Walking up the bank from the lake, Anna felt like a one-woman band. What snow the wind had not scoured from the Earth was so desiccated it didn’t crunch beneath her boots, it squeaked as if she walked on beads of Styrofoam. Fur and fleece rasped over her ears, nylon ski pants whistled as they rubbed cricket-like with each step. The racket made her think of Robin Adair and her friendship with winter. She and Robin spent a couple of hours together, eating breakfast and killing time, till the Forest Service pilot got the call that the clouds over Isle Royale had lifted. Though Ely and Washington Harbor were on the same parallel and not more than one hundred fifty miles apart, the lake made its own weather, often completely unrelated to what the mainland was experiencing.

Over eggs and bacon, Anna learned Robin was born and raised on the St. Croix River in Minnesota, that she would have made the junior Olympics in cross-country skiing if she hadn’t been invalided out on a knee injury. Robin had been in love with winter her entire life. Winter was her favorite season. Either the woman had antifreeze in her veins or winter succumbed to her shy beauty and returned her affection. What else could explain the fact that she alone seemed comfortable in less than a walrus-sized amount of down blubber and moved as a wraith – or the apocryphal Indian – through the north woods?

All by herself, Anna constituted a public disturbance.