Winter Study

As they were dividing up the trails for the search, Adam dragged in. He had the body type A

Adam looked like he’d finally run out of gas. No longer held at bay by the strength of his personality, age dragged down his cheeks and made pouches beneath his eyes.

“You look like hell,” Ridley said without sympathy.

“Yeah, well, freezing your butt off all night, then hiking nine miles in deep snow before breakfast, will do that to a guy,” Adam snapped, and shrugged out of his coat.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Ridley warned.

“Katherine’s gone missing,” A

Adam put his coat back on.

“Grab some food,” Ridley said, “then search the Hugginin Trail loop. That’ll free Jonah up to stay near the airplane in case the weather breaks.”

Bob a

Bob turned his face slightly away. Maybe Katherine’s going missing had hit him harder than A

“What did you and Katherine fight about last night?” A

His shame, or whatever it was, vanished, replaced by the tucked-back smile of false bonhomie. “We didn’t fight. I don’t fight with women.”

He didn’t wink. A

There, snow was deep enough for skiing. The best skier, Robin, was given the Minong. It was the roughest trail on the island, ru

Ridley would cover the Greenstone Trail. Because of the shortcut from the housing area to the head of the trail, if Katherine had found a trail and not just stumbled off into the bushes the Greenstone would be it. He pushed off. Ridley’s style was more prosaic than Robin’s, but the power in his legs and his familiarity with wintry things was apparent.

A

In full winter regalia, passing through a snowy landscape, her suit bulky and her face peeking out through a bucket, the wheeze of her breath and the squeak of her boots all that penetrated to her muffled ears, A

Isolation exacerbated by a sense of being crowded. A neurotic wouldn’t know which way to flinch.

When she was a ranger on Isle Royale, she’d hiked the Feldtma

Easy.

Except the cold was a wall. Sweat ran beneath the parka, while her toes, fingers and face burned like frost was gnawing on them. She unzipped her coat and pulled off one glove – the equivalent of sticking a foot out from under the covers to cool off. Taking Robin as her example, she tried to embrace winter but kept finding herself trudging along without thinking much and seeing even less. On a search and – it was still to be hoped – rescue, this was bad.

In frustration, she pulled off hat and balaclava. The cold hurt, and she wondered if Paul would still love her if the tips of her nose and ears turned black, but the sense of being bundled into helplessness diminished. At least she could hear the rat-tatting of the woodpeckers and the chittering of squirrels.

Life had come back while she wasn’t paying attention. She tilted her head back and looked at the sky. The snow had stopped. The clouds were still too low for Jonah to take the airplane up, but they looked like they might lift in an hour or more. The thought of backup – or an audience to witness her weakness – gave her usable energy and she pushed on in better spirits.

Another two hours elapsed before she reached Feldtma

She didn’t have to remind herself to eat. The pathetic little peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich was gone before the morning was out. By noon, she was so famished she wondered if she could catch a squirrel and force it to give up the location of its stash.

She saw a red fox, woodpeckers, red squirrels, chickadees, wolf tracks, moose tracks and what looked to be martin tracks. Nothing to indicate Katherine had been this way.

Ridley radioed in. He’d skied ten miles up the Greenstone and seen nothing but two half-starved moose and more wolf prints.

Robin radioed in soon after. She, too, was turning back. She’d skied as far as Lake Desor, a brutal jaunt for a lesser person, and was still talking without gasping. Robin had seen nothing. Not so much as a fox.

Nobody could raise Adam.

“Battery must have gone dead,” Ridley said drily.

“Yeah.” For a man supposedly in charge of the physical plant, he seemed to be developing a penchant for being out of pocket and unreachable.

The sun didn’t show its face, but the wind dropped to nothing and the sky lightened. When A

Half an hour later, Jonah found something. Color, he said. Like a piece of clothing thrown off, and a disturbed area in a cedar swamp between the Greenstone and the Feldtma

No place to land that was any closer than the supercub’s tie-down on Washington Harbor, Jonah circled low and slow to see if he could get a rise out of anything in the trees around the scrap of gold and red.

A

“Two miles out,” Robin’s voice came back over the air.

“Head down the Feldtma

Jonah circled till he spotted A

The find. Scraps of color. A

She’d never have said it aloud. Bad juju.