Winter Study

8

As challenging as it was to play the Pollyanna glad game with dirty boots and a hunk of half-eaten cheddar snugged between her thighs, Anna was glad for the physical demands of the past day. She was so thoroughly tired that she knew Robin was right; she would sleep. Eventually.

Darkness inside the tent was absolute, thick, pressing down on skin and mind the way it did underground: Carlsbad Caverns, Lechuguilla. Anna remembered that crushing blindness, air so hard with earth and ink that it choked her.

Claustrophobia tightened her skin and squeezed on her lungs. People, flesh, crowded in on her: breathing and rebreathing the air, snuffling, wriggling, adjusting; a filthy monstrous womb and the four of them stillborn.

“Enough!” Anna hissed.

An elbow pressed into her side. Robin. Her feet were jostled. Bob. Bob Menechinn took up the lion’s share of the space. This was almost balanced out by Katherine, who had squished herself into the corner between tent wall and floor until Robin made her move farther in, where it was marginally warmer.

Cold, as palpable and suffocating as the crowding night, negated the odors attendant on such a pile of humanity, but nothing could negate the ectoplasm – or whatever the stuff was called when people were not yet dead. The lives of the others fluttered and battered in the enclosure as if they were captive birds flying against the bars of a too-small cage.

On the best of nights, tents were not necessarily Anna’s friend. She’d woken more than once to claw her way through the opening flap, past the rain fly, to see the sky and breathe new air. This was not the best of nights. Forcing her mind away from crazy places, she readjusted the bagged boots between her knees. Had they been left outside the tent, or even outside the bag, the boots would freeze, Robin said. There would be no getting them warm in the morning.

Who knew boots could freeze? Anna could have gone to her grave without knowing that.

Time passed. The parts of Anna touching the ground cloth numbed. She curled up as best she could with half of North Face’s inventory jammed in the sleeping bag with her. The spectral birds began to settle. One by one, pairs of wings ceased to scrabble on her consciousness. The others slept. She tucked her hands into her armpits and tried to focus on a single point of white-hot light in her mind. Shirley MacLaine had done it with some guru or other and gotten so hot, she felt like she was burning up. It didn’t do much for Anna. After a time, she drifted into a chilled coma full of aching dreams.

A nightmare wind gusted in her ear: “Anna! Anna, wake up!” The second hiss brought her out of her icy dreams. Her eyes opened to total blindness, her arms were pinioned to her sides and she couldn’t feel her legs. She began to panic.

“Listen!”

Robin; it was Robin. Panic subsided. The biotech had hold of her shoulder. She was pressed so close Anna felt her breath on her cheek. It was warm. Anna remembered warm. “What-”

“Shh. Listen,” came into her ear on a balmy breeze.

Anna listened.

Beyond the tent walls, the preternatural stillness of a night, frozen into a timeless instant, creaked in her ears. With a mittened paw, she shoved her hat up the better to hear. Silence, thick as an ice floe, pressed against her eardrums.

“There it is again.”

Now Anna heard it. Into this concrete quiet came the pad of a soft-footed animal, an animal heavy enough that the snow squeaked under its weight. Faint and ethereal, the sound moved around the tent, then stopped. Anna’s ears rang with the emptiness and she tried to sit up, but Robin was on Anna’s left arm and the detritus of Anna’s life was tangled around her body.

A thin skritching sound scratched through the black air, clogging Anna’s ears. Whatever it was pawed at the rain fly. “Fox,” Anna whispered.

“No.” Robin’s hands clutched and her voice shook. The woman was terrified.

In her short life, Robin had probably hiked nearly as many miles as Anna had in her significantly longer existence. Robin had camped out in all seasons and all weathers. That this night she suddenly got the megrims chilled Anna as surely as the flatlined mercury. She tried to pat Robin reassuringly but ended up hitting her in the face with a great mittened hand. “Sorry,” she murmured.

