A Blizzard of Polar Bears

Book 2: Alex Carter Series

by Alice Henderson

Genres: Women's Fiction; Mystery

Synopsis

Wildlife biologist Alex Carter is back, fighting for endangered species in the Canadian Arctic and battling for her life in this action-packed follow-up to A Solitude of Wolverines, “a true stunner of a thriller debut” (James Rollins) and “a great read” (Nevada Barr).

Fresh off her wolverine study in Montana, wildlife biologist Alex Carter lands a job studying a threatened population of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic. Embedded with a small team of Arctic researchers, she tracks the majestic bears by air, following them over vast, snowy terrain, spending days leaning precariously out of a helicopter with a tranquilizer gun, until she can get down on the ice to examine them up close. 

But as her study progresses, and she gathers data on the health of individual bears, things start to go awry. Her helicopter pilot quits unexpectedly, equipment goes missing, and a late-night intruder breaks into her lab and steals the samples she’s collected. She realizes that someone doesn’t want her to complete her study, but Alex is not easily deterred. 

Managing to find a replacement pilot, she returns to the icy expanses of Hudson Bay. But the helicopter catches fire in midflight, forcing the team to land on a vast sheet of white far from civilization. Surviving on the frozen landscape is difficult enough, but as armed assailants close in on snowmobiles, Alex must rely on her skills and tenacity to survive this onslaught and carry out her mission.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Release date: November 9, 2021

Publisher: William Morrow

Print pages: 352

Sample

Prologue

Hudson Bay, Manitoba, Canada

As Rex Tildesen stared in amazement at the sonar image, he had no idea of the danger that surrounded his find. He took in the image, punching a victorious fist in the air. This had to be it. The find of the century. No, scratch that. The find of the last two centuries. The last millennium. When had the Kensington Runestone been found in Minnesota? In 1898? And though it was getting new attention and more analysis lately, it was still not considered genuine evidence of Viking presence in Minnesota. Too far west, the skeptics said. There was no way the Vikings had made it that far.

But Rex, a marine archaeologist, believed they had, and that they’d sailed through Hudson Bay to do it. He studied the sonar image on his monitor, his boat rocking gently beneath him. The shape of the wreck on his screen was the exact dimensions of a Viking longboat, and there were no other historical wrecks in this area. This had to be it. Finally. Proof of his theory! He knew it!

But he had to be cautious. When the farmer Olof Ohman found the Kensington Runestone in 1898, completely enveloped in the roots of an ancient tree, no one believed the stone was genuine. They accused him of creating the stone himself, even though he had no knowledge of how to write runes. Skeptics of the stone had ruined Olof’s life, ridiculed and treated him with suspicion. Rex had to be careful to avoid the same treatment.

The stone told the chilling story of a group of thirty Viking explorers who were on a scouting mission to the west of Vinland. Some of them left camp one day to fish, only to return later and find their fellow men murdered by unknown hands, blood covering the ground. They fled the site of the murders to return to a ship that was waiting for them fourteen days’ journey away. A date inscribed on the side of the runestone read 1362, a timing that fit in well with a 1355 mission ordered by King Magnus to contact and re-Christianize the Viking settlements west of Greenland.

But skeptics dismissed the stone as a hoax. They pointed to rare runes and claimed they hadn’t been in use in the 1360s, even though documents had now surfaced that clearly showed they had been. Current dating methods confirmed that the granite crystals inside the etched runes had been weathering for hundreds of years, a far longer period of time than if Ohman had created the stone.

Still, even now, most Viking scholars clung to the old, dismissive views on the stone, not looking into the new findings. Over the years, Viking swords, adzes, and axes had been found scattered throughout eastern North America. If Rex could prove that Vikings had sailed through Hudson Bay, he could make a case for how they reached Minnesota.

So Rex had to be careful. His reputation was already in tatters for his vehement belief that the Vikings had made it this far to the west of Labrador and Newfoundland.

