Outside, the sky was dark blue, with just a breath of wind. Seventy-mile-an-hour gusts were routine on this part of the Rocky Mountain front, sixty miles north of Yellowstone Park, but at this moment the air was dulcet, and the town felt sweet-tempered, with only a few crushed plastic glasses in the gutter to warn a traveler of the place’s roaring alcoholic heart. Livingston had only eight thousand people within a county that was twice the size of Long Island, and they were on the brink of peak tourist season. Polly and Jane and the kids stopped at a food truck in the hardware store parking lot and ordered coleslaw and fried clams, though Livingston was a mile high and a thousand miles short of an ocean. They drove to the river and walked toward a bench behind the baseball diamonds, where the dogs could run around. An osprey platform stood between the lights on the outfield fence, and the dogs sniffed for bones and scraps underneath. From the higher ground on the river path, Jane said she saw two small heads bobbing around an adult osprey in the nest, rather than the three Polly had counted the day before, and Jane wondered if the third chick had blown out during the wind the night before.

The third osprey chick was fine, said Polly. Maybe it was in the deep center of the nest. The dogs would find the body if it wasn’t.

The kids and dogs zigzagged around the field. “Something else may have eaten it already,” said Jane, who had an ancient view of life.

Polly pushed such thoughts away. The bench faced south toward the river, the still-green hills and white-tipped Absaroka Mountains, all the snow from the tops and the darker north-facing slopes still plummeting into the Yellowstone, where it joined the immense melt from the caldera of Yellowstone Park and plunged on to the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Gulf. The river swirled and thundered, but the level would drop quickly. This green world would burn up in August when the fires kicked in. If Ariel’s friends had waited even one week to float, she might not be out there now, invisible.

Why, thought Polly, losing herself for a second, ripping herself back. They watched a disembodied kite flit above a lonely cow on the far side, above trees and rocks, below the osprey’s circling mate. Jane’s spaniel, a blur with millipede legs, hadn’t seen much beyond her own Michigan backyard, and barked at a stroller, an alien. The couple pushing it showed no sense of humor. She barked at the oblivious day-trippers passing on the Yellowstone River, too. Jane and Polly avoided looking directly at the water until the county’s search boats appeared.

“It seems like a tremendous waste of time,” said Jane. “They can’t see anything in that water.”