The Last Ranger

To life,” she said. “One part wonder, three parts pain.

You know, a landscape, more than any other feature of a home, reflects the character of the owner.

There were few places left on earth where large areas of habitat were wholly protected and mostly intact. Whenever and wherever the protections were lifted, these remnants were always destroyed. Couldn’t humans leave the few remaining tattered patches alone? Voracious. Most voracious predator on the planet.

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!

Now in her mid-sixties, she had “common-lawed”—her words—old Ansel, who used to manage ranches in California and now spent most of his days rereading the Russians. Chekhov, Turgenev, Pushkin. Ren had once asked him why he loved them, as he himself found the going mostly too dour. “I don’t love them,” Ansel had said. “You don’t?” “Nothing worth serious study is lovable.

Ren thought she was beautiful; if her features had a purity it was because, he thought, the light that burned inside her was pure.

Love, money, and the time to enjoy them.

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.

Down out of the trees, and as soon as he did, fifteen wolves stood out of the tall grass and turned.

Inside the park. It was brazen poaching and it was a Fuck You to anyone who cared about the wolves.

Often, when his group encountered a mother bear with, say, two cubs, she would leave her young close to the photo-snapping tourists and go off to hunt by herself. She did it, he realized quickly, because she knew the cubs would be safe from wolves whenever they were close to a group of humans. She was leaving her cubs with the nanny while she took a little Me Time.

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

He told her that on these tours he had begun to see the strangest behavior: Often, when his group encountered a mother bear with, say, two cubs, she would leave her young close to the photo-snapping tourists and go off to hunt by herself. She did it, he realized quickly, because she knew the cubs would be safe from wolves whenever they were close to a group of humans. She was leaving her cubs with the nanny while she took a little Me Time.

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.

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.

They did not indulge in Schadenfreude or gossip, because there was enough pain in the world.