Preston looked at her with frank disbelief, and she corrected herself. “I didn’t say that right—if something’s dead, you can’t bring it back. But if a lamb is not breathing when it’s born, this is how you can help get it going.”
“By throwing it?” he asked incredulously.
She scanned the writing on the page. “He’s not throwing it, he’s swinging it around in a circle. If the lamb is born with its nose and throat plugged with mucus, this is what you’re supposed to do. ‘Grasp it firmly by the hind legs and swing it,’ is what the book says. The centrifugal force will clear out the nose and lungs.”
The text also advised, “Make certain there are no obstructions in your path,” but that brought to mind a violent, cartoonlike outcome, so she didn’t read that part aloud. She was mindful of how the kids took their cues from her on what to take seriously, even at hectic times like this, the eye of their morning tornado.
Preston asked quietly, “Will we have to do that?”
“Oh, sweetie. No.” She eyed the plaid bear that still dangled from Cordie’s high-chair tray. How tempted she was to snatch it up by its heels and give it a practice whirl around the kitchen, lightening this mood, giving her children the easy gift of a belly laugh, but the better part of her nature resisted. A life was a life. She’d been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation.
The cold was stupefying. She pulled on her heavy wool cap and mittens as she hoofed it up the hill, wishing for a scarf to pull across her nose. The frigid air prickled inside her nostrils and her eyes felt sticky, as if her tears were freezing up. She’d stuffed four clean pillowcases into a big shoulder bag along with her lunch and other necessities. On the outside chance she’d misunderstood Pete’s instructions, those linens could spend a quiet morning hiding out in her purse. She wished she’d taken the time to put on more clothes. She had not checked the temperature at Ovid’s camper, did not know when or if she’d bring herself to try that again, but this had to be mid-twenties, if not lower. Or maybe she’d forgotten how to judge the cold, in the course of these mild, dreary months.
At the top of the pasture she was surprised to see a drift of white on the dark tree branches and the shady floor of the woods. Snow had fallen in the night. The sky had cleared and the early light had melted any trace of it from the fields below, if it had stuck there. But up here on the mountain it was winter. The idea of snow on the butterfly trees pulled her toward panic. Snow falling on the butterflies themselves, their brittle wings and tender bodies, was a heartbreak she had failed as yet to imagine. She hit the trail at a hard lope and would have run, if she were a thousand packs of cigarettes younger. Briefly she considered going back to get the ATV, but knew there was no real need. Her presence at this disaster could not alter it, the damage was done.
Snow softened the forest’s darkness, dusting evergreen limbs with light and reflecting the bright sky. Where the trail to the study site branched off from the gravel road, she noted that even this smaller path had become well marked by use. Signs of the visitors and their leavings were everywhere, blackened rocks pulled together for campfires, twinkling bits of broken glass rising through the thin floor of snow. She slowed her pace, to keep breathing, and tried to be observant. Clumps of snow-covered leaves high in the branches caught her eye, squirrel nests, but no living butterflies.
She descended the very steep side trail that led directly into the valley of the roost site, passing near what looked like an encampment fifty feet or so from the trail. Dellarobia had never camped out in her life—the appeal of sleeping in a nylon shroud was beyond her—but plenty of people felt otherwise, obviously, and some of them were living up here. The presence of strangers was no longer especially strange, but she felt an awkward shyness peering into the intimacy of these people’s morning lives, hearing the muffled sounds of their zippers and voices. She could smell their coffee. There were six or seven, young men she assumed, but who could say really, hunkered close to their campfire. Wild-haired, like Cordelia on an average day. One of them stood up, trailing a tail of yarn and holding long, crossed needles, and Dellarobia registered that, impossibly, they were knitting. The standing one waved a bandaged-looking paw, slowly and widely as if signaling across some great divide. He, she, or it was dressed in a man’s old coat over a cotton dress over jeans tucked into unlaced boots, exactly the kind of outfit Cordie would put together. Dellarobia hesitated before waving back, and then pressed on.
The fir forest when she reached it had its own air as always, dark and still. Within its snow-flocked boughs she began to pick out snow-laced colonnades of butterflies, first a few, then more, as her eyes adjusted to their wintry aspect. She stopped to pull off her mittens briefly and kneel down to touch the brittle skeins of veined wings heaped in the path at her feet, many more casualties than she’d ever seen before. Insect bodies lay in heaps directly under the colonies, pitifully wasted it seemed, like mounds of withered tomatoes fallen from the vines in a failed harvest. She stood up with both hands drawn to her chest and looked at the trees, trying to assess what remained. The forest still looked filled with the immense dark fingers of these clusters, lit from above, laced with orange at their edges where the sun reached through. If their numbers were diminished, she couldn’t guess how badly, as their numbers had seemed infinite to her all along. The simplest conclusion was that they survived. Part of the world was still in place.
The little glade at the valley’s bottom was becoming familiar to her, like a room in a house, the study site. She paused among the trees at its edge to let her heart stop pounding. Day by day she was getting her lungs back, since she’d quit smoking. Since stepping into the flammable atmosphere of Ovid Byron. He was there, on the opposite side of the glen. He and Pete stood together looking into the treetops, with their backs to her. She was surprised to see four field helpers already here too, moving solemnly around the clearing. Vern Zakas was one of them, breaking sticks across his knee to feed a small campfire. She’d recruited these kids, whom Ovid put straight to work. Last week they’d made a low table from a sheet of plywood siding Cub scavenged for them, propping its four corners on big rocks, and the ground around the table already looked trampled. This morning the field balance was set up there, flanked by half-open equipment packs spilling their contents. Waxy rectangles of glassine envelopes splayed across the table like cards after an abandoned poker game. She wondered if men could even see the messes they made, or if they had differently structured eyes, as Ovid had told her cats and dogs and insects did. She should get over there and organize things. The boys seemed subdued, their ordinary conviviality suspended, presumably for the urgency of this day. She felt oddly territorial. They’d gotten here before she did.