Celine

by Peter Heller

  “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.

  Pa said, “It looks like a Disney cartoon.”

  “It won’t look like Disney when she gets pissed and eats a frat boy.” Celine’s breathing was labored and her eyes were shiny. Pa wondered if the boys’ can holders had set her off. Celine couldn’t stand conspicuous expressions of dominance. The young men were already princes of the universe, if not masters: They were white, male, athletic, tall, attending one of the best universities; they had great teeth and good skin and they didn’t seem to be blind or hitch. They had it made. Why did they have to advertise a contempt for women? Pa knew that it would enrage her and he sometimes thought that she took her rage out on herself. The two boys didn’t even know they had skated: At lower altitude, where there was more oxygen, he was pretty sure she would have ended up in possession of the beer cozies, after speaking to them about respect and their own mothers.

  There was no shade where they were standing and she shielded her eyes with one hand and placed the other on her chest and struggled to get a full breath. She blew out through pursed lips. She closed her eyes and when she opened them they were very wide as if she were looking for air.

  “I think we’re pretty high up,” Pete said. “Do you want a shot of oxygen?”

  “I guess.” She was frustrated. That she couldn’t just stand out here with a group of dumb tourists in the sun and watch a bear.

  “I can get it.”

  “That’s okay.” She gave Pete her hand and they walked slowly back across the narrowed road and he pulled the small oxygen condenser out of the backseat. He turned it on and it hummed and Celine’s hand shook as she tried to untangle the transparent tubing. Pa took the tubing from her gently and loosened the coils and handed her the cannula, which she worked into her nose. Her hands stopped shaking almost immediately and she placed the split tube over her ears and just stood against the truck and breathed. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll just use it a little longer while we drive.”

  They turned east at a sign that said LAMAR VALLEY—SILVER GATE, and now they didn’t see another car. Celine breathed easier. She unhooked the cannula from her ears and handed it to Pa. “There. Good,” she said. They drove upstream along a creek that flowed over stones of many colors, rusts and greens and blues. Just before dusk they came over a rise and down into the Lamar Valley.

  The sun was almost down, fighting through dark clouds and lighting the new snow on the highest ridges. In the filtered light she saw the river lined with red-stemmed willows threading through a broad valley of tall grass. The meadows flowed out of a distance where night had already settled, but islands of aspen, flame-colored, stuttered in a sundown wind. The slopes that held the valley were blanketed in dark spruce and fir.

  And over all the open country, wherever forest gave way to grass, she made out the herds: moving or grazing, the elk in their hundreds, bunched and heads down; pronghorns in little groups; the dark shadow of dozens of bison moving slowly together and the black humps that were the huge single bulls, scattered over the valley like boulders, unafraid of anything that lived. Celine and Pete pulled over and shucked on goose-down sweaters and stood at the edge of the road in a cold wind and scanned with binocs. Pete spotted a pale coyote trotting down a game trail between rock ledges. Celine found two foxes on the riverbank, ruddy in the last light. They saw mergansers in a pool and a heron in the reedy horsetails across the river. On the wind they heard bird cries, very faint, and realized it was the closest elk, mothers calling to their calves.

  “Jeez,” Celine murmured. “All these animals. It’s like a diorama at the natural history museum. When I was little I just wanted to walk into them.”

  Pete would write that night in his journal that when they came over the rise and down into the reach of the Lamar they seemed to enter another time. It felt as if the rest of earth might suffer through its eons of fire and ice, and this valley would remain: Dusk would gather as it always had on an autumn evening, and the elk would bugle and cry, a harrier would beat her wings over the grasses. The wolves that thrived here now would watch them all from the blowdown at the edge of the forest.

  Celine said, “I was looking at the map. This valley pretty much runs all the way to Cooke City. A tributary does. If Paul Lamont is dead, he might have died in this drainage. It’s strange to think it.”

  “There are worse places to go, I guess,” Pete said. “I just don’t get the feeling he is here. Or ever was for very long.”

  Celine reached for Pete’s hand. Her own was icy and his felt warm. He’d been keeping them in his pockets. “I don’t either,” she said. “If he had died here then why would our handsome young friend be so interested?”

  “Speaking of whom, where is he? He seems to be slacking.”

  “When we get back to the truck I can tell you.”

  They decided to wait until Cooke City to track down Mr. Tanner. They wanted to drive the remaining twenty-five miles before full dark. They unfolded the map and drove up the Lamar. The road and the river skirted the base of Druid Peak, a dome of forest glades and rimrock where some of the first Canadian wolves were reintroduced in the nineties. A tributary branched off to their left and continued north-northeast and they followed it. Soda Butte Creek was smaller and the valley was narrower and the black woods ran down off the steep ridges almost to the banks of the stream. The mountains loomed over the river bottom and were walled with high broken cliffs. The rock was striped with seeping water and runneled with thin waterfalls. High up were flecks of white that Pete said must be mountain goats. Jesus—nothing up there b
ut cliff. It may have been the thickening dark or the first patter of rain, but this upper valley felt ominous. Pete had his file of notes open and their GPS in his hand, and he said Lamont’s car was found just about eight miles north. They would hit the spot at about the same time of night that he had probably come through. Even the weather might be about the same.

  Up ahead they saw two white vans parked on the shoulder and a group of people milling. Curious, they pulled over, got out. It was a safari, a group of wildlife watchers just packing up their spotting scopes. Maybe eight of them, in expensive outdoor gear.

  A young woman guide in a black fleece jacket shoved one last tripod into the back of a van and turned and said, “That’s right. Rafaella asked about Tala, the legendary she-wolf. Come over here, all of you, and I’ll tell you.” The eight crowded around her. She wore a knit wool hat and her dirty-blond hair stuck out from under it in a ponytail. She had a round face and a chipped front tooth. “I told you about the Soda Butte pack. One of the first in the valley. Tala came from that bunch. By then there were three established and active packs centered around this area and they were thriving. But Tala had an independent streak from the get-go. She was big and fast, and she was very very smart. Wily, cunning, playful. She began to hunt by herself. The biologists were amazed. The pack would be lying around and she would just get up, stretch, and it was as if she were saying, ‘See ya later, I’m going to go get an elk.’ Incredible. She is one of the few wolves ever documented that could bring down a full-grown adult elk on her own. Again and again. It’s very dangerous work and she did it with ease.” The guide raised her voice over the cold wind.

  “She broke away. Went off to start her own pack. An alpha female if there ever was one. Of course every alpha male in the country wanted to mate with her. She had her pick. And you know what she did?” The guide was very good. She had them in the palm of her wool mitten. She noticed Celine and Pete standing at the edge of her group and nodded. “She went and picked two gawky, gangly adolescent brothers. Who didn’t know crap, excuse my French. She could have had her pick! Did have. And she picked these two youngsters that didn’t have much skill and she mated with both of them and taught them how to hunt. One of the great stories. They got very good at hunting, too. And the pack got strong. That was the beginning of the famous Cache Creek pack.”

  “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.

  She blinked. Couldn’t be. The man had made a U-turn.

  Maybe he was sick of diner food. Maybe she had scared him with her plaid robe! Why was her first emotion disappointment?