The Last Woman in the Forest Read online

  Marian hesitated before answering because she did not want to sound presumptuous, and Tate said, “It isn’t a difficult question,” and Marian told him what she really wanted was to be working with the dogs.

  “You want to be a handler,” Tate said.

  “I wish I’d had the chance to try out.”

  “We’ve had a lot of folks over the years who started out as orienteers, Jenness included. What you want isn’t out of reach.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The living area of one of the two handler trailers had been converted into the group’s workstation. It was late when Marian had finished downloading her GPS tracklog and entering her notes regarding the roads, sometime close to midnight. A dusting of snow blew over her boots as she walked back to the orienteer housing, and snowflakes collected on her lips and lashes, though the sky was clear. She thought of Deacon and loneliness and other matters that collected in her mind at a day’s end when sleep was close. Only three weeks before, Marian had been running down a sand-packed trail with Deacon bounding alongside her. Her life had felt snagged in a trailer and a place too hot to call home. She was fair-skinned with sun-enhanced freckles and too much Irish and Scandinavian blood to be living in Texas.

  For the past four years, Marian had gone from job to job. Her family worried that she was chasing happiness and might be better off with a man, even though they typically weren’t conventional thinkers. After Marian had started college and still did not have a boyfriend, her father asked her if she was gay. But Marian did not think she was gay. She met a boy her junior year. He had brown hair, and when the sun shone on it, the ends looked like copper. He was friends with Marian’s roommate, a tall, strong woman with Chippewa blood. The boy’s name was Hawkon, and he told Marian he had Chippewa blood, too, like her roommate. He was an English major who enjoyed writing poetry. Marian liked his name and the poems he wrote, though she did not understand them, and she liked the copper tips of his hair. They talked and read poetry for a month before he kissed her one night underneath a streetlamp in downtown Ann Arbor. They had just left a bar and three empty beer bottles each. And when he kissed her, he slid his right hand beneath the fall of her hair, lifting it slightly from the nape of her neck, and her spine chilled from the warmth of it all. After he walked her back to her dorm, she tried to write a poem for him, but her words felt futile.

  Hawkon did not stop by the next day or the next, and a month later when she had not heard from him, she cried. She thought her roommate was asleep, until the covers on her roommate’s bed stirred, the mattress springs creaked, and bare feet padded across the vinyl floor. Linda lifted the polyfill comforter and crawled in beside Marian. She smoothed Marian’s hair and breathed warmth against her skin. The next night, Linda slipped beneath the covers with Marian again, and the night after that. Her fingers stroked Marian’s arms. She tugged at the neckline of Marian’s T-shirt and kissed her freckled shoulders. They became lovers, but Marian never wondered if this was love, and only once after their lovemaking did Linda speak those words, shortly before falling asleep.

  Marian had actually only been with one man, when she was twenty-three, a kind man with fleece sheets who would bring her coffee in the morning. But he’d eventually moved on, as had Marian, when their seasonal job together ended.

  * * *

  • • •

  Marian visited the women’s communal bathroom. She was thinking about emailing one of her co-workers from Turtle, Inc. But when she walked out of the bathroom, she was startled by Tate, who was standing just outside the doorway.

  “I understand you want to take the sleds out tomorrow,” he said.

  Marian told Tate about seeing only one road on the grid unit that she and Jeb had been assigned to check and that she wasn’t sure what kind of shape the road was in. “After today, I’d feel better taking the snowmobiles.”

  “Do you know how to handle these machines?” he asked.

  And Marian told him she did, that she’d grown up riding snowmobiles in Michigan.

  “Do you want me to give you some pointers?”

  “I’ll be okay,” she told him.

  * * *

  • • •

  Marian moved down the hall and was surprised to find she’d left her room unlocked. She didn’t think much of it until she opened the door and removed her boots and began to peel off the layers of her clothes. In that moment she felt certain that a man had been inside her room. There were footprints on the floor that were too large to be hers. She thought of the oil workers. She checked her belongings. Everything was in its place. But when she turned in she knew someone had lain on her bed, because her pillow had the unfamiliar scent of a man that she would later come to recognize, of spruce and sweat and diesel oil and outdoor air.

  And when she eventually came to know Tate’s body and the comfort of his breathing and the way his skin and clothes smelled, she asked him about the night when she had turned her pillow over and had lain awake for too many hours and had promised herself never to leave her door unlocked again.

  “You were in my room,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Why were you on my bed?”

  He told her that her door wasn’t locked, that he’d come looking for her to ask her about the sleds. He knew the orienteers had been complaining about their rooms. He’d wanted to get a sense of just how small the rooms were. He was being a responsible team leader.

  It all made sense to Marian. It always did.

  4

  February 2017

  MARIAN

  Oil sands, Alberta, Canada

  There was a moment when Marian saw Tate differently, when she looked into his amber-and-brown eyes, which were closer than they had ever been before, and she felt her blood move through her and heard a whirring in her ears as if she were on a plane that was either taking off or landing, though she was not sure which. Tate held her gaze as one who is in perfect control, and never before had Marian felt as protected and safe; never before had she felt as vulnerable and exposed.