Robin caught her hand and held it. The pawing stopped. There was no pad-pad-pad of the animal, curiosity satisfied, going away. Anna could feel it outside the tent, feel it so close to them, had she been able to reach through tent and fly she could have touched it.

They waited.

It waited.

From the huge paw prints Robin had seen and the great curled beast Anna had glimpsed from the supercub, Anna’s mind formed a vision, and a jolt of primitive fear shot through her as this monster of the id bared teeth the size of daggers and lunged for her throat. Anna shook the thought off. Claustrophobia and cold were getting to her.

“Shh. Shh. There!” Robin hissed.

Slightly above them came short, sharp whuffing breaths of a creature tasting the air the way a bear might, lips pulled back, nostrils flared, scenting danger or prey. Anna had never heard a canine do it; not fox or coyote or her old dog Taco. The whuffing stopped. The silence was deafening.

Anna pulled off her mittens and fumbled through the jetsam that had been extruded from her sleeping bag until her hand closed around her headlamp. With fingers already clumsy from their short sojourn away from her armpits, she pushed the ON button.

Bob and Katherine were as the dead; so worn out, neither the external noises nor the light woke them. Anna switched the lamp off. Instinct warned her not to make a magic lantern of the tent, with the four of them the shadow players.

Sudden and loud, clawing erupted near the tent flap and Anna squawked, not just at the noise but because Robin had shrieked in her ear.

“What is it?” came a frightened voice. Katherine had woken.

“Nothing,” Anna lied. “Probably a squirrel. We may have pitched our tent on top of his dinner cache.”

“Too big to be a squirrel,” Robin murmured, and her grip on Anna’s shoulder became painful. Fear is the most contagious of emotions, and Anna flashed on nights in high school, girls in their pajamas, tales of the escaped lunatic with a hook, the sudden frenzies of fear.

“Would you stop?” she snapped. “We’re not doing Night of the Grizzly here. And I’m not getting out of my sleeping bag and braving the arctic to chase away a fancy dress rat.” She wasn’t hoping to fool herself or the biotech; she was hoping to soothe Katherine and snap Robin out of whatever horrors she was entertaining before they all succumbed.

As if to deny the unflattering characterization, the snuffling came into the black of the tent followed by a low growl that brought up Anna’s nape hairs.

“Oh my God,” Katherine whispered. “Wolf.”

A light beam, sudden and harsh, smacked Anna between the eyes, and a bear-sized shadow raked up toward the tent dome. She screamed like a teenager. So did Katherine and Robin.

Bob had regained consciousness.

“Shh,” Robin hissed.

“Kill the light,” Anna said. He didn’t, but he turned its lens down in his lap.

“What-”

“Be quiet,” Katherine said, the first show of rebellion against her professor Anna had noticed. “You’ll scare it away.”

Robin made a soft sound in her throat, a groan or muted cry. Anna tried to read her face in the dim light of Bob’s smothered lamp, but the shadows of hat, scarf and long hair effectively screened her.

Bob was easy to read. His head probably wasn’t any bigger than a normal human being’s – unless one was speaking metaphorically – but his face appeared immense, meaty, slabs of cheek and jowl dwarfing eyes, nose and mouth. On this wide canvas, fear was clearly writ. The big game hunter didn’t like being hunted.

“What’s it after?” he asked. He’d meant to whisper, but the words came out in a squeak.

“Food,” Robin replied succinctly.

Anna couldn’t argue. The chocolate and cheese and other high-fat, high-sugar, high-protein items they’d tucked into bed with them might have been rendered odorless to human noses, but to a wolf they would smell like a deli at lunchtime. For decades, humans and wolves had lived separate lives on the small island. Though ISRO was only forty-two miles long, and trails raked down both sides of her spine and crisscrossed the many lakes and coves, wolf sightings weren’t common. Wolves were a private people, a quiet, watchful people. Undoubtedly the frequency of wolves seeing visitors vastly outnumbered that of visitors seeing wolves.

