Pride cometh, she thought wryly as her mittened hands scrabbled on the webbing and her spiffy new balaclava interfered as she tried to bite her fingertips to pull the mittens off. Finally she sat as patiently and helplessly as the apocryphal Iowa lad and let the pilot string her shoulder harnesses through her lap belt and lock the whole mess down.

Then she thanked him politely.

Robin Adair, the long-legged research assistant, sprang gracefully into the left rear seat, settled herself like a pro, and the plane was pushed from the hangar.

The Forest Service seaplane operation was on the shore of Shagawa Lake, edging the small town of Ely. In summer, the runway was open water. Now it was a lane of hard-packed snow, running north-northeast, between gaudily painted ice-fishing houses put up helter-skelter till they resembled nothing so much as a 1940s trailer park dropped from a passing cargo plane.

In an attempt to quell what was verging on internal whining, Anna focused on the beauty of the boreal forest as the Beaver left the ice and banked, turning east toward Michigan. The day was painfully bright and clear as it can only be in the north, where every particle of moisture is frozen from the air and the sun moves low in the south, feigning evening even at noon. Crystalline amber light honed the edges of the world till shadows of pines, long on the shores of snow-covered lakes, were as sharp and black as fangs drawn by children. Even from an altitude of twenty-two hundred feet and climbing, every track across the dazzle of white showed blue.

Static rattled in Anna’s headphones, and then the pilot’s voice: “Have you been to Isle Royale before?”

“Once.” Anna had the scar to prove it, a six-inch weal of shiny flesh across her abdomen. It still ached occasionally.