Garrett hiked up Canyon Creek, trying to get to a good prospect of the valley, where he could point his radio antenna and hopefully get a signal. He’d been signal-less for a week and a half. Not even a cheep. It was June, an unseasonable eighty-two degrees in the park. But everything was unseasonable these days. That was the problem. Garrett had seen martins, a band of goats, even some moose tracks near the defile of the creek. But no wolverines. Every so often, he stopped and rubbed a deer leg he’d scavenged from roadkill on the scree littering his path, trying to create a scent trail. Anything to lure Q14 out of hiding. It was an act of desperation more than practical science. Best as anyone could tell, there were only four gulos left in the park—the rest had died, or fled to colder climes, or been marked down as “fate unknown.” Soon, if you wanted to find a wolverine in the US, you were going to have to fly to Alaska.
Near Cracker Lake, Garrett veered through a boulder field and climbed a talus slope so he could shoot the transmitter down into the drainage. He wheezed a bit on the ascent. The AQI was in the low hundreds—these days, they got smoke from Oregon starting in May—but it was enough to bother him, squeezing his throat so that it felt like he was breathing fire. The wheeze revved into a cough. Garrett had to sit down for a minute and let the cough run its course: a bit of a shaggy-dog thing, long and disjointed, with several trick endings that left him hacking again, harder than before. He’d turned into his father at last.
Incredibly, Garrett had outlived him. He was sixty-three.
It felt good to rest his knee for a bit. To the west, below Piegan Peak, he could see the cirque basin that held Piegan Glacier—or had for seven thousand years. It was bald now, as gray and snowless as the desert. It still took him aback to see it like that: a tug of grief. Of course, they were almost all gone now, the glaciers, melted to nothing or dwindled into snow patches. At this point only Blackfoot was left, and Harrison, both in rapid retreat. Garrett tightened his knee brace to relieve the pain. Charlie had warned him not to get surgery, but Garrett had done it anyway, refusing to believe that he had osteoarthritis and couldn’t be helped. But of course he did, and couldn’t.
Carefully, he stood up again and unfolded the Yagi antenna and plugged it into the receiver. He turned the gain up to Max, searching for signals near and far. He moved the antenna back and forth, slow as a metal detector. Nothing. Static. Story of his days. Increasingly, Garrett felt like one of those kooks out looking for a beast that didn’t actually exist. A cryptozoologist, tracking the Yeti. He hiked farther up the talus and pointed the antenna toward the south bank of the drainage.
Remarkably, the receiver began to cheep. Garrett’s heart lurched. The yearling had been MIA for fifty-three days. Garrett, an atheist, had begun praying for her survival; just last night, lying in his cot in the ranger station, he’d whispered, “Please, God, let me know Vincent’s fate.” He’d named Q14 this—Vincent, after Vincent van Gogh—because she’d had her left ear bitten off while fighting a grizzly. Actually, Garrett had no idea if it was a grizzly who’d wounded her, but he’d begun to mythologize the animal for reasons he couldn’t explain. He’d always had a curious thing for Q14. They’d trapped her as a kit in her mother’s den, when she was still white as a polar bear, and even then she seemed scrappy and resourceful, trying to bite through the stitches where they’d implanted a radio. Garrett had lain awake all night, worried about the incision coming unglued, her tiny insides spilling out.
It was an Adam and Eve situation really. Vincent and P19, the last breeding wolverines in the Lower 48, needed to mate. They needed to find each other and get on with it, or it was sayonara to the gulos in the park. This would be the final generation.
Garrett checked the receiver again, because there was something strange about the signal, something he was just now wrapping his mind around. It was cheeping double-time. The mortality alert. The radios were programmed to do this if the animal hadn’t moved for a long time.
The radios malfunctioned all the time. In hot weather, like today, it probably meant that Vincent had gone swimming in a creek, or maybe in Cracker Lake, and the thing had gotten cold enough that it short-circuited. Past a certain temperature, the radios liked to slip into mortality mode.
Plus the bearing for Vincent kept bouncing around, as if she were moving. It was hard to tell. She was so far away—almost two miles—that it was hard to get a fix. Garrett turned down the gain on the receiver, trying to get a more precise reading, but the cheeps faded into static.
He hiked back to the truck, then drove to the ranger station to tell Piper what he’d found. Piper reacted to the news appropriately. She screamed. She jumped up and down. They’d been looking for Vincent for a long time. She stopped jumping when he told her about the mortality signal, though Garrett emphasized that he believed the radio was on the fritz. The wolverine seemed to be moving around—though it was possible, too, that the readings were faulty.
“In other words, she might be dead.”
“She’s not dead,” Garrett said.
“But it’s called a ‘mortality signal’ for a reason.”
“Look, I know Vincent. I’ve known her since she was a week old. She likes to keep us on our toes.”
Piper looked at him doubtfully. What did she know? A grad student from Missoula, volunteering for the summer! Of course, he was a volunteer too. At this point, everyone was. Funding for the project had dried up many years ago; they’d kept it limping along for a while, squeaking by with micro-grants from private donors, but eventually they couldn’t afford the running expenses it took just to man the traps. GPS collars, alone, were three thousand bucks apiece. Park officials ended up pulling the plug, unhappy with how little hard data they were seeing and with how much the researchers were handling the animals. That was the explanation anyway, but from Garrett’s perspective it looked a lot like giving up. The population was dying out anyway; why waste the park’s resources on something hopeless?
