Nevada Barr: Winter Study

Book 14 in the Anna Pigeon series, 2008

Winter Study is real and has been ongoing for over fifty years. The value of the research is inestimable not only in the detailed work done from winter to winter but in the patterns that can only unfold when a project is maintained over periods of time which are meaningful to the natural world. There’s little space and much work to do during these weeks on the icebound Isle Royale. Had Superintendent Green not extended to me the generosity of the park and the forbearance of a good manager, I wouldn’t have been able to write this book. Thank you, Phyllis.

And thanks to the Forest Service pilots in Ely, Minnesota, who took the time to share stories with me and who delivered me, along with food, to the island in January.

Most especially, thanks to the Winter Study team: Rolf Peterson, John Vuceti, Beth Kolb and Donnie Glaser. They are the heart and soul of this book. They had the kindness not to throw me out in the snow when I was whining about the cold; they answered endless e-mails with questions about what a wolf smelled like and how fat a fat tick was and who ate what and whom. Had Rolf not taken the time to work through the manuscript, researchers everywhere would have been rolling their collective eyes at the errors I made. The four of them shared not simply the knowledge they had but the spirit that motivates what is good in this book.

In July 1970, when I was a neophyte graduate student just beginning fieldwork at Isle Royale National Park, a stranger invited me to lunch at the Windigo Inn. He must have thought I knew something, or at least was poor and in need of free food. The cafeteria adjoined a house of the erstwhile Washington Club, a turn-of-the-century private organization that predated the establishment of Isle Royale as a national park. (Over a decade later, I helped burn down the house in winter, tidying up the place and helping it revert to forest.) The stranger, a balding and very tanned man dressed in a stylish recreational outfit, explained how he had traveled the world over but he believed Isle Royale was simply the finest place on Earth. I recall thinking I was lucky indeed – this man spared me the need to look any farther.

It must be a similar impression – of splendid isolation – that brought Nevada Barr back to Isle Royale, to write an unprecedented second novel based in the same national park. I was happy to cooperate, as Nevada ’s signature blend of mystery and nature writing has a wide following. Isle Royale has always been a difficult destination, and relatively few people visit the place, even when open and accessible in summer. To the extent that it is known at all, it is primarily through the writings and imagery of others. A seasoned interpretive ranger at Mesa Verde National Park told me that all she knew of Isle Royale was contained in Nevada ’s 1994 work, A Superior Death.

While Isle Royale has a rich, largely unappreciated history, in the modern era its wolves and moose have put it on the map. As this book goes to press, the scientific effort to document and understand their population fluctuations will be in its fiftieth year. Simultaneously, the worldwide status of the gray wolf has improved remarkably, from vilified vermin to charismatic top dog. No longer confined to wilderness areas far removed from people, wolves now claim as their own many areas of private and public lands, including heavily visited Yellowstone National Park. There are still, however, only four national parks in the United States outside of Alaska, the other two being Glacier and Voyageurs, with a resident wolf population. Providing wildlands for these wolves, as well as other large carnivores, remains a serious conservation challenge.

Another person for whom Isle Royale was the finest place on Earth was Bob Linn, a local park naturalist who participated in the first Winter Studies of wolves and moose at Isle Royale. Bob eventually became Chief Scientist of the Service in the 1960s, presiding over the rocky marriage between science and national park management to which Nevada alludes. Bob hated controversy, but three times he had to take action to help stifle political or bureaucratic interference in the study of Isle Royale wolves. One would think these wolves would hardly have an enemy in the world, isolated as they are from any hint of competitive threat to human interests. Bob marshaled the forces of good to quell threats as they arose, whether inspired by greed, hunger for power, jealousy or just plain orneriness; afterward, he modestly declared that scientists were simply viewed as “loose cannons on the deck.” The most serious challenge was certainly when James Watt was Secretary of the Interior under President Reagan; Park Service support was withdrawn and staff was recalled in the middle of the Winter Study in 1983. However, Watt was blameless, as I concluded years later after a rare conversation that demonstrated he didn’t even know Isle Royale existed, let alone was a national park that he’d been nominally responsible for conserving. So it goes…

Nevertheless, to this day the wolves of Isle Royale have survived, the study of them has survived and, elsewhere, the species is thriving in places where wolf recovery at one time was considered most improbable. This is ample testimony to the ability of the human mind to embrace, eventually, the true and unblemished facts about the way the world works and about the role we can play in securing our own sustainable future in it.

For now, enter the white and cold world of Isle Royale and Lake Superior in winter. It is a world that Nevada Barr brings alive with descriptive power through her love of the natural world, her wide-ranging experience in national parks and her curiosity about the sometimes-abstruse ways of wildlife biologists. All this, mixed with the fears, frailties and foibles of her human subjects, makes for a chilling and absorbing account. Finally, one may be well advised to eschew cell phones, and, for the record, it is a bad idea to drink beer in the sauna.

– ROLF PETERSON

January 2008

The Beaver was spotless. Anna’d never seen an airplane so clean. Sitting in its heated hangar in Ely, Minnesota, it fairly gleamed from its annual check. Only the deeply scarred floorboards stood witness to the old warhorse’s hard duty. Beavers hadn’t been manufactured since 1962, and the one the pilot was loading for its weekly provision and personnel trip to Isle Royale in Lake Superior was older than Anna.

But it had taken better care of itself, she thought, with a touch of icy realism. Suited up in brand-spanking-new, fresh-out-of-the-box, felt-lined Sorel boots, insulated socks, ski pants and parka, watching a woman half her age, with legs as long and strong as a yearling moose, move nimbly about in lightweight mukluks and an alarmingly thin winter jacket, Anna suffered a sensation neither familiar nor welcome.

She felt frail, insecure, out of her element. Isle Royale in Michigan had been one of her first duty stations, but that had been years ago. And in summer. A jaunt there in the arctic temperatures of January, when the island was closed to the outside world, wasn’t her idea of the perfect winter vacation. Too many years on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi, where a Levi jacket and knee socks were sufficient for a winter wardrobe, had thinned her blood. Her current tenure as District Ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park might bring back her limited tolerance for the cold, but she’d yet to spend a winter there.