tion>
BOOKS BY ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE
PROSE
Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land
The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland
Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide
Nabokov’s Butterflies (Editor, with Brian Boyd and Dmitri Nabokov)
Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage
Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip
Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year
The Tangled Bank: Essays from Orion
Through a Green Lens: Fifty Years of Writing for Nature
POETRY
Letting the Flies Out (chapbook)
Evolution of the Genus Iris
Chinook and Chanterelle
ON ENTOMOLOGY
Watching Washington Butterflies
The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies
The IUCN Invertebrate Red Data Book
(with S. M. Wells and N. M. Collins)
Handbook for Butterfly Watchers
Butterflies: A Peterson Field Guide Coloring Book
(with Roger Tory Peterson and Sarah Anne Hughes)
Insects: A Peterson Field Guide Coloring Book (with Kristin Kest)
The Butterflies of Cascadia
Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest (with Caitlin LaBar)
Magdalena Mountain
Copyright © 2018 by Robert Michael Pyle
First paperback edition: 2018
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pyle, Robert Michael, author.
Title: Magdalena Mountain / Robert Michael Pyle.
Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017060550 | ISBN 9781640090774 (softcover) | eISBN 9781640090781
Subjects: LCSH: Quests (Expeditions)—Fiction. | Wilderness areas—Fiction. | Naturalists—Fiction. | Butterflies—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3616.Y545 M34 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060550
Jacket designed by Kelly Winton
Book designed by Jordan Koluch
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the women
who made this book possible:
JoAnne, Sally, Thea, Mary Jane, Jan, and Florence
∼they know what they did∼
and, of course,
for Maggie May
BEFORE
Should a landing craft from elsewhere settle onto Magdalena Mountain on an early-autumn morning, the visitors might arrive at two conclusions. First, this world is a golden one; the denizens must have monochromatic vision. Second, this world is harsh; the citizens must be tough. Upon leaving, they would jot field notes such as “inhospitable, but rather pretty in a raw sort of way” in their intergalactic log.
On both counts they would be partly right. The rockslide and its environs indeed glitter in September’s dawn. On the fellfield, all the prostrate herbage has yellowed, except for certain low shrubs that have turned red, and they only lend depth to the overall gold. Sliding up the ridges, the tongues of aspenwood range, in their clones, from cinnamon to lemon, with orange-peel and persimmon in between. Even the granite, the substance of the scene, shines with a varied patina in the rising sun and morning frost, mica catching the sun’s color, feldspar pink going to peach, gray feldspar to platinum.
So, golden. And rough. But not necessarily inhospitable. True enough, humanity seldom appears on the scene. But there are lives below the surface, many of them. Now, in the chilly gilt of oncoming autumn, they come out of the rocks to bask. They suck every calorie of warmth from the cool fire of the alpenglow. For soon enough, afternoon cloud will rise, promising something rougher yet: rocks in winter. For now, frost holds off. Then the sun passes beyond its perigee, and all the gold is gone. Most of the animals retreat beneath the stones, as a minute caterpillar creeps down deep into a withered tussock of grass.
1
The yellow Karmann Ghia left the road at forty-five. Its tires never scored the soft tissue of the tundra. It simply flew over the edge, into the mountain abyss.
A lookout marmot shrilled at the sight. A pair of pikas, young of the year, disappeared beneath their rockpile as the strange object passed overhead. Clearing the stony incline, the doomed auto glided over the rich mountain turf. Its shadow fell across a patch of alpine forget-me-nots, deepening their hue from sky to delft, then passed over a pink clump of moss campion. A black butterfly nectaring on the campion twitched at the momentary shading. Such a shift
