He sprang off the snowmobile with the sharp suddenness of a switchblade knife opening and lifted the trailer’s lid.
“Camera,” he said, like a surgical nurse might say “Scalpel.”
Robin began taking pictures of the moose from all angles. The buzz of a scientific find – or an audience at a freak show – began over the size and peculiarity of the antlers, the number of ticks, the marks of starvation on the body.
Due to moose predation, balsam fir, the favored food in winter, was almost gone from the island, and the once-thriving herd – nearly fifteen hundred when Anna had been a ranger on Isle Royale – was down to around three hundred animals.
“Will hunger make the wolves more aggressive?” Menechinn asked. He’d been watching the recording process, with his arms folded across his chest and his chin buried in his neck scarf.
“It will,” Robin said.
“I’ve never seen an increase in wolf aggression that was tied to food availability,” Ridley said. “Only to sex and turf.”
“There’s always a first time,” Adam sided with the biotech.
Ridley shrugged. “Are we ready for the ax?” he asked Robin. “We need to take the head,” he explained to Anna. “It’s a perfect example of the peruke deformity. If we leave it, the critters will get it.” Already ravens were calling the good news of the slaughter to each other and cutting up the pale sky with ink-stained wings.
“Here.” Bob Menechinn held out a hand for the ax. “I’ll do it. Man, it would be something to have that on your wall, wouldn’t it?”
“Step back,” Ridley warned them, ignoring the offer. “This is going to be messy.”
Ridley wasn’t much taller than Anna, five-eight maybe, and slight, but he swung the ax like a man long used to chopping his own wood. Hefting it back across his shoulder, he swung it in a clean arc, the strength of his legs in the blow.
The axhead buried itself in meat and bone behind the moose’s ears.
Anna’d thought it would be the way the guillotine was depicted in the movies; a single chop and the moose’s head would roll free of its body. Except, with the antlers, it couldn’t roll. With the long, bulbous nose, it couldn’t roll. Moose were not beasts designed for a beautiful life or a dignified death.
Ridley put his mukluk on the thick neck and yanked on the ax. With a sucking crunch, it jerked loose, and blood flew like a flock of cardinals over the ice.
The head lolled. Great, dark eyes stared upward; the executed watching the executioner botch the job.
“He looks stoned.” Bob laughed. “Or is it a she?”
Ridley’s ax hit the animal between the eyes.
“God dammit,” he whispered, took a deep breath and swung the ax again, severing the head but for an eight-inch strip of hide that Adam quickly cut with a mat knife he produced from somewhere in his ragtag clothing.
Ravens were landing before they’d finished wrapping the moose’s head in a tarp. They hopped and scolded; their feast was growing cold. Bolder birds dashed in to snatch bits of flesh from the open neck wound; easy pickings, with no tough hide to tear through. By the time the carcass was consumed, all manner of smaller creatures would have had a good dinner; maybe the meal that would give them the strength to make it until summer, when the island provided in plenty.
With the severed head wrapped in black plastic and stowed in the snowmobile trailer, Anna and the others shuffled back to the Beaver and finished transferring gear and food into the trailer around the moose head. Because of the size and awkward shape of the antlers, the trailer’s lid had to be propped partly open. Adam driving, Bob behind him, and Ridley, boots planted wide on the rear runners like a musher with a mechanized pack of dogs, headed up to the bunkhouse.
The Forest Service plane took off, leaving the ground in a surprisingly short time and disappearing around Beaver Island as the pilot used the length of Washington Harbor to get up to altitude for the flight back to Ely.
The sounds of internal combustion machines, simultaneously anachronistic and a reassuring reminder that Winter Study team was not marooned on an icebound island in the time of the mastodons, grew fainter. Anna wanted to hear the ice singing again, but there was nothing but the quarreling of ravens.
For a moment, she, Robin and Jonah stood without speaking, eyes on the sky where the USFS plane had gone. Then, as if moved by the same impulse, the way a flock of birds will suddenly change directions, they turned and followed the track left by the snowmobile. Ungainly in bulky clothes, boots unsure on the slippery surface, Anna felt like a toddler. Robin, doing a kind of Texas two-step, the soles of her soft mukluks never leaving the surface of the lake, shuffled expertly along.
Partway back to the dock, a supercub was tied down, a tandem-seat fabric airplane used since before World War II for air reconnaissance, search and rescue, hunting – any job that called for flying low and slow and being able to land anywhere the pilot had the guts to set it down. This one was a classic, down to the fat brown teddy bear painted on the tail, and skis where wheels would be in summer. Lines, dropped through holes cut in the ice and held there by lengths of two-by-four, were gripped by the ice when the hole froze again, making as firm a tie-down as any hook set in concrete.
“That’s my airplane you’re admiring,” Jonah said. “She’ll let you pet her if you kiss her on the nose first.”
Jonah was the team’s pilot. Old, Anna thought. Moon, was her second thought as she realized that when the Beaver was coming in on final approach it was Jonah’s pale old behind that dared the frigid air to welcome them in proper style.
The glare went off the lenses of his eyeglasses and showed Anna eyes the palest blue she’d ever seen, the color of the sky with a high, thin overcast. They’d probably taken on the tint from too many years staring through the windscreens of airplanes. Jonah Schumann had to be seventy. Seventy-five, maybe.
Jonah looked as if he could see her doing math in her head and said: “I normally don’t offer my lady’s favors to strangers such as yourself, but she may have been traumatized by recent events. The old gal is pushing fifty, and it would be a comfort to her to have the company of a contemporary.” His eyes twinkled through the deadpan seriousness of his words.
Anna laughed and realized she’d not introduced herself. “Anna Pigeon, Rocky Mountain.” Reflexively they both thrust out their hands to shake in the approved manner, but with the mittens and gloves they were more like two old declawed bears pawing at each other.
“Nice butt,” Anna said.
“Thank you,” Jonah replied gravely. “Many women and some men have told me that. You have already met my fiancée.” He was looking at Robin, with her sweet, unblemished face perfectly framed by long, straight brown hair. Anna had a balaclava with the drawstring pulled till only her eyes and nose showed and, around that, to keep the cold from creeping down the collar of her parka, a wide thick scarf. The only concession to the cold Robin had made was a wool Laplander’s hat, the kind with a pointy top and silly earflaps.
“In your dreams, Jonah,” Robin said.
“She’s shy,” he confided. “It embarrasses her that she would marry me just for the sex.”
Robin ducked her head and looked inland. “I’ll walk back by the Nature Trail,” she said. “I need to stop and take a look at the weather.” With that, she was two-stepping toward shore, slender and graceful in her minimalist wear.
Anna’s twenties came back in a hot flash: the flattering but endless and, finally, exhausting sexual references and jokes, the mentioning of body parts, the sly looks, the double entendres. She’d thought that sort of thing had gone down beneath the nineties tsunami of lawsuits and political correctness. Maybe it had just gone underground, or, maybe, it would not be dead till every man of her generation and the generation before her was rotting in his grave.