The Last Ranger

by Peter Heller

To Becky Arnold. And to her sons, Landis and Thor. And to her husband, Andy, in memoriam.

Wolves had never once attacked a human in Yellowstone. In Ren’s fantasy they would spare the boy. And when Ren had shaken himself from his reverie, he thought, Jesus, what the hell has gotten into you? Do you think you’re the last ranger that puts the animals first? But that was the anger that frightened him. In his world lately, the life of a wolf, or a hawk, might be worth more than the life of a man.

And so, having this enforced Eden right next door, enjoyed by mostly privileged folks from away who were on vacation, and where idyllic herds roamed and the lion practically lay down with the lamb—it galled. More than a few people along the park’s borders would abolish Yellowstone in a heartbeat. Ren got it. He didn’t mind. He usually met the flipped birds with a smile. He liked to leave the park, and then he loved to drive back in. There was wildness going in either direction.

In the same wooded canyon, and in another creek one drainage over, never far from the park boundary, seven leg traps had been discovered in the last few weeks. Each trap had had a red ribbon tied to the chain ring. It had baffled Ren and the other rangers. A taunt or a brag, who knew. A fisherman had reported the first, and after that Ren had made a point of fishing that stretch and scouting, and he had found the rest. In the silt of the creek at water’s edge he had photographed a single boot print.

The foot was large—size fourteen, it turned out. How many trappers out of the handful in Cooke City had feet that big? There had been other disturbing incursions. Outside of Mammoth, along Lava Creek, an enforcement ranger named Jim Lefevre had his tires slashed. Farther upstream, in plain view of the road, a nesting osprey had been blasted with a shotgun. 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.

And then the note. A week ago, he had been fishing up Slough Creek, and he’d come back to his truck, and tucked under the wiper blade was a cash receipt from the general store in Cooke City. Someone that morning had bought ten dry flies for twenty-five dollars cash. It was folded in half, and Ren opened it, and on the back was scrawled in scratchy ballpoint a stick figure hanging from the inverted L of a gallows and in capital letters below it, each letter underlined, his name: H-O-P-P-E-R.?

but when he landed the job with the NPS and was assigned to Yellowstone his fifth year, he had felt like he’d come home.

Rich scents of wet earth, swollen creek water, rain-sweetened grass. Above him, mist spumed in tatters off the rocky cap of Druid Peak, and off the wet black cliffs farther north. The sky looked scrubbed. The few clouds splayed like empty linens blown off a line. The gusting rain had torn leaves from the aspen across the creek and flecked the ground with yellow like a flight of songbirds just landed.

Ren always thought that planning a day was almost as good as spending one.

“You know, a landscape, more than any other feature of a home, reflects the character of the owner.” And if that stung, and you asked why, she would tell you that it was because it was evolving and aging just like you were, and how you handled it was how you handled yourself.

Poetry is like hunting, he thought: you either come home with the kill or you don’t.

Hilly withdrew herself from the eyepiece and turned. “How can you guys feel cooped up out here?” she said with a sweep of her arm. “Do you really think this is the middle of nowhere? This is the middle of everything.”

She softened. “I’m sorry, Robbie. It hurts, huh? You know, the legendary female 06—I’m talking about a wolf—she had two mates. Two brothers. It could work. Or you might tell Kelli you’d like to take a break, too, tell her you understand it’s a bit…” Hilly hesitated, looked around the Slough Creek Valley as if asking its forgiveness. “Maybe it feels a bit claustrophobic. And when she’s done playing around with John Colter, Jr., who, BTW, to my mind is a mega-sized fuckwit, she can come talk to you about renewing her vows. Just a thought.”

“My hunch is, she comes back,” Hilly said, and returned to her scope.

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

Ren stood. “More coffee?” he said. “No, I’m good. Thanks. Catch you on the flip.” She handed him her cup, and tripped off the porch as lightly as she’d come. And Ren almost reluctantly started his day. The part where he didn’t just sit and listen to the wind rushing in the pines and think again how sometimes it sounded like surf, how the ticking of the aspen leaves in the same wind was prettier than chimes.

He knew himself: how he loved to hold time in abeyance, or try. He never could, of course, because time, like everything else, flowed through his cupped fingers like water, and he knew he could rarely stave off anything that was already in motion.

He packed his vest, waders, boots, and rod in an old Lowe rucksack, checked again that he had bear spray, and headed out the door. Halfway to the steps he stopped, turned back. He snagged his badge off the table and retrieved the .45 automatic handgun from its hiding place behind the fridge. He swung down the pack and slipped them into the top zippered pocket. He was required to carry them even on his days off.

He lowered the binoculars and breathed. He was moved. Not sure why, except that what he’d just seen seemed an ancient dance, enacted probably for millennia. Hilly had told him once that a wolf’s failure rate on a hunt was 85 to 95 percent. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. He felt a little like doing both. And he never knew who to root for.

