Action & Adventure
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The Last Ranger: A novel
The best-selling author of The River returns with a vibrant, lyrical novel about an enforcement ranger in Yellowstone National Park who likes wolves better than most people. When a clandestine range war threatens his closest friend, he must shake off his own losses and act swiftly to discover the truth and stay alive.
Officer Ren Hopper is an enforcement ranger with the National Park Service, tasked with duties both mundane and thrilling: Breaking up fights at campgrounds, saving clueless tourists from moose attacks, and attempting to broker an uneasy peace between the wealthy vacationers who tromp through the park with cameras, and the residents of hardscrabble Cooke City who want to carve out a meaningful living.
When Ren, hiking through the backcountry on his day off, encounters a tall man with a dog and a gun chasing a small black bear up a hill, his hackles are raised. But what begins as an investigation into the background of a local poacher soon opens into something far murkier: A shattered windshield, a series of red ribbons tied to traps, the discovery of a frightening conspiracy, and a story of heroism gone awry.
Populated by a cast of extraordinary characters-famous scientists, tattooed bartenders, wildlife guides in slick Airstreams-and bursting with unexpected humor and grace, Peter Heller masterfully unveils a portrait of the American west where our very human impulses-for greed, love, family, and community-play out amidst the stunning beauty of the natural world.
Officer Ren Hopper is an enforcement ranger with the National Park Service, tasked with duties both mundane and thrilling: Breaking up fights at campgrounds, saving clueless tourists from moose attacks, and attempting to broker an uneasy peace between the wealthy vacationers who tromp through the park with cameras, and the residents of hardscrabble Cooke City who want to carve out a meaningful living.
When Ren, hiking through the backcountry on his day off, encounters a tall man with a dog and a gun chasing a small black bear up a hill, his hackles are raised. But what begins as an investigation into the background of a local poacher soon opens into something far murkier: A shattered windshield, a series of red ribbons tied to traps, the discovery of a frightening conspiracy, and a story of heroism gone awry.
Populated by a cast of extraordinary characters-famous scientists, tattooed bartenders, wildlife guides in slick Airstreams-and bursting with unexpected humor and grace, Peter Heller masterfully unveils a portrait of the American west where our very human impulses-for greed, love, family, and community-play out amidst the stunning beauty of the natural world.
Editorial Reviews
"Heller writes in lean, descriptive, contemplative prose that often reflects a spirit of solitude…Ren, like his literary creator, is a philosopher at heart; you get the feeling he'd do just fine hanging with Thoreau at Walden Pond…The thrills of The Last Ranger...should resonate with any thoughtful reader who considers the human relationship to the world that was here before we arrived, and, hopefully, will be here after we shuffle off this mortal coil."
-Chris Vognar, The Boston Globe
"The opening pages of...The Last Ranger will make you want to become a better human. Heller's style...is Hemingway with the machismo scoured out of it. He can linger romantically on Yellowstone's atmosphere....But his observations and dialogue are typically as clipped as Papa's. Still, his tension within the natural setting is more psychologically nuanced."
-Mark Athitakis, The Los Angeles Times
"Heller offers an immersive story of a dedicated Yellowstone park ranger and the threats he faces down....Strong characterizations, a vivid sense of place, enough wolf lore to fill several NatGeo specials, and a Boy Scout Handbook's worth of wood-crafting tips. Fans of fiction about the outdoors are well served."
-Publishers Weekly
"Fast-paced, elegantly written....Along with evocative descriptions of Yellowstone's stunning beauty, Heller efficiently creates a small cast of fully realized characters, most notably Ren, who's still struggling with grief over the death of a mother who introduced him to the natural world before abandoning her family. But as the author displays in a thrilling climactic chase scene, he doesn't neglect his obligation to bring what at heart is a nature adventure story to a satisfying conclusion....Life and death in nature are close companions in a fast-moving and lyrical story."
-Kirkus
"When describing wildlife and landscapes, [Heller] deploys the precision and cadence of Ernest Hemingway....In a subplot, Heller also dramatizes another threat to our national parks: militias and business interests who want to turn public land into private holdings. Heller's swift environmental thriller reminds us that humans are the most successful predators-but not the only predators."
