The fog had congealed into a low, thick cloud cover, and she’d seen no butterfly action for an hour. A thermos of coffee she’d left at the study site was calling her name. But Dimmit had now approached Mr. Akins, they were blocking the path, so she waited until their encounter was complete. It didn’t take long. Mr. Akins explained he was asking people to sign on to a lifestyle pledge to reduce their impact on the planet. Dimmit nodded serenely, took the flyer, folded it into a paper airplane, and sailed it high across the foggy valley. Then he kicked his Harley into gear and tore off, throwing gravel.
“That’s just Dimmit,” she apologized to Mr. Akins, leaning her folding chair against a tree. “I’ve known him my whole life. Sometimes you shouldn’t even try.”
“I always try,” Mr. Akins said brightly. His snow-white bangs were cut straight across and he had a gap between his front teeth. “That’s why I come to places like this, instead of Portland or San Francisco. You people here need to get on board, the same as everyone else. If not more so.”
She didn’t know what to say about that, so she headed down the path in her leather-soled farm boots. You people here. If not more so. She felt heat rise from the collar of her shirt. She remembered Dovey’s declaration that she hated everyone, which was not true, but beginning to seem that way. Leighton Akins and his snappy L.L. Beans. Apparently all those tourists ignored her because she and the Dimmits of this world were you people. She descended into the fog-shrouded forest, a little disoriented by the whiteness that lay on the air. In the mixed, barren forest surrounding the fir grove, craggy old pines stood out in relief. A solitary woodpecker laughed. The path crossed a streambed whose banks were deeply encrusted with monarch bodies washed down from the center of the roosting site, dumped here like litter.
At a distance she saw the lanky frame of Ovid Byron walking downhill, charting his own course between the butterfly-clad trunks. She picked up her pace to catch up to where he would meet the trail, stumbling a little over a tree root. She wondered if he would mind that she’d left her post. “Hey,” she called, getting his attention. “I got to thinking about hot coffee, when that sun went in.”
He waited for her with his arms crossed, standing behind all the gleaming teeth in his smile. “Great minds have similar thoughts.”
“I have something amazing to tell you,” she said when she caught up. “Oh, is it okay if Preston comes up after school tomorrow? That’s not the amazing thing.”
His smile notched up, like flipping the headlights to brights. “Preston is, actually. I have to admit, Dellarobia, I envy you. A child like that.”
“Thank you.”
“Yes, it is fine. I have a little project for him I have been thinking about.”
Her heart tumbled, and she held her tongue, lacking faith in it. Why did he not have his own children? What argument, what divide, what kind of wife. She fell into step behind him on the trail, watching her footing, thinking the words head over heels.
“The amazing thing,” she said, “is this man has volunteered his truck to transport the butterflies to Florida. Some nature park, I guess, where he’s got family ties.” She hesitated, recognizing a level of absurdity. “I just thought I’d mention it. I called and talked to the guy last night. He really cares, you know? About the monarchs surviving.”
“Surviving,” Ovid put back. Even from behind, she saw the absent enthusiasm.
“It’s a bad idea. Sorry.” A cold drop of rain hit the back of her left hand.
“Very generous, though. This man, who is he?”
“A long-haul trucker, Mr. Baird is his name. He lives in Feathertown. He really means well. But okay, dumb idea.”
“In Feathertown,” Ovid said. “It’s really quite touching, the good intentions, you know?” He stopped in the path to look up through the canopy as more drops fell.
“Is this rain picking up?” she asked.
He nodded, aiming his finger like a pistol down through the trees toward the blue tarp shelter at the study site, and they made a break for it through the sudden shower. Ovid covered the ground in a deerlike way with his long strides, dodging fallen branches. She reached the shelter behind him and shivered, pulling her sweatshirt hood close around her face and tucking her hands in her sleeves.
“Why is it a bad idea?” she asked.
The rain was loud on the plastic tarp. He seemed to be waiting his turn to speak. Ovid and Pete had strung up this shelter one rainy day using a taut rope stretched between two trees to form a ridge, with ropes through metal grommets in the tarp’s four corners pulling it outward, also tied to trees. Dellarobia had marveled to watch them construct a simple, perfect roof that seemed to levitate over the plywood table and single folding chair. Here they now stood, she and Ovid together, in their little house without walls.
“An animal is the sum of its behaviors,” he said finally. “Its community dynamics. Not just the physical body.”
“What makes a monarch a monarch is what it does, you’re saying.”
He stood looking out at the forest, arms crossed. Not exactly facing her, but not turned away. “Interactions with other monarchs, habitat, the migration, everything. The population functions as a whole being. You could look at it that way.”
She did, often. This butterfly forest was a great, quiet, breathing beast. Monarchs covered the trunks like orange fish scales. Sometimes the wings all moved slowly in unison. Once while she and Ovid were working in the middle of all that, he had asked her what was the use of saving a world that had no soul left in it. Continents without butterflies, seas without coral reefs, he meant. What if all human effort amounted basically to saving a place for ourselves to park? He had confessed these were not scientific thoughts.
The rain softened its percussion on the roof, a little. Light passing through the tarp bathed them both in a faint cerulean glow. The study site was completely deserted. She wondered if he also felt the concentrated atmosphere of their aloneness.
“But do they have to move? Could the whole being just stay in one place?”
“The problem is genetics,” he said. “You are who you are, because of a history of genetic combinations. So are they. The monarchs rely on a particular alternation between inbreeding and outbreeding.”
Dellarobia corrected her impression of the moment. Ovid was not alone with her here. It was not going to be that scene in the movie. He was in church: with these ideas, the companionship of creatures. Every day she rose and rose to the occasion of this man.