Peter Heller - Celine

“What happened to them?” asked a man in an Australian safari hat.

The guide frowned. “One fall she led the pack out of the park boundary, in Wyoming, and a hunter with a legal wolf permit shot her. The pack fell apart after that, disintegrated.”

The whole group swayed. The guide took a second to recover as well. Finally she said, “That big black female we saw just now, trotting into the shelter of the trees with her own family, that’s Tala’s granddaughter.”

“Wow,” one lady said, just the way Celine would have if she hadn’t been speechless.

She turned to Pete. “We just missed wolves. Wow.” Pete squeezed her hand and they climbed back into the truck and drove north and west. Celine couldn’t stop thinking about Tala and her pack. How easily parents can disappear and families fall apart.

The open valley ran out with the remaining daylight. They entered dark woods and the road turned due east. Somewhere they crossed into Montana. They drove through an unmanned park gate. The road narrowed. The tall firs leaned over it and they lost the sky.

“There,” Pa said. Ahead the painted wood railings of a small bridge flashed in the headlights. Celine slowed. As she did, two then three shadows ghosted across the road.

“Coyotes!” she said.

“Wolves. Much bigger than coyotes. No bounce in the gait.”

“This feels a bit like Little Red Riding Hood, don’t you think?” she said.

She pulled over on the shoulder. This was it, the bridge where the biologists had found Lamont’s truck. With his good parka still in it, his wallet, his knife. Somewhere off to their right, across the stream, the searchers had found drag marks, pieces of clothing, blood on a tree. She turned off the ignition and they got out. The wind rushed in the tops of the trees. The stream lapped and gulped. Night had fully descended and with it the chill of a certain frost. For a while they just stood there.

“This feels like a place of death,” Celine said finally.

“Wildness or death?” Pete said.

“Death.” They stood there listening. “Well,” she said, and shivered. “It’s good we’re here on a similar night. Now I know that if this was all Lamont’s idea he had brass balls. Imagine heading out alone on a night like this.”

“Imagine being married to Danette,” Pete said.

“Good point. Let’s go on into town. This is out of the park. What are we in? Unincorporated Park County? We need the sheriff’s report.”

They decided to stay at the Yellowstone Lodge in Cooke City. It was not in Yellowstone and it was not a lodge, and the closest city was very far away. The motel was a collection of log cottages strung along a rutted dirt driveway. They could have stayed in the camper and poached Wi-Fi from someone, but frankly Cooke City looked like it could use the business. Anyway, the motel had Internet and it might be good to have an HQ and spread out. So they asked for a room with two double beds so they could use one as a map table.

It wasn’t hard to find a place to eat. Cooke City had one short main street carved out of thick woods and they had two choices: a pizza parlor with a pool table that smelled so strongly of stale beer that they did a U-turn in the doorway, and Poli’s Polish. There was also a bar with a neon flashing Pabst in the window. At least there was cell reception. They sat at one of the six vinyl tables in Poli’s and as soon as Celine turned her phone back on it dinged with a new text and a new voice mail. The waitress brought them bowls of iceberg lettuce with lumps of shaved carrots on top. “Comes with dinner,” she said with a thick accent. Her name was Nastasia and she was from Latvia. She had a round face with baby fat around the mouth and skeptical violet eyes, all of which made her age impossible to determine. “I thought this was a Polish restaurant,” Celine said.

“Actually, most of our customers think Latvia is in Poland,” said Nastasia, clattering down two small bowls of white borscht floating with rounds of sausage. “Also comes with dinner.”

The text was from Gabriela.

Cam Travers, Sheriff. Still there, I checked. I guess Park County constituency doesn’t change much so he isn’t going anywhere. Helped me a lot. Trust him.

Timothy Farney, U.S. Park Ranger, Yellowstone Lamar District. Led the search and rescue and signed off on death certificate. Saved my ass. Pitied me I think. Knew I could not inherit or move on for seven more years without ruling of death, so signed. Very grateful to this man.

L. B. “Elbie” Chicksaw, professional tracker. Lives in Red Lodge. Probably disputed findings of the Park Service report. Seemed troubled about the tracks, to me. Ask him. He’s kinda loony.

Lonnie and Sitka Fuzile, owners of the Beartooth Bar. You’ve seen it already, I’m sure. Name sounds Italian but it’s South African. Not going anywhere either, I think they’re Afrikaner refugees disguised as old hippies. They knew Dad well as you can imagine.

Ed Pence, lead bear biologist, man Dad was profiling when he disappeared. Lives in Helena.

That’s it for now. I looked up some of Dad’s old stories. The most famous one from that time was the one he did on the horse country of the Manso River in Chilean Patagonia. All the farms along the river are connected by horse trails only. It’s a gorgeous spread. Came out in the January ’74 issue of Nat Geo. Okay. Let me know what else you need. I wish I could be there.

The voice mail was from Harold: “Twenty-two fifteen” was all it said. She looked at her watch. That was in six minutes. It was the time, New York time, when she was meant to call their prearranged number. That’s how they worked it. She waved over Nastasia and asked if she could use the restaurant’s phone to make a call to New York, it was very urgent and the call would be no more than a minute and she’d be glad to pay. “Of course,” Nastasia waved her to the counter. “Comes with dinner.” She smiled. The phone was on a narrow desk behind the front counter and the register. Celine waited two minutes and dialed.

“Hi doll,” came the gruff voice. Harold always thought he was in a police movie from the sixties. Why not make the most of his job?

He said, “Master chief, Seal Team Three, based Coronado, California. Specialist: sniper. Enlisted ’87. Deployments redacted. Hope that helps. Love ya.”

“Love you, too.”

He hung up.

Celine left a five-dollar bill on the counter and made her way back to the table. She repeated the information to Pete and watched the slight up and down movements of his bushy eyebrows. “No surprises there,” he said as he finished jotting in his little steno book. “Wonder where he’s gotten to. You were going to tell me.”

Celine propped open the laptop and scooted to Pete’s side of the table. There was an open network called “Kielbasa” and she logged on. The GPS tracker she had stuck to the underside of Tanner’s truck was the same model recently used to track a great white shark from South Africa to Australia. The shark surprised the researchers by making the 6,900 mile journey in 99 days. Celine thought that was fitting. She was sure the shark didn’t irritate his trackers by calling them ma’am.

The technology really was wonderful. It worked with Internet, and when they were on the road they had a small map screen that connected via satellite, but it was very expensive to use. She typed in the code for the first tracker and clicked on an icon and a map began to constitute itself. The boundaries of Yellowstone National Park appeared, there was the Yellowstone River and Highway 89, there to the south the Grand Tetons, Jackson Lake, there was Jackson Hole—and there was a pulsing blue dot. In Jackson Hole.