Winter Study

“I don’t think this sample came from any ISRO wolf,” Katherine was saying as A

“This year’s pup,” Bob said. “Not on the radar yet.”

A

“There are other things,” Katherine said.

“Every wolf on ISRO descended from the one breeding pair that came across the ice,” Ridley told Menechi

A

Ridley pressed the DNA readout flat on the counter; next to it, he placed another, a known DNA readout of an island wolf, and studied the two together. “It’s like wolf plus… something.”

“The sample got tainted,” Bob said.

“Maybe.” Katherine was looking not at the readout but out the window toward where they’d seen the pack cross the compound.

She was thinking about the huge tracks Robin had seen, A

6

The following day, the promised snow began to fall. Robin laced up her mukluks, shouldered her army-issue rucksack and headed out to photograph the track of the gigantic hound with Adam. The others slept late and dawdled over breakfast. The wolf pack on the ice had changed the daily habits of the researchers. Usually, when the sky was clear and there was little wind, Ridley would spend the day in the air with Jonah watching and photographing the wolves. When the weather was too bad to fly, there were chores, but not enough to keep them busy.

For most of breakfast, they chewed over the DNA Katherine had identified as alien. The wolf that had left the scat wasn’t from the island. At first, A

This wolf had come to the island in some other ma

This last was the most probable. Wolves’ reputation as cold-blooded killers of little girls in red capes was unearned. No one around the breakfast table could think of a single recorded incident in their lifetimes or that of their parents. In 2005, a presumed wolf/ human killing had been reported, but the attack animal turned out to be a bear.

What there had been were attacks on people by wolf/dog hybrids, kept and bred by dog owners. Like any animal that ca

Jonah tired of saying “wolf/dog hybrid” first and dubbed the speculative animal a “wog.”

A wog could have been dumped on the island at any time, but most likely in the last six or seven months. Had the creature been in the park the previous winter, Ridley believed there would have been sign of it, a sighting or scat or the outsized paw prints Robin had reported.

Most domesticated – or even partially domesticated – animals couldn’t survive in the wilderness for long, but if the wog was as big as the tracks Robin found suggested, and trained to kill, it might have joined – or taken over – a pack. This could explain why the pack had apparently lost its fear of humans and sauntered through the bunkhouse area. If the wog were big enough and fierce enough, it could have killed the wolf now decomposing in the kitchen, dispatched it so quickly there were no signs of a fight.

“Any alien wolf or wolf/dog hybrid,” Bob declared, pointedly refusing to use Jonah’s word, “would be killed by any pack that came across it.”

“What if it was big, really big?” Katherine said.

“It’s not one-on-one in a fair fight, Kathy,” Bob said with a smile that pushed his cheeks up till his eyes were crescent moons. The smile notwithstanding, the “Kathy” was a clear rebuke. “The pack would kill it.”

“Maybe not,” Ridley said. “If there was a breeding slot open, the wolf might be assimilated.”

Bob snorted. “Pretty hard to arrange,” he said.

“It could happen by chance,” Ridley said. A

The breakfast club finally broke up: Ridley to his laptop to work on reports, Jonah to wander the bunkhouse looking for somebody to pester and Bob to the chair closest to the woodstove to read through the daily log, a thick, three-ring binder full of the forms provided for record keeping. The park service was full of such information-gathering tools. For the most part, they were a tedium of pages hurriedly filled in by the lowest-ranking member of any team. On the island, the biotech did it each day. Temperature at sunrise, at sunset, snowfall, comments; office closets were full of these binders, detailing one study or another. As far as A

For a while, she amused herself in the DNA lab kitchen, watching Katherine pore over her alien sample, ru

“A

It was the first time Katherine had spoken in a quarter of an hour and her voice was so low A

“I’m here,” A

“Tell Robin to stay away from Bob,” Katherine said quietly and without turning. A

“Sure,” she said. Then, in hopes it would ease Katherine’s mind: “She’s got a boyfriend.”

Katherine acted as if she’d not heard. After a moment, A

“Looks like a Christmas card, doesn’t it?” he said genially.

She looked out the picture widow. The bunkhouse had a wide deck with a railing. She remembered potluck suppers there the summer she’d worked boat patrol. Now it was three-quarters covered with wood cut by the NPS and stacked there for the use of the Winter Study. The sky was lost in the falling flakes, birch and spruce trees surrounding the cleared area veiled in drifting snow, a muted study in black and white.

A