For now, enter the white and cold world of Isle Royale and Lake Superior in winter. It is a world that Nevada Barr brings alive with descriptive power through her love of the natural world, her wide-ranging experience in national parks and her curiosity about the sometimes-abstruse ways of wildlife biologists. All this, mixed with the fears, frailties and foibles of her human subjects, makes for a chilling and absorbing account. Finally, one may be well advised to eschew cell phones, and, for the record, it is a bad idea to drink beer in the sauna.
– ROLF PETERSON
January 2008
1
The Beaver was spotless. Anna’d never seen an airplane so clean. Sitting in its heated hangar in Ely, Minnesota, it fairly gleamed from its annual check. Only the deeply scarred floorboards stood witness to the old warhorse’s hard duty. Beavers hadn’t been manufactured since 1962, and the one the pilot was loading for its weekly provision and personnel trip to Isle Royale in Lake Superior was older than Anna.
But it had taken better care of itself, she thought, with a touch of icy realism. Suited up in brand-spanking-new, fresh-out-of-the-box, felt-lined Sorel boots, insulated socks, ski pants and parka, watching a woman half her age, with legs as long and strong as a yearling moose, move nimbly about in lightweight mukluks and an alarmingly thin winter jacket, Anna suffered a sensation neither familiar nor welcome.
She felt frail, insecure, out of her element. Isle Royale in Michigan had been one of her first duty stations, but that had been years ago. And in summer. A jaunt there in the arctic temperatures of January, when the island was closed to the outside world, wasn’t her idea of the perfect winter vacation. Too many years on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi, where a Levi jacket and knee socks were sufficient for a winter wardrobe, had thinned her blood. Her current tenure as District Ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park might bring back her limited tolerance for the cold, but she’d yet to spend a winter there.