Three men live in, and plunder, the wilderness in novel ‘Old King’

The undying allure of the West and that attraction’s lethal impact on the wilderness is a pervasive theme for writer Maxim Loskutoff. There is no part of settling it that doesn’t also involve plunder, he asserts, from the ranchers whose livelihood goes back generations to the miners and loggers who despoil the landscape to tourists who leave their detritus behind.

In Loskutoff’s 2018 collection of linked short stories, “Come West and See,” the tension among those who do the taking devolves into armed conflict. In his 2020 novel “Ruthie Fear,” the confrontation becomes otherworldly. And in “Old King,” a fictionalized Ted Kaczynski makes use of the West and its ethos of individualism-at-all-costs to hide out and build bombs.

In Loskutoff’s hands, the Unabomber, as Kaczynski came to be known, is real but also a symbol of the ultimate outsider in a state, Montana, that’s full of them. The novel is built around the broad strokes of Kaczynski’s life, beginning in 1976, when a bomb goes off at the University of Illinois, wounding a security officer (the first bomb attributed to Kaczynski was sent in 1978 to Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., but I can see how the bicentennial year as a backdrop would be much more stylistically interesting).

“Old King” isn’t just about Kaczynski. Loskutoff introduces two other characters, Duane Oshun and Mason Carnegie. Both men are drawn to Montana, too, but for different reasons.

Duane flees Utah after he and his wife split. He loads up a microwave he bought for her and drives for hours. When his gas gauge hovers on empty, he stops in Lincoln, Mont., to fill up. In the few hours he waits for the only gas station to open, Duane has a meal, gives the microwave to a waitress, meets a minister who gives him a job and decides to stay.

Mason came to save Montana. He arrived in 1969 as a newly hired forest ranger with the goal of restoring the state’s wolf population — through whatever means necessary. Mason throws in with unlicensed veterinarian Hutch Smith. He and Hutch rescue and rehabilitate wild animals, penning them up on Hutch’s property near Kaczynski’s shack.

The three men’s lives overlap — in sometimes terrible ways — but mostly in what it means to live in the wilderness and yet never truly be part of it. When Duane spots a caged bear Hutch is treating, he is overwhelmed: “An impossible power flooded its movements, turning Duane’s elation into a kind of wild, plunging panic, as if he’d come here to be eaten, having finally crossed the line between civilization and his dreams.”

Mason is equally overcome by a black wolf he and Hutch rescue from a trap: “when he looked into the wolf’s yellow eyes, he had the same teetering feeling he had looking north in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, as if he might be swallowed up and emerge as some primitive version of himself, naked and fighting to survive.”

Despite man appearing to have the upper hand in the battle of dominance over the wilderness, that’s deceptive, Loskutoff seems to be saying. Just like a mad bomber deep in the woods, it has little regard for who it hurts because there’s “only the calm evaluation of what was danger and what was food.”

Maren Longbella is a Star Tribune multi-platform editor.

Old King

By: Maxim Loskutoff.

Publisher: W.W. Norton and Company, 304 pages, $27.99.