In recent years, that had begun to change. A wolf had been seen hanging around a campground in Rock Harbor on several occasions. A dead wolf washed up on shore in Robinson Bay, apparently drowned. People reported seeing wolves near the lean-tos in Washington Harbor. The wonder of this was that it hadn’t happened long ago. Wild animals quickly became habituated to humans when food was involved.

“We’re food,” Robin said, as if reading Anna’s thoughts.

Anna could have smacked her. “Don’t be an idiot. When was the last time a wolf ate anybody?” she demanded.

Robin looked slightly cowed, but she said: “Maybe this isn’t a regular wolf.”

The animal, quiet since Bob had come to life, began frenzied digging, claws scraping loud against the fabric of the tent and the frozen earth.

Bob yelped. Robin, still pressed to Anna’s side, screamed. Bob jerked his lamp from his down bag and shined it frantically around the tent walls, a wild, dizzying rush of light. Anna felt as if she was falling into a vortex of hysteria.

“My God,” Katherine cried. She grabbed Bob’s wrist and steadied the light on a section of tent opposite the entrance flap. The fabric was pounding in and out as the animal’s claws raked against it. Big paws. Bigger than a man’s fist, and high up the tent wall. The urgent whine of a carnivore closing on its quarry cut through the rapid clawing, then a growl from deep in the chest; the growl of a dog who does not bark but bites.

“God damn,” Anna breathed. Her heart thudded against her rib cage, skin prickled, adrenaline poured into her till she was strung out with it. Night of the Grizzly no longer seemed so far-fetched. Neither did The Haunting of Hill House.

The pawing stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Paws padded away.

Then nothing.

Silence was so complete, Anna realized, not only had the nocturnal intruder ceased its onslaught but the four of them had pretty much stopped breathing. Her hand was cramping. She was hanging on to Robin as tightly as Robin was holding on to her.

She laughed shakily. “Whoa! That was-”

“Shut up,” Bob cried and began swinging the headlamp, clutched in both hands, in crazy patterns, as if the circle of light was an eye through which he could see outside the tent. Shadows rushed and retreated till the space seemed full not only of human bodies and gear but a host of unquiet spirits.

“Stop it!” Anna ordered.

“It’s gone, Bob,” Katherine said softly.

“Shut up,” Bob snarled.

“It’s gone,” Anna said, forcing her voice to the light and conversational. She found her lamp, turned it on and shined it in Bob’s eyes to get his attention. White showed around the irises, and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his upper lip. His fear was phobic; pure terror. The kind that runs amok. “We’re okay,” Anna said, not sure it was true. She, too, was scared, but she wasn’t sure whether it was of the creature outside or that Bob would begin throwing himself around like a panicked bull in a china shop, where her bones took the place of the porcelain.

“Let’s all settle down,” she said reasonably.

“You fucking settle down,” Bob snarled. “You fucking settle down! Ridley sends us out to fucking freeze to death because he’s bred some freak wolf/dog hybrid that’s ripping the shit out of our goddam tent-”

“It’s okay, Bob. There’s nothing to be scared-” Katherine was begging, reaching out to touch the back of his hand.

He batted her away and yelled: “Keep your hands off me, you fucking cunt.”

“That’s enough,” Anna ordered sharply. “It’s gone. We’re all right. Now we sleep.” Anger had taken up the space where fear had been.

Bob’s eyes cleared marginally. He was coming back to himself from a hunt where he was the trophy animal, but the bone-deep horror remained. Anna saw it and she snorted; a stiff sniff of air through nostrils pinched with cold. Had she been less tired, less chilled, less freaked out by the bizarre behavior of the animal, she would have been able to stop herself. As it was, she saw his fear, and he saw her contempt for it. They all saw it.

As she lay down and turned off her lamp, she knew that was something a guy like Bob Menechinn would never forgive them for. Lying in the frigid dark, she could feel the others listening. She could smell the fear sweat from Bob.

The animal did not come back. And none of them slept.