Flight Behavior

  After they had their words, they could only keep walking. The trail climbed to the rocky spine of a ridge that divided the butterfly valley with its dank, looming firs from the broader south-facing hollow above Bear and Hester's house. The lay of the land was plain from up there, the patchwork of brown farmlands below and the blue-gray wall of mountains that contained all. The sky opened by degrees, and it grew nearly too warm for brisk walking inside layers of winter wool. As they descended the south-facing incline, Dellarobia saw a glint of sun reflected off the steep tin roof of Bear and Hester's farmhouse far below. They passed through more groves of these little trees that held on to their leaves for no good reason she could guess, except to rattle like worn-out lungs with any faint movement of air. The woods possessed but one color, brown, to all appearances dead. Yet each trunk rose up in its way distinct. Shaggy bark and smooth, all reaching for the sky, come what may. Hester could have said what they were. She was a fount of strange woodland names like boneset and virgin's bower, for which no person of their acquaintance seemed to have any use. That must be lonely, Dellarobia thought, to have answers whose questions had all died of natural causes. The trees were skinnier here and the woods more open, though still as varied as any standing congregation of human beings. She knew this valley had been cleared of its timber in Cub's youth. So this had all grown up during her own time on earth. The thought amazed her.

  In the clearing she spied a flower and let out a small oh. Hester must have seen it too, the sole speck of white in the winter-killed monotony, just a handful of little fringed blossoms no taller than a shoe. Dellarobia knelt down to get close, the myopic's everlasting impulse, and saw each blossom was a whole cluster of petaled flowers. Black specks danced on filaments held above the flowers' gullets. There were no green leaves, only the floral bunches on naked pink stems poking straight up through matted dead leaves. That looked eerie, like some posy handed over from the other side, from death.

  "That's them," Hester said. "I thought there'd be more."

  "Well, there might be." Dellarobia was not about to dig this one up if it was the sole delegate. She remained on her knees, connected through her thigh muscles to all the hours she'd spent in that posture as if in prayer or surrender, counting dead butterflies. She feared taking her eyes off this one live thing. It could disappear.

  "Mommy called them harbingers. Some of them says salt-and-pepper flower."

  Dellarobia found it hard to imagine the people who knew, much less disagreed about, the name of a Cheerio-size flower that bloomed in the dead of February. What would possess them to come out here and find it?

  "I see more," Hester said. Dellarobia removed her pink wool scarf and laid it in a ring around the first one so as not to lose it, but Hester was right, there were more. Salted across the dun floor of the woods she counted three, four, a dozen small bouquets. Once her eyes knew how to see them, they became abundant. She took the trowel from her bag and dug into the dank forest floor, which was wet and gravelly just under the top inch of matted leaves. While she chipped at the inhospitable garden, the air stirred and in plain sight the experiment ran ahead of itself. Monarchs were already here, this source discovered. She saw two bright drifters coasting tentatively in the woods, and near Hester's boots, the duller orange of folded wings at rest on a flower cluster. Nectaring, that was the verb. King Billy nectaring on the harbinger.

  Beyond all half-answers and evasions one question had persisted, since forever, and it was why. In Dellarobia's childhood it plagued and compelled her, one word, like one silver dollar on the floor of a wishing well, begging to be plucked up but strategically untouchable. Unsatisfactory answers crowded the waters around it, she could measure her life in those: because you are too young, because it was his time, because it isn't done, because I didn't raise you to behave that way, because it's too late, because the baby came early, because life is like that, just because. Because God moves, it goes without saying, in mysterious ways.

  Why the butterflies, why now. Why here?

  Ovid had three theories. Not at first. In the beginning he resisted, wielding nonanswers with the best of them: untestable hypotheses, too many variables. Herbicides, for example. Their sole larval food is milkweed, a plant whose last name is "weed." Pesticides too, spraying on the increase, as warming temperatures bring in the West Nile mosquito. New weather patterns affect everything in the migratory pathways. Both the fire and the flood. But at length he consented to certainty about these few things: It has become much too warm at the Mexican roost sites. With climate change the whole forest moves up those mountain slopes, a slow-motion slipping uphill, a thing she could imagine. The trees have their requirements. With arboreal stoicism they edge toward the peaks, and from there they cannot levitate.

