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He flinched.
“Sorry. Did I hurt you?”
“Not too bad.”
The cut was deep but not long. “You don’t seem to much like Bob,” she prodded.
“He’s not a real likable guy,” Ridley said.
“Why did you want him to do the study evaluation?” She closed the gash with butterflies and patted his hand dry with paper towels.
Ridley took his hand back though she’d not yet bandaged it. “He came highly recommended,” he said curtly.
The conversation was over but A
She retrieved his hand and wrapped his palm with narrow gauze to keep it clean, then released him into the wild, wondering if, like Androcles, she’d made a friend. He went to his room and closed the door. A
It wasn’t the only soap opera, however.
Muffled in the saber rattle of winter branches and the fierce drive of the wind, and cloaked in the growing dusk, A
Katherine was crying. “He was such a beautiful wolf.”
A
Bob had seen the movies too. He caught both of her wrists. He wore heavy gloves; Katherine was bare-handed. A
Katherine jerked free and ran. In seconds, she was out of sight behind a curtain of snow and a scrim of trees.
The little drama had been played out within ten yards of the kitchen door against the glamorous backdrop of the outhouse. Bob didn’t chase after Katherine; he turned and plowed toward the bunkhouse. A
Bob closed the door behind him. A
The wind snatched the door from A
“All but for me and thee, and I have my doubts about thee,” Jonah replied. He had small, even teeth, and when he smiled the hairs of his cropped white beard bristled out like the whiskers of an interested cat. It was hard not to smile back but A
“What is going on around here?” she demanded.
“Unless I observe things from two hundred feet aboveground, they don’t make much sense to me,” Jonah admitted cheerfully and shoved the mess into a garbage bag. “Katherine was doing her thing. Bob split for the house. ‘Wine time’ comes earlier in the north, I guess. Then Ms. Huff starts sniffling and snuffling. She jams half a dozen vials of blood-filled vacuum tubes in her pocket and runs out after him.”
“Robin?”
“She left between the two. Headed for the bunkhouse, I guess. Even our delightful, delicious bi-athlete wouldn’t want to go out in this weather.”
A
DINNER, THE SACRED COOKING RITE presided over by the lead researcher, didn’t happen. Ridley took his laptop into the room he shared with Jonah. Robin climbed into her sleeping bag for a nap. Bob took a coffee cup of boxed red wine and two peanut butter sandwiches into the room he shared with Adam and closed the door.
Being alone, or what passed for it in cabin fever country, hit A
In the unpeopled space, her mind unfolded like the wings of a bird kept too long in a small cage and her body relaxed into the fatigue left over from her dip in Intermediate Lake. She stretched out on the sofa nearest the fire and slept.
When she awoke two hours later, she was still alone, and she felt better than she had in three days. She sat up straight, settled her shoulders and commenced to find at least a few answers.
Ridley had a laptop, as did Katherine and Bob, but there was another computer, an old clunker that the biotechs who rotated through each winter had for their use. A
From Ontario, he’d gone to the University of Saskatchewan, from there to New York, then to Virginia and finally to Bethesda, Maryland, where he now taught “Education in the Sciences” along with several other classes that barely qualified him to lick the wolf scat off Ridley’s mukluks when it came to a wilderness study of actual animals.
A
She leaned back and stared at the screen without seeing it.
Menechi