Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“Stop it!” Robin screamed. Anna squawked, scared half out of her wits by the sudden cry. At first, she thought Robin was yelling at her – fatigue and stretched nerves made the best of women into shrews – but she was yelling at the dark and the trees, at the wog and the windigo, the ice and the night.

The biotech, so seemingly strong and untiring, was breaking apart. Delayed reaction, Anna thought. It had to be; the woman was cool efficiency itself first when photographing the slaughtered wolf, then assisting with the packaging of the slaughtered researcher. She’d held up till near the end. Then she’d started unraveling.

“It’s okay,” Anna said. “We’re going to be okay.” With a huge effort but no grunt, she stood without using her hands to push herself up.

“Let’s go. It’s nothing. The wind plays tricks.”

“It isn’t nothing,” Robin hissed at her. “It’s not fucking nothing!” she yelled at the dark. She began thrusting the flashlight beam into the trees, stabbing, as evil Nazis did with bayonets into haystacks in old movies.

Anna made her way to the front of the sled, the mush of her boots through the snow covering whatever sound the followers in the woods might have been making. She pried the flashlight from Robin’s fingers. “We’ll walk together,” she said. “If the Sked hangs up, I’ll go back. Come on now.”

Robin’s tears metastasized; she sobbed, snot running from her nose, tears freezing in opaque droplets on her cheeks.

“Pull,” Anna said.

Through thick down gloves, Anna felt her hand being taken. Robin had reached out and taken it, two puffed, oversized hands, neither of which could feel anything but the pressure of the other, clinging together in the dark.

“Ridley!” Anna yelled. “We could use some help back here!”

There was no answer. Like a will-o’-the-wisp, Bob’s stolen light had led Ridley astray. Ahead was only darkness and silence.

“Fuck them,” she said cheerily. “We’re better off without them.” She squeezed Robin’s hand in what she hoped was a reassuring manner and tucked her other arm through the harness rope where it stretched down to the Sked. She could take some of the weight off the younger woman’s shoulders, literally if not metaphorically.

For twenty minutes, they labored on without speaking. Twice the Sked caught on downed tree limbs and twice Anna trudged back to free it. The act of pretending to be stronger and braver than she was helped. How long she could run on this low-octane fuel, she didn’t know. Robin had stopped crying and went forward like a skiing machine. Her face, when Anna caught glimpses of it in the reflected light, was filled with such bleak hopelessness it was scary. Drawing breath, Anna was about to shout for Ridley again – not that she thought he’d answer but just to make a fierce noise against the darkness – when something beat her to it.

The howl of a wolf ululated through the frigid night, leaving not a ripple; a round, perfect sound that too many stories and too many movies imbued with the absolute distillation of terror. Anna felt the hairs on her body stand on end as her skin tightened. Her mouth was suddenly dry, and she wanted nothing more than to run away, leave Robin and what was left of Katherine to appease whatever it was, wolf or wog or the ancient eater of flesh the Ojibwa told of.

In the falling-apart arena, Robin beat her to the punch. She dropped like a stone, gloved hands over her ears, knees up under her chin, then rolled over into the fetal position. The flashlight hit the snow and disappeared into the powder, leaving only a glow where it had gone under.

Anna retrieved the light and crouched down, one arm across Robin. “Shh, shhh,” she murmured automatically. “It’s just a howl. They howl to say hi. That’s all.” Without being aware she was doing so, Anna was talking to the very little part of Robin, the part that covered her ears and curled up and hid under the covers when the monster was in the room. The adult Robin knew more about wolves than Anna did.

The howl came again. This time it had a sorrowful, almost questioning tone. Anna would have been hard-pressed to describe it, but on the musical glissando, where the singer carried the notes skyward, there was a longing.

“Wolves won’t hurt you,” Anna said, patting Robin. “Wolves don’t eat people.” Then she remembered what they pulled behind them in a trough of tin. “Anyway, they don’t eat when they’re full,” she muttered.

“Come on,” she said, changing tactics. “Up. Get up. We’re moving.” She uncurled Robin and forced her hands away from her ears.

“Stand while I untangle you.”

When the harness and the pull ropes were straight, Anna gave the front of Robin’s parka a tug, much the way she used to give her horse Gideon back in Texas a tug to get him to go.

Robin didn’t budge. She turned her head as if she heard something besides the howling, a call from the woods that was above the frequencies humans could hear. For a long time, she stood, staring, and a cold more severe than winter crept deep past Anna’s bones and into her brain.

“We’ve got to go.” She’d meant to say the words in a normal way, a comforting, leaving-the-mall-before-traffic kind of way. What came out was a squeak that would have emasculated the tiniest vole. She said it again and had a better result.

If Robin heard, she showed no sign. She showed no sign of knowing Anna was close, so close her fists were doubled in the front of her parka.

“They’ve decided to kill,” Robin said.

Her voice held the same note of sorrow as the howl.

Anna would have thought any self-respecting werewolf or wog would have taken Robin’s show of weakness as an invitation to come to dinner, but, after she’d cried out, the slithery, sneaky sounds of their uninvited escort ceased. Robin didn’t bounce back. Youth and strength and athleticism went out of her. Her skis tangled and tripped her as if she were the rankest novice. She stumbled and fell, and each time it was harder for Anna to get her up. Finally Anna removed Robin’s skis, stowed them on the Sked and put the harness on her own shoulders. To keep the biotech close, she insisted Robin keep one hand on the lead rope and help.

Help was the word Anna used to try to break through the walls that had formed around the young woman’s brain and were suffocating her body. Robin had lost even the strength to close her fingers tightly enough to keep her hand from constantly falling away from the rope and her feet from slowing to a stop.

The flashlight began to brown out. Ski tracks leading back to the main trail were filling with blowing snow, becoming harder and harder to follow. Wind carved up the storm and slung freezing snow at them from every direction. Anna’s eyes watered and the tears froze her lashes together. The drag of the Sked on her shoulders grew heavier. Her feet turned to chunks of concrete in leaden boots the size of canoes.

Ridley never came back. Then Anna forgot she’d once hoped he would.

There was a place in her about the size of a softball just behind her sternum. A surgeon or MRI or X-ray would never find it, but it was where her center of energy resided; the tiny machine that had to be kick-started at the beginning of every hike, revved up when the natural laziness of mankind wanted to crawl back into the hammock. Muscles could be tired or weak or cramping, and she could push on as long as that motor kept running.

Whatever it was – will, stubbornness, pride – ground to a stop.

The Sked hit the back of her knees and she went down on all fours. Robin stopped beside her the way an old dog will stop when its master does.