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There was no warmth like the warmth of Paul’s arms around her, no sleep like the sleep she enjoyed when she had her head on his shoulder. He made her feel safe, and, until she’d known him, she’d not realized she felt any other way. Love lent her a dangerous and delicious fragility.

They’d been married four months. They’d been together ten days of it.

Sitting in the right seat of the Beaver, watching the landscape scroll by, she wanted to be with him with a fierceness that bordered on panic. Being a park ranger was a job, not a life; loneliness a choice, not a necessity anymore. It was all she could do not to scream at the pilot to turn the plane around. For a gut-wrenching minute, her career seemed a foolish exercise, a pointless labor for little pay, a cruel hoax that had lured her from her marriage. Being with Paul was the only thing that mattered. She tried to clench her fists, to concentrate her mind, but they only balled into soft paws in the thick down mittens.

A breaking sound in her ears let her know relief was coming, in the form of distraction, and she welcomed it. Robin spoke again, the edge of anger in her voice a refreshing antidote to A

“Ridley recommended the Homeland Security guy from this list they sent the park, but nobody who knows anything made up the list.”

Nobody who knows anything. A

“Word came down from Washington. Terrorists.” Robin snorted, and A

Word had come down from Washington.

After 9/11, Homeland Security dumped money on the NPS. Everybody loved it. It was like Christmas, till they noticed the money was earmarked for law enforcement. Like Popeye’s arms, the LE divisions were puffed up in classic steroidal fashion, the interpretive programs relegated to the leavings.

Now D.C. sent down the “Interpretive Theme” for the year, and campfire programs – from the Everglades to Death Valley to the Kenai Peninsula – had to focus on pollution or endangered species or bioterrorism – whatever the folk in Washington thought was important at the moment. Never mind that the public wasn’t interested, or that the theme didn’t suit the park.

Free money was never free.

“ Lake ’s wide open,” the pilot said.

A

Washington Harbor reached out a welcoming arm, and the airplane flew in low and slow. Water, catching the iridescent blue and amber of the sky, riffled between narrowing banks of evergreens, black with shadow. Blue turned to white as ice formed in the shallower water, ringing Beaver Island in a necklace of diamonds. At the level of the treetops, and hugging the bank to avoid the worst of the crosswind, the pilot lined up on the expanse of white between the tiny harbor island and the docks at Windigo.

The weekly arrival of food and people from the outside world was apparently quite an event. A snowmobile, surrounded by four figures so muffled in layers of clothing that they looked like bags of dirty laundry, was parked on the ice east of the dock. As the airplane slid gracefully from the sky, one of the bundles turned its back, dropped its insulated trousers and mooned them; a pale butt exposed to the elements. A



As the propeller came to a stop, bearded faces with fur-rimmed hoods peered up at them, and A

Wind, razor-sharp and just as cruel, cut across her cheek as she turned to the troglodyte welcoming committee. A wall of parka-puffed backs greeted her.

Robin’s voice cut through the whistling silence: “Holy smoke!” She spoke in the hollow whisper of a celluloid citizen seeing the mother ship. A

“A windigo,” Robin breathed.

The Algernon Blackwood story of the Ojibwa legend that rangers told around the campfire to scare the pants off park visitors flooded A

A

The creature in the trees was immense, larger than a horse, and moved in painful lurches. It appeared to shrink and expand in an u

“Watch out,” one of the bearded men said. “Not all moose are Bullwinkle.”

A

Head swaying in wide, low arcs, as if the deformed antlers tugged at its sanity and drove spikes deep into its brain, the animal lurched toward them. In the harsh light reflecting from the ice, the grotesque growths looked pink and alive. Sixty yards from where they stood, the moose went to its knees. Dark eyes, full of anguish; it raised its massive head and cried, a tiny bleat like that of a newborn lamb. Then its chin fell to the ice and it didn’t move again.

In sci-fi movies, when a plague was loosed on mankind, it invariably produced a growth unfettered by gravity or plan; warts and goiters to cause a makeup artist to wriggle with delight. This windigo was as cursed as any Hollywood extra, dying for eighty dollars a day.