  But that explains why not there. That is not why here.

  His second line of thinking was the OE parasites he'd shown her under the microscope. They stunt wingspan and lifespan. Monarchs highly infected with this parasite cannot fly very far. The annual trip to Mexico seems to weed out the most burdened, keeping the population healthy. But west of the Rockies is a different group, an outsider's club of monarchs that are very infected, and do not fly to Mexico but seek their winter shelter in scattered groves of trees along the California coast. Maybe they portend what is coming. Warmer temperatures correlate with rising infection rates. If the parasite reached a critical level in eastern populations, natural selection might favor short migrations and dispersed winter roosting everywhere, not just in California. The hypothesis is immense, with its multiple bonds of cause and effect, some of them testable. To this end she cut small squares of cellophane tape, pressed them against the abdomens of one hundred live monarchs, and under the scope, counted the dark parasite spores nestled among the ridged, translucent scales. It took hours of acute ocular focus, a headache beyond all known proportions, and an appointment with the eye doctor for new glasses (overdue). Counting the microscopic dots on every centimeter-square of tape was not unlike counting butterflies on squares of forest floor, except that the numbers kept rising. Measuring and counting are the tasks of science. Not guessing, and not wishing. The potential answers are infinite, and no preference among them is allowed: there will be no just-because, or unjust-because.

  She understood. But still, it's why not there. Not why here.

  His third theory concerned devastation in the "spring range," which is what he called a funnel-shaped area on the map, fundamentally Texas. Monarchs that eke out winter in the Mexican Neovolcanics awaken from their torpor to an unruly sexual madness. Males are hormonally driven to assail anything--a quaking leaf, other males--eventually enclosing within their embrace the host of congregated females, and afterward they are spent, fulfilled. Their mates flee with gorged ovaries toward a nonnegotiable deadline, the deposit of perfectly timed egg on the first unfurling leaf of a Texan milkweed, moving inside the consecrated clock of a ticking earth. This, he said, tapping the map on the glass screen of his computer, is all our eggs in one basket. The spring range. Steady through the ages, now its rhythms abruptly faltered, ransacked by drought and unquenchable fires. By fire ants marching north, consuming 100 percent of the monarch caterpillars they chance to meet. Suppose a genetic mishap sent a handful of fall migrants just to the northern edge of this realm of fire ant and firestorm. This far south in the autumn, and no farther, he said, drawing one long finger from the Texas panhandle to the Carolinas, a scattering of migrants overwintering here, where they would not be forced to come back across that desert. A Bible Belt latitude, favorable for its mildness, but a mountainous place high enough to cool an insect pulse to dormancy for the winter wait. Suppose there is only one such place. And that they had been coming here for years, in small numbers, cloaked by this forest, mostly unsurviving. Until precipitous natural selection against the Mexican migrants destroyed most of the population, shedding favor on these pioneers. Their gene, suddenly, the inheritance of a species.

  The explanation was far from c
omplete. A population was only as valid as its habitat. Winter nectar sources remained problematic, when repeated warm spells broke their dormancy, and so did the spring milkweed emergence. There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line. He warned her about this, as a standard point of contention. People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

  And even while he warned her of these caveats, Dellarobia felt a settling down of her lifelong plague of impatience. He did not claim that God moves in mysterious ways. Instead he seemed to believe, as she did, though they never could have discussed it, that everything else is in motion while God does not move at all. God sits still, perfectly at rest, the silver dollar at the bottom of the well, the question.

