The last ranger, p.11
The Last Ranger, page 11
Ren made himself glance at Hilly, and he saw that she was crying.
Chapter Seven
A hurt wolf goes solitary. She will back herself into a spot that can be defended from one direction only, preferably close to water, and she will curl up and let her metabolism slow and let nature take its course. She will heal and grow stronger or she will die. Now and then, if destined to live a little longer, she will hobble or belly-crawl to a creek or a seep and drink. Hilly always marveled at the sense of acceptance that radiated from an injured wolf. Get close and you will trigger the deepening snarl, the ferocity and fear. But from a distance, through the scope, there was sun-gleamed fur ruffling in wind, yellow eyes when they opened not defiant but neutral, waiting for death with a hunter’s patience, as the wolf would wait for the trailing scent of an elk. Hilly sometimes remembered Jeffers’s stunning poem “Hurt Hawks,” the line He is strong and pain is worse to the strong. Not so the wolf; to her pain is pain and comes and goes like weather.
She herself might have felt like backing in and curling up. But she didn’t have that option. The next morning, a little later than the usual daybreak, Ren rapped at her door with a pot of coffee, and within minutes Tenner had pulled in with a sack of Sandra’s butter cookies, and then Pete and Aliya showed up with a bacon-and-cheddar quiche Aliya had made, and Kaylee from the Perk soon after with a commercial thermos of hot Costa Rican French roast. Hilly came onto the porch with her brand-new aluminum cane the color of a cranberry, and Ren noticed that she did not carry her usual reticence but openly winced—her version of a big smile—and invited everyone up. They were part of her pack after all, her clan. She limped back inside and shouldered out again without the cane and the fingers of her hands curled through half a dozen coffee cups, and they all sat in the Adirondack chairs and on the porch rail and ate all the cookies and drank coffee and then devoured the quiche, which everyone swore was the best they’d ever had—to Aliya’s painfully shy delight.
There was no mention of the trap or who had set it. No need. To mention it or dwell. Just as in a wolf pack, there is a pool of ever-evolving communal knowledge, communicated as much perhaps through scents—on fur, on air—as through anything else. It was like that. They knew.
Hilly, because she was Hilly, had probably not said as much as a hundred words to any of them save Ren, but they all moved around each other every day, and raised hands in waves, and voices in greetings, and all knew what the others were up to in a general way, and within a certain territory; and so, season after season, without any of the demonstrative expressions employed by people with less time on their hands, a web of trust was built. And respect. Hilly really didn’t have much truck with people, or use for human society, but Ren noticed that this morning she was relaxed, if still tired. And she told them all that, three days before, just after she had left Ren to his day off, she had witnessed something she had never seen: a golden eagle striking a young badger in a meadow above Soda Butte Creek.
“It was a female, huge. Still,” she said, “why would she do that? Hunt something that you know could kill you that fast, when there is so much else to eat?”
Tenner said, “I guess it’s like me betting on the Knicks.”
Everyone turned to him. He must have read the mix of expressions, because he hastily added, “Okay, it’s not a thing like that.”
Pete said, “Aliya and I saw a show the other night where the Japanese eat these puffer fish that can poison them. Like stone-cold dead in minutes. Didn’t we, Al? Total crapshoot.” He reached into the bag of cookies Kaylee held out for him. “Thanks.” He chomped half in one bite and chased it with a swig of coffee. Then he pinched the brim of his cap for moral support. He said, “But, then, you’d think an eagle has enough adrenaline in her life, with flying around all over the place and stooping at a hundred miles an hour.”
“A hundred fifty,” Hilly said.
“Damn.”
“I know. So then I watched her feed for over an hour. And guess who came over the hill?”
Ren noticed that Aliya was watching Hilly with a mix of curiosity, wariness, adulation. Starstruck. She had probably never been this close to the famous wolf biologist, who had been on television, on National Geographic and Discovery and History Channel specials—the woman her father said couldn’t stand TV people but did the shows in service to her wolves, to raise awareness. The girl now leaned so far forward from her perch on the rail Ren thought she might topple off.
“Two of the Lamar Pack males—493 and 507, a buff and black. She saw them before they crouched. Nothing like the eyes of an eagle. And she hopped and tried to fly, but she was too gorged. Too heavy with her feast. She hopped and spread her wings and tried again, and they charged.” Hilly sipped her coffee and looked at Tenner. “Whaw, this story is making me hungry. Tenn, mind handing me a slice of that awesome quiche?”
Ren was astonished. Once again, he was amazed to see someone in their element. Was this her element, or one of them? He had no idea that Hilly the Recluse had it in her. He had never seen her hold forth or tell a story to an audience of more than one. No, that’s a lie. He had seen her give wolf talks to high-school and college class visitors with reasonable aplomb. But. Front-porch storytelling is a different art, and she was a master, it seemed. Her timing was perfect. She had everyone canting forward now.
