Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

  She kept her cold hands in her pockets, and kept up. She was surprised when they left the road and descended into the hollow on a trail she had not known about. Possibly they'd made it themselves. It led directly to the heart of the valley where the fir trees and the butterflies were. She'd seen clumps of dead monarchs along the way, another ingredient of the flotsam washed down by the flood, but here the ground was completely covered with flattened bodies lying every which way, like a strange linoleum pattern. The butterflies never lay open, as she'd seen them at rest or flying, but invariably were dead in the folded position, like praying hands. She hated walking on them, but that's what the others did. They noticed, though, sometimes picking them up and opening them gently like tiny books to read something there. Bonnie showed her how to tell the males, which had darker wing borders than the females and a black dot on each lower wing.

  They stopped and unloaded their packs in a serene place where the creek flowed under an old fallen log that was velvety green with moss. All the surrounding trees were filled with hanging clusters of butterflies. Lone individuals dropped from the trees steadily like insect rain, trembling where they landed and taking their time to die. She wondered if this was a butterfly funeral, but you'd not know it from this science crew. They seemed in a fine mood, just getting down to business with their tape measures, plastic sheeting, boxes of waxed-paper envelopes, and smaller instruments she couldn't name. Scales, things for taking measurements. Ovid Byron was a man possessed with purpose, setting his sights on the trees and immediately tramping off into the woods with Pete, pointing and talking as they mounted the incline.

  Bonnie and Mako worked together to pull an extremely long nylon tape measure across the forest floor in a white line that followed the curve of the hill, crossing the full length of the area where butterflies filled the trees. Then they painstakingly laid out squares on one side of the tape measure or the other, at regular intervals, for unknown purposes. Their chat when she overheard it was more personal than scientific. They discussed music they'd put on their iPods, names she didn't know, and shared complaints about the place where they ate breakfast, which they called "vile," with its sluggish waitresses and country music. She wondered if it was any different from the Feathertown Diner, where she'd had to wear a tacky polyester apron and the boom box in the kitchen played George Strait and Patty Loveless from opening to closing. What a bewildering verdict: vile. Maybe they only meant it at half-strength, in the same way they used "epic" and "heinous" and "stellar." They'd found a Mexican restaurant over in Cleary, deemed "righteous," which was all news to Dellarobia. She sat on the mossy log feeling like a third wheel. These students had all been to Mexico, she'd learned, on a monarch project with Dr. Byron. No older than twenty-five or so, and already Bonnie and Mako had ridden airplanes, moved among foreigners, walked on the ground of other countries. Dellarobia had been nowhere. Virginia Beach, back when her father was alive and had relatives there, but that was it. She couldn't even muster the strength for jealousy, given the size it would have to take. She had no hope even of visiting the Mexican restaurant in Cleary, righteous or not. Cub wanted nothing to do with foreign food.

  She wondered if they knew about the landslide, where Josefina's family had lived. That family had come back to see the butterflies, and sat in her kitchen getting acquainted afterward, a fact she'd withheld from Cub. Lupe and Reynaldo. It was a little awkward, but they were so eager to talk about the butterflies, and knew a lot of facts. That was touching. Lupe did speak some English, once she warmed up. They had two boys, both younger than Josefina, who sat on the floor with Cordelia in awe of her toys. Lupe told Dellarobia she was trying to find work cleaning houses or babysitting, and offered to look after Preston and Cordie if the occasion arose. Dellarobia had laughed, the poor leading the poor. It was a tempting offer, she said, if only she had someplace else to go.

  Bonnie startled her out of her funk, calling out, "Hey, can we put you to work?" Dellarobia jumped to attention, reminding herself of Preston. While Mako did something with a handheld GPS, Bonnie gave her a small notebook and explained they were going to spend several hours on their knees counting the insects on the ground. The line made by the tape measure she called a transect, and the plan was to count every butterfly inside the squares they'd laid out along its length, which were called quadrats. They would keep track of the numbers in each square, and the sex ratio, which meant how many males and females. Bonnie asked Dellarobia to identify several butterflies by sex, to be sure she could do it, and Dellarobia was nervous but took her time and made one hundred percent. Her first test in a decade, aced. Bonnie tied yellow flagging along the transect, numbering the squares and assigning ten of them to Dellarobia. Mako and Bonnie would each take twenty.

