Winter Study

She and Jonah shuffled on toward the dock and his little airplane. On the ice to the right was a waist-high pile of snow with a shovel stuck in it. “Ice fishing?” A

“That’s our well,” Jonah said. Then: “Doggone it!” He hurried over to the hole chopped in the ice. “The little bastard is trying to poison us. He’s done it before.” Jonah snatched up the shovel. On the side of the excavated snow and ice was a patch of yellow. “Fox,” Jonah said. “A pesky, pissy little red fox whose mother was no better than she should have been.” Shoveling up the tainted snow carefully, he tossed it as far from the well as he could. “I tell you, this little fur ball is potent. One drop of his urine got in the well a while back. One drop and our water reeked of fox for two days.”

“Reclaiming his territory,” A

“Very broad-minded of you, Ranger Pigeon. Wait till you’ve had café au fox piss.” Grumbling, he began using the tip of the shovel like a gargantuan scalpel, incising spots of yellow. A

“What are you going to do with the body?” she asked.

Jonah jammed the shovel back into the snow pile. “Nothing. There’s nothing we could do even if we wanted. Used to, before the warm-and-cuddlies got up in arms, we’d shoot a moose once a winter. Middle pack always knew and always showed up. One year, the rules were changed, but Middle pack showed up right on schedule anyway, like they had a watch that read: MOOSE TIME. No free moose meat. They never came again. I don’t know how they know things, but they do.”

“Think they know this is here?” A

“See that raven?” Jonah pointed to a sharp cut of black flying toward the western shore of the harbor. “He’s going to tell the pack supper’s on.”

A

They heard the snowmobile returning and, stiff in their bundling, rotated toward it. “We’ll load up on water, then head back up,” Jonah said. “You sure you don’t want a ride?”

“I’m sure.” Without the distractions of dead ungulates and fox piss, she remembered how cold she was. If she didn’t move soon, she would freeze where she stood.

“Stay away from the dock,” Jonah called after her. “Ice is always rotten around docks.”

A

There was no negotiating with thermodynamics.

3

Walking up the bank from the lake, A

Over eggs and bacon, A

All by herself, A

Where the dock met the shore, she stopped. The ranger station was gone. In its place was a picnic area designed with the inherent poetry of an RV-storage garage. The old, red rambling ranger station had been cramped and dirty and full of mice, but A

An unpaved road curved to the west by the fuel dock and up to the seasonal employees’ housing area. That was as she remembered it, but four huge orange fuel tanks had been put at the turn.

Huge.

Orange.

She decided to take the trail through the woods.

Twenty yards in, she saw what had become of the old ranger station. It had been replaced by a much-larger structure that housed a Visitors Center as well. Cranky as the cold made her, she could find no fault with it; it was beautifully done, and, with a boatload of tourists arriving every day in the summer from Grand Marais, when it rained the poor wretches would now have a place to seek shelter rather than sitting along the edge of the dock making pathetic attempts to keep dry beneath unfolded island maps.

Above the new V.C. was the original concessionaire’s store: an unattractive brown wooden rectangle full of junk food, mosquito repellent and fishhooks. In the fall of her season on ISRO, two bull moose had fought in the picnic area by the door. Their antlers were so heavy, they could do little more than sway them at one another, rarely making serious contact. If moose felt the same about their antlers as old men did about their Corvettes, the windigo on the ice must have nearly died of shame.

A quarter of a mile farther uphill, she stepped out of the trees into the clearing where the seasonal employees were housed. The place she had lived in – fondly known as the “Mink Trail” due to its plethora of mice and the weasels that came to dine on them – was gone. Beyond it, trees had been cut down and earth disturbed. In preparation for the threatened winter resort? A

The bunkhouse where the Winter Study team would live for six weeks had smoke coming from the chimney. A

Trying not to look obvious, A