Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“Robin?”

“She left between the two. Headed for the bunkhouse, I guess. Even our delightful, delicious bi-athlete wouldn’t want to go out in this weather.”

Anna ignored the “delightful, delicious” and helped him with the cleaning up.

DINNER, THE SACRED COOKING RITE presided over by the lead researcher, didn’t happen. Ridley took his laptop into the room he shared with Jonah. Robin climbed into her sleeping bag for a nap. Bob took a coffee cup of boxed red wine and two peanut butter sandwiches into the room he shared with Adam and closed the door.

Being alone, or what passed for it in cabin fever country, hit Anna like a couple of Xanax on an empty stomach. Her shoulders dropped an inch, her lungs filled and she realized she’d been clenching her jaw most of the day. There were some for whom being with others of their kind was energizing. For Anna, it was as if her fellow human beings sucked the marrow from her bones if incarcerated with them too long. To a majority of felons serving time in the federal penitentiaries, the threat of going to prison did not – and, should they get out, would not – deter them from a life of crime. Even as a little girl, for Anna the mere thought of being locked in with people, having her life regulated by others, had been enough to keep her from pocketing so much as a penny candy at Idaho’s Grocery.

In the unpeopled space, her mind unfolded like the wings of a bird kept too long in a small cage and her body relaxed into the fatigue left over from her dip in Intermediate Lake. She stretched out on the sofa nearest the fire and slept.

When she awoke two hours later, she was still alone, and she felt better than she had in three days. She sat up straight, settled her shoulders and commenced to find at least a few answers.

Ridley had a laptop, as did Katherine and Bob, but there was another computer, an old clunker that the biotechs who rotated through each winter had for their use. Anna got online and Googled Robert Menechinn. He was born in Canada and started his academic career in Manitoba. He’d gotten his B.A. at the University of Manitoba. He’d gotten an M.A. at the University of Winnipeg. Where the Ph.D. was obtained wasn’t mentioned. All three degrees were in education, nothing in the natural or zoological sciences. The first connection with wolves was at the University of Western Ontario. When he was a lecturer there, he had taught “Education in Green” to students working on a project studying wolves. The “Green,” Anna surmised, meant ecologically hip, how the neophyte researchers could teach others about their work.

From Ontario, he’d gone to the University of Saskatchewan, from there to New York, then to Virginia and finally to Bethesda, Maryland, where he now taught “Education in the Sciences” along with several other classes that barely qualified him to lick the wolf scat off Ridley’s mukluks when it came to a wilderness study of actual animals.

Anna could see how he might have gotten his name on one government list or another. He was a self-promoter. Every award or commendation he’d ever received was on every Web site that mentioned him. As a fish, he was too small to warrant such coverage. He’d had to provide the information unasked. More likely one of his graduate students did it for him. That could have impressed some government flunky sufficiently that Bob was put on the list for the ISRO evaluation, then Ridley recommended him. Someone recommended him, Anna amended. Ridley had simply taken their bad advice.

She leaned back and stared at the screen without seeing it.

Menechinn was forty-six; he’d gotten his B.A. at twenty-five. In a couple of decades, he’d worked in eight colleges and universities. Had this been a Park Service résumé, and the star of the piece not at least a deputy superintendent by the end of the story, she would have read it to mean Bob was a troublemaker or had severe adult-onset attention deficit disorder. It had the earmarks of an employee that nobody wants the trouble of firing so he is given rave reviews to get him passed up to be somebody else’s problem.

Anna Googled Ridley Murray.

Ridley was a golden boy, commendations from all and sundry, awards, and enough papers published to satisfy the greediest university.

Jonah Schumann’s name came up twice, once in a newspaper article when he’d been hired by the wolf/moose study and once as a Web site, schumannairalaska.com. In summer, Jonah ferried hunters to camps on wilderness lakes in Alaska.

Robin wandered into the common room. “What happened to dinner?” she asked sleepily.

“I guess we’re on our own.” Anna closed down the Internet. She’d been sitting hunched over a hot computer so long her head had settled between her shoulders like a turkey vulture’s. She pulled her bones back into alignment. “Want to heat up the leftover casserole?” Robin looked dubious, as if she’d dine on bits and scraps rather than cook. “I’ll do it,” Anna said. “You can keep me company.” Robin’s company didn’t grate on Anna. There was a quiet center to her that people seldom achieved, and never before the age of forty. Maybe it was the unusual childhood, traveling the world, skiing and shooting in competition, before she was out of high school. Parts of her seemed arrested in an age of innocence, others world-weary yet without judgment.

Chicken-and-pasta casserole heated, Anna spooned it into bowls, and they carried their makeshift supper back into the common room. Sitting side by side on the couch like strangers on a bench waiting for the same bus, they ate by the warmth of the fire. Anna’s ravenous appetite had returned. She marveled at how good the simple fare tasted and wondered if she could take seconds without being rude. The fierceness with which her body craved carbohydrates stunned her; when food was put before her, everything else faded away.

Wolfing it down. She was eating as a wolf would eat.

An image of the half-skinned animal on the table in the carpenter’s shop, the graphic lines of muscles and the coarse thick fur making the carcass look human and inhuman, wolfish and monstrous, flared behind her brow bone. Then Ridley’s hand, tight and bloodless on the hilt of the sausage knife, Katherine striking out at Bob, Jonah with his tiny, perfect teeth, singing as he slopped up viscera.

They were all becoming werewolves.

Perhaps after dinner she would go out and get in some first-rate howling. Short of a sauna and shampooing her hair, it would feel better than anything she could think of.

“That’s weird,” Robin said.

Anna looked up from her food, her mouth too full to speak.

“I’ve never seen it do that before.”

Anna swallowed. “What? Seen what do what?”

Robin set aside the dregs of her casserole, stood and walked to the picture window. Uncurtained and without blinds, at night it worked as a one-way mirror. All Anna could see was the reflection of the living room and Robin. Things were sufficiently off balance that had the biotech, like the classic undead, cast no reflection, Anna doubted she’d have been surprised.

“The ice rime,” Robin said. “When it warms up enough to snow but is still below freezing because of the wind or whatever, ice rime builds up on the trees, sometimes does a kind of crystal thing on the glass of the windows. But this is like… I don’t know what it’s like.”

Carrying her bowl, Anna rose and joined Robin at the window. Eye level, about halfway across the pane, precipitation was turning to ice on the glass but not all in one place. As they watched, the ice crystals formed a vertical line, then a horizontal, then, as if spread by the gusts of wind, many straight-line segments began to appear.

“I’ve never seen anything like it either,” Anna said.