“They charged, low and fast. I’m guessing sixty yards. That’s all the distance they had to cover. I don’t think I breathed. She couldn’t get off the ground, this huge engorged eagle. And then I saw her do another thing I’d never seen. She turned down the hill and half waddled, half ran with her wings spread, and finally she lifted off a little and coasted down the slope and right across the river. She had just enough glide. She settled on the cobbles on the other side, and the wolves stopped halfway down the slope and stood in the sunlight. Aw, beauties. The way the light sheens off those summer coats. And they had to decide whether to chase after a bony bird with razor talons or turn back for most of a fat badger who was no longer capable of clawing anyone. So they turned back.”
Ren thought everyone was about to burst into applause, but they held back, it seemed, out of respect for the usually reserved misanthrope.
* * *
When they left, Ren took the seat beside her. He could see the roof of his cabin and a sweep of the valley through the widely spaced pines.
“Nice up here on the mountain,” he said. Her cabin was 150 yards behind his.
“Suits me.”
“Hurt?”
“A little.”
They sat. The morning was still. A reedy cry drifted down from above and behind them.
“Cooper’s hawk,” she said. “Accipiter. Kills birds on the wing. Look out, meadowlarks.”
“Look out, everything,” Ren said.
“Right? I’m reaching my limit with this asshole.” She picked up the cane propped against the chair and stubbed the planks of the porch with the rubber tip as if digging for tubers.
“I think it’s my fault,” Ren said.
She twisted around. “How so?”
“The other night, when I was fishing, when I caught him running Edgar, I got into it with him. I think it just egged him on. I mean, if he put the trap out that night.”
“Well, I would’ve tangled with him, too. Or maybe just shot him right there and bypassed all the talk.”
“Yeah.” Thinking, I was about an inch away. And then, We shouldn’t be having this conversation. “Well, you didn’t take an oath,” he said.
“I did,” she said. “In a way. A long time ago.” Her long hair was loose over her shoulders; she hadn’t had time to get herself together before Ren had arrived with the first coffee. Now she dug into a pocket of her Gore-Tex shell and pulled out a frayed blue hair band. She reached behind her and twisted the thick hank and worked it through the band and doubled it and thumbed it through again. She turned to Ren. She had dark crescents of exhaustion under her eyes, but her movements were crisp.
“I promised myself I would defend the ones who have no voice. No voice in the human world.”
And Ren thought about the howls he had heard the other night, the singing of the single wolf answered by another, and another far across the valley. The inhuman voices. And the hawk gyring somewhere up behind the cabin. The two crickets he could now hear somewhere in the warming grass just off the porch. Last night, when his head had finally and gratefully hit the pillow, he listened for too long to a bull elk bugling in the dark. An untuned fiddle bowed in an echo chamber, breaking high and so loud it blew all the thoughts out of Ren’s head, which was not a bad thing. Those voices had been in these valleys for hundreds of millennia before the first human had muttered and yammered.
“I was just thinking of all those voices,” he said.
Hilly winced her smile.
“I was thinking how I describe them to myself in human terms. ‘Bugle,’ ‘fiddle,’ ‘song.’ Funny, huh?”
“Not really,” Hilly said. “And they only have value in human terms, too. Or cost. As when a wolf strays out of the park and kills a calf. Which is twisted.”
They sat in silence. One of the big pines wheezed, its trunk flexing slowly in a wind they could not feel. “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.”
“Crazy,” Ren murmured. But he was thinking that the other day he’d had almost the very same thought.
“You know I’m not,” Hilly said. “Crazy. Don’t you think you better get to work?”
He laughed, and as he was about to get up she said, “It was me.”
“What?” he settled back into the chair.
“I egged him on.”
“Who? Les?”
“Yep.”
“How?”
Her mouth tightened and she looked away. “I…” She winced down her eyes and he could see the spray of crow’s feet at the corner. “He killed one of my pack. I know it was him. So when you went fishing I drove to his house in Cooke City and taped a wanted poster on his gate.”
Ren stared. “You did? A wanted poster? What did it say on it?”
“It said, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive. For poaching wolves.’ And it had his face on it. Don’t ask how I got the photo.”
Good God. He was going to have a bona-fide range war on his hands. “Is that it?” he stammered.
“I took out a Sharpie and I wrote on the bottom, Better Off Dead.”
* * *
There is a certain respite in work. Simply working. When Ren put on his uniform, which he did now, and strapped on his utility belt, and pinned the badge above the breast pocket, he was also slipping into a role whose lines were mostly already scripted. There was relief in that.
But when he walked to his truck the chain mail of his commission was pierced again. A slip of pink paper fluttered under his wiper blade. He yanked it free with something like fury—for violating this needed respite. Same Cooke City general store, date yesterday, cash receipt, this time for a knife. There it was, in probably Carol’s cursive: Bowie knife 10" $229. Nothing penned on the back, but there didn’t need to be.
That was a threat. Clear and concise. Canny, because not as blunt and legally admissible as Hilly’s simple Better Off Dead. He crumpled it in anger and then reconsidered and opened his fist and smoothed it on the hood of the truck, and folded it, and slipped it into his breast pocket.
