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Suddenly she stopped. A whiff, a hint of something freakishly bad, evil and death and old fish distilled into a toxic perfume, was borne on the wind. Tilting her head back, she sniffed. It was gone. She smelled nothing but the clean, vicious perfection of winter.
The Ojibwa’s windigo was heralded by the stench of rotting corpses, the rotten stink of a ca
For someone who had eschewed the supernatural not ten minutes before, A
She waited and watched the black of the woods in the direction from which the wind blew. The line of shadows that marked the trees hid anything that might have been there.
4
Despite the pack’s dramatic arrival, the wolves settled down in lupine domesticity around the unexpected gift of the moose carcass. A
She landed the plum job. Jonah was taking her up in the cub to see if they could find Chippewa Harbor pack. Flights in the supercub were jealously guarded. From the scuttlebutt, A
Four hours immobile in a two-seat fabric airplane with a heater that did not deserve the name was a recipe for misery, if not frostbite, and A
On the far side of the harbor, beyond the little airplane, wolves lounged around the moose carcass like fat house dogs around a hearth. “Won’t we scare them off?” she asked.
“There’s not been a wolf on this island in three generations – that’s in dog years; ten years old is an old wolf – that hasn’t had an airplane buzzing around from the time he was a pup,” Jonah said and began unwrapping an orange, oil-stained down comforter he kept around his lady’s nose when she was earthbound so her engine wouldn’t turn into a block of ice. “The sound doesn’t bother them. Most don’t even look up. I think they live the simple life: food/no food, threat/no threat, sex/no sex. In the no food, no threat, no sex category, the cub and I aren’t worth a passing glance.
“Get the tie-down, if you will.”
A
The cub had clamshell doors, a hexagon cut laterally and opening up and down. Jonah let the lower part of the door down and held the upper against the high wing. “Hop in. I fly from the rear seat.”
Hopping was not an option. A
The plane jounced. Jonah had gotten in. A prisoner of survival gear, turning around to look was in the same category as hopping. “Here,” Jonah said, and a headset was thrust over her right shoulder. “You know how to use one of these things?”
“I do.” High-tech communications in an old supercub struck an odd note. It seemed as if the small-plane industry had not kept pace with electronics. But, then, nothing had kept pace with electronics. A
The engine fired smoothly and the plane began to taxi, skis sliding over the ice. The nose blocking the view forward, A
The engine revved up to a determined bellow and the cub picked up speed. The tail lifted off the lake and the horizon came down; Beaver Island was approaching with considerable speed, and A
“I feel it every time,” Jonah said.
The NPS was A
She loved it. Except for the cold and the racket, it was like flying in dreams.
“East pack has been hanging around Mott Island, but we haven’t found Chippewa Harbor pack yet,” Jonah said in her ears.
Isle Royale was forty-two miles long and no more than twelve across at its widest point. It was hard to believe a group of seven or eight big animals could stay out of sight from air surveillance, but they did. Wolves traveled long distances, and slept a lot during the day. It wasn’t unusual to “lose” a pack for a week or more.
“We’ll head up toward Malone Bay, see if we can scare anything up,” he said. Malone Bay was about halfway between Windigo at the west end of the island and Rock Harbor at the east. Malone Bay was one of the backcountry outposts; the ranger was inevitably dubbed the “Malone Ranger” because of the isolation.
A
The bed of Lake Superior had been gouged out by glaciers. Isle Royale, made of tougher material, was scored and slashed but remained above water. From the air, the colossal shredding was evident; ridges ran the length of the island, and smaller islands, long and thin as scratches, stood offshore separated from the main island by deep cha