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of the alpha female’s,
on hearing the approaching snowmobile. A shadow passed behind her eyes,
and she turned away as if from something obscene. Maybe she wasn’t as
unmoved as Anna had thought.
Ridley
pulled his glove on, his eyes blank under the glare of Menechinn’s
grin. He looked the way Robin did when she came in at the end of the
day; her face frozen — not figuratively, literally — cold paralyzing
surface muscles and skin, as unable to show any expression as a Botox
junkie.
“The head and pelt,” Ridley said evenly.
In
the minds of the members of the wolf/moose study team, the island had
been their personal domain for years, intruded on occasionally by the
National Park Service and other ignorant bureaucrats but never
conquered. Anna waited for Ridley to light into Menechinn.
Ridley
didn’t take his eyes off Bob for a good ten seconds, then he said to
Robin: “Get a tarp from the snowmobile. I want to get it to the
bunkhouse before the ravens find it.”
ON
THE FLOOR in the unused kitchen down the hall from Anna and Robin’s
room, garbage bags were put down, then newspapers to soak up the
fluids. The wolf was laid on this unglamorous bier to thaw.
“It’ll
be a few days before we can do the necropsy,” Ridley said as he handed
a fine-tooth comb to Anna and another to Katherine, then set a box of
small ziplock baggies, the size cheap jewelry is sold in, on the
newspapers by the wolf’s spine.
“I’ll be here to supervise,” Jonah said. “Keep an eye on young Ridley.”
“You taught me everything I know,” Ridley said good-naturedly.
“Any
mistakes I make will be your fault.” It had taken Anna a while, but
she’d eventually caught on; one of the many amusements they’d developed
was the fiction that Jonah was all things: chef, scientist, philosopher
and learned professor. Though he was a smart man, Anna doubted he’d
gone any further than high school.
“We’ll do the external exam now,” Ridley said for Anna’s benefit.
“No smell, for one thing. Once the specimen starts thawing, it’ll stink pretty bad.”
“At least we’ve got that to look forward to,” Jonah interjected.
“We want to get the ectoparasites off. They are opportunistic and will jump to other hosts if they can. We’re the other hosts.”
“Like
this,” Katherine said, and Anna watched as she combed the fur from the
roots of the hairs out, much like a mom looking for lice on a child’s
head. Ridley moved to the kitchen counter and set out a rack of small
vials he’d brought from the storeroom off the shared living area. The
tubes were held upright by the rack, half filled with clear liquid and
tightly stoppered.
“Alcohol,” he said. “For preservation.”
Anna
began combing. She’d thought the fur would be like dog fur, but it
wasn’t. Where a dog’s coat was relatively smooth, hairs all the same
length, the wolf’s pelt was made of many lengths, and lengths of many
textures and colors. From the distance of the dock, the animals had
appeared to be rather plain. Up close, the rich color and lush texture
of the coat was stunning. Midwinter, times were tough, the wolf hadn’t
been shampooed or visited a doggie salon in his life, yet the
descriptive that came to Anna’s mind was “regal,” a robe of royalty
right down to the extra-long guard hairs around the throat that created
a silvery ruff.
The
pelt’s loveliness was somewhat dimmed by the bloodsuckers it harbored.
At least none were embedded. Wolves seemed to possess a natural
deterrent to ticks that the moose did not enjoy. Anna didn’t have any
particular fear of the world’s many-legged denizens, but there was
something about ticks that had always made her queasy. She was not
sorry to drop the little buggers into the certain death of the vials.
The
combs dredged moose ticks, lice and mange mites from the thick fur. The
combing wouldn’t come close to cleaning the parasites from the body.
They were sample takers, not exterminators, and Anna knew