  The moment happened the same week the program lost one of its dogs, and Marian wondered if she might have been responsible. Then her parents told her about Deacon, and she no longer felt sure of herself or anything she had felt sure of before, and her heart was broken; yes, she thought, this great beating muscle felt as severed as a bone.

  Marian had been assigned to work with Noah, who was tall and gangly and barely out of college, and Chester, part Labrador and golden retriever, who was new to the program. The group’s field schedule included three days on and one day off, and then two days on and one day off to give the dogs a break. But that all depended on the weather. The coldest workable temperature was –10°F. Any colder than that and the air could damage the dogs’ lungs.

  Each night before going into the field Marian would meet with Jenness to prepare for her team’s next assignment. Jenness would provide Marian with a clear-coated paper map of the team’s study cell. The map included a geological information system with radio telemetry data of existing caribou that had been collared, and habitat model layers. The habitat model layers estimated where there might be lichen-rich resources, an important staple in the caribou’s diet. From the map Marian would determine the best course of travel that her team should take.

  Typically teams collected anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five scat samples a day, which included moose, deer, caribou, and wolf. However, often teams would find so much deer and moose scat, particularly if they were in an area where the animals had been feeding on carrion, that they had a special protocol: After collecting one, skip the next five before collecting again. This was just so the team could keep moving and identify more individual species. But caribou, being at risk for extinction, was the study’s priority; all scat from that species was collected.

  * * *

  • • •


  The teams had been conducting fieldwork for almost four weeks now, and in those four weeks, what had first begun as a six-hour day in mid-January, including time en route to and from each team’s respective survey area, had now extended to nine hours by the second week in February because of the increase in daylight. The longer days required greater stamina from each of the team members, as well as the dogs. Though the terrain was flat, unlike the steep trails on which the teams had trained in Montana, the snow could be three to four feet deep, which required the handlers and the orienteers to take turns breaking trail for the dogs.

  Over those four weeks Marian had grown increasingly frustrated with Noah. He was sullen and moody and difficult to work with. That particular day in February was no exception. Noah had pulled the truck off at kilometer post 10 and unloaded. They would hike the rest of the way along one of the decommissioned roads to their survey area. Marian powered her phone and Bluetooth, then waited for the GPS on her Android device to make a satellite connection. The GPS device would log her position every thirty seconds.

  Noah had let Chester out of the back of the truck. The dog ran off a few yards to relieve himself, but within seconds he was jumping on Noah, his front paws pressed against Noah’s chest. The dog licked Noah’s face and then jumped down and sniffed Noah’s hip pack, as if waiting for him to pull out the rubber ball. Chester wore a harness over an insulated vest. Noah strapped a bell to the top of Chester’s harness and secured a small GPS tracking device in a pocket on the harness. Chester’s GPS device would log his position every second. The dog’s tracklog, along with waypoints of where scat had been found, would later be downloaded onto a map.

  Marian’s job was to navigate her team and to collect and record the scat. Noah’s job was to work with Chester, recognizing when Chester was onto a scent and rewarding him when he’d found a scat sample. Away from the road, the snow level quickly became at least three feet deep and dense. Pushing their way through it was like wading through wet concrete.

  By noon, Chester had found five samples, two of which were caribou. Some of the samples were buried three feet beneath the snow. Using a collapsible shovel, Marian cleared the snow away from the scat. She also had tools for chiseling samples loose from the frozen condensation. Then she’d remove her gloves and mittens and, with only a latex layer, pick up the samples and deposit them in Ziploc bags. She’d record the samples and their waypoints on her phone. And sometimes Chester would be onto the next sample before Marian had finished her tasks, especially if they were in a kill zone. If they entered an area where there was a carcass, they could be sure there would be an increase in samples. Too often Marian could be moving from one sample to the next, without having time to pull on her gloves and mittens and warm her hands.

  On that particular day the temperature was hovering just barely above –5°F, and by midafternoon they had indeed entered a kill zone. Marian’s hands were freezing. The tips of her fingers on her right hand were already turning white. She held them in her mouth to try to warm them while she hurried to the next find.

  She knelt in the snow, which came to just over her shoulders. “These are all deer,” she said. “I think it’s time we follow the deer and moose protocol. You know, skip five for every one.” But Noah had already disappeared around the timber. Though she could no longer see them, she could hear Chester’s bell.

  “Hold on!” she yelled.

  She dropped the sample. She could barely maneuver her hands now. “To hell with it.” And she moved on to try to catch up. But just as she rounded the corner into an open space, Chester was onto yet another find.

  “That-a-boy,” Noah said. “Nice job.”

  Chester stood alert. Snow had frozen to his coat in icicles, and his muzzle was covered in a white dusting like freezer burn. Icicles hung from his mouth where his drool had frozen. As Marian drew closer, Chester’s feet pranced in place, creating a crater around where he stood.