-Bookpage
-Chris Vognar, The Boston Globe
"The opening pages of...The Last Ranger will make you want to become a better human. Heller's style...is Hemingway with the machismo scoured out of it. He can linger romantically on Yellowstone's atmosphere....But his observations and dialogue are typically as clipped as Papa's. Still, his tension within the natural setting is more psychologically nuanced."
-Mark Athitakis, The Los Angeles Times
"Heller offers an immersive story of a dedicated Yellowstone park ranger and the threats he faces down....Strong characterizations, a vivid sense of place, enough wolf lore to fill several NatGeo specials, and a Boy Scout Handbook's worth of wood-crafting tips. Fans of fiction about the outdoors are well served."
-Publishers Weekly
"Fast-paced, elegantly written....Along with evocative descriptions of Yellowstone's stunning beauty, Heller efficiently creates a small cast of fully realized characters, most notably Ren, who's still struggling with grief over the death of a mother who introduced him to the natural world before abandoning her family. But as the author displays in a thrilling climactic chase scene, he doesn't neglect his obligation to bring what at heart is a nature adventure story to a satisfying conclusion....Life and death in nature are close companions in a fast-moving and lyrical story."
-Kirkus
"When describing wildlife and landscapes, [Heller] deploys the precision and cadence of Ernest Hemingway....In a subplot, Heller also dramatizes another threat to our national parks: militias and business interests who want to turn public land into private holdings. Heller's swift environmental thriller reminds us that humans are the most successful predators-but not the only predators."
-Bookpage
Readers Top Reviews
She Treads Softly
The Last Ranger by Peter Heller is a very highly recommended, exquisitely written novel following a realistic account of a national park ranger. Officer Ren Hopper is an enforcement ranger with the Yellowstone National Park Service. His many duties vary greatly as he deals with often clueless tourists, a park full of wildlife, and local residents. Off duty, he enjoys spending time with Hilly, the wolf biologist, who is passionate about her work. There is trouble brewing between Hilly and a local hunter/trapper, Les Ingraham, who may be poaching too. And then there is someone who is specifically leaving notes that are targeting and threatening Ren. Heller does a magnificent, poetic job capturing the beauty and danger found in the natural environment of Yellowstone, as well as the conflicts between people in The Last Ranger. It is an even paced novel that is part mystery novel with several incidents to investigate and part ode to the natural world. Heller has seamlessly written into the plot many facts and information about wolves, bears, and other animals in the wilderness. At the same time Heller also populates The Last Ranger with a cast of realistic characters with differences and conflicting emotions. Ren is a wonderful, complex, fully realized character. He is thoughtful, contemplative, and purposeful while dealing with the conflicts and questions he encounters. His emotional wounds from his past are present, but help make him the man he is. The Last Ranger would be a wonderful choice for a book club. There are so many details and questions that could be discussed. Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Knopf via NetGalley.
CSShe Treads Soft
I’ve read several of Peter Heller’s books over the last ten plus years or so, but my first, ’The Dog Stars’ remains my favourite - in part because I loved the story, and because it was my introduction to this author, who I knew I would want to read again. I do not gravitate to thrillers, although others seem to consider that his category, his writing strikes me as more ‘thrilling’ than ‘thriller’, the moments of tension and danger are so beautifully written, for one, and I love his descriptive writing, his passion for nature, as well as a sense of compassion for the people who inhabit his stories. This story more or less revolves around Officer Ren Hopper whose job as a Ranger involves protecting the animals who reside there from those people who don’t particularly care about following the rules. He is friends with Hilly, a Wolf biologist, and as such is deeply invested in more than simply protecting them, she studies them to understand and manage them better. But there are others, of course, who want nothing more than to destroy them. This story is brimming with tension that ebbs and flows, but there is also a sense of love for Nature that permeates these pages, and a love for this life far removed from the big cities. There is also love for others, and there is loss, and a rising tension as the story continues. There is an almost spiritual reverence for what we take for granted too often. The gift of this life, this place we call home, and the nature that surrounds us, the trees, lakes, rivers, and oceans. Many thanks for the ARC provided by Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, Knopf
Mark MyersCSShe T
I think what I love about Peter Heller books is his reverence of nature. In The Last Ranger, the backdrop of Yellowstone isn’t just a setting; it is a character. From the animals to the landscape, he paints such a vivid picture that it lives and breathes as nature intended. This story centers around an affable Yellowstone ranger, Ren, who has had a very troubled life. He became a ranger so he could get away from his past. His closest friend is a wolf biologist who studies the packs in the park and takes their conservation very seriously. There are lots of other great characters on the right side of Ren. Then there are some on the wrong, including a hunter/trapper who is potentially a poacher and the emerging threat of an anti-government group. Ren skates a fine line as he seeks to protect the park, its wildlife, and his friends. I love learning things, and Heller does a masterful job of teaching about wolf interactions and what happened when they were extirpated from the park.
