The Last Ranger - A novel

Informationen zum Autor Peter Heller Klappentext The best-selling author of The River returns with a lush and vivid mystery set in Yellowstone National Park where a skirmish between a local hunter and a wolf biologist turns violent, and a park ranger, facing his own personal demons, sets out to determine what really happened. Ren is a park ranger, tasked with duties both mundane and thrilling: breaking up fights at campgrounds, saving tourists from moose attacks, and attempting to broker an uneasy peace between the wealthy vacationers who tromp around with cameras and the locals who want to carve out a meaningful living amid this western landscape. When Ren discovers his friend Hilly, a biologist and wolf expert, nearly dead in the steel jaws of a wolf trap, he hopes it’s just an accident, but the small red ribbon tied to the stake makes him fairly certain that it wasn’t. What begins as an inquiry into a known poacher soon opens into the discovery of a local group of ranchers who have formed an alliance at odds with both the park and with Ren’s responsibility to protect it. Rife with surprising humor, populated by a cast of extraordinary characters, each drawn to Yellowstone for their own reasons, Peter Heller once again mines the rich vein where our very human impulses play out against the stunning beauty of the natural world. Leseprobe 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 tu...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Peter Heller
• Editore: Random House USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 01.08.2023
• EAN: 9780593744161
• ISBN: 978-0-593-74416-1
• Pagine: 400
• Dimensioni: 154 mm x 106 mm x 27 mm
• Serie: Vintage Contemporaries
• Categoria: Narrativa > Romanzi