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struck up a conversation with her, laughing and resting his fingers on her forearm as they spoke. He flashed Chuck a devilish grin a few minutes later as he escorted Sarah across the room, his hand at the back of her hot pink vest. Sarah aimed a look of her own at Toby, her eyes narrowed. Toby turned away from her in response.
    Sarah’s dangling earrings twinkled in the gleam of an overhead light as she left the building with Clarence. Toby turned back after they were gone, his eyes on the door through which Sarah had exited.
    Clarence didn’t respond to Chuck’s texts in the morning, nor did he answer Chuck’s knock at his cabin door. When Chuck peered through the front window, he noted the bed inside was crisply made.
    With the Grizzly Initiative team scheduled to head across the lake to Turret Cabin two hours ahead of the Archaeological Team, Chuck wasn’t too worried about Clarence’s arriving atBridge Bay in time for their scheduled mid-afternoon launch. He did wonder, though, how hungover Clarence would be when he showed up at the marina.
    â€œThe effects of global warming in the park are showing themselves more?” Janelle asked.
    Chuck guided the truck along the winding road with one hand. “It’s the only reason we’re here.”
    Janelle clicked the heater fan up a notch. “But it’s so cold, even in June.”
    â€œNot as cold as it used to be. In the last twenty years, Yellowstone’s glaciers have melted away to a few lumps of remnant ice. The park’s alpine regions have lost half their year-round snow coverage, and the speed of the loss is increasing. If present trends continue, year-round snow coverage will be a thing of the past in the park’s high country in another few years.”
    â€œThat won’t take much away from its beauty.”
    She leaned forward to peer out the windshield. Pines swept past along the side of the road and sunlit meadows showed through breaks in the trees.
    â€œYou’re really okay with this, aren’t you?” Chuck asked.
    â€œWith what?”
    He waved out the window. “All of this. I was raised with it. I never can get enough. But you’re a city girl.”
    â€œI was a city girl.” She glanced at Carmelita and Rosie in the rearview mirror. “ We were. You brought us something different. Something better.” She slid her hand from his and rested it on his shoulder. “Way better. It’s like I’ve been handed this gift—you, the mountains. It’s a chance to really live, not just survive, like the girls and I were doing before you came along.”
    â€œSurvive? I guess that explains the courses you’ve been taking—EMT Basic, Backcountry Medicine, Wilderness First Responder.”
    â€œThe girls are growing up. I’m about to turn thirty. You’ve got your archaeology, your thing. It’s time for me to find my thing, too.”
    â€œAnd you’ve decided medicine is it.”
    â€œYou have to admit, it goes well with this outdoorsy life you’ve got us living.”
    They approached a slow-moving recreational vehicle on the narrow road. The lumbering vehicle blocked the lane ahead, leaning as it negotiated the curves.
    The dense forest through which they traveled was one of the three major features of the Central Yellowstone Plateau, along with Hayden Valley just ahead and Yellowstone Lake beyond. The sprawling grasslands of Hayden Valley served as home to vast herds of elk and the wolves and grizzlies that fed on them. Yellowstone Lake, the largest natural body of water above seven thousand feet in North America, occupied the plateau’s southeast corner.
    They’d left the canyon of the Yellowstone River and the river’s famous, thundering waterfalls behind. To the east, the river meandered northward from Yellowstone Lake across the central plateau before plunging over the falls at the north edge of the plateau and on to