Winter Study Read Online Free PDF

not more than one hundred fifty miles apart, the lake made
its own weather, often completely unrelated to what the mainland was
experiencing.
Over
eggs and bacon, Anna learned Robin was born and raised on the St. Croix
River in Minnesota, that she would have made the junior Olympics in
cross-country skiing if she hadn’t been invalided out on a knee injury.
Robin had been in love with winter her entire life. Winter was her
favorite season. Either the woman had antifreeze in her veins or winter
succumbed to her shy beauty and returned her affection. What else could
explain the fact that she alone seemed comfortable in less than a
walrus-sized amount of down blubber and moved as a wraith — or the
apocryphal Indian — through the north woods?
All by herself, Anna constituted a public disturbance.
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 Anna missed it. The parks were
never supposed to change; they were supposed to house memories of
better days, keep them intact: nobody filled in the creek where one
used to hunt crawdads or built a Wal-Mart in the field where the
reading oak had grown.
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been replaced by a much-larger structure that housed a Visitors Center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? Anna wouldn’t put it past an overeager
concessionaire to finagle it through NPS channels prematurely.
The
bunkhouse where the Winter Study team would live for six weeks had
smoke coming from the chimney. Anna hurried the last hundred feet.
Designed for multiple occupants, the living space was laid out around a
central room with a woodstove at the west end. Racks of drying socks
and boots and shirts screened the heat from the fire. The three sofas,
like in any self-respecting suburban home, were in a C shape around a
television set. Along the back wall were computers and radio equipment.
An old upright piano served as a bench for two laptops. To either side
of the common room were small semiprivate apartments, with two
bedrooms, a bath and a kitchen.
Trying
not to look obvious, Anna headed for the nearest bathroom, shedding her
parka as she went. The door was closed, and she knocked softly before
pushing it open. A blast of icy air met her. The window over the
commode was open six inches, and the toilet, shower and sink area