Winter Study

Here, in the thick fall of snow, the silence was absolute. In an indefinable way, even silence was muffled by the slow white flakes.

A

Opening the park in winter would effectively shut the study down. The noise and humanity attendant on a winter resort destination would disrupt the wolves to the point the study would no longer be viable.

There was no reason for Homeland Security to send one of their own to evaluate it. The NPS had debated every salient point regarding the study, first with David Mech, then Rolf Peterson and now Ridley Murray. The research was prestigious, high-profile and cheap. People loved the wolves, loved knowing they were around. At every campfire talk, regardless of the subject, the first question was always, “How many wolves are there?”

Pursuing its mandate to keep America’s borders safe, Homeland Security needed to plug up corridors used by unsavory aliens. Big Bend in Texas bordered on Mexico, as did Organ Pipe. Glacier, Isle Royale and Voyageurs national parks shared a border with Canada. Many national parks had stretches of seacoast within their boundaries. If A

But why bring in anybody? And why Bob Menechi

ROBIN RETURNED EARLY. Adam wasn’t with her. So dull was the day, Robin’s return was heralded with great excitement. She had pictures of the track of the gigantic hound. The camera was plugged into Ridley’s laptop, and they gathered around to see if the paw prints were all they’d been advertised to be.

Robin had traveled fast, but there’d been at least a half an inch of snowfall before she’d reached her destination. The light was lousy for photographing tracks, directionless and muted. Tracking was best in the morning and at sundown, when the light was low enough it caught the minute contours of the prints. She’d used a pen for scale – the proper tool was a small ruler, but a pen or a dime was often as good as it got.

Shouldering Jonah aside, A

The paw prints did appear significantly larger than those of the other wolves, but, in the diffuse light and with the snow obliterating the edges, it was hard to be sure they had actually been made by as large an animal as they suggested.

“They could have been made when a normal-sized wolf was ru

“A

A

“Huge?” Ridley questioned the word.

“Half to twice the size of a normal alpha.”

“Wolves here run seventy to eighty-five pounds. Are you talking a hundred-and-sixty-pound wolf?” Ridley asked skeptically.

“Like I said, thought is the key word.”

“And you thought you saw huge tracks.” This was to Robin, and A

“I saw them,” Robin said firmly, abandoning her earlier wavering.

“Okay,” Ridley said, and: “Okay.” The second okay was more to himself than the others, and A

7

“Good morning, campers!” Ridley said as they settled down to their oatmeal the following morning. A

“Normally we don’t trap wolves in winter – too great a danger of a foot freezing off in the trap before we get there,” Ridley said to the group.

“Not to mention people’s feet freezing off,” Adam put in.

“But we’ve done it before,” Ridley went on, ignoring the aside.

“Two years ago, we thought we had a virus threatening the population and couldn’t wait till summer to check it out, and we’ve had to do it a time or two when we couldn’t get what we needed to do finished in the summer.” He took a topographical map of the island he had folded at his elbow and spread it out, shoving jam and peanut butter and milk aside. A

“I don’t know what we’ve got going this winter, but I don’t think it can wait till summer. If somebody dumped an animal here, chances are it won’t survive the winter, but it might live to reproduce or just screw up the wolves’ patterns. Worst case, it will reinfect them with parvo or some other virus. ISRO wolves have isolation for protection, but they’ve not been exposed to mainland diseases and have little tolerance for that kind of exposure.”

Ridley was rather enjoying the lecture, but A

“You,” he said to Robin, “and you,” looking at A

Sending Robin made sense: she was an experienced trapper and winter camper. He’d included A

Malone Bay was fourteen or fifteen miles over ridges. The trail was only moderately difficult and stu

Camping in the glow of long summer evenings in the mountains, waking on the shores of a lake to the crisp bite of autumn on the air, sleeping away a hot afternoon beneath an overhang of sculpted rock in a desert creek bed: this was the stuff of heaven. A