During the week Jo sits in a clearing outside La Sal for eight hours every day in hundred-and-five-degree temperatures. The wind has been at least forty knots every day, sometimes fifty and sixty, and it hasn’t rained all summer. She baby-sits peregrine falcons and breeding bald eagles, and her lashless eyes are white-circled from whole days peering through binoculars, waiting for fledglings to emerge from aeries. Her eagles have kept a spare nest all summer, a nest they don’t seem to use, like it’s there for emergencies. So she has three nests to monitor, one empty, two full, and she never looks up from her lenses. I play with the soft down on her cheek and note that it’s still there. It’s under her arms, too, and she says it’ll grow back on her arms and legs.

I slide out of bed, find my shoes and step over Inger in her sleeping bag by the door. Her guitar leans against the screen wall and I’m careful not to bump it. She opens her eyes and smiles at me when I ease the door closed.

The Forest Service let me salvage the screenhouse to live in until we build. It’s twelve feet by twelve, with a solid roof, and it held pamphlets on wildlife on the Colorado River before I reassembled it here. We have to bring water in, so I hike to the well, swinging the empty six-gallon bottle against the tamarisk, and thinking what to do about the knapweed. The well is a good, deep one, and the water comes up clear. From the pump I can see the bluffs across the river a half mile away, but mostly I can see sky. After a week down in a canyon, I can never wait to get back to a full-sized sky, to weather I can see coming.

I lug the heavy bottle back, and the women are sitting up, with their legs swaddled in their sleeping bags like puffy blue mermaids. From outside the screenhouse they look like twins, in their braids. They’ve been best friends since college, since before I knew Jo. I can hear their voices from outside, deep alto voices that make strangers think they’re tired, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. When I come into the screenhouse they stop talking, and smile up at me. I’m forty-nine, so much older than both of them, and still they flummox me.

“What?” I say.