He fished. All day. Not in the canyon, but out in the broad meadow, whose grass had turned tawny and was crisscrossed with the trampled paths of single browsing buffalo and pocketed with beaten patches where they had lain. They would be the lone bulls, wandering up this high, unassailable and unafraid. Ren had seen them much higher. Once, he had stumbled on one grazing among the rocks above tree line. Here in the meadow were signs of elk, too. He could smell their particular musk and see where they had tracked the thick grass in a small herd and left piles of droppings.

For a while he was movement only, and sensation, and a circle of awareness that encompassed the ridges, the mountain, the meadow, and in which his own distinction vanished.

Is that what he wished for after all? To vanish? Maybe everyone did. He would think later that the sensation was the closest thing to becoming pure spirit. Which, oddly, brought a sense of fullness and relief. Why, then, did we fight death so hard?

He was thinking that and chewing on his second power bar when he saw movement at the bottom of the clearing. It was on the trail where it emerged from the woods, a black shape moving fast.

Edgar. The little bear was hauling ass, straight up the trail. Why? Then Ren heard the single bay, a rising bark cut short. He slid the binocs back along the trail and saw the dog, a blond figure, big, weighing probably as much as the bear and in full charge. It was a massive male golden retriever, maybe seventy yards behind Edgar but closing. Fuck a duck. He swung the binocs farther to his right and saw the third figure, a large man stepping out of the trees. The man carried a rifle. At three hundred yards, Ren could see it was a bolt-action with scope.

He might not beat the dog, but he’d be close. He sprinted. Dodged the dried patches of rabbitbrush, jumped over a tuft of sage, nearly buckled and fell in a hidden dip, recovered, lungs burning. A sprint he could not sustain, but he needed only a little longer.

Ren could see the bulky collar now, probably a shock collar, why the bark was cut short. Whatever the man was doing, he didn’t want it advertised. Ren thought it all in a flash as he stopped abruptly and raised the SIG in a shooting stance with both hands and fired.

Ren could see now a leash trailing from his collar. He let out a long breath of relief. He managed to turn his head in time to see Edgar flow up the trail and disappear into trees. Phew. He guessed a stone had ricocheted with the shot into the dog’s chest or head.

Ren looked back down the trail and saw him coming, hitching along with a swinging limp, no rifle now.

When he was within earshot, the man slowed to a walk. He was big, barrel-chested, and he had huge feet—like size fourteen. He looked from Ren to the trembling retriever, who was rooted to the ground. “Come,” the man said. The dog looked back. Did Ren see fear in his eyes? The golden came.

“What’d you do to my dog?” the man snarled. Heavy face, hard jaw, mussed black hair, no cap. Deep tan couldn’t cover the broken veins of a drinker on cheeks and nose. Had to be Les Ingraham. Ren had no patience now for the brazen bullshit of a poacher.

To watch another navigate their life and surmise motives and emotions was a guessing game at best.

The sun was low behind them and lit the fawn hills and warmed the slopes of black timber to a hundred hues of green that refracted like iridescence as the wind tumbled through the spruce and pines. Where the swaths of aspen ran along a ridge, they wavered and flamed, and the creek bottoms were traced with red-stemmed willows. Only a few evenings like this in a year, Ren thought.

They drove with the windows down and smelled the tang of turning leaves and desiccating grasses. And sage. And the sudden scent of tumbling water and cold stones as they crossed the Yellowstone, and again as they dropped into the Lamar.

That was when they knew they were home. That smell. And the unhurried stony river on their right, and the valley both opening ahead and hemmed by the mountains and ridges on all sides. And Hilly sat up and turned and followed the transit of ...

She turned to him and said over the wind pouring through the windows, “The sonofabitch tried to kill me, didn’t he?” It was matter-of-fact, as if the coyote had reminded her that there was nothing more normal than a predator and a food chain. “I don’t know,” Ren said. “I think maybe not. The trap was out in the meadow, out below your nest.”

“If he was trying to kill you, don’t you think he’d put the trap right in your trail? Or where it’s all beaten down, where you sit?” He saw her shrug. “I don’t know. If not me, he was going after my pack.” He could barely hear her over the rush of wind.

“I’m glad it was me.” “What?” “I’m glad it was me in that trap and not one of my wolves. It’s hard not to get attached,” she said. “I try. I mean I try not to, but I always do. And I always lose.”

“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.”

Is this what happened as life went on? You got less sure about everything?

The turnoff was just a gap in a grove of old aspen. He jounced into it and into a tunnel of blazing yellow leaves and hard blue sky. On any other morning the colors might have pained him, how they enhanced and sharpened each other. But not now; he was driving the track as fast as he could without hitting his head on the roof. It was more of a four-wheeler track than a road, and the limbs of trees screeched against the truck as he plowed through—oh well. He crossed a little park of grass and sagebrush and startled two does. They lifted their heads in unison, ears forward, and showed their pale rumps and bolted.

They had kept the possibilities at bay and continued to learn about one another. To know. So, when they did make love, finally, maybe inevitably, it had shaken Ren to the core. It was like traveling into the center of a deep wilderness and realizing you already knew the place by heart. As he stood beside Hilly’s ticking truck, he understood that the shocking wonder of the night was not that he loved her, but that he had loved her already.