Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“Good night,” she said to the black nest filled with her fellow larvae. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded so gloomy that she laughed.

“It’ll be okay,” Robin whispered. “You’ll sleep.”

Anna said nothing, but she took comfort.

“Leave your nose alone,” Robin said.

The biotech was freakishly intuitive. Anna pulled her hand back under the covers.

“Don’t breathe in your sleeping bags.” Robin’s voice filled the cramped space though she spoke quietly. “It’ll make them damp and you’ll freeze to death.”

Anna quit breathing warm air into her bag.

“Will it happen soon?” she asked hopefully.

As challenging as it was to play the Pollyanna glad game with dirty boots and a hunk of half-eaten cheddar snugged between her thighs, Anna was glad for the physical demands of the past day. She was so thoroughly tired that she knew Robin was right; she would sleep. Eventually.

Darkness inside the tent was absolute, thick, pressing down on skin and mind the way it did underground: Carlsbad Caverns, Lechuguilla. Anna remembered that crushing blindness, air so hard with earth and ink that it choked her.

Claustrophobia tightened her skin and squeezed on her lungs. People, flesh, crowded in on her: breathing and rebreathing the air, snuffling, wriggling, adjusting; a filthy monstrous womb and the four of them stillborn.

“Enough!” Anna hissed.

An elbow pressed into her side. Robin. Her feet were jostled. Bob. Bob Menechinn took up the lion’s share of the space. This was almost balanced out by Katherine, who had squished herself into the corner between tent wall and floor until Robin made her move farther in, where it was marginally warmer.

Cold, as palpable and suffocating as the crowding night, negated the odors attendant on such a pile of humanity, but nothing could negate the ectoplasm – or whatever the stuff was called when people were not yet dead. The lives of the others fluttered and battered in the enclosure as if they were captive birds flying against the bars of a too-small cage.

On the best of nights, tents were not necessarily Anna’s friend. She’d woken more than once to claw her way through the opening flap, past the rain fly, to see the sky and breathe new air. This was not the best of nights. Forcing her mind away from crazy places, she readjusted the bagged boots between her knees. Had they been left outside the tent, or even outside the bag, the boots would freeze, Robin said. There would be no getting them warm in the morning.

Who knew boots could freeze? Anna could have gone to her grave without knowing that.

Time passed. The parts of Anna touching the ground cloth numbed. She curled up as best she could with half of North Face’s inventory jammed in the sleeping bag with her. The spectral birds began to settle. One by one, pairs of wings ceased to scrabble on her consciousness. The others slept. She tucked her hands into her armpits and tried to focus on a single point of white-hot light in her mind. Shirley MacLaine had done it with some guru or other and gotten so hot, she felt like she was burning up. It didn’t do much for Anna. After a time, she drifted into a chilled coma full of aching dreams.

A nightmare wind gusted in her ear: “Anna! Anna, wake up!” The second hiss brought her out of her icy dreams. Her eyes opened to total blindness, her arms were pinioned to her sides and she couldn’t feel her legs. She began to panic.

“Listen!”

Robin; it was Robin. Panic subsided. The biotech had hold of her shoulder. She was pressed so close Anna felt her breath on her cheek. It was warm. Anna remembered warm. “What-”

“Shh. Listen,” came into her ear on a balmy breeze.

Anna listened.

Beyond the tent walls, the preternatural stillness of a night, frozen into a timeless instant, creaked in her ears. With a mittened paw, she shoved her hat up the better to hear. Silence, thick as an ice floe, pressed against her eardrums.

“There it is again.”

Now Anna heard it. Into this concrete quiet came the pad of a soft-footed animal, an animal heavy enough that the snow squeaked under its weight. Faint and ethereal, the sound moved around the tent, then stopped. Anna’s ears rang with the emptiness and she tried to sit up, but Robin was on Anna’s left arm and the detritus of Anna’s life was tangled around her body.

A thin skritching sound scratched through the black air, clogging Anna’s ears. Whatever it was pawed at the rain fly. “Fox,” Anna whispered.

“No.” Robin’s hands clutched and her voice shook. The woman was terrified.

In her short life, Robin had probably hiked nearly as many miles as Anna had in her significantly longer existence. Robin had camped out in all seasons and all weathers. That this night she suddenly got the megrims chilled Anna as surely as the flatlined mercury. She tried to pat Robin reassuringly but ended up hitting her in the face with a great mittened hand. “Sorry,” she murmured.

Robin caught her hand and held it. The pawing stopped. There was no pad-pad-pad of the animal, curiosity satisfied, going away. Anna could feel it outside the tent, feel it so close to them, had she been able to reach through tent and fly she could have touched it.

They waited.

It waited.

From the huge paw prints Robin had seen and the great curled beast Anna had glimpsed from the supercub, Anna’s mind formed a vision, and a jolt of primitive fear shot through her as this monster of the id bared teeth the size of daggers and lunged for her throat. Anna shook the thought off. Claustrophobia and cold were getting to her.

“Shh. Shh. There!” Robin hissed.

Slightly above them came short, sharp whuffing breaths of a creature tasting the air the way a bear might, lips pulled back, nostrils flared, scenting danger or prey. Anna had never heard a canine do it; not fox or coyote or her old dog Taco. The whuffing stopped. The silence was deafening.

Anna pulled off her mittens and fumbled through the jetsam that had been extruded from her sleeping bag until her hand closed around her headlamp. With fingers already clumsy from their short sojourn away from her armpits, she pushed the ON button.

Bob and Katherine were as the dead; so worn out, neither the external noises nor the light woke them. Anna switched the lamp off. Instinct warned her not to make a magic lantern of the tent, with the four of them the shadow players.

Sudden and loud, clawing erupted near the tent flap and Anna squawked, not just at the noise but because Robin had shrieked in her ear.

“What is it?” came a frightened voice. Katherine had woken.

“Nothing,” Anna lied. “Probably a squirrel. We may have pitched our tent on top of his dinner cache.”

“Too big to be a squirrel,” Robin murmured, and her grip on Anna’s shoulder became painful. Fear is the most contagious of emotions, and Anna flashed on nights in high school, girls in their pajamas, tales of the escaped lunatic with a hook, the sudden frenzies of fear.

“Would you stop?” she snapped. “We’re not doing Night of the Grizzly here. And I’m not getting out of my sleeping bag and braving the arctic to chase away a fancy dress rat.” She wasn’t hoping to fool herself or the biotech; she was hoping to soothe Katherine and snap Robin out of whatever horrors she was entertaining before they all succumbed.

As if to deny the unflattering characterization, the snuffling came into the black of the tent followed by a low growl that brought up Anna’s nape hairs.

“Oh my God,” Katherine whispered. “Wolf.”

A light beam, sudden and harsh, smacked Anna between the eyes, and a bear-sized shadow raked up toward the tent dome. She screamed like a teenager. So did Katherine and Robin.