Winter Study by Nevada Barr

white disk of land with white spruce nibbling one edge. Niggardly
snowflakes, desiccated by the cold, left a dusting less than half an
inch deep. Yellow-and-gray stalks of long-dead grasses poked up through
winter’s thin skin like old men’s chin stubble. White spruce crowded
the edges of the open space in a curtain of black, color leached from
the boughs by the day’s eternal dusk.
Anna’s
pack was too heavy to shrug out of without the torque twisting her
skeleton from its natural state. A kindly rock waited by the side of
the trail as if for that very purpose. Sitting on the edge, she let it
take the weight, unbuckled hip belt and chest strap and stepped free of
the shoulder straps.
Tempting
as it was to let the instrument of her torture topple to the ground,
she lowered it as carefully as she could, then stood with a groan.
Apparently her grace period had grown significantly shorter since last
she’d carried an overloaded pack.
Robin
followed suit and leaned her pack against Anna’s. Bob and Katherine
stood dumbly on the trail, two spavined nags asleep in the traces, too
tired to think or move without direction. That Katherine did so didn’t
surprise Anna. She was nearly to that point herself. Only pride and the
promise of hot drinks kept her moving. That Bob had reached paralysis
wasn’t what she’d expected.
Big game hunting,
she remembered.
Big
game hunters were not known for long, arduous treks carrying heavy
loads. There were native peoples for that, and ATVs to carry the
carcasses and the conquerors back to the lodge and the wet bar.
Uncharitable,
she thought without caring.
She
and Robin checked the camp area. As far as they could tell, the little
meadow was devoid of hidden evils. Had it possessed a snake pit or
hellmouth, Anna would have voted for stopping there anyway. Much as she
would have loved feeling superior, she could identify with Katherine
all too well. She doubted she had the where-withal to take up the
fifty-three pounds again.
They headed back to spark enough life in Bob and Katherine to get camp set up.
“Stop that,” Robin said as they crunched south shoulder to shoulder.
“Stop what?” Not only was Anna not doing anything, she was too tired to think of doing anything.
“Stop touching your nose. You’ve been touching your nose all day. It’s not frozen.”
Sheepishly Anna put her hand back into her mitten.
“You’re
obsessing, aren’t you?” Robin asked. The question wasn’t judgmental.
She asked it like a physician familiar with the symptoms of poison ivy
might ask: “You itch, don’t you?”
“I guess,” Anna admitted. “I keep thinking it might be frostbitten.”
“Mine’s
here,” Robin said and tapped her mittened fingertips against her high
cheekbones. “I can see them turning dead white out of the corners of my
eyes and I picture myself with two holes in my face. Leave your nose
alone. You touch it all the time like you’ve been doing and you’ll
irritate the skin to where it’ll peel. Then you’ll really think your
nose is falling off.”
Anna nodded and stifled the urge to check her nose one more time before she went on the wagon.
Because
it was lighter to pack in and their body heat would be consolidated,
the four of them were sharing a single dome tent. While Bob and Robin
went about pitching it — a task that in moderate weather would have
been the work of fifteen minutes but was roughly doubled by the clumsy
mandate of winter — Anna settled Katherine on a sleeping pad, for the
little insulation from the ground it afforded, and set about boiling
water. In a pinch, snow could be melted to drink, but the process
wasn’t as easy as one might expect. On a freezing day, if snow were
packed into a cooking pot and the stove turned up, the pot would burn
before enough snow melted to even out the temperatures. Small portions
had to be heated slowly till slush formed before the gas could be
cranked up. Eating snow was a taboo of which even Anna, with