  Many questions occurred to Dellarobia, starting and ending with: Why in the world? If she told her family these people counted dead insects all day, they truly would not believe her. She wondered, were they looking at some kind of a disaster here? These might be dumb questions. All their efforts seemed bent on the simplest of measurements. She kept quiet, watching to see how they went about the task: kneeling, inching forward, noting numbers in two columns for male and female. She also noticed that if one fell from the trees onto their already-counted areas, they did not go back and pick up the tally. She surveyed her assigned corpses in despair, doubting she could count that high without just a wee little hit of nicotine. But she soon grew absorbed, feeling something change in her brain as her eyes shut out everything else in the world but the particulars of monarch butterfly color and gender. And noticing the smell: like dirt and lightning bugs, as Preston had said, and also like the firs themselves, musky-pungent. She hardly paid attention to odors, but this one grew on her. She was ready to agree with her son, the scent was good, at least here in its own world. Like dead lightning bugs in a jar, but not nearly that acrid. It was softer, more like rich black soil. Maybe it was the effect of all these deaths. Her lifetime-first miracle was becoming a force of decomposition.

  She noticed that Mako and Bonnie took breaks from time to time, sitting back on their heels, closing their eyes or looking up into the trees. Several times he brought dead butterflies over to Bonnie and she measured them with a small silver instrument she kept in her pocket. They also had a hanging scale, a miniature version of a produce scale in the grocery, from which they dangled stacks of butterflies in waxed-paper envelopes. Dellarobia watched their faces as they read the scales and wrote down numbers in a speckled notebook, and felt deeply envious of their absorption in this work, the things they knew. Earlier she'd thought Bonnie and Pete must be a couple, because of the way he gave Bonnie a hand up across the creek, and she later brushed some dirt off the seat of his pants, and even pulled a plastic bag out of Pete's front jeans pocket for him when his hands were full, a gesture that seemed intimate to Dellarobia. But now she observed the same nonchalant physical comfort between Bonnie and Mako when they stood close together, arms touching, while examining something. They reminded her of Preston and his friends absorbed in a game, boys and girls together, their differences undetected or overlooked. Dellarobia wondered how that would feel in adulthood, to be freed from the flirtations and oppressive rules of sex, a dread and thrill she could never seem to escape. Just sometimes, to be with men without being with them.

  Her heart lurched when a loud crash sounded suddenly from up the valley. Mako laughed and said it was the lumberjacks, meaning Ovid and Pete. Sometimes, he said, they climbed up trees and cut off some butterfly-filled branches, dropping them onto tarps and shaking out all the monarchs to get a count. They'd done this same kind of work last winter in Mexico. They had formulas for estimating branches per tree, trees per acre. "Counting monarchs is, like, madness," Mako told her. "It's like that old joke about the guy counting his herd of cows. Count the legs and divide by four."

  It didn't seem like madness to Dellarobia, it seemed pretty methodical. And she knew the butt of that joke would be a farmer, if the person telli
ng it said "cows" instead of "cattle." Why was it so important to count these butterflies? She wished she could ask. Instead she said, "I just found one with a sticker on it. Is that important?"

  They both whooped and came running. It was a little white dot stuck on the lower wing of one of her counted dead, something like the stickers her kids got free at the pediatrician's. At first she'd thought it was some scrap of her own unraveling household that had fallen off her clothes. She'd been known to walk around with worse things stuck to her. But no, this dot was something official. Mako pointed out numbers on it she could barely see, a code they would key into a database in Ovid's computer this evening. It would tell them where this butterfly had come from, where it was tagged and by whom.