  Noah threw the ball about ten feet behind them and along the trail. Chester retrieved it in a couple of quick bounds. They were moving again. “Don’t skimp on this one. It’s caribou,” Noah said.

  Marian knelt to collect the scat. Noah was right. The sample was caribou. She was writing the date on the bag when Chester barked.

  “Way to go. You got that,” Noah said.

  They were definitely in a kill zone, Marian thought.

  “Hold on, Chester,” Marian said.

  “What’s that?” Noah said.

  “I told Chester to hold on.” She put the sample in the dry sack attached to her pack.

  Noah was walking toward her. “You don’t talk to him, you got that? You don’t say his name. You don’t throw the ball for him. You don’t acknowledge him.”

  “I didn’t throw the ball for him.”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Back off, Noah!” Marian wasn’t looking at him. Her fingers could barely move. The battery on her phone was low. She had an extra one in the breast pocket of her jacket, but to replace the battery would mean more time that her hands would be exposed to the cold.

  “You need to step it up,” Noah said.

  Chester had walked over to Marian. She didn’t look at him.

  “Let’s go, boy. Check over here,” Noah said.

  Marian went ahead and replaced her battery. The pain in her right hand was almost unbearable. She would try to use her left hand with the next sample. She packed her supplies away and relayered her gloves. She added additional hand warmers. Then she attempted to quicken her pace, to literally jump from one foot to the next as if in a slow jog, along the trail that Noah and Chester had made. She winced as the blood returned to her fingers as if she’d stuck her hand inside a pincushion. And wasn’t the temperature dropping, and wouldn’t it be too cold for Chester to work? She’d forgotten to check the temperature when she’d had her phone out. She would remember to do so when she collected the next sample. She pulled her neck gaiter over her nose and held it in place. And how far were they now from the truck? She should have looked at the map more closely when she’d stopped.

  These were her thoughts when she heard a high-pitched screaming sound, both childlike and animal-like, followed by a rapid series of yelps and barks. Noah and Chester had gotten ahead of her again and were in the thick timber to her left. Running to catch up wasn’t possible, though she tried, and on doing so toppled over more than once. She clambered back up each time. A residue of snow coated her clothes, and hardened clumps stuck against the fibers of her hat and in her braid. Chester was in some sort of pain. And amid the barks and yelps and high-pitched cries, Noah was yelling, and the panic in his voice seemed to only exasperate the dog.

  She saw Noah hunched over the ground. Chester was lying flat on his side. His back legs kicked frantically. Marian lumbered toward them. She fell on her knees beside Noah. Chester’s head was pinned to the ground by the jaws of a conibear trap, used to harvest fishers and martens. The trap was much like an enlarged, two-sided mousetrap, though with the pressure of at least ninety pounds. Chester’s gums were torn and bleeding. Blood was trickling out of his right ear, which was also torn badly.

  The teams had been warned about the trap lines, the routes along which traps had been set. Though Pétron Oil gave the teams some idea as to where the traps might be, neither the oil company nor the conservation workers had access to precise locations for the simple reason that trappers would not give up this information. Fur trapping was a vital staple in their lives. They were not going to risk their kills being poached.

  Jenness had told the orienteers and handlers to watch for snowmobile tracks that were not headed in any particular direction, saying oil workers did not go for joyrides into the wilderness. The trappers, though, headed straight into the woods, as did the conservation teams. For this reason, if Marian saw snowmobile tracks or foot tracks and knew that none of the conservation group’s teams had be
en to that grid yet, she’d avoid moving in that direction. There was also the problem of one of the dogs being lured by the bait of the traps. Marian couldn’t help but wonder if in all the haste of the afternoon she had missed some sort of sign. Even though Noah had been breaking trail when this happened, it was Marian’s responsibility to navigate her team.

  Noah cursed and yelled as he tried to pry apart the trap jaws on the end closest to Chester’s muzzle.

  “Give me your pack,” Marian said.

  But Noah ignored her. All of his focus was on trying to pry the trap open.

  Marian pulled off her mittens and unzipped Noah’s pack while it was still on his back.

  “Grab the other side of the trap!” Noah yelled. He was no longer wearing his mittens either. He was down to a thin layer of wool gloves.

  “That’s not going to work.” Marian’s hands dug through the pack. She was thinking of the mousetraps she had set over the years in the housing where she’d stayed during some of her jobs. She thought about how she would go about resetting a trap, which was never done by lifting the metal jaw. “Noah, where’s the leash?” she asked.

  “I don’t know!”

  Marian continued to dig through the pack until she found the leash toward the bottom, beneath a package of trail mix and a fleece layer. She retrieved the leash and the fleece top. Still on her knees, she moved toward Chester’s head. “It’s okay, boy,” she said. Her voice was as soothing as she could make it sound. His yelps turned into long whimpers and cries. “That-a-boy,” Marian said. She stroked his back.

  “What are you doing?” Noah pulled again on the trap and grunted in one enormous exhale. The springs did not budge, nor would they, Marian knew.

  “Fuck!” Noah pounded his fists against the snow. He then chucked a handful of it as if throwing a baseball at high speed.