  On the way to the study site a pine cone war broke out among the kindergartners. The boys took it more to heart, predictably, although the instigator was a big, rough girl in a decrepit parka whose fake fur hood was matted like old shag carpet. She shimmied up a pine trunk and fired away, ignoring Miss Rose's escalating threats about getting sent right straight home with what she called a pink note. Dellarobia had a whole new impression of Miss Rose and what she was up against, in general. This girl, Comorah, exemplified a category of children whose parents, if applicable, would not be impressed by a pink note. She came down when she was good and ready, with gummy black stains all over her clothes and hands that Dellarobia knew would not give in to soap and water. She'd had her own tangles with pine sap up here. Preston seemed both thunderstruck and distressed by Comorah, needing to tell her the munitions were cones, not "pine combs." Undaunted by her indifference, he sidled up to her with this information again and again, just the way Roy would carry around his old tooth-punctured Frisbee to drop at your feet while you did yard work, all afternoon if need be.

  Dellarobia held herself a little apart from her son, curious to observe this ecosystem he regularly navigated without her. She saw that he was reserved but not shy, that other kids ran to him with their special finds such as beetles, and that he stuck close to the willowy, confident Josefina. She was his partner or protector--Dellarobia couldn't quite read it. For all she knew, they might be the only two free-lunch kids, though she doubted it. Some of these youngsters appeared to be well-heeled--she'd actually spotted a cell phone--and others, like Comorah, were turned out in gear that had seen many generations of hand-me-down. But Josefina and Preston seemed to represent some subtle divide of maturity, like the automatic segregation of seniors from sophomores at a dance. Dellarobia recalled their spontaneous hug, that first day Josefina's family showed up on their porch. In retrospect she saw in it some element of rescue.

  Dellarobia felt an unaccustomed remove from all the children in terms of nose-wiping and pink-note threats, which were handled by the proficient Miss Rose and two helpers she'd wrangled for the day. Some of the kids knew she was Preston's mother, but for this field trip she had acquired an aura of special esteem; she was in charge, a teacher-superior kind of personage evidently on par with the principal or Dora the Explorer. Obviously the class had been prepped. Dellarobia had no prior experience in this realm and was struck by their goggle-eyed regard and physical deference. They did not tug unremittingly on her limbs, whine to be carried, or put her outer garments to use as a nose rag. This was quite something, being in charge.

  They began their field trip in the lab, where Ovid understandably had safety concerns. His compromise was to allow eight kids at a time just inside the door for a quick lecture while they waited to be shuttled in groups to the top of the High Road. One of the teacher-helpers drove a van. The livestock that shared real estate here with science became an unexpected challenge. Sheep, especially while undertaking their bodily functions, proved vastly more interesting to some than the lab lecture. Ovid was a good sport. "That is biology too," he said serenely, during a particularly worthy expulsion of methane. Instantly the boys were on his side.

  This outing had been all Dellarobia's idea. She and Ovid had had several well-tempered disagreements about ordinary people mistrusting scientists, and this seemed such a natural starting place, he had to consent. He wasn't crazy about the interruption, but warmed to the occasion, as he was still the gentle teacher who'd pointed at Preston their first night at supper and declared him a scientist. A moment, Dellarobia now believed, that changed Preston's life. You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from everything that comes next. Ovid was patient with their questions about scientists (Do they like to blow up stuff? Could you make a human being?), steering them onto the general butterfly topic. They responded well to any mention of poison. Aposematic coloration was a bright orange butterfly or a wildly striped caterpillar, the bold fellow whose hugely magnified photo was tacked to the wall of the lab. These colors are a stop sign, Ovid explained, warning other creatures not to eat him, or they might very well throw up. Or even die! Dellarobia was touched to see him dressed as she'd never seen him before, in a dress shirt and tie for the kindergartners. Like a slightly more hip Mister Rogers.