In the end, he’d used a small chunk of Cece’s inheritance and started the study up again himself. His wife had offered the money, and he had accepted it. “Why wolverines?” she’d asked him once, in the early years of their marriage, and Garrett had not been able to answer her. He’d told her that if he was sixty and still obsessing over them—if people started calling him, say, “the wolverine guy”—she had his permission to strangle him. But that’s exactly what had happened. Not the homicide part, but the rest of it. Incredibly, he was in his sixties; a recent article in the Billings Gazette had referred to him as Mr. Wolverine; he was still chasing after gulos, luring them into traps in order to try to figure out where they’d been and understand them an iota or two better than before. To be honest, Garrett couldn’t really explain it himself. Certainly there were bigger problems in the world than the disappearance of an animal most people couldn’t identify from a photograph. He might just as easily have ended up devoting his life to lynxes, or bull trout, or yellow-bill cuckoos. But no: he’d mistaken the world’s Quick-Pick lottery for fate. And then of course he’d had to spend the rest of his life justifying it, convincing himself it was meant to be. Like Cece and her baboons.
In darker moods, of course, he saw his vocation differently. It did not seem like a fluke at all but a life sentence, masochistically imposed. He could have picked an easier animal to track. But he’d chosen wolverines, the stealthiest animal in the park. Cece called them his “invisible friends.” Which meant a life, basically, of searching.
Hunting for something in the snow.
Garrett drove the pickup out to Canyon Creek, then hiked the trail with Piper through the benchland, taking reading after reading, trying to pinpoint Vincent’s location. Piper watched him sweep the antenna back and forth, perhaps sensing, rightly, that she shouldn’t interfere. She was not beautiful—she was too tall and gawky and fretful for that, hunching around the great outdoors as if she were being bombarded by bats—but there was always a transformative intimacy that arose when you were sharing a cabin with someone. The quirks of their appearance began to seem less quirky and more inevitable, more like an accurate representation of the beauty inside of them. How strange someone’s face is, until it’s not strange at all. You look at each other and laugh; you start to feel a bit drunk all the time; you excuse the things—habits, opinions—that would ordinarily bother you. You feel like the last two people on earth. In Garrett’s case, the intoxicant could be a woman or a man; it had happened with both. In the past, he’d combated this feeling by imagining he had a GPS collar on. He actually did this. He pictured himself with a radio on, then did some mental telemetry and imagined he could track himself a month later, after he’d gotten back from the field. That had always been his strategy: to point his antenna into the future, a month from now. And he could never imagine a scenario, once he’d returned to the world, in which he’d rather be somewhere else than in his own house—rather be with a research partner than with his own family. With Cece and Lana. Not even close. It was a way of sobering himself up. Because that’s the way you lived 90 percent of your life, if you wanted to avoid hanging yourself: sober. Even when he found out about Charlie and Cece, he’d kept his imaginary collar on, resisting the temptation to fuck someone else. Why? Because he didn’t want to. He needed Cece more than she needed him.
Garrett hiked up a skid trail a ways to get another reading while Piper stayed behind, leaning against a krummholz fir. She stooped against the wind, her hair flagging in the precise tilt and direction of the tree’s branches. Of course, Garrett was far too old for her anyway. The days of intoxication were over. He was no longer of breeding age. He walked back down to where Piper was standing, ignoring the pain in his knee. According to his triangulations, Vincent was lurking on the other side of Canyon Creek, hidden among a forest of young spruce.
“She’s not moving,” Piper said, watching him repeat his findings.
“Might be localizing for some reason.”
“In June?”
“Anyway, she was moving before,” Garrett said. “I tracked it from Cracker Lake.”
“I thought you said the signal was unreliable.”
“No, no, it was pretty clear. Unambiguous. She was up and moving.”
Piper gave him a curious look, as if he were a teacher who’d misspelled a word on the board. “Do you think you might be, um, biasing your readings?”
“What are you? Twenty?” he asked.
“You know how old I am. Twenty-four.”
Garrett, who’d been fighting a burr in his throat, began to cough. He turned his back until the attack had passed; when he spun around again, Piper was looking at him with a note of pity. He saw himself, suddenly, through her eyes: one of those sentimental Doolittles, the kind who anthropomorphizes his subjects and begins treating them like pets. Whose data gets compromised because he starts leaving trap-bait out to help them through the winter.
“I’ve been doing this a hell of a lot longer than you,” he said. “I know a fucking live gulo when I hear one.”
Piper failed to respond. Garrett led the way back to the truck, which he drove down to the knickpoint of Canyon Creek, where it cascaded down an escarpment before entering the woods. He was being an asshole, but so what? He didn’t care. He got out of the truck and began to traverse the escarpment with the receiver in one hand, listening to Vincent’s frequency, which came from every direction now, cheeping more and more loudly as he switchbacked down to the tree line. Piper followed behind him, keeping her distance. Garrett’s heart was pounding. It should have been even hotter at the tree line, below the alpine zone. Certainly he was sweating. Was he shivering too?
The radio signal was coming in too strong. He turned the gain down all the way but still couldn’t get directionality. To lower the sensitivity, Garrett disconnected the Yagi and tracked with the receiver only, creeping into the forest, his boots crunching softly on the duff. He followed the signal across the creek, wading through knee-high water to a stand of larch on the opposite bank, where the cheeps from the receiver jumped an octave. Soon the meter was going bananas, showing full bars. He felt parched and strange and sick with fear.
Snow began to fall—huge flaked, evil—swirling all around him. It was over eighty degrees.
“Onion?” Piper asked.
Garrett looked at her helplessly.
“Do I need to call 911?”
“No. It’s not that.” He handed her the equipment. She was right, of course: he could hear the flies from here. “I just…I don’t think I can look.”