Alone, Oisín would have watched the coyotes for as long as they were there, but he knew the kids would lose patience. Besides, they had only so much light to get to the Museum and back. They marched on, and as they approached the wide flat stone on which the coyotes were sunning, the trio drifted off, disappearing behind the far side of the hill.

“Why do you sit in the river?” another child asked. She had her black hair pulled painfully tight into a ponytail.

“Who are you?” Oisín asked.

“Caitlin,” she said.

“For one thing, Caitlin, I like it.”

“Why?” she asked.

“It feels good.”

“Is the water warm?”

“God no! It’s so cold.”

Caitlin made a face.

“Is it like a punishment?” she asked.

Oisín laughed. Catholics. “No,” he said. “It’s just something I like to do.” Now most of the kids were listening—between the coyotes and Pringles and this story of sitting in rivers, he’d become intriguing, so Oisín decided to tell the plain truth. He would likely never see any of them again, and maybe he could impart this much to them.

“There’s a stream that runs behind my cabin,” he explained. “Snow from the mountains melts in the spring and comes rushing down, and eventually runs past my home, which is on the valley floor. In the summer, it gets very hot—”

“Where?” the mushroom boy asked.

“Where what?”

“Where do you live?”

“Idaho. Can I continue?”

The boy threw his stick and got another.

“It gets very hot in the summer, and for years I’d been just dipping my feet into the river. And then, about ten years ago, I began sort of crouching down in it, for relief from the heat. But the current is strong, and the river’s only about two feet deep, so you can’t swim.”

“Why not?” This was a new boy, the largest of them all. He was bulbous and heavy-legged and had what Oisín hoped were fake tattoos on his ankles.

“Because it’s only two feet deep. It’d be like swimming in a bathtub.”

This boy did some calculating and seemed to concur.

“So one day I was sitting in my chair on the side of the river,” Oisín continued, “and I was watching the river go by, and it just occurred to me that I could put the chair in the river.”

“Why?”

It was the same boy.

“You have a habit,” Oisín said, “of asking why the moment after I explained why. It’s perverse.” The boy slashed a weed with his new stick. Oisín softened his rejoinder with a wink.