Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(5)
Light snow drifted over the riverscape fronting the tent, while to his left, a few hundred yards away, the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant pumped huge volumes of steam into the bitterly cold winter air. Virgil wasn’t sure whether the snow was natural or condensed from the steam.
He’d been in the blind for two hours, and though he was wearing a parka, his lack of movement let the January chill seep into his shoulders and down his spine. He’d brought the sleeping bag to deal with that problem, and when he’d begun to lose feeling in his butt, he’d taken off his boots and pulled on the bag. Overhead, his breath was condensing into ice crystals on the inside of the tent.
Virgil was a tall man, thin, with country singer blond hair and cool blue eyes. An agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, he was in the final two days of a weeklong winter vacation, which he was using in an effort to get photos of an owl.
As a part-time outdoor writer, Virgil liked all the Minnesota seasons; the best months were the lush August days and the brilliant blue days of February. There was hunting in the fall and spring, fishing almost year-round; and he liked to walk, to simply get out and look at the place he lived.
A birder friend had mentioned seeing a great horned owl fishing over the open water south of the nuclear plant, which they weren’t supposed to do. Great horned owls ate rabbits, not fish. The birder said the owl had been around since a big cold front had come through in mid-December, fishing the whole time.
Virgil wasn’t that much of an owl fancier, but he’d made some inquiries, and Wing & Talon, a magazine focused on raptors, had guaranteed a thousand dollars for good photos of a great horned owl taking a fish, with a short accompanying article.
—
At three o’clock on this sunny afternoon, Virgil still had good light, but it’d be fading quickly over the next hour and a half. He wanted to be out of the blind before sunset, which came at 4:48. Despite an air temperature of minus three degrees, the river in front of him was open, with wisps of steam rising up like cartoon ghosts. The heat came from the nuclear plant’s cooling towers, which used cold water to keep the nuke from turning into a fiery hell pit of radiation and doom. From the cooling towers, the warm water flowed through canals and a couple of ponds and into the river.
Virgil’s girlfriend, Frankie, had said, “You’ll come back with your balls glowing in the dark.”
“Wrong, ignorant farm girl,” Virgil said. “The cooling water doesn’t touch the radioactive part. You could drink it.”
“You know that for sure?”
“Yeah, I looked it up,” Virgil said. They were taking down the Christmas tree, packing the glass ornaments into boxes of Styrofoam peanuts. “Besides, if my balls did glow in the dark, I’d have some light when I get up at night to pee.”
“Or, even better,” she said, “you could lead Santa’s sleigh if something happened to Rudolph.”
She was not only an ignorant farm girl but a wiseass.
—
Virgil’s great horned target had taken up residence in a nearby oak: Virgil could see its hulk as a dark oval through the bare branches. The day before, he’d seen it swoop down over the water twice but hadn’t yet gotten a good shot, hadn’t yet seen it nail a fish. The problem was, the owl didn’t hunt during bright daylight hours, except for the couple of hours before sundown and the hour or so after daybreak.
To shoot at those times, he used a Nikon 400mm f2.8, paid for by the good citizens of Minnesota who’d bought it in the belief that he would use its lens to apprehend the criminal element. The lens cost something like twelve thousand dollars. Should it roll down the riverbank into the Mississippi, he’d be looking at a major hole in his retirement plan.
So here he was, sitting in a camo tent, eating cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, a prefocused, bazooka-like camera lens mounted on a tripod. He hadn’t gotten the owl yet, but he’d gotten several dozen photos of other forms of wildlife—foxes, minks, otters, bald eagles—all pulled in by the warmth of the open water and the fish roiling the shallows near the shore.
He had gotten one great sequence of two coyotes hunting mice, or maybe voles, in the snow-bent wild grass at the top of the bank. The coyotes would move silently across the snowfield, noses down, ears up, listening for movement under the snow. When they heard something, they’d rear up and come down on the mouse or vole with both feet, pinning the unfortunate rodent to the ground.
Best shot: the larger of the two coyotes passing a mouse off to the other one. Mates? Sisters? Couldn’t tell. Great sequence, but great coyote sequences were a dime a dozen, as were great bald eagle shots. Dozens of bald eagles hunted the open water during the winter, and he could easily fill up a memory card with shots.
—
Virgil was looking at the Safari browser on his iPhone when the owl made its first move of the day. Virgil caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, went to the camera’s viewfinder, picked up the bird, and turned the lens with the bird’s flight and hit the trigger, which fired an automatic sequence of shots, and BANG!
Nothing.
The bird’s talons had touched the water but come up fishless. The owl flapped its great silent wings a couple of times and returned to its perch onshore.
“Get a fish, you incompetent motherfucker,” Virgil muttered. The owl sat on the branch, its head swiveling as though on ball bearings, then cocking sideways.