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she wouldn’t
sleep well for the feeling of crawly things in her sleeping bag.
“That’s
enough,” Ridley said finally. Anna had just culled a fat moose tick
from a section of fur on the wolf’s belly and was trying to keep it
from creeping off the comb till she could drop it in the alcohol.
“Wolves are not at the top of the food chain on Isle Royale,” she said disgustedly. “Ticks are.”
The
alcohol vials were stowed in the kitchen cupboard next to a box of
granola bars. Ridley brought in another rack of vials, the glass
preservation tubes smaller than those used for ectoparasites. Using
tweezers, Katherine plucked guard hairs, careful to get the follicles.
“Ninety-five
percent ethanol,” she said to Anna as she dropped them in
fifteen-milliliter glass vials. “We use that instead of alcohol for the
DNA. It keeps the sample from degrading. Well, keeps it from degrading
longer. Eventually everything goes.”
“We’ll
have to wait on the teeth and throat,” Ridley said. His hands were
around the wolf’s muzzle, pulling with a degree of force. “Frozen
solid.”
There
was a wrongness in Ridley’s hands on the animal’s mouth that disturbed
Anna on a rudimentary level, the way watching people put a car in gear
without fastening their seat belts or wave an unloaded gun in the
direction of living things did.
“Rigor or
frozen
frozen?” she asked.
Ridley
rocked back on his heels. “When it’s this cold, it doesn’t make much
difference. It takes longer for specimens to thaw out than it would for
rigor to go off.”
“How long does rigor last in a wolf?” Anna asked.
“I
don’t know,” he said without curiosity. Ridley exhibited a disinterest
in anything regarding research animals that wasn’t study specific.
Maybe a narrow mind was a strength for a researcher; the ability to
focus on one tiny thing for a very long time.
“No gloves!” Anna blurted out suddenly. That was the wrongness; Ridley was handling the animal without wearing surgical gloves.
“We’ll put them on for the necropsy,” he said. “That gets messy.”
Anna
nodded. There was no need for gloves except to keep one’s nails clean.
No AIDS, no hepatitis B or other blood-borne diseases. The risk of
contamination was nil. A bit of human DNA sprinkled here and there amid
the wolf DNA wouldn’t interfere with the investigation.
The research,
Anna corrected herself.
The
wolf’s hide had softened in the relative heat of the bunkhouse, and
Ridley pulled up the wolf’s right eyebrow with his thumb. The dull eyes
were gold colored, closer together and more slanted than the eyes of
domestic dogs.
“Great eyes,” he said as he pulled up the lid of the left.
“Yes,” Anna said. “He looks Slavic, as if he hunted the great plains of Russia from the beginning of time.”
Ridley
stared at her blankly. “They’re not eaten,” he explained. “Ravens get
the eyes first thing, usually.” He looked back to the wolf. “No
cataracts. Even without seeing the teeth, my guess is this guy is two,
three at most. He must have tried to run the pack or gotten himself
crosswise with the alpha some other way, then lost the fight,” he said,
rocking back on his heels. “The rest is going to have to wait till he
thaws.”
Ridley
rose gracefully, his elegant hands held out in front of him like a
pianist about to perform. He would wash them immediately with hot water
dippered from the stovetop into a basin. The Winter Study team was
fastidious about hygiene. Gastrointestinal upsets took on a whole new
meaning when the bathroom was a one-holer and the temperature minus
twelve degrees.
Anna
squatted in the vacated place by the wolf’s head. She knew she was
making a pest of herself, getting in the way of the scientists and
asking what were, to them, foolish questions, but she didn’t much care.
A wolf.
She’d yet to get over the wonder of it.
“Wine time,” Bob said, glancing at his watch, and followed Ridley toward the common