Robbie had related all this to Hilly. He had found her one afternoon at her tripod and spotting scope in the first meadow, two miles up the creek. He talked, then gushed. He spilled everything, maybe because she never lifted her eye from the scope and because he knew she didn’t care a whit about anything he was saying. And because he was young. He would have forgiven Kelli, probably—they were churchgoing Christians, it was how they had met—but when he confronted her, she had declared her intention to leave him for Kyle. “Well, he’s big and handsome and knows a lot about everything,” he said to Hilly, and slumped heavily on a rock. “Also, he says he belongs to some club of millionaire ranchers. Go figure. Me, I’m just me. I guess Kelli is bored.”

  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.”

  Robbie stared at her as if she were clinically insane, probably dangerous. 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.”

  Something snagged in Robbie’s grief-torn mind; she saw it. Some kind of bafflement and relief. She smiled. “My hunch is, she comes back,” Hilly said, and returned to her scope.

  She had related all this to Ren last week, but only to say that if Robbie seemed less than his enthusiastic goofy self, this was why. And they only talked about it once. They did not indulge in Schadenfreude or gossip, because there was enough pain in the world. One night about a month before, Ren had heard her truck in the turnaround below and he came out with two cold beers. When he met her on the path, he could see the streaks on her face. She had been crying.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said with conviction. And then she told him how she had just witnessed a male from a rival pack slay an entire litter of pups. She was close enough to hear the yowls and frenzied barks of the mother, who was trying to defend her young, and whom he had almost killed, too. She took the beer, held it up, clinked his bottle. “To life,” she said. “One part wonder, three parts pain.”

  Now Hilly sipped her coffee and followed the transit of a fox along a berm on the far side of the river and said, “Edgar’s back.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yep. He went viral again.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “If you go up the creek today you might see him.” She dug into the pocket of her cargo pants and pulled out a phone. She tapped it and handed it to Ren. The video began with a wide trail through yellow aspen and the sound of heavy breathing. Then a woman’s panicked voice: “Oh, shit, here he comes. He’s running. He’s charging. Oh God.” Jerky picture, and here, around the bend, comes Edgar, trotting. A two-year-old black bear, small and so plump that most of his parts are round—even, it seemed, his legs. Trundling toward the freaked-out hiker in what is clearly a genial amble—no change in pace at all, no alarmed lifting of the head—a bear fairly used to intruders and heading from A to B, minding his own business, and using the good trail as anyone would. More jostle and panic from the filmer, and then the unexpected hand in the picture, holding the can of bear spray, and then, when Edgar is maybe twenty feet off, a yell and the audible hiss and jet of pepper: Edgar’s head jerked, his whole body shied sideways, he gave a cry like a human child, startled. Ren knew it was always a mistake to anthropomorphize a wild animal, but he couldn’t help it. Edgar flinched back and whimpered and ran off into the trees as if more than his eyes stung.

  He handed back the phone. “Well, that was dumb. Why didn’t she just step off the trail?”

  Hilly shrugged. “ ’Cuz it’s more fun to post something dramatic on TikTok?”

  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 made a sandwich with thick slices of cheddar and the last of the roast beef and wrapped it in a produce bag from the grocery store in Gardiner, thirty-five miles away. He disciplined himself to go every other Wednesday, and sometimes on day ten or eleven he’d begin to keep the trout he caught. There was no limit on rainbows or browns or any other non-native fish, and, in fact, anglers were supposed to kill any they pulled in. They were invasive. So, every couple of weeks, when his provisions got thin, he ate trout. Now he filled a stainless two-liter water bottle at the sink, and took a fresh can of Copenhagen out of the freezer drawer below the fridge. 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 drove. Down the gravel drive to the paved park highway, which was more like a country lane. It was narrow and winding, with no shoulder and regular turnouts, designed to encourage drivers to go slowly but not just pull off anywhere. It didn’t work. The sportier visitors, who had places to be, became impatient with theme-park speed and treated the sinuous, smooth track like Le Mans. Ren wondered why they had come to the park in the first place, or even gone on vacation. They gunned past lines of three or four creeping cars, or tried to, and killed themselves with great efficiency on a regular basis. When they lived, and were compos enough to speak, he often found out that they had a bucket list of sights to tick off and had only eight days of vacation and were understandably in a hurry. Productivity over time. If that’s what fifty weeks a year demanded, it made perfect sense that one would approach the remaining two in the same way.

