Winter Study

Robin opened the metal jaws and set the pressure plate, then packed trap and paraphernalia in snow till it was no longer visible. “This trap probably won’t fool anybody,” she said as she stood and addressed her audience. “There are too many of us and we’ve been here too long being stinky. The wolves will smell a rat. After you all move away, I’ll sprinkle around some clean snow and that might help. It’s best to get in and out with the least interruption of the space as possible.

“Do you want me to set the next one?” she asked A

“No. It’s coming back to me. I think I’m good.”

“Okay.” Robin pulled a topographical map from her pack and folded it so the area where they were was uppermost. “You and Bob take the western side of Intermediate. Katherine and I will go around to the east. Lay the first trap here.” She pointed to where the trail split on the shore of Intermediate Lake to embrace the perimeter.

“When you get to where this little triangle of land sticks out into the water – the ice – you need to cross right here.” Robin took a mitten off to better point at the narrow bay where an isthmus curved back toward the main shore. “Put a trap there.”

“Why there?” A

“The wolves have been known to den up on that triangle of land.” Robin’s voice tightened as if A

“Got it,” A

“Bob, you go with A

“Help me with my pack,” she said. Apparently not too put out at drawing the short straw, Bob complied.

A

Setting the trap was harder than A

Bob turned out to be deft with his hands. Given the thickness of his fingers, it was a pleasant surprise. He uncoiled the chain and buried it as neatly as A

The cynical core of her suspected Dr. Menechi

It had taken them twice as long to set the trap as it had taken Robin, and twice as long again as it would have taken A

“There’s where we’re going,” she said as they packed up and pointed to a hump of land beyond which lay the triangular isthmus that marked where the next foothold trap was to be laid. Intermediate had not been blown clear of snow and the walking was easier. The ice was also considerably thi

Long habit of tracking kept A

“In winter?” he asked.

“In winter,” she assured him. “The park heals in the winter, when people aren’t here.” She figured she might as well get in a plug for keeping ISRO closed from October to May.

Bob grunted.

The isthmus, comprised of volcanic rock surrounded in glacial rubble, rose from the ice in ragged chunks of stone dusted with white. Desperate earth-starved trees poked skeletal branches through the snow cover, black arthritic fingers reaching for a sky that was the same color as the grave they sank their roots in. Wind bared the rock in places, exposing the tops of granite-colored boulders, till the land resembled a boneyard for formless beasts that had come there to die. Out from the steep shore, ice piled up, six-inch slabs where the water of the lake had risen and receded, refreezing each time.

Using hands and feet, A

“Umph.”

“The next trap we set will be one of yours,” she promised as he tottered and fell to one knee.

“God damn!”

He stayed where he was, his backpack rounding up like the hump of a camel kneeling to let a rider mount.

“You okay?”

“My knee,” he huffed, but he got himself upright and crossed the rest of the broken ice without incident.

“You’re limping,” she accused. It was not good to let oneself get injured in the wilderness in the winter.

“It’s a bad knee,” he said. “How many more traps do we have to set?”

Bob sounded like a little boy who couldn’t add and was whining about it. So much for Dr. Jekyll.

“A couple more.” A

Maybe.

With the snow drifted in, it was hard to tell, but it was larger than fox and smaller than moose. In spring, she might have assumed it was a calf. Not in January.

“We’re in the right neighborhood,” she said. Bob limped up and looked at the tracks. “The one on the left,” she said. “Wolf, I bet.”

“Big.” A trace of the fear she’d seen and heard the night they’d been called upon by the wild was in his voice.

The print was beyond big; it was monstrous. “Hard to tell,” A