The last ranger, p.2
The Last Ranger, page 2
* * *
Day broke nearly clear and washed clean. He slept in, which meant not being out in the dark, and he stepped onto the porch with his first cup of coffee just as the sun balanced on the black timber of Beartooth Pass and warmed the valley. Wolf Running Time. How he would think of it from now on. It was his day off. Must be a Tuesday, then, though out here he had to look at a calendar to know. He thought maybe Hilly would show up on her way through. He hoped she would.
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. Maybe the simile occurred to him because he could hear the meadowlark trilling what sounded like a glad song, an after-rain song. He was resident, Ren was pretty sure, his own cabin was in the bird’s territory, and Ren had been hearing him improvise and embellish all summer and would miss him when he flew south in the next few weeks. Ren couldn’t see the bird now, but at one of his caesuras he whistled a few responding bars and raised his cup. Did the glad singer pause a beat longer, as if trying to interpret his regular interloper? Ren always thought he did, and then the bird warbled on.
Still brisk, but he left the solid door open and stepped inside. He unhooked the skillet from over the gas range and scrambled eggs in an enamel bowl and poured them, hissing, onto a skim of clarified butter. No toaster, but he rolled the eggs onto a plate, pried two more fat chunks of butter from the plastic tub and into the pan, and laid two pieces of bread onto the beurre noisette. What his mother had called it. Twenty seconds a side, and he plucked out the ranch toast with two fingers, fetched a jar of huckleberry jam from the fridge, poured another cup of coffee, and carried it all out onto the porch. He sat in one of the two cane rockers, and used an upended wooden ammo-crate for a side table. It had been used to ship tranquilizer darts. Why the government sent a thousand rounds of darts at the beginning of every season, and why they came from Agriculture, he had no idea.
He ate. Three ravens flew over, just clearing the roof, and croaked a greeting. Below, over the broad meadow sloping to the river, he could see a harrier hunting, gliding just over the browse and hovering abruptly, wings beating—flushing mice, probably, or voles. And farther out, across the stream that now ran low and clear, over stones of a hundred colors, blues and greens and burnt reds, a herd of elk grazed, heads down. He knew the wolves would be watching them from the deep shadows at the edge of the woods.
Again the sense of the world working as it should. He tore off a piece of jam-covered toast and closed his eyes against a current of air moving down-valley. It came off the pass, night cold, and flowed downhill as the river did, and if he listened closely he thought he could hear it in the tallest grass. He breathed. He thought he could sit like this for the rest of his life. This time of day. He loved the stillness and awakening together. He fluttered open his eyes and used the toast to slide eggs onto his fork. Sipped the coffee. What could be better than this? What he often told himself, especially when he needed convincing. And he thought, not for the first time, that though there was no hour that held more stillness and peace, it was also when the hunters in all this country were most active. The night hunters might still kill, and the diurnal predators were just getting started. Wolf and meadowlark, lynx and harrier…and trout.
Trout. Did he want to fish today? Maybe. He might drive down to the confluence with the Yellowstone. The good fishing was a two-hour walk in. Or he might hike straight out the back of the cabin, over the flank of Druid and down into a creek that he never named, a stream so alive with green-gold cutthroat that the grizzlies fished it, too; or they swiped at the thickets of serviceberry that grew along the banks. When he fished there, he almost always encountered a bear. By now he knew that the big male with the scarred face was 631, the sow with two cubs 570. When he saw her he would move fast away and fish another bend, but the battle-scarred boar was never bothered. Plenty of food for everyone. Ren had often fished a run while the huge grizzly foraged and dug on the slope above. Once, the two of them fished the same long riffle—Ren at the very bottom, where he knew he could beat a retreat around the corner.
He was tired, though. He felt hungover, though he had not drunk. He didn’t want to get out of the chair. He would, in a sec, hoist himself up to get more coffee, but this morning he wanted to be in no hurry. Which meant that he would probably just drive a few miles down to Slough Creek and hike up to the second meadow, where he could fish into dark if he wanted; it was a good wide trail, and after nightfall he could find his way down by feel.
* * *
Ren always thought that planning a day was almost as good as spending one. Which meant he was in no hurry now. It had driven Lea crazy. She was his first and only wife. She ran a small nursery-and-landscape business in Denver, with a fiercely loyal clientele who loved her no-nonsense positivity and generous laugh as much as her work. Ren had thought about it often, and he concluded that one of the traits people adored in her was her literalness. That could always cut both ways, but in her it was endearing. When she said she and her crew would show up at seven and be done by noon, she meant it. When she thought your wild English garden looked slovenly and sad and you’d be better off with a few more parking spaces or a basketball court, she buttressed her impression with a “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. God. Her candor could leave the more tender humans in tatters, but somehow it usually just made the clients love her more. She had no patience for hothouse flowers. Ren marveled. Well, he had loved that in her, too. As much because it was so much the opposite of the way he navigated the world—he who spent half his morning daydreaming, and who, among all the other aspirations, had wanted to be a writer. A writer of the wild, like Merwin or Dickey or even Conrad. Well. 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.