Short Excerpt Teaser
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 turn and decide enough was enough. They would fan out in an arc, eyes steady and fast on their prey, and they would flank the father and son. And one of the fast females would feint a charge, and one of the big males would dart in behind and hamstring the man, and in minutes it would be over.
Wolves had never once attacked a human in Yellowstone. In Ren's fantasy they would spare the boy. And when Ren had shaken himself from his reverie, he thought, Jesus, what the hell has gotten into you? Do you think you're the last ranger that puts the animals first?
But that was the anger that frightened him. In his world lately, the life of a wolf, or a hawk, might be worth more than the life of a man.
Now, with the rain gusting against the roof of the cabin, he left the door to the porch wide open for a minute and filled the kettle in the steel sink and set it on the woodstove. He'd make tea. It was late, and he was amped from the night, more from what he'd seen in the buffalo's eye than anything else. The animal was one of those huge, scarred old bulls who had lived a life of hardship and battle and now browsed alone, and dozed in the open, sometimes skylined on a grassy spur because he feared nothing now, not wolf packs nor storm. As Ren squatted over him in the rain, he had thought he saw, beneath the confusion and fear and raw pain, a sadness: after wolves, lions, drought, snowdrifts so deep the calves drowned in them . . . had it come to this? Or maybe the depthless black eye was only a mirror for Ren's own bafflement and grief. In any event, he needed to open the cabin door wide and let the gusts smatter the screen door and fill the room with the cold of the autumn night. On the wind he could smell the faint sweetness of aspen turning and the unmistakable scent of snow, which must now be falling on the highest ridges. It was already past midnight. He wouldn't sleep much.
He picked a smaller stick of firewood out of the box and knocked the chrome handle of the woodstove and let the door swing open. He stuffed in two more chunks of aspen-not the best firewood, it burned ho...
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 turn and decide enough was enough. They would fan out in an arc, eyes steady and fast on their prey, and they would flank the father and son. And one of the fast females would feint a charge, and one of the big males would dart in behind and hamstring the man, and in minutes it would be over.
Wolves had never once attacked a human in Yellowstone. In Ren's fantasy they would spare the boy. And when Ren had shaken himself from his reverie, he thought, Jesus, what the hell has gotten into you? Do you think you're the last ranger that puts the animals first?
But that was the anger that frightened him. In his world lately, the life of a wolf, or a hawk, might be worth more than the life of a man.
Now, with the rain gusting against the roof of the cabin, he left the door to the porch wide open for a minute and filled the kettle in the steel sink and set it on the woodstove. He'd make tea. It was late, and he was amped from the night, more from what he'd seen in the buffalo's eye than anything else. The animal was one of those huge, scarred old bulls who had lived a life of hardship and battle and now browsed alone, and dozed in the open, sometimes skylined on a grassy spur because he feared nothing now, not wolf packs nor storm. As Ren squatted over him in the rain, he had thought he saw, beneath the confusion and fear and raw pain, a sadness: after wolves, lions, drought, snowdrifts so deep the calves drowned in them . . . had it come to this? Or maybe the depthless black eye was only a mirror for Ren's own bafflement and grief. In any event, he needed to open the cabin door wide and let the gusts smatter the screen door and fill the room with the cold of the autumn night. On the wind he could smell the faint sweetness of aspen turning and the unmistakable scent of snow, which must now be falling on the highest ridges. It was already past midnight. He wouldn't sleep much.
He picked a smaller stick of firewood out of the box and knocked the chrome handle of the woodstove and let the door swing open. He stuffed in two more chunks of aspen-not the best firewood, it burned ho...