He would not let it rule him. Him, her, whoever this was. Sometime today he would drive into Cooke City and talk to Jim and Carol at the general store and ask them who had bought the knife. It was not a small item and they would surely remember; also, whoever it was had been in twice now in a week. “Fuck you,” he murmured to air. “I’ll deal with you later.”
He drove first to Wolf Watcher Hill, where he counted over forty vehicles. The first had arrived in the dark, but now, just after nine, more were pulling over, the lines of cars extending down the edges of the road. The tops of the two mounds were crowded with spotting scopes on tripods. He hit his bar light and worked around the traffic to where a black Range Rover was canted across both lanes, as if the driver was trying to decide where to pull over. He was not really in the mood. Ren set the parking brake, lights flashing, and got out, approached the driver’s window. The morning was warming fast, probably already near sixty-five, but the tinted windows were up. Ren tapped. The window hummed down. A woman, fortyish, in large Prada sunglasses turned to look up at him. Her glossy black hair was pulled back tightly, and she wore full face makeup. In the passenger seat was a girl, mid-teens, with a mass of unkempt curls and a pair of Leica binoculars around her neck.
“Morning,” Ren said.
“Good morning, Officer,” said the woman. She had a strong accent.
“What are we doing?” Ren said.
“I’m…” She searched for the word. “We are presos.”
“Presos.” Ren took a guess. “You are stuck.”
“Yes! Yes,” said the woman as if she had just nailed a question on a game show. “We are stuck!”
“You don’t look stuck.” Ren made himself smile, to let the woman know that she was not in big trouble. “Do you have a license?” he said.
“Yes, yes…” The woman spoke to what must have been her daughter in some rapid Spanish-sounding language that Ren realized was too wrought in the vowels to be Spanish, and too exuberant in the plosives, and the girl undid her seatbelt and dove headfirst into the back seat, where she rooted around in a pile of down coats and fur hats, and came up with a shout of triumph, holding up a Louis Vuitton handbag like a diver coming up with a pearl. Ren was a bit out of the loop on women’s fashion, but he did recognize the signature pattern on the turquoise leather.
“That’s all right,” Ren said. “The license is from Brazil, yes?”
“Yes, São Paulo,” the woman said. “No! I am mistaken. We have the international license.”
Ren held up a hand. “That’s all right. Let’s get you un-preso.”
“Oh. Okay, okay. Okay, great.”
She had a full four feet at either end of her SUV and Ren gave her hand signals and she still managed about a fifteen-point turn, and when she was finally in the lane and pointed back to where she had come from, she let a smile flutter and said, “Obrigado, Officer. We will park now. It is our first time, you know, Yellowstone. My daughter knows all the wolves. By number.” She turned her chin. “Show him the picture,” she ordered. The daughter was suddenly extremely shy and Ren didn’t know why, but though the traffic was backing up in both directions he let the girl reach under her seat for a satchel shoulder bag and unclip it and bring up a large sketch pad with a full-face portrait of a magnificent male wolf. A gray. Done in ink. “It is 382,” she said shyly. “From the pack here.” And she pointed out the back window. “Today I hope to see him in face—in person.”
“Good luck,” Ren said and waved them on, and he meant it.
After Wolf Watcher Hill he drove up to the Lamar River Trail parking lot on the bluff. The lot was already full. He could see hikers crossing the river on the footbridge below. Farther on, two groups were rounding the spur at the base of the ridge. A gorgeous mid-September day in Yellowstone—what else did he expect? This is what the trails and bridges and signs were for, to funnel visitors through an experience of the park that was rich and safe, and to keep them from damaging more of a fragile ecosystem than had already been ceded. This is what gave him a job and, frankly, a home. So quit feeling aggravated, you never respected a complainer, ever.
I’m not complaining.
Well, you are something. Get over it. Whatever’s in your craw.
You know what’s in my craw.
It’s not just Ingraham. It’s deeper than that. You’ve been sailing under a false flag for years.
You think so? Well. In other news, everybody around me is itching to kill each other or looking the other way.
He got out of the truck. It was a good day to stretch the legs. Almost any day out here was. He took his daypack out of the back seat, grabbed an evidence kit and a fleece, a bolt cutter and a bottle of water, and set off down the steps to the trail.
* * *
Ty had said there was no point in establishing a crime scene because in his estimation there had been no crime. Not in relation to Hilly. There was trapping in the park, but that was Ren’s jurisdiction and he could handle it any way he wanted. Ty told Ren he’d never find a print on the traps, not on the one in Hilly’s meadow, and not on the ones along the creeks. Hell with it, Ren thought, there was due diligence. And he wasn’t just going to leave the trap out there to traumatize Hilly if she wanted to go back. He was sure she would. And he also knew her well enough to know that next time she would surely carry a firearm, probably her Winchester .30-06, which did not shoot darts.
