The wolf researchers – Anna, NPS seasonals and Homeland Security, in the persons of rented experts from American University – would share a bunkhouse for six weeks. Anna was surprised some enterprising young reality-TV-show producer hadn’t offered big money to film it.

The mike woke up, and the seventh-grader flying the plane said: “It was a man and a woman – Homeland Security – the guy was somebody Ridley Murray recommended. They were weathered in in Ely for nearly a week. Hung around the hangar all day, being mad because we wouldn’t move the ceiling up. Clouds were right down on the deck.”

“I can’t believe the park would do this to Rolf.” It was Robin from the backseat, her voice-activated mike crackling with more anger than static.

“Rolf Peterson retired,” the pilot said.

“The study is Rolf.” Robin again. From Robin’s fierceness, Anna guessed she, like a lot of other young outdoors people, was in love with the charismatic wolf researcher. Not sexual love but romantic love, in the sense that they wanted to grow up to be him, or at least have his life. To a woman Robin’s age – twenty-two or-three, at a guess – retirement could look a lot like desertion. Or death.

“Ridley wanted this guy,” the pilot said doggedly.

“Ridley Murray was Rolf’s student.” Robin’s voice came back on its bed of cracklings. “Lesser of evils: Ridley didn’t want any guy.”

The mike was live for another moment as if an unspoken thought prolonged its activation, then, noiselessly but unmistakably, it went dead again. Fleetingly Anna wondered what differentiated that quiet open line of communication and the quiet but utterly different isolation that followed. Maybe it was the difference between silence and deafness; some sense deeper than the stirrup and hammer that tells one she is alone.

Embracing the solitude, she watched the frozen miles pass beneath the Beaver’s wings and thought of Paul. It wasn’t only the Mississippi heat that had thinned her blood. Paul Davidson was the source of the living heat in her life. After her first husband, Zack, had died, Anna had, without even knowing she’d done so, chosen a chill and lonely place to stow her heart, a limbo where it continued to beat, like the heart of a frog frozen in winter mud, to thaw to new life come spring. Paul had been her spring.