  "But it's dead now," she said, wondering how this information could help the creature in its present state. Bonnie and Mako seemed very excited about the find, putting the tagged butterfly in one of the wax-paper envelopes, and then inside a zip-sealed bag they tucked into a pocket of Bonnie's pack.

  "That's the first tag we've found at this site," Bonnie said.

  "Really." Dellarobia tried to get her mind around the idea of scientists sending messages in this way across a distance. "Where do you think it came from?"

  "That's the big question," Bonnie said. "Could be the next state over, or it could be Ontario. God, Mako, what if it's one of ours?" She and Mako had also done fieldwork in Canada over the summer, she explained, including tagging butterflies.

  Dellarobia was floored to think of these fragile creatures owning the span of a continent, from Canada to Mexico, moving back and forth across the wide face of a land. Each one was so little and sure to die, yet they constituted a force, like an ocean tide. She was relieved Bonnie hadn't suggested the butterflies had come straight here from Mexico. The thought of them running up here after the landslide and flood, displaced along with Josefina's family, was a worrisome possibility she did not want to entertain. It would give her family's mountain an air of doom. If these butterflies were refugees of a horrible misfortune, there could be no beauty in them.

  As the day grew warmer they took breaks to stretch their limbs and shed their coats. Mako had to step out of his because the zipper was stuck at the bottom, the kind of thing Preston might do, which was endearing. The butterflies also began squirming around in their colonies, making for a lot of overhead action that Dellarobia found unsettling. Bonnie told her the monarchs couldn't make their own body heat, so they were paralyzed in the cold, unable to move until the sun warmed them to 55 degrees.

  "Exactly fifty-five?" Dellarobia asked. "How do you know that?"

  Bonnie shrugged. "It's been measured. It's all published. Dr. Byron did a lot of the early work about temperatures inside and outside the clusters. They're most protected in the interior at night, but in sunlight it's best on the outside, so they jockey around all the time for good position."

  "Like puppies in a pile," Dellarobia said. Rather than "pigs in a pile," which was the actual expression. She went back to counting and finished her quadrats before the others, because they'd given her fewer of them to do. She went and sat again on the velvety green log, realizing she'd forgotten about smoking for a span of at least five minutes. Maybe eight-point-six minutes. Which made it all the worse, now that she'd remembered. If she'd had matches she would have lit up a twig, just to inhale some smoke. She lay back on the log, trying to put cigarettes out of her mind, staring up into the quivery, shifting, scaly black and orange bouquets. The clumps were massive, like great hanging bears up in the shadows. She thought of deer hunting with Cub years ago, and the way they hung up a carcass to field-butcher it. Wearing the same coat she wore now. A versatile wardrobe, suitable for all manner of dead-animal fun. The sun was trying to come out, winking behind the clouds. Wherever a ray of warm light struck the drooping tresses of butterfly clusters they would light up, butterfly wings opening wide in response, fanning slowly, drinking in warmth. Sometimes for no apparent reason a cluster seemed to break open, with butterflies spilling off it, pouring their motion into the open void. If she tried to follow any single flight through the forest air, it was impossible. They moved around so high in the trees, and there were so many, the eye jumped from one to another.

  She was glad when Pete and Dr. Byron returned, even though she'd had no practical reason to miss them. Probably it was just a collie kind of thing, like Roy and Charlie, always relieved when the herd came back together. She helped spread out one of the tarps and they sat on it to eat lunch while discussing the area of the roost, the storm mortality, some things Dellarobia could understand and many she could not. She'd promised not to get in their way, but they went to some trouble now to explain things. The same transect they were sampling and counting today, they had counted a week ago, so comparing the numbers would tell how many butterflies were downed by the storm. This made sense, the matter of keeping track. She was surprised to learn the ones on the ground were not all goners. When the sun came out, a lot of them would bask and shiver to raise their body temperatures, and get going again. If the rain alone caused mortality, that would be different from what they'd seen in Mexico.

