/no threat, sex/no sex. In the no food, no threat, no sex category, the cub and I aren’t worth a passing glance.
“Get the tie-down, if you will.”
Anna clowned over to where the wing was tethered to the ice and was amused momentarily by the image of the supercub taking off with the frozen harbor dangling cartoonlike from the tie-down lines beneath the wings. Loath to remove her gloves, she had barely loosed the knot by the time Jonah had untied his side and come around. Because she’d learned to do it on ISRO with boat lines, she carefully laid the rope in a coil.
The cub had clamshell doors, a hexagon cut laterally and opening up and down. Jonah let the lower part of the door down and held the upper against the high wing. “Hop in. I fly from the rear seat.”
Hopping was not an option. Anna clambered into the front seat and manually arranged her great booted extremities so they wouldn’t interfere with Jonah’s operation of the ailerons, then lay there helplessly gazing at nothing. The supercub was a tail dragger and, on the ground, sat nose high, the windscreen pointing at pale gray sky.
The plane jounced. Jonah had gotten in. A prisoner of survival gear, turning around to look was in the same category as hopping. “Here,” Jonah said, and a headset was thrust over her right shoulder. “You know how to use one of these things?”
“I do.” High-tech communications in an old supercub struck an odd note. It seemed as if the small-plane industry had not kept pace with electronics. But, then, nothing had kept pace with electronics. Anna put on the earphones, adjusted the mike and then continued staring at a blank sky while Jonah went through his checklist.
The engine fired smoothly and the plane began to taxi, skis sliding over the ice. The nose blocking the view forward, Anna looked out the side window at the pack. Ravens inked the snow in ever-changing kaleidoscopes of black and white. They ranted and teased, flying at the wolves’ heads, then stopping in a sudden outthrust of wings inches out of reach of the wolves’ jaws. Suddenly the radio-collared female whipped out of feigned sleep, and where there’d been a bird there was only a few feathers and new drops of blood, bright and jewel-like, on the snow. Neither wolves nor ravens turned a head as the supercub roared by.
The engine revved up to a determined bellow and the cub picked up speed. The tail lifted off the lake and the horizon came down; Beaver Island was approaching with considerable speed, and Anna unconsciously braced herself for collision. Then they were airborne, banking around Beaver and flying down Washington Harbor. Forgetting the mike was voice-activated, Anna laughed aloud with the gust of pure expanding freedom.
“I feel it every time,” Jonah said.
The NPS was Anna’s favorite bureaucracy, but a bureaucracy all the same, and it had endless safety regulations. Aviation safety experts had come up with the mind-boggling discovery that many crashes were caused by the airplane colliding with the ground and passed rules about how low and slow was acceptable. Jonah Schumann exhibited a fine indifference to the rules. Anna could almost feel the treetops tickling the airplane’s canvas belly.
She loved it. Except for the cold and the racket, it was like flying in dreams.
“East pack has been hanging around Mott Island, but we haven’t found Chippewa Harbor pack yet,” Jonah said in her ears.
Isle Royale was forty-two miles long and no more than twelve across at its widest point. It was hard to believe a group of seven or eight big animals could stay out of sight from air surveillance, but they did. Wolves traveled long distances, and slept a lot during the day. It wasn’t unusual to “lose” a pack for a week or more.
“We’ll head up toward Malone Bay, see if we can scare anything up,” he said. Malone Bay was about halfway between Windigo at the west end of the island and Rock Harbor at the east. Malone Bay was one of the backcountry outposts; the ranger was inevitably dubbed the “Malone Ranger” because of the isolation.
Anna settled into the joy of flight, of being up where there was air to breathe instead of sequestered in a smoky bunkhouse, of seeing the island in a glory of white and black.
The bed of Lake Superior had been gouged out by glaciers. Isle Royale, made of tougher material, was scored and slashed but remained above water. From the air, the colossal shredding was evident; ridges ran the length of the island, and smaller islands, long and thin as scratches, stood offshore separated from the main island by deep channels. Hikers unfamiliar with the topography frequently underestimated the difficulty of traveling through country boned with sharp stone ridges and crosshatched with swampy valleys.