He had to dive now, see if he could find any artifacts. Anxiously he geared up, checking over his scuba equipment, excitement coursing through him. He knew he shouldn’t dive alone, but his partner was laid up onshore with a bad case of the bends, the result of a previous dive in which she’d surfaced too fast.

Sasha. His partner. He’d been so excited he’d nearly forgotten to radio his location. It was a lame backup system, but there was no way he was going to wait on this dive. Not after chasing this all these years.

He got on the radio and heard his partner’s familiar warm voice as she answered. “Enjoying the weather out there?” Sasha asked him.

“Just like Malibu.”

Ice was difficult to navigate. He’d had to stick to a narrow band of water between the land and the pack ice.

He could have waited a couple more months, but he’d gotten cabin fever, impatiently waiting for the hunt to resume. He scanned the sky, seeing a gray storm on the horizon. Nearby, the white mass of pack ice glittered in a patch of sunlight streaming through a break in the clouds.

“You find another mess of shipping containers?” she asked.

A shipping route, Hudson Bay had its share of sunken cargo.

“I really got something this time. It’s just the right dimensions. And it’s in only forty feet of water. I have to check it out.”

“Hey,” she said. “This was supposed to be recon only. Keep cataloging wreck locations. Don’t you go down there without me.”

“If you weren’t laid up, I wouldn’t have to.” He knew it was killing her to stay behind and recuperate. “I’ll only be down for a few minutes. Just want to get a closer look.”

“If it’s what we think it is, it can wait another few days.”

“Maybe it can,” Rex said, “but I can’t. I’ll radio you as soon as I’m topside again.” He read his coordinates to her, then signed off before she could object further.

As he fell backward off the side of the boat, he could feel the cold water pressing against his dry suit. He descended slowly, turning on his powerful dive light, which pierced through the murky gloom.

Soon the wreck came into view, the decrepit seventy-two-foot-long remains of a ship. A lot of it had rotted away, but he could still make out some detail, including several long, slender, silt-covered shapes that might have been oars and a mast. Disappointment sank into him as he realized it had decayed too much to discern if it was a Viking longboat. But it didn’t mean it wasn’t, either.

Lumps lay scattered around it, and he waved the debris off the shapes. Most were objects so corroded he’d have to clean them before he could really tell what he had. He picked half a dozen pieces off the seafloor, placing them carefully inside his dive bag.

He checked his time. Still twenty minutes before he had to surface. Swimming the length of the ship, he took in the sight with wonder. He’d have to dive again with a camera. See if he could find any distinctly Viking features.

He found a few more objects scattered near the wreck and placed these in his dive bag, too.

Then he started the long ascent, doing a safety stop along the way. He nearly burst with impatience. He wanted to examine the objects in the light. Start to clean them. See if any of them were cloak pins or the arched blades of adzes or spinning whorls . . . One piece was even large enough to be part of a broken sword.

Light crept into his world as he neared the surface. His head broke through to the air and he flipped his dive mask up to the top of his head. Swimming the last few feet to his boat, he noticed that the storm was moving his way.

He hauled himself out, carefully placing the dive bag on the floor of his boat.

He was just stripping off his dry suit when the sound of another boat’s engine drew his attention. He turned around, seeing a beat-up fishing trawler approaching quickly. He froze in mid-strip-down, the top half of his dry suit folded down, the towel in his hand forgotten as he paused from drying his face.

For a second he thought the boat was going to hit him, but it pulled up short, its wake rocking his boat so violently he had to grab on to the railing to keep from losing his balance.

The boat slid up alongside his, and two men and a woman jumped aboard.

“What’s going on?” Rex demanded.

“Heard you over the radio,” one said. He seemed to be in charge, standing in front of the other two. He was portly, with a beige, weatherworn face, longish black hair, and a goatee. A scar ran across the bridge of his nose. Another man stood tall and threatening, jet-black hair shorn close to his scalp, menacing brown eyes staring out from a shrewd sienna face. He crossed his arms, a tower of muscle, staring down at Rex. The woman was the scariest of them all. She looked like she would kill puppies before breakfast and then make her way to blow up a nursing home, just for the fun of it. She wore her long brown hair in a tight ponytail, and the dead look in her piercing blue eyes gave Rex the chills. Her unmoving face was carved out of ivory.

