The Last Ranger

by Peter Heller

Part of the deal for him to stay at the research station: he’d supply his own firewood. He didn’t mind. He liked it.

there, five feet below an outlier pine, was Hilly, curled. Right shin above the boot crushed in the flat jaws of a #15 leg trap.

Most of his law enforcement duties entailed handing out summonses to tourists for doing dumb stuff.

He drove and tried to clear his mind. Every fall, the memories came back to him; they came with the smell of autumn the way some people recall the cries of geese flying over in the dark decades before.