The radio call came in at 11:47 p.m. on a Thursday in late October, and Hollis Wren was already half-dressed by the time the phone stopped ringing.

A pair of elk hunters were overdue out of the Selway-Bitterroot, last known to be camped on a tributary of Moose Creek. The weather was a low ceiling and snow above 7,000 feet.

Wren is 68. He flew C-130s for the Air Force out of Pope Field in the 1980s, then twenty-two years for Alaska Airlines, retiring in 2018.

He lives now in a converted hangar at the Stevensville airstrip, south of Missoula, with a wood stove, a yellow Labrador named Pearl, and a 1979 Cessna 185 on amphibious floats that he bought from an estate sale in Idaho Falls.

He flies for a volunteer outfit called Bitterroot Air Search, founded in 1994 by a logger whose son went missing in the Sapphires.

The group has eight pilots on the roster. Wren is the only one who will routinely launch at night, in October, in marginal weather, into terrain that rises to 10,000 feet within fifteen miles of the runway.

He says he is not brave. He says the others are sensible.

On the Thursday call, he took off at 12:34 a.m. with a spotter named Annika Lund, a former smokejumper from Hamilton who has flown with him for six years.

The Cessna climbed out of Stevensville at 600 feet per minute, banked south over the dark line of the Bitterroot, and disappeared into the snow.

“The Cessna climbed out of Stevensville at 600 feet per minute, banked south over the dark line of the Bitterroot, and disappeared into the snow.”

They flew a grid pattern Wren had drawn on a sectional chart taped to his knee. The forward-looking infrared camera, mounted on a strut, fed a small screen on the panel.

At 2:11 a.m., Lund saw a thermal bloom on a ridge above Moose Creek that she thought looked too organized to be elk.

Wren circled twice. The bloom resolved into two human figures and the remains of a fire, in a rocky clearing about three hundred yards from where the hunters' last GPS ping had been logged.

He could not land. There is no strip there, and the snow was too deep for floats on the nearest lake. He climbed, marked the coordinates, and radioed them to Ravalli County Search and Rescue.

A helicopter from Two Bear Air, out of Kalispell, reached the clearing at 4:30 a.m. Both hunters were hypothermic but walking. One had a broken ankle from a fall earlier in the day.

Wren landed back at Stevensville at 5:12 a.m., in a snow squall, with the runway lights at half intensity because of a bulb out near the threshold.

Pearl was waiting in the hangar. Wren made coffee. Lund went home to sleep.

He has done this, by his own count, 211 times since 2002. He has logged 1,847 search-and-rescue hours, most of them at night.

He has been credited with finding eleven people alive and helping recover seven who were not.

He keeps no plaque. He keeps a notebook, in pencil, with the date, the name if he learned it, and the weather.

The notebook has a few blank pages in the middle where his handwriting changes. That was the year his wife, Marian, died.

He started flying again three months after the funeral. He says the cockpit was the only place quiet enough.

When asked why he keeps doing it at his age, he tends to deflect. He says the airplane is paid for. He says somebody has to.

Once, to a reporter from the Missoulian who pressed him, he said that the mountains at night are not, in his experience, frightening. He said they are very large and very patient, and they will let you do your work if you stay humble.

Then he asked the reporter if she wanted more coffee, and she said yes, and that was the end of the interview.