  The pavement of the park roads was built up in most places a good eight inches off the sloping grade, sometimes more, and when gawkers tried to pull halfway off to take a picture of a swan or a marmot they might scrape their mufflers from the undercarriage, or simply get stuck. The wrong vehicle might just tip over. The ever-popular tall and boxy Sprinter vans were the best candidates. Pete from Cooke City did a roaring business in hauling them back to their feet and cutting temporary plexiglass windows to replace the ones that had been broken so that the grateful campers could continue their tour.

  But no road engineer with a zest for social control could keep drivers from simply stopping in the middle of the highway. A herd of buffalo trying to cross was the best. 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. The bison huffed and snorted and wherever there was a gap they crossed between the cars. A festive, circuslike atmosphere, unless you were trying to get across the park for your bimonthly groceries in Gardiner, or transport a perp to the police station in Cody. In any other jurisdiction in the Lower Forty-eight, the drive from his cabin to Gardiner would take an hour and a half, even at forty MPH, but if it was daylight—light enough to see a marmot—Ren always added an extra hour.

  He rolled out of the Lamar station driveway and onto the pavement and turned right and followed the river downstream. Grassy bottomland here, with broad meadows climbing into the spruce forests on either side of the river, and islands of aspen on the open slopes, their canopies shimmering gold in the sunrise wind and loosing flurries of yellow leaves. Higher up were rimrock outcrops and the wooded ridgelines and a hard featureless sky. And the river itself, on his left, running low through the gravel bars and cut banks, lens clear over beds of colored stones. He could bitch all he wanted, but in truth he could drive this stretch of road every day for the rest of his life.

  He slowed and rounded the last tight bend that led into a narrow granite canyon, and stopped. He pulled over, two wheels on pavement, and got out. Across the river, in a wide swale, were maybe two hundred buffalo, heads down and grazing. They spread like a cloud shadow across the depression between the humps of grassy hills. But that’s not what caught his attention. He lifted his binocs from the passenger seat and focused. Moving toward the herd from upstream was a line of wolves. They came at an easy lope—not running, as they had been the other morning, but at a determined trot, single file, contouring along the hillside. Ren slowed his breath, held the binoculars as still as he could. He counted twenty-one, all adults. Before they got to the muscular hump of meadow that looked down on the herd, they slowed and bunched and gathered. Four broke away—two blacks, a big fawn, and a gray—and continued to a rock outcrop with a view of the bison. They did not crouch. They stood tall, with the downstream breeze ruffling against the grain of their fur and carrying their scent to the grazers. Ren thought that in their proud stance on the bluff they looked like four generals planning the strategy for an assault. They probably were. And now everything began to move. Not hurriedly, but the way clouds merge and spread when there’s little wind. The mass of dark bison coalesced, the outer edges drifting inward, and it was as if there were currents of movement within the swarm, a stream of animals flowing into a tighter bunch closer to the river. Ren saw that these were mothers with their calves. And as the herd moved, the wolves came on, as if on some signal. The four scouts hopped off the ledge to grass and the pack followed, no one in any hurry, lined out across the slope and maybe fifteen yards above the throng. Animal to animal, the wolves looked agile and small and valiant. And then Ren saw something he’d never seen: as the file of wolves made to flank the herd, four massive bull buffalo broke out of its upper edge and challenged them. It looked to Ren coordinated, almost like a drill team—the humped and shaggy bison, with their massive heads and lethal horns, stepped up at the same time, almost evenly spaced along the flank. It was a bias, Ren knew, to give the IQ points to the predators. And as the lead wolf neared the first guard, the bull dropped his head and lunged and swung his horns, and the gray shied and feinted higher, and the wolves strung across.

  All the way across. They would have their eyes and noses on the huddle of calves farther down, but the risks, just now, were climbing. They loped and stayed well clear of the huge bulls and convened again on the hump of the next spur. They gathered all together and turned to survey what seemed now an enemy army, and Ren thought they were discussing it; and then, on no signal he could see, they all swung downstream and went on. Over the hill, away from the rising sun.

  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 drove on downriver. Entered the tight little canyon. The current spilled through boulders that gleamed in the long light, and he came out the other side into open country again and could see the turnoff for Slough Creek up ahead. Slowly, through the loginess, and a hangover from the events of last night, he could feel his blood rising. He was going fishing.

