“I think you can take care of all the rest of this paperwork,” he said at last. “I think you will do fine. Our main concern is to get things going quickly, because we have so little time. A matter of weeks. Maybe not even that.”
“Thank you. Wow, thanks very much.” In other words, he was in a bind, and she would suffice. He stood up and gave her a quick handshake, handing over the clipboard, looking not at all thrilled. He indicated she should sit tight and finish filling out the forms. His impatience made no sense. He was acting like a man who’d been told he had only weeks to live. She wondered if he had spoken to Bear at all about the logging plan.
“Let me just ask,” she said cautiously, “what is your main worry, time-wise?”
He clicked his pen, looked at it, put it in his pocket, and then sat down again, looking her directly in the eye. “My main worry, time-wise, is that a winter storm could arrive here tomorrow and kill every butterfly on that mountain.”
She was so startled that any possible reply left her head. Even the assault-weapon cadence of Pete’s staple gun faltered for a moment, it seemed. How could they put all this effort into such a precarious scenario? That the butterflies could be wiped out, completely apart from the logging she hoped to forestall, was inconceivable.
“The temperature at which a wet monarch will freeze to death,” he said very slowly, as in, Don’t make me repeat this, “is minus four degrees centigrade.”
“Okay,” she said. As in, I’m listening.
“That is an inevitable event, for this latitude. The mid-twenties, Fahrenheit. The forest might shield them to some extent, where the canopy is closed. Large trees are protective; the trunks create a thermal environment like big water bottles. That’s why you see them covering the trunks. Maybe it’s why they ended up in that stand of old conifers for their roosting site when they went off track. These firs are similar to the Mexican oyamels, in terms of chemistry. We have no idea of the cues involved. But to protect them from the kind of winter they will have here, that forest is far from adequate.”
“So what normally happens to them, when it goes below freezing?” she asked.
“Normally they are in the Transverse Neovolcanic Belt of Mexico, at a latitude of nineteen degrees north. Where winter as you know it is not an issue.”
“So these butterflies would all die off, when it gets bad, and then what? Their eggs would hatch out in the spring?”
“Monarchs don’t lay eggs in winter. This is something I think you know.”
“You’re right, I did know that. Sorry. Technically a tropical guy, just visiting.”
“They are obliged to survive the winter in adult form. Even for these individuals with aberrant migratory flight behavior, the reproduction is hardwired. Like ours. If we somehow were tricked into going to live among cattle, we could not give birth to calves or feed them on grass.”
“I understand.”
“These insects have been led astray, for whatever reason. But breeding and egg-laying are still impossible for them until spring, when the milkweeds emerge.”
“So if they die here, they die.”
“That’s right,” he said.
She despised this account, the butterflies led astray. She’d preferred the version of the story in which her mountain attracted its visitors through benevolence, not some hidden treachery. “And the other monarchs . . . ,” she began, unsure what she meant to ask. “The ones in Mexico are still doing okay.”
“What we’re finding in Mexico this year is a catastrophically diminished population in the Neovolcanics. They had unbelievable storms and flooding last spring, which may or may not have something to do with this. We have been waiting all winter for better reports. A lot of people are there now searching the forests for relocated roosts. Higher up the mountain, is what we assumed. But the report is nothing.”
She tried to assimilate this news while her brain crashed with thoughts of the Mexican mudslide, the smashed and twisted cars, houses lifted from their moorings, floating downstream. A secret she had thought she was keeping from him.
“The report is nothing,” she repeated. “You mean the butterflies aren’t there.”
“Not in the ordinary numbers. This is not yet public information, so I ask you to keep it private. Not that anyone hereabouts is likely to be very interested.”
The insult was unnecessary. She felt accosted. “So what are you saying? That these butterflies here—”
“That this roosting colony is a significant proportion of the entire North American monarch butterfly population.”
“Most of the ones that exist?”
“Most of the migratory population, yes,” he said. “In terms of genetic viability, reproductive viability, what we have here is nearly the whole lot.”
Like Job, in the Bible, she thought. All his children gathered in one place for a wedding when a great wind rose and collapsed the roof upon them. All hope and future lost in a day. Of all sad stories, that parable was meant to be the saddest, a loss to make a man fall down on the ash heap and meet his maker or else run to the arms of darkness. She wondered if Ovid Byron knew the story of Job.
“So why does it even matter what you do here?” She looked at the laboratory in a different way. Mission control of a boggling heartbreak. “I’m sorry to ask. But, you know what I’m saying?”
He avoided meeting her eye. “We should be physicians, or some kind of superheroes saving the patient with special powers. That’s what people want.”
She didn’t reply, wondering if he was right about that. Probably it was true. People resisted hearing the details of a problem, even when it was something personal, like their own cancer. What they wanted was the fix.
“We are only scientists,” he said. “Maybe foolish ones. Normally it would take years to do what we are trying to accomplish here in a few weeks. We are seeing . . .” He paused. She followed his gaze to the plastic-covered window, a filmy rectangle of light and nothing more. Whatever he saw, it was not there.
“We are seeing a bizarre alteration of a previously stable pattern,” he said finally. “A continental ecosystem breaking down. Most likely, this is due to climate change. Really I can tell you I’m sure of that. Climate change has disrupted this system. For the scientific record, we want to get to the bottom of that as best we can, before events of this winter destroy a beautiful species and the chain of evidence we might use for tracking its demise. It’s not a happy scenario.”