The Last Ranger: A Novel

by Peter Heller

Genres: Action & Adventure

Synopsis

The best-selling author of The River returns with a vibrant, lyrical novel about an enforcement ranger in Yellowstone National Park who likes wolves better than most people. When a clandestine range war threatens his closest friend, he must shake off his own losses and act swiftly to discover the truth and stay alive.

“A good story that’s intertwined like leaves afloat in a river with the current of Heller’s descriptive powers… Filled with Heller’s lush writing… Powerful.” –Denver Post

Officer Ren Hopper is an enforcement ranger with the National Park Service, tasked with duties both mundane and thrilling: Breaking up fights at campgrounds, saving clueless tourists from moose attacks, and attempting to broker an uneasy peace between the wealthy vacationers who tromp through the park with cameras, and the residents of hardscrabble Cooke City who want to carve out a meaningful living.

When Ren, hiking through the backcountry on his day off, encounters a tall man with a dog and a gun chasing a small black bear up a hill, his hackles are raised. But what begins as an investigation into the background of a local poacher soon opens into something far murkier: A shattered windshield, a series of red ribbons tied to traps, the discovery of a frightening conspiracy, and a story of heroism gone awry.

Populated by a cast of extraordinary characters—famous scientists, tattooed bartenders, wildlife guides in slick Airstreams—and bursting with unexpected humor and grace, Peter Heller masterfully unveils a portrait of the American west where our very human impulses—for greed, love, family, and community—play out amidst the stunning beauty of the natural world.

Release date: July 25, 2023

Publisher: Knopf

Print pages: 302

Sample

Chapter One

It was the anger in him that scared him. The more time he spent in Yellowstone, the more he wished that people would just go away, leave the bears, the herds of elk, the foxes, the hawks alone. The wolf packs. Yesterday morning he had issued a summons to a man and his nine-year-old son for walking across the shallow Lamar River to within sixty yards of where the Junction Butte Pack were trying to feed their pups.

The river ran through open meadows here, mostly wheatgrass and sage, and on the far side they were hedged by woods that climbed steeply. The four hunting wolves had loped in from a fresh kill down-valley, and the rest of the pack had run to meet them. Nineteen, twenty, strung out in the tall grass—the image frozen like a photograph in Ren’s mind, a portrait of how the world ought to be—the wolves lean from summer, grays and blacks and buffs, one big male nearly white, sprinting flat out in what looked to be a joyous line beneath a wall of trees. They didn’t have to run. But it was daybreak on a brisk mid-September morning, and the pack was all together, and there was meat. The sun had just cleared the pass, and it burnished the grass and threw the shadows of the runners ahead of them. If he himself could feel joy, it was now. And then, through the binocs, he saw the two figures. Man and boy already over the far bank, through the willows, stalking for a better look. Already too close.

Integrity, Honor, Service. He would run. Splash knee-deep across the river, and in forty more yards he would hail them. Yell. The pack, which had known the two were coming since well before they crossed the river—and decided to ignore them—had tumbled together in an exuberant moil, yelping, wrestling, but now, at the shout, they would freeze and stand and look. The father and son would turn, confused. Ren would wave them back, retrieve them, as he was trained to do. Back at the road he would give a stern lecture about harassing wildlife and the safety of the boy and the wolves themselves, and write the man a summons that would result in a five-hundred-dollar fine. He would tell them that the wolves would have tolerated their proximity only so long and so close, and maybe within seconds the entire pack would have raised the alarm and moved into the trees, and that every calorie they spent retreating from the boy and the man was another calorie closer to starvation. Which was true.

But it was not what Ren wanted. What did he want? In a parallel life, the wolves would stand all together and turn and decide enough was enough. They would fan out in an arc, eyes steady and fast on their prey, and they would flank the father and son. And one of the fast females would feint a charge, and one of the big males would dart in behind and hamstring the man, and in minutes it would be over.

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.

Now, with the rain gusting against the roof of the cabin, he left the door to the porch wide open for a minute and filled the kettle in the steel sink and set it on the woodstove. He’d make tea. It was late, and he was amped from the night, more from what he’d seen in the buffalo’s eye than anything else. The animal was one of those huge, scarred old bulls who had lived a life of hardship and battle and now browsed alone, and dozed in the open, sometimes skylined on a grassy spur because he feared nothing now, not wolf packs nor storm. As Ren squatted over him in the rain, he had thought he saw, beneath the confusion and fear and raw pain, a sadness: after wolves, lions, drought, snowdrifts so deep the calves drowned in them…had it come to this? Or maybe the depthless black eye was only a mirror for Ren’s own bafflement and grief. In any event, he needed to open the cabin door wide and let the gusts smatter the screen door and fill the room with the cold of the autumn night. On the wind he could smell the faint sweetness of aspen turning and the unmistakable scent of snow, which must now be falling on the highest ridges. It was already past midnight. He wouldn’t sleep much.

He picked a smaller stick of firewood out of the box and knocked the chrome handle of the woodstove and let the door swing open. He stuffed in two more chunks of aspen—not the best firewood, it burned hot and wouldn’t bank all night, but there was plenty of it standing dead on the pass above Cooke City, and it was easy to cut a truckload. 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. To get out of the park and onto a highway whose speed limit wasn’t forty. Where nobody was gawking. Where the pickups going too fast were the parents fetching their kids from the bus stop down in Ranford, and where sometimes a passing teenager flashed him the finger, because Ren’s truck had a green stripe and “U.S. Park Ranger” on the side, and all things park were bogus because they wouldn’t let the boy or his father kill the wolves in there, or the trophy elk that wandered the clearings so close to the road you could slay them with a shovel. He didn’t mind. Life in Cooke City was hardscrabble. In the summer the tourists came in tidal floods, a local could work sixteen hours a day for thirty days straight, and in winter moms took their schoolchildren over the pass on snowmobiles in the dark. 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.

But once in a while a resident in Cooke City did kill. There was today’s wolf. And now Mink Man was back. 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. Ren laid his Pilot pen next to the track before he took the picture. 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 so the rangers’ reports were tucked into a Review in Six Months file and ignored.

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.?

Question mark after the period. A barb like an uncrimped hook. Ren on reflex took a step closer to the side of his truck, the protection of it. He looked down the line of seven pickups and SUVs still parked at the edge of the gravel road. Backpackers and fishermen, mostly. He glanced at the trail climbing steeply into the aspen. No one.

Tonight Ren wouldn’t sleep much. He knew. The kettle would boil and whistle and he’d steep a chamomile and sit in the chair where the woman had listened to her husband lie. He’d let the buffeting wind from the open door chill his back, and then he’d get up and step onto the porch and let it truly freeze him. Until chest and hands were numb and he began to shake. And then he’d sing—“River in the Rain” or “Guantanamera”—just so he could listen to the hard quaver and chatter, and finally something clean and good would rise in his torso and warm it. “Stop whining,” he would think. “This is fun.” Not whining. “Well, you’re something. This is the best place and one of the jobs you always wanted.” He’d end the song with a loud “Brrrrrr” and body shake, then step inside and close the door and stretch out on the bunk in back and drift.

It was true. It was one of the jobs he’d always wanted. But then he’d been one of those kids who had wished he had a dozen lives to try out. Game warden had been one aspiration—among more conventional careers like cowboy, salvage diver, and founder of a new country—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.

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, ...