Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“I’m going to practice my cross-country skiing,” she announced as she dusted the crumbs from the table.

“Take a radio,” Ridley said.

Bob smiled, a half smile that said: I saw you naked.

I Know What You Did Last Summer fluttered out of a box in Anna’s brain and she smiled back, not at Bob, at the silliness of the teen-scream B movie. A touch of the gory knife and the dripping hatchet must have shown. Bob stopped smiling and concentrated on eating.

TEN YEARS OR MORE had passed since Anna’d been on skis and she hadn’t been much good then. Over rough patches where Robin would fly and Ridley power through, she would have to take her skis off and carry them; still, it would still be quicker than hiking. The only boots she had with her were the Sorels. There was no way the fat toes would fit into the bindings. Having learned from Robin’s ingenuity at Malone, she grabbed a butter knife and popped off the bindings and affixed the toe of each boot firmly around the ski with duct tape, leaving her heels free. Not ideal, but it would suffice. The remainder of the roll of tape she shoved in her pack.

The gentle, curving slope where the road led down to the water gave her time to establish a relationship between feet and skis, hands and poles. By the time she passed the pier, she was moving with a modicum of confidence.

Following the Feldtmann Trail to where she’d cut cross-country was easy. Snowmobile tracks cut deep. The trail from the Feldtmann to where Katherine had fallen was harder, but the drag of the Sked and the holes left by Anna’s boots had yet to be completely eroded by wind or filled by new snow. Ski tracks were mostly gone. Occasionally she’d see the stripe in the snow or a pock where a pole was driven in, but she would have been hard-pressed to stay on course if they’d been her only map.

Adam had said it wasn’t too far to where she’d abandoned the Sked. It wasn’t. Unburdened, rested, on skis and in the light of day, the trip took less than an hour. The cheekiness of time irked, then disoriented, her. Déjà vu telescoped, collapsed into two dimensions, as if she’d walked out of the living room in her house in Rocky and into the bath, the connecting hall suddenly not there.

The nose hill, the nose-hair tree, the refrigerator rock: Anna shed her skis and waded into the cedar swamp.

The neon orange patches where animals had unearthed tasty bites of researcher were erased by snowfall, but the trees were still startling in their neon spatter. Anna pulled her balaclava off and stood quietly, sending her senses out to taste the forest. Wind blustered through the tops of the trees but without malice; a teasing shake of bare branches, a rattle of dead leaves that had refused to fall in autumn. The air smelled clean and new; there was no lingering odor of the windigo, to speak of unspeakable things. She felt only the amiable curiosity of red squirrels.

Following the trail blazed so conveniently in blood, she worked her way out from the clearing.

She’d learned to track in the desert. A land of snow was very like a desert, and she found she could read sign tolerably well. Working slowly, she followed the spatters and the now-almost-obliterated mark where Katherine had crawled – or been dragged – from the swamp. She found the hole she and Robin dug, excavating the backpack. The bottom had filled in till it was just a large dimple in the snow. Anna pulled a pasta server she’d lifted from a kitchen drawer out of her backpack and used it to rake around the area. Gloved hands packed snow rather than lifting it, and it was too cold to use bare fingers.

Sieving turned up bits of blue canvas, one soaked with what Anna presumed was either wolf blood from the broken vials or human blood from the researcher. On fabric, there was none of the cheery traffic-cone orange; the blood had gone dark and hard. Anna had no idea of the chemistry involved, but, no doubt, one day an enterprising researcher would get a hundred-thousand-dollar grant to study the phenomenon.

Near ground level, she found a blue canvas strap. One end was intact, the buckle still in place. The end that had originally attached to the backpack was ripped. Either it had been torn from Katherine’s back or been ripped in a game of tug-of-war between woman and wolf or wolf and wolf.

Or woman and scary noneating thing.

Anna rose to her feet and looked for the next spatter of orange. Snow humped over downed wood, and the swamp resembled a rumpled giant’s bed. Half the trees were alive, erect above the snow, and half in a deadly tangle beneath it. Contours and cave-ins could be the mark of human intervention or snow cover interacting with gravity, temperature and the various levels of piled trees.

Anna had been hoping for a bit more blood. She’d seen the wolves taking down a moose. There had been a lot of blood. Wolves and moose hearts pumping at top capacity, wolves slashing, moose fighting back with hooves and antlers. Blood had flown in every direction.

Here there was little for a tracker to go by. Maybe because Katherine hadn’t the physical strength to fight a predator that didn’t weigh much less than she did and her clothing soaked up fluids from her wounds.

Without its bizarre coloration, Anna might have missed the next spatter. Seven orange drops in a neat arc stood out at snow line against the pale bark of a downed cedar.

With careful steps and her pasta-serving spoon, Anna worked Katherine’s back trail. Fifty yards into the tangle of downed trees was a six-by-eight patch of snow that was sufficiently disturbed that the drifting had not completely concealed it. Digging was deepest in a crotch formed by two dead limbs. Around this patch was a wide area of lesser dimpling, the paw prints of wolves.

If they were paw prints. The windigo carried its victims so high and so fast, their feet burned away to stumps, and the prints they left in the snow were more like hoofprints than human tracks.

“Cut it out,” Anna said aloud. An “inner child” was all well and good, but the little buggers could be a real pain in the ass when it came to scary stories.

Starting at the outer perimeter of the circle, she began clearing snow away. Within a foot of where the branches came together in a natural snare, she found a patch of frozen urine. It was human; a fragment of wadded tissue paper lay next to it. Katherine had been trapped long enough to need to relieve herself, and her leg was not yet broken. The compound fracture would have rendered her too crippled and in too much pain to have squatted neatly.

On the same imaginary ring around ground zero – the foot trap – Anna found a flashlight, an unused emergency flare and a water bottle, half full and frozen solid as a brick, and a pack of Juicy Fruit. Katherine might have run madly into the woods, but she had returned to her room, or had this pack cached elsewhere, and come prepared.

Anna rocked back on her heels, wondering what a small, emotionally upset researcher from Washington, D.C., would rush out in the dark with a flare and a pack of gum to do. Did she plan to get lost to punish Bob but wanted to hedge her bets? Did she stage the fight with Bob to establish a reason to run off that wouldn’t incriminate her?

In what? And why didn’t she use the flare? Any late-night-movie viewer would know to strike the flare to keep wolves away. Whatever Katherine’s reasons, it was here that the rucksack was wrested from her.

Not having evidence bags large enough to accommodate flashlight and flare, Anna stowed them in her backpack. A little more digging turned up the cell phone Bob worried about. Anna knew pretty close to nothing about cell phones. For much of her career, no one had such a thing, except for the crew of the Starship Enterprise. In the years since they’d become commonplace, she’d worked in places too isolated to get service. Paul bought her one, and, because she’d promised she would, she kept it in the car when she traveled between Colorado and Mississippi. A couple of times she’d gone so far as to turn it on. Once she’d even needed it, but the battery had gone dead and it had been demoted from glove compartment to trunk.