The Last Ranger

by Peter Heller

Life in Cooke City was hardscrabble.

More than a few people along the park’s borders would abolish Yellowstone in a heartbeat.

A growing sense of organized harassment had begun to percolate slowly up the park’s chain of command; but the chain of command did not at all like making a decision, especially one that carried a smidgen of political risk.

He was a bad poet, or at least unexceptional, which was pretty much the same thing. Poetry is like hunting, he thought: you either come home with the kill or you don’t.

he walked up the hill to West Highlands with a book of short stories by Gogol, his favorite nineteenth-century Russian. His favorite because, of all the towering intellects of an intellectually top-heavy empire, Gogol carried his brilliance the most lightly and was the most brazenly satirical, and…he made Ren laugh.

She took the beer, held it up, clinked his bottle. “To life,” she said. “One part wonder, three parts pain.”

Traffic might back up half a mile from Specimen Ridge in both directions while visitors parked themselves square in their lane, opened doors, and attempted to get gored while taking selfies.

And then he tossed back the Knob Creek and the hot current ran into his chest and he heard Tracy Lawrence on the jukebox ask the artist to paint him a front porch, make it early spring, and on the swing a girl in a calico dress, and Ren was surprised by a rush of grief, which he blinked away.

Les applied himself to Stoly with the same dogged focus with which he assembled a rifle or rebuilt a carburetor.

Kaylee the stolid business owner still carried the rebelliousness of a teenager. How old was she? Twenty-nine? Thirty? Younger? Ren thought how she hovered between youth and middle age as if she couldn’t decide where the greatest virtues lay.

It was a beautiful gun, if guns can be beautiful.

“You know,” Hilly said, finally, “if the earth were a meritocracy and we were graded on how much each species contributed to the well-being of the whole, we’d be fucked. God would blow his whistle at all the people and yell, Everybody out of the pool! It’s why Paul Watson, the Sea Shepherd captain, once said that the life of a worm is worth more than the life of a man. Sounds nuts, but it’s something to think about.”

He knew himself. There was that sense of too much incoming; he knew that he had to bat one away, and the next—start clearing some breathing room—or he’d hyper-accelerate and get out of control.

The door jingled as he closed it and Gretchen looked up, ready with a Hello Tourist smile, though at the end of a long season those muscles were pretty played out, and what she displayed was more of a grimace.

Kid Mog did what Ren thought he might do and turned bodily and swung the handgun toward him. Ren understood that this was probably less of a threat than a startle reflex, but in any city in the United States it would be enough to get him plastered all over the tree trunks by law enforcement.

Nobody thrived on their own. That’s what Ren thought as he watched the rockered slip of a moon rise off the ridge as if on a tide.

This was a woman who shooed bull bison out of campsites with her clipboard, saying stuff like “You know you are better than this. C’mon, honey, c’mon, let’s get a move.” And they did.

Do not double-cross a serious small-town Baptist who has thrown over her high-school sweetheart and business partner for your charms. That could be the moral that Kyle took away from the next five minutes. The claw marks to the girl’s back would heal over; the broken lamp, TV, tiny coffee pot could be replaced…but to observers in the parking lot, Kelli’s screams, and the sight of Kyle fleeing out the back door to his truck clutching a bundle of buckskin, could not be unheard or unseen.

They were idling, truck to truck, window to window, which was the way a lot of important news in the valley was passed on.

“Nothing worth serious study is lovable.”

DA decided not to prosecute, because the conviction rate in this county for high-school fights is near zero. Juries have no stomach for it.”

it’s a fact that moose are one of the most dangerous animals in the United States, injuring many more people than, say, bears, and a mother moose with calf can be particularly tetchy.

Had the moose truly charged and made contact, she would probably have been put down. The calf, too, because she was still nursing. How many innocent lives had been lost in service to Instagram?

There, through the trees, was the valley. Brilliant in sunlight. Amber grass, dark woods, orange aspen. Across the way, the high cliffs of rimrock breaking out of the timber were salmon pink. The river glinted, nearly blue. A day to make the spirit throb.

If you stay within the law you might not have nightmares.”

He had no clue what she was planning, but he’d sensed the hum of it, even as they lay in postcoital rapture.

And there had been no propulsion toward a consummation, because it was already happening, not with the force of an eruption but with the ineluctable press of river water.

The river. A wooded cleft upstream in which he could see the white tatters of a riffle. Gray beach of a gravel bar. The uneven, feathered canopy of spruce and fir. Another bend and a smooth curve of creek revealed, crowded with willows. Downstream, to his left, more woods, and then a crescent meadow of grass making a cove in the trees beside a stretch of water.

Les and Hilly had maybe more in common than they had their differences: the thrawn disdain—of authority, of convention—their cross-grained stubbornness and iconoclast’s temper.