Peter Heller - Celine

God may have made the world for the last week of September. Celine had thought that about Vermont when she was a child, and she thought that now. They drove along the Yellowstone River in mobile sunshine that tugged cloud shadows over the ridges and into the canyon. The river flowed low and clear over the gravel bars and the willows were yellow and orange and the box elders and cottonwoods loosed their leaves over the water when the wind blew.

When the wind blew the aspen groves sent gusts of leaves into the road. They drove slowly. They saw the silver V of a beaver cutting across a pond banked with alder, and saw his stick lodge covered in mud, and saw one the size of a bear cub clamber out onto a rock ledge and glare. “You are king of the river for sure,” Celine murmured. “But how on earth do you get the mud onto your house?”

She liked to give a quiet running commentary as she drove, it was a habit Pete thought charming. The leaves stuck to the windshield and they drove with the windows open and the smell of sage and grass pouring in with the cold. They saw a grizzly bear running flat out across a meadow. He was huge and humped and he more flowed than ran, and the long sun rippled over his sleek fur like water and changed his colors. He stopped at the edge of the spruce and began digging. “Jesus,” Celine said. She had no idea a bear could move like that. Or that his shoulders would be so massive, or that he could throw up dirt like an excavator.

They drove over a wooded rise and when they came out of the spruce they could see a hundred bison grazing in grass in a bow of the river and white trumpeter swans on the slate-blue water. “Do you think,” she said, “that the whole country was like this once? I mean these mountains? Or is this like some game park? It’s incredible. Living was easy.” She imagined that the Shoshone who had lived here would never have gone hungry.

They lost the river to her canyon and the road rolled through hills of burned lodgepole and down into a broad open valley with a thin creek threading the meadows and stands of black timber like islands. When they smelled sulfur and saw plumes of steam and big parking lots they kept driving. Celine had no desire to join throngs of people; the usual attractions of Yellowstone were not for them. At Canyon Village they pulled in for gas and coffee and beef jerky and bought a book on Yellowstone’s wolves. The store clerk saw them studying the maps in a spinning rack and came over to help. She wore an olive ranger shirt and thick glasses and a pin that said, Ask Me About Bison! “Are you guys on a bus tour?” she said. Celine turned to her and smiled and said, “That would be nice.”

“They have round-trip day tours right from the village, just two miles down the road. They serve lunch at Old Faithful.”

“How lovely.”

The girl looked pleased with herself. “I can get you the brochure if you’d like.”

“What we’d like to know is who handles law enforcement for the park.” This would be a good person to get to know. There would probably be a file on Lamont, even if he went missing just outside the park boundary. A sketch of the case and a discussion of jurisdiction, if nothing else.

The girl frowned. “Is there a problem?”

“No, but we’d like to know where the law enforcement headquarters are.”

The girl was puzzled.

“Just in case,” Celine added helpfully.

“Oh, right,” said the girl. She’d pretty much seen everything; once a Taiwanese man in a tour group asked her in excruciatingly composed English at what age a deer became an elk. “Well,” she said, “I’d just recommend you call 911?” It sounded much more like a question than a recommendation. “If you have reception that is. There are emergency phones at all the restroom facilities.”

“How convenient. But what we’d really like to know is where your chief law enforcement ranger resides.”

“Oh,” she brightened. A lightbulb, high watt, seemed to have gone off. “We have a law enforcement ranger right here. I think I saw Chad in the interpretive area.”

Celine knew when she had been whipped. She beat a tactical retreat. “We’ll just take the book,” she said.

It didn’t matter. They weren’t ready for that talk anyway. Celine and Pete liked to get the lay of the land, literally, at the outset, before they dug into a case. And of course they could find the headquarters and the park’s chief officer in two minutes with another Wi-Fi connection. They bought travel mugs in the gift shop that said MAMA GRIZZLY and PAPA GRIZZLY, and filled them up in the small restaurant. There was a good cell signal, so Celine called Gabriela. She wasn’t worried about a possible phone tap, as everything she needed to know now was old news.

“Without the file in front of you, do you remember the names of the people you worked with up here? Both in the sheriff’s department and in the park?”

“Yes, of course. There were three main people. I can text the names to you as soon as we hang up.”

“Good, text me everyone you can think of. The sheriff you mentioned, the tracker, the bar owner who knew your father, the name of the bar if you know it. Anything you can recall. Pete wrote down a few when he first talked to you, but I’d like the complete list.”

“Okay.”

“Gabriela, do you remember where your father traveled to most? Did he tell you? Or did he bring back gifts from the same countries over and over?”

“His favorite place when I was really little was Peru. He did a big spread on Machu Picchu for Nat Geo in like ’68. You’ve seen the images probably. Pretty classic. And then he went more and more to Chile. Chile, Argentina, Paraguay. I have gaucho ponchos and maté cups, and pink flamingos from the Atacama. Plastic ones. He loved the coast of Chilean Patagonia more than anything, the fjord country south of Puerto Montt.”

“Was he working for the magazine? On those trips, do you remember?”

“Yes. Yes, he was. Do you want me to hunt down the stories?”

“Could you? That might be a big help. I think we may have most of them but I don’t want to miss any. I’m not sure what the research facilities are like at the Cooke City Library. Or if they even have a library.”

“They don’t.”

“Oh, and one other thing. Can you tell me about the Ice Mountain?”

There was a startled pause. She hadn’t expected the question. When Gabriela spoke again her voice was fraught with probably more than one emotion. She said, “It’s way up north in the borderland. There’s a lake there, the color of his true love’s eyes, and there’s a castle there for princesses and their families. Pop said he would take me there. He said the lake sounded like birds and the mountain was the king of mountains.”

They drove north and east into the afternoon. Along Buffalo Creek they had to slow and negotiate a traffic jam on a steep hill where someone must have spotted some charismatic megafauna. The line of cars wasn’t moving so Pa and Celine got out and stretched and walked to the shoulder and squeezed between a heavy woman in camo with a graphic of Bin Laden in red crosshairs on the back and two boys in Duke T-shirts holding beers with insulators that said Vaginivore. A mama black bear was eating popcorn flowers, shouldering her way slowly through the small white blossoms and competing with two butterflies who hovered in and out of the sunlight that streamed through the poplars. One landed for a moment on her ear. Two cubs trundled after, climbing over a log and falling onto each other.