  Their line of work was not just body counts, Dr. Byron assured her. Ovid. They called him that, and he was their boss, so she could try to do the same. She thought of the evening he'd come to supper and felt embarrassed all over again. But his manner with her was plain and very kind, guiding her into comprehension as he had with Preston that night. He called the butterflies a system, a "complicated system." She was getting used to his accent. "A compli-keeted sys-tem, mon," she would say to Dovey later, exaggerating, when she recounted all this. He'd been studying monarchs for twenty years, all over the North American continent. She asked him how long the butterflies lived, and his answer was baffling: generally about six weeks. The ones that lived through winter lasted longer, a few months, by going into something like hibernation. "Diapause," he called it, a pause in the normal schedule of growing up, mating, and reproducing. Somewhere in midlife, the cold or darkness of winter put them all on hold, shutting down their sex drive until future notice.

  Like life in an uninsulated house, she thought. Maybe like marriage in general. "And then what?" she asked. It made no sense, a lifespan of a few weeks did not add up to an annual migration of many thousand miles. How did they learn where to go? Dr. Byron explained that no single butterfly ever made the round trip. At winter's end, the now-elderly butterflies in Mexico roused themselves and mated like crazy. The males copulated their brains out, then left it to the pregnant single moms to struggle north across the border into Texas looking for milkweed plants, the sole sustenance that could feed the caterpillars. There they laid their eggs and died without ever seeing their young. Dellarobia was stunned by this tale, which sounded soap-opera tragic, like something on the Oxygen network. She could tell Ovid liked telling it, too. The motherless baby monarchs hatched as caterpillars, grew up, and then flew north to repeat the drill, laying their eggs on milkweed plants and dying. The monarchs they would normally see in these mountains, he said, would be a second spring generation. Their offspring would go north to produce a third. And only those, in the fall, would fly all the way to Mexico.

  "Where they've never been," she said.

  "Where they have never been," Ovid repeated.

  "How can they do that?"

  He laughed. "You're looking at one crazy man who has been asking that same question for twenty years."

  "Well, yeah, I get it," Dellarobia said. His "complicated system" began to take hold in her mind, a thing she could faintly picture. Not just an orange passage across a continent as she'd imagined it before, not like marbles rolling from one end of a box to the other and back. This was a living flow, like a pulse through veins, with the cells bursting and renewing themselves as they went. The sudden vision filled her with strong emotions that embarrassed her, for fear of breaking into sobs as she had in front of her in-laws that day when the butterflies enveloped her. How was that even
normal, to cry over insects?

  It wasn't easy for her to stay on the train of the conversation, even if they were running it for her benefit. Pete explained that in recent years their studies had found the range was expanding northward. Meaning the butterfly generations had to push farther into Canada to find happiness, Ovid added helpfully, probably astute to the fact that in her pay grade a range meant a stove. The southern end of things was getting difficult too, he said. The monarchs had to leave the Mexican roost sites earlier every year because of seasonality changes from climatic warming. She wondered whether any of this was proved. Climate change, she knew to be wary of that. He said no one completely understood how they made these migrations. Hundreds of factors came into play. Fire ants, for example, had now come into Texas, where the monarchs were vulnerable. Ants ate the caterpillars. And farm chemicals were killing the milkweed plants, another worry he mentioned. She wondered if she should tell Ovid about the landslide in Mexico. But the students were jumping into the conversation, rendering it less than comprehensible. Bio-geography, roosts, host plants, overwintering zones, loss of something-communities, devastation. That one she got, devastation. She held to the vision that moved her, an orange flow of rivulets reaching over a continent, pulsed by its own internal engine.

  "They seem sturdy," she said. "Seems like they always find their way."

  "They respond to cues," Pete said. "Temperature, solar cues, it's all they can do. It works perfectly until something changes. Like, if they're roused off their wintering grounds to fly north before the milkweeds come up, they show up to an empty cafeteria. Or it's too dry and they desiccate. Every year that we record temperature increases, the roosting populations in Mexico move farther up the mountain slopes to find where it's still cool and moist. But there's only so far you can go before you run out of mountain."