  From the lab they proceeded to the roost site in a slow-moving swarm, like bees moving with consensus but no strict arrangements from one hive to another. Dr. Byron promised to join them up there to answer more questions at lunchtime, by which Dellarobia hoped he meant in thirty minutes or less. Meanwhile she was to take the reins. The walk from the van to the study site was eventful. In addition to the pine cone war, which devolved to a beetle-throwing contest, there were some warriors down with scraped arms, a good deal more pine sap, and one winter coat utterly, magically gone missing. Lunch boxes fell open everywhere. Three girls felt they saw a bear or a deer, which occasioned some sustained shrieking. None of it threw Miss Rose, their young teacher whose perfectly streaked, flipped hairdo, cool furry boots, and earnest composure conveyed a touching respect for the endeavor of kindergarten. Like Ovid's tie. Dellarobia felt underdressed, prepared for a regular science day. A small boy in a puffy white jacket like the Michelin Man walked very close to her, constantly picking up the caps of acorns from the trail and handing them over for safekeeping. He was amazingly good at finding them. She probably pocketed thirty in the distance of a hundred yards. He called them "egg corns." Emboldened by his presence, several girls walked in a little assemblage just behind Dellarobia with an air of the chosen. Their know-it-all leader announced the names of shrubs growing alongside the trail, universally wrong: cabbage, water sprout, hash plant. Where did she get that?

  A few children noticed the butterflies as they approached the roost, craning their necks to declaim their astonishment, gathering the whole audience into gasping goshes and wows. Dellarobia heard a few soft curses, probably channeled directly from parents or TV. Butterfly trees, encapsulated branches, prickling trunks: she tried to see it as new, through their eyes. Trees covered with corn flakes. She wished it were one of the magical days when the butterflies swirled like autumn leaves, but being here at all was something for these kids, who seemed unacquainted on principle with the outdoors. Only four had been up here before, two besides Preston and Josefina, though all claimed to have seen it on TV. Today was cold; there was no movement in the trees, and winter had taken its toll. This roost had held upward of fifteen million monarchs, by Ovid's early estimates, but had suffered about a 60 percent loss, much of that in the last few weeks. Even now they dropped, the pattering sound of little deaths almost continuous. So close to the end, they were literally failing to hang on.

  In the little clearing of the study site, the kids settled in a half circle on their sit-upons, which were doubled squares of waterproof fabric stitched together with yarn in anticipation of this very occasion. They had tie-strings a
nd were meant to be worn around the waist like a backward apron, but that didn't work out, so Miss Rose carried them from the van to be distributed, each to its maker, and at long last sat upon. When asked to give Mrs. Turnbow their full attention, the children's settling down looked like popcorn in a hot-air popper, but in time the eyes turned up, ready for the zigzag bolt. Dellarobia was nervous, as new to this as any of them, but did her best to tell the story. That the striped caterpillar is also the orange butterfly, not different but the same, just as a baby that becomes a grown-up is still one person, though they look very different. That the forest of butterflies is really all one thing too, the monarch. She explained how the caterpillar eats only one plant, the milkweed, so that is also part of the one big thing. And she told how they fly. Carrying a secret map inside their little bodies, for the longest time content to hang out with their friends, until one day the something inside wakes up and away they go. A thousand miles, which is like light years to a butterfly, to a place they've never been. Probably they never even knew they could do that.

  At some point Ovid arrived. She sensed some change in the children's attention and blushed scarlet to realize he'd been behind her, listening. She was finished anyway. Ovid, tall and stunning in his tie and genuine overcoat, not his ordinary field gear, clapped his hands slowly and sincerely for Dellarobia, inciting Miss Rose and the children to do the same. He said he didn't have much to add, except to mention what was not so good about seeing these butterflies here. Their ordinary home in Mexico was changing, trees getting cut down and climate zones warming up, much too quickly for their liking. He asked the kids if they ever had a big change at home they didn't like. Every hand went up. Dellarobia envisioned tales of broken transformers or foster care agencies--kids this age could hardly differentiate levels of grief--but Ovid kept to the subject of the wider world and its damage. Animals losing their homes, because of people being a bit careless.