Hailstone National Wildlife Refuge, with Owl and Eagle

We haven't even brought snacks for our drive to the prairie northwest of Billings. We've been out a lot longer than we thought we'd be, and we're hungry, Bernie and Luke the Dog and I. It is 8:30 p. m., and after rain and clouds all day, the sun has finally slipped below the valence of dark cumulus that bedeviled the afternoon. It primps up the wheatfields, alfalfa rows, last year's crop stubble, and the remaining tracts of shortgrass prairie with a light so wise and cleansing we might have passed into an El Greco canvas or an Ovidian myth. Long-billed curlews rise, glimmer, and shimmy like kites-white against purple clouds scuttling off to the east. They lure their beloveds and charm us. It's hard to comprehend that somewhere there are pavement and crowds and world affairs-and sumptuous dinners. It's June 11, 2018. It's also June 12 in Singapore where President Donald J. Trump is dining on beef confit with Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Fittingly, confit involves the slow cooking of muscle in its own fat, leaving the flesh tender and moist. The process usually happens to some sort of tough creature, like duck. But Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump are above the consumption of birds. Castrated cattle for those two. A dish for autocrats and despots.