Nevada Barr - Winter Study

Jonah or Adam might take the room. Adam, probably. When he was in the bunkhouse and not on the couch, he shared a room with Bob. Anna couldn’t figure out that relationship. Adam seemed to want to be Bob Menechinn’s friend one moment and showed nothing but contempt for him the next.

Bob, as the axman from Homeland Security, wasn’t in much of a position to make friends. Anna doubted if he fared much better when he was elsewhere, then wondered what it was about him that set her teeth on edge. When a person – or a situation – brought out a strong sense of unease, she’d learned to pay attention to it. A thousand “tells” were broadcast every minute: a tic, a wince, a smell, a shadow, a draft, a flick of the hand, a door ajar. The human senses experienced them all. The human brain registered them. The human monkey mind, clamoring with the shouting littles of life, was lucky if it recognized one or two. The message from the gestalt trickled down in intuition, gut feelings, geese walking on one’s grave, déjà vu. There was a reason or reasons she didn’t trust Bob. She just didn’t know what they were yet.

A shivering ululation cut into her thoughts, reminding her that she had been seeking to quiet their flames, not fan them. A wolf’s howl embraced rare magic; sound transforming into pure emotion, the kind that exists beneath the level of language. Train whistles had it. They touched a chord in the human breast that echoed a longing for things unknown. For Anna, the sound of a cat purring or the tiny thunder of their paws racing over hardwood floors had the power to cause instant, unthinking delight, but that might not apply to everyone.

Train whistles and wolves howling seemed to be universal in their ability to pass through the paltry defenses of civilization to the more fundamental primitive heart of people. Anna loved the sound, loved the pleasurable shivers it sent up her spine. At least until she remembered the wog, the pack coming through the housing area, the attack on Katherine.

Giving up on the idea of sleep, she slid from her sleeping bag and into Levi’s and a sweatshirt. It occurred to her as she completed this abbreviated toilette that, should an unfortunate incident befall her, she would be found without underwear, clean or otherwise. She’d be careful not to get hit by a truck.

Lighting her way with a battery-powered headlamp secured around her brow with an elastic strap – the preferred headgear of the Winter Study team from ten p.m. till sunup – Anna found the kit Katherine had used to extract blood from the wolf. Two of the eight vacuum tubes remained. She took them both, returned to the bedroom and put the headlamp on the table, facing away from Robin.

The biotech was deeply asleep, but her breathing was even and twelve breaths per minute so Anna wasn’t unduly worried. In fact, she hoped the girl was far enough out she wouldn’t wake up when the needle plunged into a vein in her antecubital site. Robin did flinch, but she didn’t wake. Anna watched as first one vial, then the second, filled with rich, dark blood. She’d neglected to bring a bandage, so when she’d finished she folded Robin’s arm over the ruined sweater.

The blood should have been drawn hours before, but Anna had other things on her mind. Tomorrow morning, when she could get Robin’s permission, would be too late. She hoped it wasn’t too late already. Pocketing her purloined hemoglobin, she left the bedroom. The door locked only from the inside, and she locked it before she closed herself out. If need be, she’d bang until Robin woke to let her in.

In the faint glow from the fire, Anna donned the necessary layers of clothing and then laced up the Sorels. Her body felt heavy and tired, but she ignored it. Till she could shut down her mind, her body was going to have to lump it. Another wolf’s howl threaded beneath the doors and around the window glass, and she stopped to listen. This call sounded closer, and she wondered if she was a fool to be heading out into the woods alone. Even having seen Katherine’s body, Anna harbored a belief that the wolves would not attack her. She felt that way about mountain lions and bears as well – about most wild animals in parks where she’d worked. The major exception was the alligators of Mississippi. They, she was sure, would like nothing better than a bite of Pigeon meat.

Her sense of safety with other carnivores was based on nothing factual. It was a powerful and totally illogical feeling that they knew she loved them and would leave her untouched. Aware it was irrational, and probably born from watching too many animated Disney films as a kid, Anna was careful never to test this notion. She wasn’t testing it tonight. Given a choice, she would have waited till daylight, but she wasn’t sure how long the blood sample would be viable.

Trudging along in tracks – hers and half a dozen others, several of them being moose – she reached the head of the trail to the V.C. A shape shifted beyond the tree line; not a visual shape, a sound, the squeaking the snow made when crushed, the peculiar, dry Styrofoam sound.

Moose, she told herself. Moose, like deer, were curious and would come to see what was happening. Hunted only by the wolves, moose on ISRO had little fear of people and often wandered through housing areas, campgrounds and by the sundries store.

Anna walked into the woods. Trees, naked with winter, closed around her like a barbed-wire fence. The flashlight cut swaths through the black: tunnels of white tangled with twisted branches and gray-scaled tree trunks. The fear that had been with her earlier on her first ill-fated trip down this hill returned.

“Damn!” she whispered.

At each step, she began to think she heard the faint echo of snow being compressed in the trees alongside the path. She stopped. The echo stopped. Hard as she listened, as far as she tried to push her senses and her flashlight beam into the darkness, it was impossible to tell whether she was being stalked, followed or was hearing things. Panic stirred beneath her sternum, not the fear that motivates action or caution but the unreasoning whine of buzz saws in childhood nightmares.

Turning out the light, she let the fear have her, let the panic throb on violin strings out of tune, sirens and screeching tires on concrete. When the first wave had passed, leaving her feeling light-headed and breathless, she spoke to the darkness, within and without.

“Being scared is beginning to bore me. Do what you have to do and I’ll do the same.” Speaking aloud in the frigid darkness was oddly daring; a wild act of sanity enacted in a classically insane way. It reminded her many things were a choice. Fear, to a great extent, was a choice.

“I’m headed to the Visitors Center,” she said to her monstrous, malevolent or imaginary friend. “If you need to devour me, or whatever, I’ll be in the back offices.”

She thought she heard a snuffle or a smothered laugh trickle back through the thick underbrush. It was so faint and quickly aborted she couldn’t be sure it was anything more than the scrabble of a raven’s claw on a branch.

The building housing the V.C. and the ranger station was not locked. The key was on the chest of drawers that served her and Robin as bed table. Stopping before the double glass doors, she stomped the snow off her boots so the first seasonals to arrive in summer wouldn’t have too great a mess to clean up. Once inside, she closed the doors behind her. The mindless fear was gone, but if a wog did wander the island seeking human flesh there was no sense in tempting furry fate.

She went to the District Ranger’s office, stopped in the open door and automatically swept the light switch into the ON position. No illumination was forthcoming. In the second it had taken her hand to push the switch, she’d remembered it wouldn’t work. Finishing the sequence made no sense, due to lack of electricity, but she pushed the switch down again in the OFF position anyway.