Winter Study

14

Bob talked. A

A

RIDLEY RECALLED THEM to Windigo. Robin skied out at first light and sprang the traps.

The next front had yet to arrive; the sky was clear and there was no wind. No one was sorry to be leaving Malone Bay. The meager comforts of the bunkhouse were palatial compared to the tiny cabin.

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An hour after sunup, the warm buzz of the supercub rolled over the tin roof and they started down to the bay. A

ANNA’S TOUCHING NOSTALGIA for the bunkhouse vanished as soon as she opened the door and the reek of death slapped into her senses. The wolf had thawed.

By one o’clock, the team was reassembled, and Ridley declared the animal was ready for the necropsy.

“I’m going to miss this old boy,” Jonah said as the wolf was transported from the kitchen to the carpenter’s shop. “He was just begi

They carried the carcass on a tarp held at four corners by Ridley, Jonah, Katherine and A

A metal folding table, the kind used in church halls for potluck suppers, was in the middle of the room, samples from Robin’s last expedition piled on one end. The wolf was placed on the table and the five of them gathered around. They looked like a band of homeless people, worshipping a long-awaited meal. At Ridley’s suggestion, they’d all put on old clothes; at the suggestion of an icy Mother Nature, they’d do

Ridley opened the wolf’s jaws. “They must have a good dental plan,” A

“Wolves’ mouths are amazingly clean,” Ridley said. “If a tooth gets broken, you’ll see some brown at the edges; otherwise, they’re like this guy’s.” He pinched the animal’s tongue between thumb and forefinger and pulled it out to do a sweep of the throat. Short of a giraffe’s, the wolf had the longest tongue A

“Let’s open him up,” Ridley said.

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Jonah and A

“You can see bruising or wounds better on the underside of the skin,” he said. “They show up as dark red blotches or punctures.” He stood back and Robin photographed the denuded animal.

With its hide partly peeled away and the sinews and ribs exposed, it bore an unca

“See there?” Ridley pointed with the business end of the knife. “You can see where a rib has been broken and healed. That’s fairly common. Moose will fling them against rocks, bash them against trees, anything to get them off.”

Robin moved around the table and took several pictures of the rib. No bruising was apparent. “No defensive wounds,” A

“Maybe our wog is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of wolves,” Adam said and laughed, but none of the rest of them did. Bob snorted to indicate he had not been given the creeps, but A

“Governor Wolf,” Jonah said.

“Subcutaneous fat?” Katherine asked.

“Not enough to collect.” Ridley adjusted the shop light over the table, a light better suited to interrogating suspects than dissecting them. With the tip of his knife and his fingers, he pulled and pricked beneath the skin where it folded down over the paws and sides. “This time of year, with the moose population down, we don’t see much fat on these guys.”

Katherine cut out a sample of muscle tissue with a scalpel, the shiny, precise instrument looking delicate and civilized next to Ridley’s sausage knife. She put the tissue into a glass vial with alcohol.

Ridley inserted his knife into the hide at the throat to make a lateral cut.

“Hey,” Bob said, showing his first real interest in the proceeding.

“Don’t ruin it. And don’t peel the skin off the head.”

Ridley looked at him. His eyes went as dead as the wolf on the table. His hand tightened on the knife till the rubber glove he wore was pulled taut as a second skin over his knuckles. A

“I’ll be careful,” Ridley said and smiled. A

The wolf’s throat wasn’t shredded by repeated attacks from different angles the way most wolf-on-wolf kills were; it was ripped deeply four times. The tears went through an inch of hide and muscle. Two cut across the wolf’s aorta, and two were near the carotid, in a distorted mirror image of the killing punctures.

“We got any tigers on this island?” Jonah asked. Nobody said anything. Whatever had attacked the wolf had a bite pattern close to twice the usual size wolf’s.

“Any number of scenarios could have led to these marks,” Ridley said. “Let’s move on.”

They did but a sense of the eerie, of the windigo screaming down out of the north woods to devour human flesh, remained. A hybrid, Jonah’s wog, causing havoc in the wolf population wasn’t impossible. Gray wolves mated with red wolves, red wolves mated with coyotes. There’d been a case in California of a seal/sea lion hybrid suffocating the female seals he tried to mate with because of his size. On the su