The Last Ranger - Peter Heller

 

The Last Ranger is my first experience with Peter Heller's work but I was immediately taken by the author's storytelling ability and the conflicted characters that populate this tale of what everyday life inside a large national park such as Yellowstone might be like for the rangers and staff who live and work in them. Having spent some time in several national parks in recent years, I've often admired the patience that park rangers display even while witnessing the utter stupidity of an unfortunately high percentage of the tourists they have to deal with every day - but there were things I was still curious about. Well, The Last Ranger, I'm happy to report, not only kept me thoroughly entertained, it left me with a much better understanding of what daily life inside a park like Yellowstone must be like for the animals and humans who live there.

Ren Hopper, a Yellowstone National Park enforcement officer, is still dealing with the personal grief created by the sudden death of his wife. Ren is getting better, but he's still not ready to be around a lot of people, so the isolation and remoteness of his job are exactly what he both craves and needs. The ranger has two or three close friends for support and he's friendly enough with a small circle of locals and park employees, but it is the company of the park's beautiful wolf expert that he enjoys more than most - a positive sign. 

Ren knows the routine well. He realizes that his days are largely going to be spent rescuing clueless tourists from themselves, breaking up campground fights, and dealing with locals who sometimes resent the behavior of tourists passing through their world - but he can always look forward to days off when he can lose himself inside the park's more remote areas. Everything changes on the day Ren spots a poacher, rifle in hand, allowing his dog to chase a young black bear inside the park. As it turns out, the poacher is not only a threat to Yellowstone's bear population, he is also a threat to the wolves who call the park home. And because the park's wolf expert is just as aggressive in defending her wolves as the poacher is in trying to take them, the poacher is now a direct threat to the woman Ren wants so much to protect.

Peter Heller's main characters are complex and flawed, even the ones who make doing the right thing their first priority. Too often, doing the right thing is not easy, and Heller's characters must decide how far they are willing to bend in order to get the job done. It's the age old question of judging when the ends justify the means. The Last Ranger is a literary novel; it is a painless lesson in the behavior of the animals found inside Yellowstone National Park; and it is a crime novel - with the real question being who will turn out to be the criminal, and who the victim.

Peter Heller author photo