Read Online Winter Study by Nevada Barr - Free Book Online

bank.
Katherine pushed up from the scat-dotted ice to come with her.
“Hang
on, you two.” Bob sounded like a schoolmaster dealing with overeager
children. “I don’t want you tracking up the area before Ridley gets
there.”
Idiot,
Anna thought charitably as she pretended not to hear him.
Menechinn’s
find was no more than a hundred yards from shore, near where the
Feldtmann Trail joined the Nature Trail that led up to the
permanent-employee housing. In a three-foot radius around the body,
duff, dirt and snow were plowed up by Menechinn’s size thirteens. Mud
and blood churned the snow to the unsettling brownish pink Anna
associated with wallpaper in old ladies’ bathrooms.
“Idiot,” she reiterated as she studied the radically compromised scene.
A wolf.
There was no scene. Dead animals did not constitute murder.
Pet Sematary.
“Right,”
she said, and, careless of where she stepped, she walked up to the
animal and squatted on her haunches. It lay on its side, eyes open,
tongue — pink and silly looking like a goofball dog’s — lolling out of
its mouth. Anna pulled off a mitten and touched the tongue. Frozen
solid. Scavengers had been at it but not a lot. The animal had been
there long enough to freeze but not so long that the body had been torn
up. Five or six hours, maybe less. Ridley could make a more educated
guess. He knew the island food chain better than she did.
The
blood was from the throat. A wolf-on-wolf killing; on ISRO, nothing
else was big enough to take out a wolf. The wolves were isolated by
miles of open water for decades at a stretch, and no other large
predators had migrated to the island: no puma, no bears, no coyotes,
not even a badger. The other wolf — the one who’d left the fray alive —
was either very big or very lucky. This animal was a good-sized male,
yet he hadn’t had time to put up much of a fight. Fur, matted with
blood and frozen solid, masked the wound, but it had to have been
severe. The wolf looked as if he bled out fast. There was little sign
of movement after the neck was slashed.
Anna
laid her bare hand on the fur. In the Western world’s collective
unconscious, wolves symbolized hunger, danger, vicious cunning and
cold-blooded slaughter. The flip side was, they were the embodiment of
the wild; like the wind, they went where they would, did as they
pleased, then vanished into the woods. Touching a wolf — even a dead
wolf — Anna thrilled to the echo of primitive, amoral freedom.
“What killed it?” Ridley had come. Everybody had come. Anna stood and moved back.
“Neck wound,” Anna said.
“Interpack rivalry,” Bob said.
“Could be,” Ridley replied noncommittally.
“What else?” Bob demanded.
Anna
leaned against the bole of a birch. She loved a good pissing contest
when she wasn’t on the wrong end of it. Ridley said nothing but
crouched over the wolf much as she had. Menechinn gave Anna a
conspiratorial grin as if they shared a joke on Ridley. He winked at
Anna, then said to Ridley: “You wanted a dead wolf. Now you’ve got it.”
“Now
I’ve got it,” Ridley echoed absently. He took off his left glove. With
long, sensitive fingers, he pulled back the eyelids, then the lips.
Ridley Murray was unmoved by the wolf’s death per se. Wolves were not
wolves to him, Anna realized. They were subjects of study.
Katherine
was not quite so clinical, but she was detached and professional. After
the story of her first wolf and love torn asunder by parental decree,
Anna thought she’d show more emotion.
“Let’s get it to the bunkhouse,” Ridley said, rising effortlessly to his feet. “It’ll need to thaw before we can do much.”
“I’ll
take the pelt and head,” Bob said. “I’ll have it shipped to American
University. You know, for research, a research tool. Our students don’t
get much of a chance for the hands-on like you folks do.” He smiled,
turning it on each of them in turn.
Katherine’s
head twitched up, in a gesture oddly reminiscent