Winter Study

“Wolves are not at the top of the food chain on Isle Royale,” she said disgustedly. “Ticks are.”

The alcohol vials were stowed in the kitchen cupboard next to a box of granola bars. Ridley brought in another rack of vials, the glass preservation tubes smaller than those used for ectoparasites. Using tweezers, Katherine plucked guard hairs, careful to get the follicles.

“Ninety-five percent ethanol,” she said to A

“We’ll have to wait on the teeth and throat,” Ridley said. His hands were around the wolf’s muzzle, pulling with a degree of force. “Frozen solid.”

There was a wrongness in Ridley’s hands on the animal’s mouth that disturbed A

“Rigor or frozen frozen?” she asked.

Ridley rocked back on his heels. “When it’s this cold, it doesn’t make much difference. It takes longer for specimens to thaw out than it would for rigor to go off.”

“How long does rigor last in a wolf?” A

“I don’t know,” he said without curiosity. Ridley exhibited a disinterest in anything regarding research animals that wasn’t study specific. Maybe a narrow mind was a strength for a researcher; the ability to focus on one tiny thing for a very long time.

“No gloves!” A

“We’ll put them on for the necropsy,” he said. “That gets messy.”

A

The research, A

The wolf’s hide had softened in the relative heat of the bunkhouse, and Ridley pulled up the wolf’s right eyebrow with his thumb. The dull eyes were gold colored, closer together and more slanted than the eyes of domestic dogs.

“Great eyes,” he said as he pulled up the lid of the left.

“Yes,” A

Ridley stared at her blankly. “They’re not eaten,” he explained. “Ravens get the eyes first thing, usually.” He looked back to the wolf. “No cataracts. Even without seeing the teeth, my guess is this guy is two, three at most. He must have tried to run the pack or gotten himself crosswise with the alpha some other way, then lost the fight,” he said, rocking back on his heels. “The rest is going to have to wait till he thaws.”

Ridley rose gracefully, his elegant hands held out in front of him like a pianist about to perform. He would wash them immediately with hot water dippered from the stovetop into a basin. The Winter Study team was fastidious about hygiene. Gastrointestinal upsets took on a whole new meaning when the bathroom was a one-holer and the temperature minus twelve degrees.

A

A wolf.

She’d yet to get over the wonder of it.

“Wine time,” Bob said, glancing at his watch, and followed Ridley toward the common room.

“Generator time,” Jonah said. “Since the good Adam, first man on Earth and not on time even once in the ensuing mille

A

“Let there be light,” Jonah said and left.

Five minutes later the lights came on. Since Katherine showed no indication she was finished, and A

“I’ve got a new toy,” Katherine said, more at ease with the men gone. She lovingly removed a box about the size of two toasters from a duffel bag stacked with other bags and boxes on the unused cot in the corner of the kitchen. “They’ve been around for a while, but this is of a new generation.” With obvious pride, she removed the top half of the Styrofoam packing to reveal a machine that looked like a cross between a computer and an adding machine.

When no explanation was forthcoming, A

“It’s a PCR,” Katherine said. “A polymerase chain reaction machine. It’s brand-new technology.” Katherine stroked its plastic face. “American University bought it for this trip. The wolf/moose study is a kind of rock star in animal research studies.”

A

“The lab at Michigan Tech does the original fingerprinting,” Katherine went on as she set the PCR on the counter. “ISRO’s samples are sent there. They extract DNA using a Qiagen extraction kit. Then the sample is visualized, using a Beckman-Coul fragment analyzer. They do it at a bunch of different microsatellite loci in the genome.”

It would have fallen to Katherine, as Menechi

“You lost me at ‘Qiagen,’” A

Katherine looked sheepish, oddly juxtapositional to the technically precise language she’d been spouting. “Sorry.” She bobbed her head in the birdlike way A

Katherine took a deep breath and looked into the corner behind A

A

“Tiny fragments of the DNA are taken,” Katherine finally said, and her gaze came back to eye level. “From a lot of different places – not on the sample; from different places on the genome from the sample. All these tiny pieces have different weights. The fragments are… uh… squirted… into tubes of gel… like Jell-O, you know?”

“I know Jell-O,” A

“Good. Good. So each little piece of DNA is in its own tube, and the tubes are all in a line like…” She groped mentally, probably through a bag of metaphors that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody without at least a master’s degree.

“Like a bowling alley?”

“Yes!” she said gratefully. “Like a bowling alley, but tiny. Very, very small. Small. Smaller than small-”

“Tiny,” A

“Tiny. So each tiny bit is in its own tiny tube of gel in the tiny bowling alley. All in a line like the lanes.” She was warming up to the bowling alley and waited till A

“I get the idea,” A

“Okay. That will work. The lighter ones go farther along the gel tubes than the heavier ones. When they all stop, you look at a readout; it looks sort of like a shadowy version of the old computer punch cards. A series of marks. Like on television when they lay one DNA readout over the other and all the marks are exactly the same and – Bingo! – you’ve got the criminal.