They had met in a coffee shop in his neighborhood in Northwest Denver. He was twenty-four, working a job at a brick-warehouse art gallery in the River North district, where his appreciation of art history was channeled into transporting sculptures and hanging pictures and repainting walls. Down at the gallery, they had been preparing to hang a new show by the well-known cowboy artist Maddie Caldwell. The show was a departure for her: most of the paintings, which were large, were of silos or empty landscapes. Empty of her usual subjects, which were mostly wranglers on horseback herding cattle through every kind of weather. These new pieces were insistently quiet. A quiet so pervasive it spilled into the gallery. The usual conceits of drama were wholly absent; there were no wheeling horses, or lowering storm, or driving wind, or even the flattering long light of early morning or late afternoon. The silos and barns and rail fencing stood above their own short shadows, the grass barely stirred, the hour felt no need to explain itself. Ren was transfixed. On a break, he would stand before one or another and feel the curious pull of an ecclesiastical silence. He wondered why a hugely successful artist—one who had delighted many and raked in the bucks with a dependable genre of nostalgic work—why she would make such a departure. What in her life had prompted it? He thought it her best work and wondered at that, too—that, in taking what seemed a step back, she had entered exciting new territory. And…how could that be? There were a billion paintings of barns in the world, and silos, too.
In any event, the gallery staff had been busting ass to hang the show before next Friday’s opening, and they had nearly finished, and the owners had given everyone an afternoon off. Ren never had an afternoon off in the middle of the week, and so 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.
He got a café au lait and sat at a table facing the window and was buried in his book when the door jingled and in walked a tall young woman in torn Carhartt work pants followed by two equally ragged minions who wore hand shears and Leathermans in leather holsters on their belts. Clearly a work crew of some kind. The tall girl took off her safari hat, and Ren, more curious about her just now than the comings and goings of Nevsky Prospect, saw high tanned cheeks smattered with freckles and smirched with mud, a strong jaw, and the forthright amber eyes of a husky. Her cotton work shirt was rolled to her elbows, and her forearms were grimed with dirt, and tendoned. She moved with the balance of someone very strong. Ren had not dated in many months, and suddenly he was more than intrigued. He knew his verbal pickup game was lame at best, and so he slid his napkin toward him and took a pen from the jacket hanging over the back of his chair and jotted his number. Beneath he wrote: “Wish I had the nerve to say Hi but I don’t. BTW you have dirt all over your face. Ren.”
As she passed his table he cleared his throat and said, “Excuse me.” The husky eyes came around, fixed him, maybe mildly curious, maybe holding no expression at all.
Ren said, “Here.” He held out the folded napkin, and she cocked her head barely, touched the tip of her tongue to the corner of her mouth as if she were reckoning how many yards of soil she’d need to cover a plot, and took it. No word exchanged. The crew got their coffees to go and left and she never looked back, not once. And so it was kind of a shock when his cell rang the next day with an unknown number. He was on a stepladder adjusting overhead spot lighting; he heard a woman’s voice, clear, direct, but with a resonant raspy edge, say, “I’m having a glass at six tonight at the BookBar. I might not have dirt on my nose, so you might not recognize me.” And she hung up.
That was Lea. He was already head over heels. He got to the bookstore/café/wine bar ten minutes early, and she walked in the door at six-zero-zero en punto. Also Lea. And she wore clean jeans and a clean button-down rolled to the elbows and her hair was brushed out, and as she scanned the room he noticed how broad her shoulders were. In truth, thinking back on it, he would have taken her hand and gone to the altar right then. How did he know? He knew.
Ren sipped the strong coffee and thought that he would give almost anything on earth to have her in the chair beside him now.
* * *
The memory was interrupted by the faintest click of stone.
His cabin was one of five that were built into a grove of Doug firs. His was at the bottom, at the edge of the clearing, and had the widest view across the valley. The largest was behind him, up the gravel drive, and had served as lodge and common dining area when the station was most active, in the late nineties, when wolves were first reintroduced. It was boarded up now, part of a package of deep cuts that had swept the National Parks across the country. Ren thought it was just another waste of resources in hand. Managed well, the lodge could have been thriving all summer and fall, hosting college groups and grad students studying ecology and wildlife management and, of course, wolves. It could have paid for itself and for a lot more, including, he thought, another resident ranger to help handle the swelling flow of tourists that poured into the valley. The other cabins were now empty except the one at the top, farthest up the creek. Hilly lived there. She had been a college intern when the first wolf pack was established in ’95, and had gone on to study under Bob Ream at Missoula and Doug Smith at Michigan. She was now one of the country’s most respected experts, and she held a professorship at the University of Montana but never taught, preferring instead to spend her time with four-leggeds and pursue research funded by grants.
And now she appeared at the corner of the porch, presto, and leaned her head around, asking for permission. Her thick black braid, threaded with silver, swung off her shoulder. She wore binoculars around her neck. He lifted his cup, summoned a smile. “Come up. I’ve got a pot on.”
“Bad time?” Hilly said. She hovered, poised to move. Ren thought she was spring-loaded, like the wolves she studied. And, like them, she carried not an ounce extra. Her eyes were alight with green flecks, her high cheeks deeply burnished by years outside.
