she wore a blue nightshirt spangled with moons and stars, which hung loosely over her jeans to her knees. The tongues of her boots stuck out, and the laces dragged against the floor like whiskers. In her odd getup, she looked like a cartoon.
He could hear his sister stomp her foot. “Hurry up!”
“Go away!” Jack moaned.
“OK, fine. Miss the moose.”
Her footsteps clomped on the wooden floor as she flounced off, and then Jack heard the creak of an outside door. He lay there for a minute, then flipped the covers off and rolled out the rest of the way. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, but it was no use fighting it. He was awake. Well, he sighed, he might as well see the animal that cost him an extra hour of sleep. Grabbing his parka and camera, he stepped into his sneakers, not bothering to search for his socks. Then he entered the dim hallway.
It had surprised Jack, the way all the Denali ranger homes looked exactly like regular run-of-the-mill houses. He’d been expecting a split-log cabin heated by a wood-burning stove and maybe an old-fashioned hand pump for water. In his mind he’d pictured an outhouse behind every porch. Instead, this house and all the others in the cluster looked just like the tract homes in Jackson Hole. Indoor plumbing and everything.
Once outside, he followed his sister’s footprints to the back of the house. It had snowed hard in the middle of the night, a deep, fluffy layer of white that mounded on the branches like dollops of whipped cream. Light snow kicked into his shoes and onto bare skin, so he tried to walk in Ashley’s boot prints. When that didn’t work, he switched to threading a path inches from the side of the house, where the snow was still packed. He found Ashley hunched behind a spruce tree. When she turned and saw him, she smiled, then placed her finger to her lips and pointed to a cluster of trees.
A huge moose munched lazily on bare twigs, its large, bulbous nose and neck bell bobbing with every bite. Jack held his breath as the moose moved forward, crunching through the trees until it was less than ten feet away. Although he knew the powerful animal could be dangerous, he couldn’t pass on what could be the best shot of his life. Carefully, he unzipped his camera case and was just raising his camera to his face when he heard a door squeak noisily from the screened-in porch on the south end of the house. The moose snapped its head up and looked in the direction of the noise. Jack froze, until the moose dropped its head to begin eating again.
“…thought I’d come out here for a cup of coffee, even though it’s a bit nippy. I wanted to talk to you about the wolverines.” Two chairs scraped noisily across the wooden planks. His parents wouldn’t be able to see the moose from the porch.
“This is the strangest case I’ve ever been called on. I’m hoping this cold air will clear my head so I can think it through. There’s something about these deaths that just doesn’t add up.”
“Like what?” Steven asked.
Jack could hear his mother sigh. “First of all, I’ve read through stacks of papers, and the truth is no one really knows much about this animal. They’re still very mysterious. And it doesn’t help that they are surrounded by myths and legends. There’s one story where a wolverine supposedly broke into a cabin and ate a trapper alive.”
“Ouch!”
“Steven, you know that’s utter nonsense.”
His parents’ voices distracted Jack. He didn’t want to hear about wolverines when he had a huge moose in his camera’s viewfinder. He wished they’d keep quiet so they wouldn’t scare away this animal before Jack got some pictures. Compared with all the pictures of moose he’d seen in books, this one looked twice as big, maybe because he was so close to it.
The moose took another mouthful of twigs and munched idly, although Jack thought it might be watching him.
He’d heard that more people got hurt by moose than by grizzlies, so he didn’t want to tick this big guy off. Just keep it nice and easy, he told himself. Zooming in so close he could count its eyelashes, he began to snap photos.
Ashley huddled beneath the tree branches like a turtle in a shell, watching the animal with rapt attention. “We should get Mom and Dad so they can see this,” she whispered.
“No, don’t move. I don’t want to scare him. If he decides to charge us, we’re toast.”
The moose backed up, his enormous head whipping past branches as he turned to go. Even though he knew it wouldn’t make a great picture, Jack snapped a few of the animal’s rump.
“Maybe we should go tell Mom and Dad now,” she suggested. “They can still get a look at it, even if it’s moving away.”
“Nah, don’t bother. They’re all hung up on the wolverine stuff.” Jack didn’t feel like sharing the moose experience with his parents—or more truthfully, with his father. He wanted to develop these pictures, and if they turned out as great as he thought they might, he’d present them to his dad as proof that he could take some spectacular shots too—even if he didn’t have his dad’s experience or his expensive camera equipment.
Once again his parents’ voices penetrated his consciousness. Olivia was saying, “A wolverine would rather run away than fight anything its size or larger. If they hunt anything, it’s usually ground squirrels. But lack of information is just one problem. The whole case has got me all turned around. For one thing, I don’t like the way those bodies were found.”
“You mean because the last two were next to snowmobile tracks?”
“Exactly. It doesn’t make sense, Steven. They’re such secretive animals, so why would they even come close to the trail? And two of them this last time…two males together? The fact is wolverine males are solitary. They keep to their own territories. I just don’t get it.”
“Were they hit by the snowmobiles?”
“The report says there are absolutely no signs of impact. The last two bodies are at Kantishna. I’ll know more when I examine them, but it appears they weren’t hit. It’s just baffling.”
Jack knew about the report. After they’d arrived in Anchorage, they’d driven directly to Denali, found the house they were to stay in, then quickly unpacked before heading to the ranger station, where his mother had been given a packet with pictures of the dead animals. Now he heard a rustling as his mother handed some papers to his father.
“…deaths are compounded by another sad statistic,” she was saying. “This report says wolverine young have a very high mortality rate—up to 30 percent.”
“From humans hunting them?” Steven asked.
“No. Unrelated adults appear to be killing the kits of other wolverines. But 30 percent! That’s a huge amount to lose. Which underscores how the wolverine population can’t afford the loss of apparently healthy adults. They’ll be in serious trouble if we don’t get a handle on this.”
“Nature can be cruel,” he told her. “Although I must admit I’ve thought about eating my own young once or twice.”
“Steven!”
He just laughed. A beat later he said, “I still think nature can’t hold a candle to the viciousness of the human race. Look at Nicky’s situation.”
Olivia dropped her voice low. “Seriously, what could