“What did you find down there?” the leader demanded.

“Down there?” Rex asked lamely.

The leader stepped forward, and the woman cracked her knuckles, stretched, and then adjusted her neck, as if she were warming up for a round in a cage fight.

“Am I not speaking clearly?”

Rex took a step back. “Um . . .”

“You have a problem answering simple questions?” the man asked. The others remained silent.

“No, I . . . uh . . .”

“Then what did you find?”

“A wreck,” Rex said. “Just an old wreck.”

“What kind of old wreck?”

What was this? Archaeology pirates? “I don’t know how old.”

“You said on the radio you’d been logging a lot of wreck sites.”

“Yeah. I’m a marine archaeologist.”

“We’re looking for a specific wreck. You got a list of the ones you found? Their locations?”

Anger flashed inside Rex and his ears burned. If these were some kind of looters or pirates, there was no way he was going to give away the locations of his explorations. Not if one of them was a Viking wreck. He had worked too hard for this. He wanted official recognition from academia about his find. He wanted it to be validated just as Anne and Helge Ingstad’s find was at L’Anse aux Meadows.

“I don’t see why I should show you anything. Who the hell are you?” Rex demanded.

The leader pulled out a gun and aimed it at Rex’s head. “We’re the people you’re going to spill your guts to. And these guys?” he added, hooking his thumb back at his silent compadres. “Love to make people talk. It’s a skill.”

The woman pulled out a pair of pliers from her leather jacket and Rex felt his knees start to shake. He was freezing. Standing out here with his chest exposed. Needed a shirt.

She advanced on him, shoved him backward into a seat, and reached toward him with the pliers. The pain burst white hot in his head. He tried to resist, tried to fight them off, then couldn’t bear the pain anymore. He struggled to speak, but they didn’t like any of his answers. The last thing he noticed before he blacked out was his blood spraying over the pristine white of the deck.

One

Snowline Resort Wildlife Sanctuary, Montana

The wolverine had gone straight down the cliff. Alex Carter teetered on the edge of the precipitous slope, staring down in disbelief at the wolverine tracks that veered down the nearly vertical face of the mountain, moving deftly from ledge to ledge. There was no way she could follow that. She pulled out her binoculars and focused them at the bottom of the cliff. In the far distance, she saw a ragged line of disrupted snow where the wolverine had disappeared into a copse of subalpine fir.

After discovering the tracks in the midafternoon, she’d followed them all the way up here, hoping to see more signs of the wolverine’s activities along the way. But it had marched straight up the side of a mountain and straight back down the other side, without stopping to eat anything. Alex had to blaze a freshly switchbacked trail on her skis, climbing slowly, astounded at the animal’s energy and vitality.

For the last few feet she’d taken off her skis and climbed in her boots. These giant members of the weasel family didn’t let anything stop them. They treated terrain as if it were flat, no matter how many vertical feet lay between points of wolverine interest.

She stood up on an icy rock to get a higher vantage point, studying the landscape below with her binoculars, and caught a moving dark dot as it emerged from the fir trees and crossed a patch of snow. It marched in a straight line, never pausing, until it reached another dense copse of trees at the edge of a rise. Alex lost sight of it.

Turning on the rock, she almost lost her footing on the icy surface, and her heart hammered suddenly in her chest as she caught her balance again. She stepped down, retrieving her skis. She’d backtrack now, following the wolverine tracks to see where it had come from.

She skied downward to where the wolverine’s path leveled out, following a ridgeline across the face of a mountain. Her skis slid through the powdery snow, her breath frosting in the cold air. As she worked her legs and arms, navigating up a steep embankment and down the other side, she noticed other tracks joining those of the wolverine. An ermine’s delicate little paw prints pounced along beside the deeper wolverine ones, and a coyote’s prints joined them a few feet later.