“No. Yes. But it’s never a bad time to see you.”
She didn’t ask what the trouble was. He liked that about her. Because she loved wolves much, much more than people, her dealings with humans were pretty much on a need-to-know basis. He was already standing. “Black?” he said. She nodded. He opened the screen, stepped inside. She came up the steps without sound, as if she were weightless, and sat in the chair farthest from the door. She flexed her ankles and let it rock. Her eyes roved across the river and up the valley. Then she halted the chair, lifted her binoculars, slowed her breathing. As he came out again with the two full mugs, he thought that she held the exact poise of a hunter about to take a shot. But of course she wasn’t. Her reason for being, entirely, was about protection. She was a remarkable markswoman, he knew—he had seen it and marveled—and it was with a bolt-action rifle modified to take a .30-caliber tranquilizer dart. If she wanted to tranq a wolf and get a radio collar on him, and she had to do it leaning out of a helicopter with her Remington, very few could elude her.
She laid the binoculars against her sternum. He handed her the coffee, sat.
“What do you see?”
“A new kill. Looks like a bison calf. Wanna see?”
He held up a hand. “I’ve had enough dead buffalo for a few days,” he said.
She didn’t ask. He had his job and she had hers.
“Are you going to bring in the man who killed my wolf?” she said.
My wolf. That was Hilly. “I’m going to try,” he said. “Try hard.”
“Thanks.”
They sipped the coffee. Ren thought that whoever the poacher was might be lucky if Hilly didn’t get to him first. Word going around Cooke City was that she had started bringing her rifle—the unmodified one, the lethal Winchester that shot bullets, not darts—with her into the field, and not for grizzly protection. And an outfitter whose truck door advertised legal wolf and bear hunts in Montana had emerged from the Lamar Trailhead restroom to find two empty bottles of Karo syrup on his hood. The syrup had evidently been poured into his gas tank, because the truck would no longer start. When Ren had asked Hilly about it, she shrugged, eyes alight, and said, “Gosh, there’s corn syrup in just about everything now.”
Now the sun warmed the grass below the cabin, and the creek burbled. Ren felt no desire to move anywhere. Hilly said, “Your day off, right?”
“Yep. I was thinking about fishing.”
“You’re always thinking about fishing. Sometimes it makes me wonder about the state of your intellect.”
“Well, wolves are always thinking about food, aren’t they?”
She actually cracked a smile. A bona-fide grin. Her hazel eyes danced. “No, not always. Sometimes they think about fucking. And I wouldn’t be surprised if once in a while they thought, That ranger dude really stinks. He should stop using cucumber soap and Old Spice.”
Ren choked on his laugh. He didn’t get the mug down fast enough, and he spilled coffee all over his hand.
* * *
They sat side by side in the chairs and didn’t discuss the weather or the surprising stream of post–Labor Day tourists. Most people would have, just to hear themselves talk. Nor did they range into gossip, which would have been easy, since the young host couple at the campground a few miles downriver was going through a difficult split. Robbie and Kelli were thirtyish and from Tahoe, where they had sold their bakery to come to the wilds to host the Slough Creek Campground. One night recently, Robbie was making his late bedtime rounds—he joked with the guests about turn-down service—checking that everyone was okay and where they were supposed to be—when he discovered someone not at all where they should have been. He was passing Kyle’s place. Kyle was a bearded wildlife guide for an elite tour company based in Jackson Hole who liked to spend the few days between groups camping at the creek. He was a mountain-man devotee. Whenever he met anyone new, Kyle inserted into the conversation that he was born two hundred years too late. That he would have been more comfortable in elk hide than Gore-Tex. Robbie thought that, for a mountain man, Kyle had a very slick mini Airstream trailer with heater and shower. And Robbie grew nervous whenever Kyle pulled up in his truck, elbow out the window, and regaled them with stories of his latest face-to-face encounter with a bear. Robbie concluded—after later hearing some of the tales confirmed by people who were there—that Kyle probably never lied, and he actually had deep knowledge of birds and plants, as well as the charismatic megafauna popular with park visitors. And he was the only person Robbie knew to get a close-up photo of one of the few mountain lions in the park. What made Robbie nervous was how Kelli shone whenever Kyle swung by, how she would set down her clipboard mid–check-in with a new guest and come to the truck. How she laughed at almost everything Kyle said. Well. That night, Robbie was making his turn-down service rounds and, through the gap of a hastily drawn curtain in Kyle’s trailer, he spied Kelli unbuttoning the guide’s shirt. That was all. No in flagrante delicto or coitus interruptus, no fellatio. No Latin involved, no nudity, just that simple act. But in the way she touched him, the way she spread her hand on his chest before undoing the next button, and the tenderness and lust in her eyes, which Robbie could see even in the frugal light of the LED over the sink—the image was more painful somehow than if they had been engaged in anything more vigorous and banal. “I mean,” Robbie cried, “you could almost expect that from a young person cooped up in a sixteen-site campground in the middle of nowhere for five months.”
