Winter Study

“It’s crazy to be out here without a rifle,” Bob said. He looked around like a virgin in a haunted house. What good humor survived the knee hitting the ice was gone from his face. A

There hadn’t been any wolf tracks on the lake. She looked at the boulder head high to her left. A furrow cut the snow where something had slid or fallen. The wolf had come down off the rock, possibly following the moose. There was just the single print; it had been traveling alone. The animal that had come to their tent had traveled alone.

“Okay,” A

“Are you nuts?” Bob swallowed his fear, but it soured him. “We’re losing the light. Let’s head back,” he said peremptorily.

“No we’re not. It’s one o’clock, the heat of the day.” She could have been more politic, but her mind was taken up with tracking. Moose prints were easy, dimples in the snow eight to ten inches across in two parallel lines. Paw prints were harder, especially without good light. A

“It’s like living in an old black-and-white TV with bad reception,” she said. “I can’t see a damn thing.”

“Time to start back. We’re losing the light,” Bob insisted.

“No we’re not.” A

“My knee,” Bob said. “It’s an old injury. I think I threw it out back there on the ice.”

A

Bob was following so close he bumped her pack and she pitched forward. “Watch it!” she said. “Look.” She’d managed to catch herself without damaging the print. It was immense, huge, beautiful, the track of a magnificent animal. “God, I wish we’d brought the camera.”

“We should go back. We need to report this to Ridley – the sooner, the better.”

“Radio him,” A

“I got to take a leak,” Bob said suddenly.

“Yeah, yeah. Go ahead.” Without rising, A

“Perfect.” A

From her left came moose-sized crashing through what little shrubbery the place offered: Bob dumping his pack. The guy might be a while. Keeping to one side of the faint trail, A

Ten or eleven yards out – distance was hard to estimate in poor light and a monochromatic world – the tracks vanished as if wolf and moose had been snatched off the surface of the lake by a great carnivorous bird.

“Not possible,” she whispered and pulled her focus back to what was directly in front of her. “Hah!” The impossible had not occurred. The snow covering the ice had formed a slight depression. The tracks led into this irregular bowl, effectively vanishing from a distance.

Before coming to Winter Study, A

On ISRO, she’d realized it was a living thing: changing, moody, struggling, resting, singing. Surrounding this shallow crater, water had oozed up through a circular crack and refrozen, creating a scar, a rugged ridge four and five inches high.

Moose and wolf tracks crossed in the center of the circle, where it looked as if they’d skirmished. “Hey, Bob, you’re missing this,” A

She landed, and a rifle shot cracked through the silence that had wrapped them since leaving the cabin. Bob was a big game hunter. Bob had wanted his rifle. Rifles could be broken down and carried in a day pack. Bob had slipped away, letting her go, alone and exposed, onto the ice. All this flashed through her mind in an instant of acute paranoia.

She started to look back to where she’d left Menechi

11

The sound A

If she moved, the free-floating island would tilt and she would slide into the lake. Under the lake. The land spit stretched thirty feet behind her. Another thirty or forty lay between her and the shore in front of her. Possibly the water was no deeper than her waist. Then again, glacial lakes could drop off fifty feet a yard from the shore.

Depth probably wouldn’t matter, she thought.

The cold would kill her before she had a chance to drown. Stories of kids revived after forty-five minutes beneath the ice were legend in the north. The shock of the stu

“Bob!” she called. Tried to call; his name came out on a whisper of air so faint she wasn’t sure she’d managed to speak aloud.

“Bob!”

Audible, but only to her ears. The part of her that believed the vibrations of her voice against the air would be enough to tip the balance had shut down her voice box.

For a dizzying second, she saw the ice patch flipping like a coin, her feet going from under her, hands scrabbling uselessly, as she slid into the black death waiting below the ice, the patch of ice rocking back level, shutting her away from the promise of life and light. Iron-clawed terror gripped her insides. Courage drained out as blood from a severed artery.

“Stop that,” she hissed. “Die of hydrophobia – how stupid is that?” Dragging her vision out of the bowels of the lake, she looked for ways to stay alive.

The edge of her iceberg wasn’t quite the length of her body away. Too far to make a clean jump, but if she hurled herself forward she should be able to get her arms and shoulders up on solid ice. The shoulders and upper back were key. Her backpack, seemingly light after removing one trap, would be a significant anchor underwater. Mentally she rehearsed the action. Bend the knees, going straight down so the ice wouldn’t tilt, push off like a standing broad jumper, throw her arms out like Superman and hit the surface of the lake in a belly slide. Home free.