Nevada Barr - Winter Study

Anna took Feldtmann Lake Trail. Adam had returned to Windigo that way, but he’d been traveling fast in bad light, not looking for a sign. She considered taking the one remaining pair of skis, but, in the end, she laced on her Sorels. She wasn’t proficient enough on skis not to wear herself out with them.

In full winter regalia, passing through a snowy landscape, her suit bulky and her face peeking out through a bucket, the wheeze of her breath and the squeak of her boots all that penetrated to her muffled ears, Anna felt cut off from the natural world.

Isolation exacerbated by a sense of being crowded. A neurotic wouldn’t know which way to flinch.

When she was a ranger on Isle Royale, she’d hiked the Feldtmann many times. It was easygoing, running over small hills and occasionally a basalt outcropping high enough to afford views of the lake.

Easy .

Except the cold was a wall. Sweat ran beneath the parka, while her toes, fingers and face burned like frost was gnawing on them. She unzipped her coat and pulled off one glove – the equivalent of sticking a foot out from under the covers to cool off. Taking Robin as her example, she tried to embrace winter but kept finding herself trudging along without thinking much and seeing even less. On a search and – it was still to be hoped – rescue, this was bad.

In frustration, she pulled off hat and balaclava. The cold hurt, and she wondered if Paul would still love her if the tips of her nose and ears turned black, but the sense of being bundled into helplessness diminished. At least she could hear the rat-tatting of the woodpeckers and the chittering of squirrels.

Life had come back while she wasn’t paying attention. She tilted her head back and looked at the sky. The snow had stopped. The clouds were still too low for Jonah to take the airplane up, but they looked like they might lift in an hour or more. The thought of backup – or an audience to witness her weakness – gave her usable energy and she pushed on in better spirits.

Another two hours elapsed before she reached Feldtmann Lake. It was too far. A woman running from a bad exchange with her mentor/ tormentor, or whatever Bob was to Katherine, didn’t run nine miles on the proverbial “dark and stormy night.” Either she didn’t want to be found or she’d gone off trail. Still, like the postman, Anna made her appointed rounds. When she got tired, she had to remind herself to drink. The body didn’t give the same clues in a Michigan winter as it did in summer in the south.

She didn’t have to remind herself to eat. The pathetic little peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich was gone before the morning was out. By noon, she was so famished she wondered if she could catch a squirrel and force it to give up the location of its stash.

She saw a red fox, woodpeckers, red squirrels, chickadees, wolf tracks, moose tracks and what looked to be martin tracks. Nothing to indicate Katherine had been this way.

Ridley radioed in. He’d skied ten miles up the Greenstone and seen nothing but two half-starved moose and more wolf prints.

Robin radioed in soon after. She, too, was turning back. She’d skied as far as Lake Desor, a brutal jaunt for a lesser person, and was still talking without gasping. Robin had seen nothing. Not so much as a fox.

Nobody could raise Adam.

“Battery must have gone dead,” Ridley said drily.

“Yeah.” For a man supposedly in charge of the physical plant, he seemed to be developing a penchant for being out of pocket and unreachable.

The sun didn’t show its face, but the wind dropped to nothing and the sky lightened. When Anna was halfway back to Washington Harbor, she heard the buzz of the supercub.

Half an hour later, Jonah found something. Color, he said. Like a piece of clothing thrown off, and a disturbed area in a cedar swamp between the Greenstone and the Feldtmann. He couldn’t see much, just that there was color on the snow where there shouldn’t be, and it was the same gold and barn red as the old parka Katherine had been wearing at the necropsy.

No place to land that was any closer than the supercub’s tie-down on Washington Harbor, Jonah circled low and slow to see if he could get a rise out of anything in the trees around the scrap of gold and red.

Anna radioed Ridley. “When you get to the bunkhouse, bring the Sked, a body bag and flashlights. Where’s Robin?”

“Two miles out,” Robin’s voice came back over the air.

“Head down the Feldtmann,” Anna told her. “I’ll mark where I go off trail.”

Jonah circled till he spotted Anna, then waggled his wings and led off trail toward the scraps of color. She followed like a baby trumpeter swan following an ultralight.

The find. Scraps of color. Anna suspected they no longer went to rescue a victim but to recover a body.

She’d never have said it aloud. Bad juju.

Following Jonah’s lead, Anna made it to the cedar swamp in forty minutes. At every moment, she expected to be overtaken by the skiers but was still solo when Jonah made his last transmission: “See that rise ahead of you? Got a big nose of rock sticking out of it and trees like nose hairs?”

“I got it,” Anna radioed back.

“The body is right beyond that. Trees’ll clear out and there’ll be a rock about the size of a refrigerator, then you turn left. Can’t miss it. Wind’s coming up. I’ve got to head back.”

Jonah had said “body” out loud. Out loud and over the radio. The breach of tradition gave Anna a shiver akin to that of an actor when the Scottish play is mentioned by name or peacock feathers are worn on stage. Till they knew for sure Katherine was dead – and that this was Katherine – time had to be considered of the essence. Close on quarter till four, wind rising, and fatigue dragging her steps, Anna had no choice but to keep on, but she was not averse to a little company at this point.

“Where is everybody?” She didn’t whine, but she felt like it.

“They’re coming,” Jonah promised. “They got held up leaving the bunkhouse.”

Anna wondered what in the hell could have held them up. Cell phones didn’t work on the island, the radio was out, the island was socked in so seaplanes couldn’t come and go.

Maybe somebody dropped by. Given recent events, that thought bordered on the sinister.

She topped the rise by the nose, spotted the refrigerator, half slid down and turned left as she’d been directed. Jonah said, “You can’t miss it,” and he was old enough and wily enough not to say that unless it was true.

In swampy areas, cedar trees fell like jackstraws, one over the other, the living with the dead, branches entangled. During the growing season, the swamps were water filled and choked with under-growth. In winter, they were navigable, but just barely. Fresh snow cloaked the branches of the upright trees and filled tiny ledges in the bark. Downed trees, fallen willy-nilly, made a lumpy quilt, protecting the living trees’ roots. Snow hid where one deadfall crossed another, and maybe three more below that, till walking through was like negotiating an icebound jungle filled with Lilliputian tiger traps.

Traversing a cedar swamp in the snow was just begging to have an ankle broken or a knee sprained. Anna forced herself to slow down. Becoming a second victim was too humiliating to contemplate. A gust of wind knocked snow from branches down her collar, and something else that brought her to an abrupt stop, head up, sniffing the air like an animal. She’d caught a whiff of the odor she’d noticed the night they followed the wolf pack down to the harbor. A death-and-worse smell she’d associated with the stench of Algernon Blackwood’s windigo, the horrible odor that heralded its coming. As before, the smell was snatched away before she could be sure she hadn’t conjured it up from an overactive imagination.