During her time out here in the field, she’d noticed that other carnivores often followed wolverines, hoping to locate any food the scavengers had discovered. A half mile later, Alex arrived at the edge of an avalanche chute, a steep section on the side of a mountain where, over time, avalanches had stripped away all the trees. The wolverine had marched straight across it.

About twenty feet away, the snow lay disturbed, dug up, some brown peeking through. She peered up at the snowy slope above her, looking for dangerous overhanging cornices of snow that could come down. She didn’t see any, and after a moment’s hesitation decided to ski out the twenty feet to see what lay in the snow. All the carnivore tracks she’d been following converged at this point, along with some grizzly tracks and those of a fox. Wolverine prints circled the excavated area.

She leaned over, brushing some snow away from the brown shape with a mitten. Beneath the white surface lay the frozen carcass of an elk. Alex stared up again, searching the steep slope. An avalanche had careened down in this section, probably only a few days ago, judging from the still-rough pattern of the surface snow. It likely caught the elk unaware.

Wolverines were experts at digging up frozen creatures from the snow, and usually had a network of food sources that they tapped over the winter, roaming tirelessly from one to the next.

She bent down, pulling out her camera, and snapped a few photos of the wolverine tracks. She could see slight differences in the forepaws and suspected it was actually two wolverines that had met up at this spot, likely a parent and a juvenile that was spending its first full winter out and about, learning the best foraging spots from its parents.

Her photos taken, Alex retreated to the safety of the tree line and continued higher. She picked up the tracks again on the far side of the avalanche chute, but they climbed up and over another cliff where she couldn’t follow.

She’d spent the last few months doing this almost daily, recording the location and number of wolverines living on this newly designated wildlife preserve in northwestern Montana. She’d loved the solitude, the silent hush of the snow-laden forests, the magic tinkling of snow on her parka hood. A network of remote cameras she’d installed around the sanctuary were ready to snap photos of any wolverines that crossed their infrared beams.

She climbed higher, making her rounds, swapping out the memory cards and batteries on one of her cameras. She didn’t see any more wolverine tracks, so she returned to the warmth of the old ski lodge as darkness crept over the sky and the temperature dropped.

The sanctuary had originally been the site of a popular ski resort that had declined in the latter part of the twentieth century. The owner had donated the property to the Land Trust for Wildlife Conservation. She’d landed the amazing gig to come up here and do a wolverine study, the only resident now of the abandoned resort, and the experience had been exactly what she needed to move forward with her life. But now she looked ahead at the unknown. The study ended in just a couple weeks and she hadn’t lined up her next gig yet.

As Alex leaned her skis against the exterior wall and stamped her boots on the front stoop, she heard the phone ringing inside. She closed the door and hurried to the old rotary phone sitting on the reception desk. It was a landline; there was no cell reception out here.

“Hello?”

“Alex, it’s Sonia Bergstrom.”

Alex smiled at hearing the voice of her old grad school friend. They’d met in Berkeley while earning their PhDs in wildlife biology and had spent a season together tracking and tagging polar bears in Svalbard, Norway. Sonia had gone on to dedicate her career to polar bear research and had worked at a number of study locations throughout the Arctic. She now worked with a nonprofit organization called the International Institute for Polar Bear Research.

“Hey, Sonia! How are things?”

“Good. Really good. In fact, I’ve just had a bit of a break.”

Alex sat down on one of the stools behind the desk. “With your research?”

“Yes. You know how I’ve been waiting forever on permits to come through to study the Western Hudson Bay polar bear population?”

Alex did. The permits kept getting held up, and Sonia had been waiting several years to get in. Other researchers’ permits had also been stymied. “They finally came through?”

“Yes! I can’t believe it. A set of happy coincidences finally made it happen. The new Minister of Environment and Climate Change has a special interest in polar bears. He came out to the Northern Beaufort Sea and volunteered for a week, helping with our study up there. I mentioned my struggles with getting a permit for the Western Hudson Bay, and lo and behold, a few weeks later, they’ve finally come through.”

“That’s great!” Alex knew polar bear populations were in trouble, and the more data they could gather on the reasons and rate of decline, the more they could inform policy makers of ways to help.