  Chapter Two

  It was his mother who had taught him. She had grown up fly fishing with her father in the Adirondacks and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and her love for the pastime was as much about connecting to her old man and maybe her youth as it was about catching fish. What it seemed to Ren. Because as soon as she stepped into a river or brook—no, before: as soon as she neared the bank and could hear the current, as soon as she unhooked the fly and began, as she walked, to strip line from the reel—she was at home. Her movements were fluid, her eyes brighter, her body was quicker. And she grew. He thought later how magic it was; his mother was petite by the yardstick, and elegant, but, knee-deep in a stream, she was neither. Elegance carries a social aspect. She shed it. It was as if Laura Hopper were freeing herself from the encumbrances of gender and age, and channeling something more primitive and essential, which might have simply been her own childhood. He knew how much she had loved her father and the places they had gone, and he could see as she fished that the love fueled her. She became as devoted and single-minded as a warrior. Sometimes he leaned his rod against the limb of a willow and just watched. And marveled that love could foster such grace. He supposed there never was one without the other.

  Did he love to fish in the same way? No. There had been some hard years between his mother and him. He did not invite her to the wedding, and when Lea died she showed up at the service unannounced, which somehow doubled his grief. And so now he thought he fished in spite of her. Or to remember, in the way movement and muscles remember, a time when he held no grievances and seemed to love all things.

  * * *

  He turned onto the side road and waved at Tenner, who was rolling a mop bucket out of the single-pit restroom at the pullout. Tenner lived in Cooke City and was the happiest maintenance man on earth and looked most like Santa Claus. He had a flowing white beard and a round belly and twinkling bloodshot eyes. When he put on his wire-rimmed granny glasses to read a work order or supply list, Ren conjured elves, a sleigh, reindeer, a Mrs. Claus. There was a Mrs. Claus, but she did not wear a bonnet. Sandra ran a bar in Cooke City called the Crooked Moose and wore short shorts even in winter, and had a jade-green python running down the side of her neck and into her snug sweater. No drunks, not even bikers, gave her shit when she politely asked them to leave.

  Tenner adored his wife and his job—which allowed him flextime to go fishing as long as he got his restrooms cleaned—and so he was generally in a good mood. Ren pulled off. His window was already down. Tenner leaned the mop handle against his own tailgate and walked to Ren’s truck. “Did you stop to give me a dip?”

  “Yep.” No. He stopped because Tenner made any day better. The man was congenitally generous. When Ren’s old black Lab, Carl, had died last March, Tenner showed up at Ren’s cabin with a loaf of banana bread Sandra had fashioned with ears and a tail and a dog collar, and he also carried a fifth of mezcal, which the two finished. Tenner had slept on Ren’s bed, because Ren would not let him drive home, and Ren had slept on the porch in his sleeping bag, because Tenner’s contented snores vibrated the floorboards. That was the last of dogs for Ren: the word from HQ was no more staff pets at remote housing inside the park.

  Ren snagged the tin of Copenhagen out of his breast pocket and handed it out the window. Tenner peeled off a blue rubber glove and shoveled about a fifth of the tin into his mouth. When he got it all tamped into his upper lip and handed the tin back and spat once, a perfect dark jet, he said, “I swore to Sandy I’d never buy another can. So I depend on you, you know.”

  “Awesome responsibility,” Ren said.

  Tenner half turned and looked up the dirt road that hugged the creek through slow flats to the parking area. From there a good trail climbed the stream into the mountains. “Should be good today,” he said. “No moon, and I’ve already seen a couple of hatches. It’s like they get stirred up by the storm.”

  “Wanna come?”

  “Ha. I got a late start. Where’re you going?”

  “Secret.”

  Tenner grinned. He knew exactly what that meant: Ren would hike to the first meadow and, instead of climbing higher, he would walk back downstream and follow the creek as it dropped away from the trail and enter a short rock canyon. Nobody fished there, because the going was hard against the rock walls, and the pools were deep and difficult to wade. Also, it was remote. Tenner had stopped fishing the stretch when he was in his thirties; somehow, as he got older, the slab rocks at the base of the wall got slicker. He could easily imagine losing his balance along the bank and, well, drowning.

  “ ’Kay, be careful,” he said.

  “You seen Edgar?” Ren asked.

  “Nope, he’s staying up in the woods, where he belongs. Plus, he got his feelings hurt yesterday.”

  “I saw it.”

  “I’m just scratching my head half the time.”

  Ren waggled thumb and pinkie, hang loose, and restarted the truck. “Hey to Sandy,” he said.

  “You should go up there and see her and Lauren this evening. You need to get out more.”

  “I might,” Ren said, and pulled away.

  * * *

 

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