Winter Study by Nevada Barr Page A

a
great big dog.”
The
shape, the black silhouette curled nose to tail, had looked like a
wolf. A monstrous wolf, more than half again as big as the biggest
alpha she’d ever seen.
5
That
night, the bunkhouse ran out of water. Since Middle pack had come to
Washington Harbor, Ridley had banned the use of the snowmobile for all
tasks, including hauling water up from the well. Wolves might be
impervious to Jonah’s supercub, but a snowmobile was an unknown
quantity.
At
first light, Anna positioned herself on the dock to get a final look.
Robin was collecting along the Greenstone Trail. Adam had gone with
her. Anna, Katherine, Jonah and Bob stood shoulder to shoulder, like
cattle in the wind, watching the Middle pack as the angry whine of the
snowmobile grew louder. The alpha female’s head came up first, then the
others; not one by one but in concert.
Ridley on the snowmobile broke free of the trees and the pack was on its feet.
Then they were gone.
Anna
found herself laughing. They didn’t turn tail and run the way Taco, her
old dog, did when squirrels chirred at him. They dissipated like mist
burning off a pond in autumn.
“Children of the night,” she said.
“Let’s go,” Katherine begged.
“Let’s
do it.” With Bob’s permission, Katherine was off, trotting down the
slippery dock and onto the lake, shuffle-sliding her way toward what
remained of the moose.
“Mmm-mm.”
Jonah smacked his lips. “Fresh steaming wolf scat and lots of it. For a
wildlife biologist, it just doesn’t get any better.”
Apparently
carnivore excreta being of little interest to him, Jonah stopped at the
ice well to help Ridley refill the plastic water barrels. Anna and Bob
joined the gnawed carcass and Katherine. “Will the wolves hang around?”
Bob asked.
“They may come back tonight, but I doubt it,” Anna replied. “They got most of the meat.”
“I’m going to take a look at their trail,” Bob announced. “Want to come?”
Anna
shook her head. Bob seemed nice enough, but he was too big. With his
height, bulldog jowls and thickening middle, he made the bunkhouse feel
cramped. Add six inches of cold-weather gear and he was huge, a yeti.
It made her claustrophobic.
“Don’t
get eaten,” she said to be personable. After a hard, lean winter, if a
wolf ate Menechinn it would probably flounder and die like a horse in a
granary.
“The axman never gets eaten by the wolf.” Bob grinned and turned away. The trees took him bite by bite.
For a while, Anna watched Katherine, absorbed in her work.
While
convinced that wolf poop was a fine and desirable thing, without the
actual furry beasts around it, Anna found her interest flagging. The
front that had chased the supercub home had settled in. Wind gusted
with malicious intent, and the weather site on Ridley’s computer
predicted snow. On the hill behind the bunkhouse was a vintage wooden
weather station, the kind that had served parks and mom-and-pop
airports for eighty or more years. The slat-sided wooden box housed a
barometer, minimum and maximum thermometers and a thermometer designed
— with some dipping into water and spinning — to give windchill. The
NPS had given Robin the task of checking it daily.
The
scientists thought this the height of absurdity, one more example of
Park Service ineptitude. The machinery for weather recording had moved
on while the NPS clung to the old ways. Still, when the stations were
gone, it would be one more link broken from when the world was a more
mysterious — and less endangered — place.
“Think it’ll snow?” Anna asked to keep her mind off the hoarfrost forming on her eyelashes.
“I hope so,” Katherine replied. “It makes it easier to map the packs’ movements. You can follow their tracks from the air.”
Watching
Katherine scooping frozen urine-soaked snow into ziplock baggies and
packing up wolf scat, Anna was surprised to note she no longer looked
mousey or hangdog at all. For the first time, Anna saw the fine bones
in