“But there’s a hang-up. I’m in the Chukchi Sea and I’m waist deep in the study up here. Our NGO didn’t have anyone lined up for this Hudson Bay study because we didn’t think it was going to go through anytime soon.”

A surge of anticipation suddenly welled up inside Alex. Did her friend need . . .

“When does your wolverine study end?”

“In two weeks,” Alex told her, almost holding her breath.

“Want to take this one?”

Alex grinned. “Absolutely.”

She heard Sonia breathe a sigh of relief. “Oh, I can’t tell you how much this means to me. This whole thing has been strange. For years I’ve been able to get in there and do multiyear studies. I’m not sure what’s changed, but I don’t like it. Listen, I’ve got a grad student lined up who can assist you. His name’s Neil Trevors and I’ve worked with him before in Greenland. He can fly out to Churchill in the next week and get the ball rolling, line up a helicopter pilot and get all the gear and equipment in order. Can you come out after that?”

“Yes. This is amazing. And perfect timing. I didn’t have anything lined up yet.” Alex’s face lit up. Manitoba. The Canadian Arctic. Polar bears. And she knew it also meant tracking them by helicopter, which made a thrill pass through her. She loved being up in the air, loved the season she’d spent in Svalbard. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

“Of course! I’ll call you later with the flight details. What’s the nearest airport?”

“Missoula,” she told her friend.

“Okay. Thanks again, Alex.”

They hung up, and Alex remained on the stool, motionless for a moment, taking it in. Flying out of Missoula. She thought of how she’d flown into that airport last fall, making a major change in her life as she left for this remote place. Now a new opportunity awaited her, and she was more certain than ever that she’d made the right choice all those months ago when she’d left behind an unhappy relationship and the noise, pollution, and clamor of Boston.

She stood up. A sense of pure happiness infused her and she punched a joyous fist in the air.

Alex drove to the box at the bottom of the lodge’s long drive to retrieve her mail and returned to the warmth of the lodge. She spread it out on a table and sat down to go through it. She delighted to find a care package from her father in Berkeley. He’d sent along some homemade cinnamon cookies and several articles he’d cut from the New York Times. One was about wolverines and the other about a new sauropod that had been discovered in Mongolia.

A letter from the Center for Biological Diversity asked for a donation. On the bottom of the stack lay a postcard. She rose, staring at it. It showed the historic downtown of the closest city to her, Bitterroot, with its elevated wooden sidewalks and marble post office built in the late 1800s.

JUST CHECKING ON YOU, read the postcard. KNOW I’M NEVER FAR IF YOU NEED ME. It was unsigned.

Moving over to one of the writing desks in the resort’s lobby, she gripped the postcard. At the desk, she opened the drawer, pulling out other postcards that had arrived in that same block handwriting.

She laid them all out, back sides up, so she could read them. She’d started to receive these mysterious messages when she arrived in Montana. Originally they’d been sent to her old address in Boston and forwarded out here by the postal service. She’d paid a moving company to pack up her few possessions earlier in the winter and move them to a storage facility when she’d ended the lease on her apartment there. They’d shipped a few essentials out to her in Montana: her backup laptop, some hard drives, her favorite pair of bird-watching binoculars. The movers had found a postcard pushed under the door of her flat, not postmarked but hand delivered, and they’d added it to the shipped box.

She arranged them all in order now. All were unsigned, and she didn’t recognize the handwriting. She had no idea who they were from. The first one seemed to be the one that had been hand delivered in Boston. It featured an image of Paul Revere’s house and read, HOPE YOU WERE UNHARMED. It must have arrived shortly after she’d attended a wetlands dedication ceremony where a gunman had turned up. Intent on killing as many people as he could, he was stopped only when an unknown person had shot and killed him. That person had never been caught and remained a mystery.

The second postcard had been sent to her old Boston address and forwarded to her in Montana just after she got this job studying wolverines. The card depicted the famous clock tower at the University of California, Berkeley, where she’d earned her doctorate.

On the back was a simple message: HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR NEW POST.

