The streets were quiet. Half of the town was eating dinner before the second night of the rodeo and the other half was at a concert at the park’s crumbling pastel band shell. The sound of a swing band fluttered up the river with the smell of grilling meat. They kept the dogs on leashes until the far side of the bridge, and when Jane released them, they all ran onto the island and ducked under the chain blocking an overgrown two-track. The Sutton Ranch ran all the way from this wedge up to the area of the Flats where Harry was surveying. Back when this was the narrower channel of the Yellowstone, the Suttons had built their own bridge, gone in a flood in the fifties, to connect to the rest of their land and an old road that now dead-ended at the river and ran along the edge until it turned south to the Poor Farm and Swingley Road.

Everything that was frayed in life evaporated in the face of beauty. Polly and Jane and the children followed the two-track through green grass, the vault of tall cottonwoods opening to a view of the river, a sandy area, a stone foundation of the old ranch house, gone decades earlier in a fire. The beach was wide and shallow; upstream, the kids climbed on the five-foot dynamite-carved boulders of the ruined bridge’s base. Downstream, they could see the metal of an old diversion dam, long useless, and Polly, who’d seen car bodies in that stretch—old cars were sunk for decades to reinforce ranch banks—told Sam and Helen to steer clear.

The shrinking channel was perfect, barely a part of the river but not yet funky with algae. Sam worried about how the minnows within it would be trapped and started digging a deeper outlet to the river, herding fish through this temporary gate. Jane and Polly set up Helen’s pirate ship so that she could tow it with a length of surveyor’s string in six-inch water, and she pulled it back and forth to flush the remaining minnows while making suggestions. Sam should make her a new island; someone should blow on the sails, or splash and provide some waves.

The light was almost the yellow of the Midwest during tornado season, with a big black cloudbank to the northwest, and Polly tried to guess how quickly they’d have to leave if there was a storm. No wind, not even warning puffs, nothing to disturb the spiral of fighting crows and magpies a hundred yards downstream. She fretted about the dogs, but they were staying close. Polly plopped down on the warm sand, exhausted.

“Let’s go somewhere,” said Jane, sitting next to her.

“I’d love to,” said Polly.

“Seattle. Or even Butte.”