Before enlightenment was achieved, the snowmobile came shrieking back down the hill from the bunkhouse. Dragging a trailer – a lidded aluminum box the size of a coffin set on skis – the machine raced over the lake and came to a stop beside the moose’s body.

“Adam Peck,” Ridley said as the driver turned off the engine. “He missed our meet and greet.”

“Hey,” Adam said affably. He looked to be in his forties, and, when he pulled down his muffler to speak, Anna noticed he hadn’t a beard but a lush mustache of the kind seldom seen anywhere but in pictures of Civil War heroes.

He sprang off the snowmobile with the sharp suddenness of a switchblade knife opening and lifted the trailer’s lid.

“Camera,” he said, like a surgical nurse might say “Scalpel.”

Robin began taking pictures of the moose from all angles. The buzz of a scientific find – or an audience at a freak show – began over the size and peculiarity of the antlers, the number of ticks, the marks of starvation on the body.

Due to moose predation, balsam fir, the favored food in winter, was almost gone from the island, and the once-thriving herd – nearly fifteen hundred when Anna had been a ranger on Isle Royale – was down to around three hundred animals.

“Will hunger make the wolves more aggressive?” Menechinn asked. He’d been watching the recording process, with his arms folded across his chest and his chin buried in his neck scarf.

“It will,” Robin said.

“I’ve never seen an increase in wolf aggression that was tied to food availability,” Ridley said. “Only to sex and turf.”

“There’s always a first time,” Adam sided with the biotech.

Ridley shrugged. “Are we ready for the ax?” he asked Robin. “We need to take the head,” he explained to Anna. “It’s a perfect example of the peruke deformity. If we leave it, the critters will get it.” Already ravens were calling the good news of the slaughter to each other and cutting up the pale sky with ink-stained wings.