“That’s our well,” Jonah said. Then: “Doggone it!” He hurried over to the hole chopped in the ice. “The little bastard is trying to poison us. He’s done it before.” Jonah snatched up the shovel. On the side of the excavated snow and ice was a patch of yellow. “Fox,” Jonah said. “A pesky, pissy little red fox whose mother was no better than she should have been.” Shoveling up the tainted snow carefully, he tossed it as far from the well as he could. “I tell you, this little fur ball is potent. One drop of his urine got in the well a while back. One drop and our water reeked of fox for two days.”
“Reclaiming his territory,” Anna said.
“Very broad-minded of you, Ranger Pigeon. Wait till you’ve had café au fox piss.” Grumbling, he began using the tip of the shovel like a gargantuan scalpel, incising spots of yellow. Anna looked back to where the moose with its cloak of ravens lay on the ice. Blood spatter from the ax formed three lines out from the pool where the animal’s head had lain. The sight was not gruesome, not ugly. Ravens were so black they seemed cut from construction paper and pasted on the reflective white of the snow. Blood was still the bright cheery red of life. The composition was set off by the inky lines of leafless trees against the blue of the sky. Stunning in its simplicity, the tableau put Anna in mind of a Japanese painting she’d seen: Death of a Samurai.
“What are you going to do with the body?” she asked.
Jonah jammed the shovel back into the snow pile. “Nothing. There’s nothing we could do even if we wanted. Used to, before the warm-and-cuddlies got up in arms, we’d shoot a moose once a winter. Middle pack always knew and always showed up. One year, the rules were changed, but Middle pack showed up right on schedule anyway, like they had a watch that read: MOOSE TIME. No free moose meat. They never came again. I don’t know how they know things, but they do.”
“Think they know this is here?” Anna asked.
“See that raven?” Jonah pointed to a sharp cut of black flying toward the western shore of the harbor. “He’s going to tell the pack supper’s on.”
Anna believed him. She’d been around animals enough to know humans might know how much Jupiter weighs and where stars come from, but they remain in total ignorance about what the cat in their lap is thinking or who their dog tells their secrets to.
They heard the snowmobile returning and, stiff in their bundling, rotated toward it. “We’ll load up on water, then head back up,” Jonah said. “You sure you don’t want a ride?”
“I’m sure.” Without the distractions of dead ungulates and fox piss, she remembered how cold she was. If she didn’t move soon, she would freeze where she stood.
“Stay away from the dock,” Jonah called after her. “Ice is always rotten around docks.”
Anna waved an arm to let him know she’d heard. Though she’d been hypnotized by its singing and delighted in the canvas it created for the blood-and-bird painting, she wouldn’t be sorry to be on solid ground. The thought of getting wet, when the temperature was near zero and the wind brisk, scared her.
There was no negotiating with thermodynamics.
3
Walking up the bank from the lake, Anna felt like a one-woman band. What snow the wind had not scoured from the Earth was so desiccated it didn’t crunch beneath her boots, it squeaked as if she walked on beads of Styrofoam. Fur and fleece rasped over her ears, nylon ski pants whistled as they rubbed cricket-like with each step. The racket made her think of Robin Adair and her friendship with winter. She and Robin spent a couple of hours together, eating breakfast and killing time, till the Forest Service pilot got the call that the clouds over Isle Royale had lifted. Though Ely and Washington Harbor were on the same parallel and not more than one hundred fifty miles apart, the lake made its own weather, often completely unrelated to what the mainland was experiencing.
Over eggs and bacon, Anna learned Robin was born and raised on the St. Croix River in Minnesota, that she would have made the junior Olympics in cross-country skiing if she hadn’t been invalided out on a knee injury. Robin had been in love with winter her entire life. Winter was her favorite season. Either the woman had antifreeze in her veins or winter succumbed to her shy beauty and returned her affection. What else could explain the fact that she alone seemed comfortable in less than a walrus-sized amount of down blubber and moved as a wraith – or the apocryphal Indian – through the north woods?
All by herself, Anna constituted a public disturbance.
Where the dock met the shore, she stopped. The ranger station was gone. In its place was a picnic area designed with the inherent poetry of an RV-storage garage. The old, red rambling ranger station had been cramped and dirty and full of mice, but Anna missed it. The parks were never supposed to change; they were supposed to house memories of better days, keep them intact: nobody filled in the creek where one used to hunt crawdads or built a Wal-Mart in the field where the reading oak had grown.
An unpaved road curved to the west by the fuel dock and up to the seasonal employees’ housing area. That was as she remembered it, but four huge orange fuel tanks had been put at the turn.
Huge.
Orange.
She decided to take the trail through the woods.
Twenty yards in, she saw what had become of the old ranger station. It had been replaced by a much-larger structure that housed a Visitors Center as well. Cranky as the cold made her, she could find no fault with it; it was beautifully done, and, with a boatload of tourists arriving every day in the summer from Grand Marais, when it rained the poor wretches would now have a place to seek shelter rather than sitting along the edge of the dock making pathetic attempts to keep dry beneath unfolded island maps.
Above the new V.C. was the original concessionaire’s store: an unattractive brown wooden rectangle full of junk food, mosquito repellent and fishhooks. In the fall of her season on ISRO, two bull moose had fought in the picnic area by the door. Their antlers were so heavy, they could do little more than sway them at one another, rarely making serious contact. If moose felt the same about their antlers as old men did about their Corvettes, the windigo on the ice must have nearly died of shame.
A quarter of a mile farther uphill, she stepped out of the trees into the clearing where the seasonal employees were housed. The place she had lived in – fondly known as the “Mink Trail” due to its plethora of mice and the weasels that came to dine on them – was gone. Beyond it, trees had been cut down and earth disturbed. In preparation for the threatened winter resort? Anna wouldn’t put it past an overeager concessionaire to finagle it through NPS channels prematurely.
The bunkhouse where the Winter Study team would live for six weeks had smoke coming from the chimney. Anna hurried the last hundred feet. Designed for multiple occupants, the living space was laid out around a central room with a woodstove at the west end. Racks of drying socks and boots and shirts screened the heat from the fire. The three sofas, like in any self-respecting suburban home, were in a C shape around a television set. Along the back wall were computers and radio equipment. An old upright piano served as a bench for two laptops. To either side of the common room were small semiprivate apartments, with two bedrooms, a bath and a kitchen.
Trying not to look obvious, Anna headed for the nearest bathroom, shedding her parka as she went. The door was closed, and she knocked softly before pushing it open. A blast of icy air met her. The window over the commode was open six inches, and the toilet, shower and sink area were filled with milk, orange juice, potatoes, cheese, onions, butter and a dozen other perishable food items.