The third had also been forwarded from her Boston address. It showed a mountainous vista dotted with the iconic shapes of tall cacti from Saguaro National Park in Arizona. She’d spent time there tracking Sonoran pronghorns.

The card read, I CAN SEE WHY YOU LOVE THIS PLACE.

Then her father in Berkeley had received a mysterious package containing a GPS unit she’d lost in New Mexico while surveying for spotted owls. He’d forwarded her the package, and now she held up the handwritten note that had accompanied it. In the same block lettering, it read, THIS CAME IN HANDY. The package had been mailed from Cheyenne, the exact area she’d gone to after New Mexico to do a black-footed ferret study.

So this mysterious person had found her GPS unit in New Mexico and brought it to Wyoming, right in her tracks. Had he followed her? Or was it just coincidence? Maybe he lived in Cheyenne and just mailed it back at the first opportunity he had, using the address registered with the device, which was her father’s.

Then a padded envelope had arrived here in Montana, not forwarded, but showing her current address at the old resort. In it was a DVD containing footage from a body camera worn by an unknown person. The video jostled as the wearer ran, holding out a gun in front of a decidedly masculine arm. Then he fired two rounds, killing the vengeful shooter at the wetlands dedication ceremony. The body cam wearer had saved her life. She could still remember the chill she felt as words scrolled across the footage: Alex, you had my back, and now I have yours.

She still had no idea what he meant by that, how she had his back, nor any idea who he could be. After the arrival of the DVD, he’d gone quiet for a while. But a month later, in the dead of winter, she received a postcard of the snowy landscape of nearby Glacier National Park that read, IT’S BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY UP HERE. QUIET. A PERSON COULD GET USED TO LIVING IN THE MOUNTAINS.

A few weeks later, one had arrived showing nearby Flathead Lake. The familiar block print read: THINGS HAVE BEEN QUIET. IT’S NICE FOR A CHANGE.

And now this latest postcard, written in that same unmistakable block print. She read it again. JUST CHECKING ON YOU. KNOW I’M NEVER FAR IF YOU NEED ME.

Staring at the card, she shook her head silently in confusion. Need him? She didn’t even know who he was. What had she done to draw his attention? The earliest reference to her past was the card depicting UC Berkeley. Had he known her back then? She stared at his block print. And the first evidence of him having some kind of physical contact with her was when she’d lost her GPS unit in New Mexico. He’d either found it or taken it from her without her knowing. And the unit had stored all the places she’d been before, including Berkeley.

The New Mexico spotted owl study had been after the Sonoran pronghorns, so he might have backtracked to that location using her saved GPS waypoints. She thought back to the people she’d met on that New Mexico trip. Some friendly land trust folks, but she was still in communication with them. She couldn’t picture any of them sending strange, anonymous postcards. Why would they? She’d also encountered a few angry developers who wanted to turn the spotted owl habitat into a luxury golf resort. Their designs had been thwarted, so they certainly wouldn’t “have her back.”

She thought of evenings she’d eaten out, other researchers she’d talked to. No one stood out in her mind.

She turned the new postcard over in her hand. What was his interest in her? Did he mean her harm? And if so, why this game of sending her postcards?

She returned all the cards to the drawer, her mind still churning over who they could be from. Finally she made some dinner and turned in for the night.

 

Over the next two weeks, Alex made her final journeys out into the field, retrieving all of her remote cameras and dismantling the bait stations she’d used to attract the wolverines to be photographed.

She felt bittersweet about leaving the preserve. She’d come to think of these steep mountain trails as her new home.

The last few days she spent gathering up all the remaining equipment around the resort and leaving it for the next researcher who would call the preserve home for a few months. She stowed her clothes in her backcountry pack, knowing she could secure any additional gear in Churchill, Manitoba.

She said a silent goodbye to the place. It had been a welcome refuge, a place where she could start the next chapter in her life, and she’d miss it. Then she stepped outside and locked the lodge door for the last time.

She was ready for the Arctic.

The familiar sound of Jolene Baker’s ancient truck rumbled up the long drive to the resort. ...