Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 14 Winter Study

Synopsis:
Inbestseller Barrs chilling 14th mystery thriller to feature NationalPark Service ranger Anna Pigeon (after 2005s Hard Truth), Annajoins the team of Winter Study, a research project intended to studythe wolves and moose of Michigans Isle Royale National Park, thesetting for 1994s A Superior Death
.Complicating the study is Bob Menechinn, an untrustworthy HomelandSecurity officer assigned to shadow the research. Crowded intoinhospitable lodgings and persecuted by unrelenting cold, Anna is farfrom her comfort zone as nature turns awry with a series of bizarreevents. The team stumbles upon the tracks and the mutilated victim of a preternaturally large, unidentified beast, and local packs ofwolves descend on human-populated areas, a behavior out of step withtheir species. The campfire legends of youth metastasize into adultfears as Anna must piece together a connection between these anomalieswhile guarding herself from the strangers around her. Barrs visceraldescriptions of the winter cold nicely complement the paranoia thatfollows the appearance of the mythic monsters at play.

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WINTER STUDY By NEVADA BARR
Book 14 in the Anna Pigeon series Copyright 2008 by Nevada Barr

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For Mr. Paxton.

He dedicated his life to rescuing people.
The most recent was me.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WinterStudy is real and has been ongoing for over fifty years. The value ofthe research is inestimable not only in the detailed work done fromwinter to winter but in the patterns that can only unfold when aproject is maintained over periods of time which are meaningful to thenatural world. Theres little space and much work to do during theseweeks on the icebound Isle Royale. Had Superintendent Green notextended to me the generosity of the park and the forbearance of a goodmanager, I wouldnt have been able to write this book.
Thank you, Phyllis.
Andthanks to the Forest Service pilots in Ely, Minnesota, who took thetime to share stories with me and who delivered me, along with food, tothe island in January.
Most especially, thanks to the Winter Study team: Rolf Peterson, John Vuceti, Beth Kolb and Donnie Glaser.
Theyare the heart and soul of this book. They had the kindness not to throwme out in the snow when I was whining about the cold; they answeredendless e-mails with questions about what a wolf smelled like and howfat a fat tick was and who ate what and whom. Had Rolf not taken thetime to work through the manuscript, researchers everywhere would havebeen rolling their collective eyes at the errors I made. The four ofthem shared not simply the knowledge they had but the spirit thatmotivates what is good in this book.

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FOREWORD

InJuly 1970, when I was a neophyte graduate student just beginningfieldwork at Isle Royale National Park, a stranger invited me to lunchat the Windigo Inn. He must have thought I knew something, or at leastwas poor and in need of free food. The cafeteria adjoined a house ofthe erstwhile Washington Club, a turn-of-the-century privateorganization that predated the establishment of Isle Royale as anational park. (Over a decade later, I helped burn down the house inwinter, tidying up the place and helping it revert to forest.) Thestranger, a balding and very tanned man dressed in a stylishrecreational outfit, explained how he had traveled the world over buthe believed Isle Royale was simply the finest place on Earth. I recallthinking I was lucky indeed this man spared me the need to look anyfarther.
Itmust be a similar impression of splendid isolation that broughtNevada Barr back to Isle Royale, to write an unprecedented second novelbased in the same national park. I was happy to cooperate, as Nevadassignature blend of mystery and nature writing has a wide following.Isle Royale has always been a difficult destination, and relatively fewpeople visit the place, even when open and accessible in summer. To theextent that it is known at all, it is primarily through the writingsand imagery of others. A seasoned interpretive ranger at Mesa VerdeNational Park told me that all she knew of Isle Royale was contained inNevadas 1994 work, A Superior Death.
WhileIsle Royale has a rich, largely unappreciated history, in the modernera its wolves and moose have put it on the map. As this book goes topress, the scientific effort to document and understand theirpopulation fluctuations will be in its fiftieth year. Simultaneously,the worldwide status of the gray wolf has improved remarkably, fromvilified vermin to charismatic top dog. No longer confined towilderness areas far removed from people, wolves now claim as their ownmany areas of private and public lands, including heavily visitedYellowstone National Park. There are still, however, only four nationalparks in the United States outside of Alaska, the other two beingGlacier and Voyageurs, with a resident wolf population. Providingwildlands for these wolves, as well as other large carnivores, remainsa serious conservation challenge. Anotherperson for whom Isle Royale was the finest place on Earth was Bob Linn,a local park naturalist who participated in the first Winter Studies ofwolves and moose at Isle Royale. Bob eventually became Chief Scientistof the Service in the 1960s, presiding over the rocky marriage betweenscience and national park management to which Nevada alludes. Bob hatedcontroversy, but three times he had to take action to help stiflepolitical or bureaucratic interference in the study of Isle Royalewolves. One would think these wolves would hardly have an enemy in theworld, isolated as they are from any hint of competitive threat tohuman interests. Bob marshaled the forces of good to quell threats asthey arose, whether inspired by greed, hunger for power, jealousy orjust plain orneriness; afterward, he modestly declared that scientistswere simply viewed as loose cannons on the deck. The most seriouschallenge was certainly when James Watt was Secretary of the Interiorunder President Reagan; Park Service support was withdrawn and staffwas recalled in the middle of the Winter Study in 1983. However, Wattwas blameless, as I concluded years later after a rare conversationthat demonstrated he didnt even know IsleRoyale existed, let alone was a national park that hed beennominally responsible for conserving. So it goes
Nevertheless,to this day the wolves of Isle Royale have survived, the study of themhas survived and, elsewhere, the species is thriving in places wherewolf recovery at one time was considered most improbable. This is ampletestimony to the ability of the human mind to embrace, eventually, thetrue and unblemished facts about the way the world works and about therole we can play in securing our own sustainable future in it.
Fornow, enter the white and cold world of Isle Royale and Lake Superior inwinter. It is a world that Nevada Barr brings alive with descriptivepower through her love of the natural world, her wide-rangingexperience in national parks and her curiosity about thesometimes-abstruse ways of wildlife biologists. All this, mixed withthe fears, frailties and foibles of her human subjects, makes for achilling and absorbing account. Finally, one may be well advised toeschew cell phones, and, for the record, it is a bad idea to drink beerin the sauna.
ROLF PETERSON

January 2008

TheBeaver was spotless. Annad never seen an airplane so clean. Sitting inits heated hangar in Ely, Minnesota, it fairly gleamed from its annualcheck. Only the deeply scarred floorboards stood witness to the oldwarhorses hard duty. Beavers hadnt been manufactured since 1962, andthe one the pilot was loading for its weekly provision and personneltrip to Isle Royale in Lake Superior was older than Anna. Butit had taken better care of itself, she thought, with a touch oficy realism. Suited up in brand-spanking-new, fresh-out-of-the-box,felt-lined Sorel boots, insulated socks, ski pants and parka, watchinga woman half her age, with legs as long and strong as a yearling moose,move nimbly about in lightweight mukluks and an alarmingly thin winterjacket, Anna suffered a sensation neither familiar nor welcome.