maybe—forgive me—what you should be catching is a real job?”
I told Ruth she wasn’t the first to say so, two wives among her antecedents. And that I worked construction sometimes. Then, maybe a little defensive, “I’ve worked hard at many different jobs, all colors of collars. But no job sticks for long these years.”
“Do you faght? Drink? Gamble?” Ruth had dropped all pretense of reserve and manners. The river does that to clients sometimes. She seemed both repelled and fascinated. In any case, curious, to a degree she’d probably regret once we put to shore. But I didn’t seem to mind.
“No,” I said, “none of the above. I get along fine with my workmates, and I don’t resent a good boss. I just always seem to walk away after a paycheck or two. The road and the country it crosses always call more strongly than the work whistle. It’s just being in thrall—somebody else calling the shots, planning my day . . . my life. Abe Lincoln said, ‘We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.’ Or as Eric Clapton put it, I’ve got the keys to the highway, and I’ve just got to move.” Only I probably didn’t say it that well. What she said was, “We’re driving to Estes Park from here. Would you like a rahd?”
I contemplated the Hayden’s ringlets flip-flopping between the grass blades. Those saffron ovals brimming with silver scales that run out and rim the margins: beautiful. W. H. Edwards called it an Erebia back in the 1800s. He was mistaken in terms of taxonomy, but you can see why he made such an assignment. The real alpines will soon be out, up there in the Rockies: not only Erebia magdalena, but also epipsodea, callias, and theano. But especially magdalena. How could I resist the invitation even if I wanted to?
I’m not sure whether such reasoning or the promise of a little more time with Ruth made up my mind. Both, I suppose. So, notwithstanding the daunting prospect of hours cooped up with edgy Elbert, his sunburned spawn, and their pooch, I accepted. “Sure,” I said at last. “If you think it will sit all right with your husband.”
“Just don’t pop too many of your grandpa’s words of wisdom on him, and he’ll be fine. He’ll probably mutter a lot and I’ll hear all about Charles Manson before we go to bed at night, but I don’t think Elbert will veto the idea. And the kids will love the adventure of adopting a mountain man. Sometimes I do get my own way.”
Swaying like prairie grass, Ruth rose and walked over to Elbert. He was drowsy after a six-pack all on his own. I guessed he would have left the cans if I hadn’t been there, but I can’t be sure. Ruth advised him of the change of plans. I saw him jerk, as if she had invited the aforementioned Manson to tea. I reckoned just then that Elbert could stay behind and be a boatman (or a raft) and Ruth and I could go to Colorado and sell the kids to Basque sheepherders, but no such luck. He decided to come along after all.
So that afternoon, after I’d docked the raft and drove us back in the bus, I handed in my oars. The river boss wasn’t thrilled; he said I’d done a good job and he was hoping to keep me on through the summer, and maybe next year too. But river runners are notorious for being mercurial at best as employees. I collected my pay, cleared out of my cabin, and loaded my small pack of gear into the Toronado wagon between the kids and the coolers, the dog and the suitcases. We took off for Colorado, down past the Tetons, the Gros Ventre, the Wind Rivers, and the hot country east to Wamsutter and Laramie before cutting south on 287 through Virginia Dale. We made an unlikely crew, and Elbert’s tomato face never did uncrinkle. But Ruth’s sunflower smile often appeared in the rearview mirror.
12
Magdalena Mountain melts. At least its white carapace melts and slides away down avalanche chutes, sublimates into the alpine sky, or is sucked into stony rivulets by the thirsty warmth of spring. Blackened mosses along those rills regain their green as the running snowmelt fills their sponges and swells their thalli. The first of the flowers burst out—marsh marigolds in the wet edges, glacier lilies beneath the shrinking snowloads, pale mauve pasqueflowers down where the limber pines wrestle with the rocks in perpetual border dispute over timberline.
These early floral offerings are not without their croppers, for the diminishing cold grows too weak to hold pikas in their places. The gray harelets, a little less round than last autumn, pop out and eagerly see to the pruning of the early-spring vegetation. This is turning out to be a wet and lush year, with plenty of runoff and succulent regrowth, so no desperate pika or poor skinny coyote grazes the strawlike clump of grass at the edge of the rockslide where Erebia is coming back to life. About the size of an apostrophe, he shares that character’s round black head, a feature that sets him apart from the young of the other three species of Colorado alpines. The rest of his body is colored pale flesh with purplish stripes. A greenish cast will overtake it as the grass’s chlorophyll passes down the translucent tube of his hungry gut.
Activity accelerates on the scree, where so recently the only movement was white crystals falling or blocks of them breaking away. Now screaming flocks of silver-gray, black, and white birds—Clark’s nutcrackers—swoop from one patch of pines to the next. Related ravens too pass upslope and over the rocks, kronking, their great black shapes foreshadowing the smaller ones that will mime their flight after another moon’s circle. When the ravens cross overhead, pikas squeak eek! and dive for the safety of their crevices. When any big shadow could as well be a raptor as a corvid, why take chances?
Marmots at last shake off their somnolence and begin to bask on reflective slabs of granite. Soon their whistles will be heard, an academy of traffic cops shrilling contradictory commands from every major intersection on the mountain.
Erebia remains insensitive to all these goings-on. Only the rising, falling temperature rules his day, along with the intensity of the sunshine, such that he can seek the shelter of the grassroots when nightfall threatens late frosts. The duration, too, of the sun, for the gathering daylength quickens his hormones even as the rising sun thaws his muscles. Subject to desiccation at the drop of a dry grass blade, Erebia constantly seeks the dampest patch of turf, often resting on a spongy clump of moss or moss campion to maintain his water balance.
Now Erebia’s sliver of a larva faces many dangers. Ground beetles, spiders, woodlice, ants, and many other creeping predators prowl the sparse vegetation, ready to catch and consume his tiny packet of protein. Parasitic wasps and flies probe his haunts. But the greatest threat comes from the presence or absence of moisture: too much means mold; too little, death by crisping. Any fool who has tried to rear mountain ringlets and graylings knows this. But Erebia finds his needs, is not himself found, and so he grazes and grows.
Then, not many days after spring breaks out on Magdalena Mountain’s southeast flank, at eleven thousand feet, Erebia reaches the point when his skin can stretch no more. Taut, sleek, and bulging, it splits, and along the new suture a softer, deeper green skin shows through. Like any dry seed erupting, cotyledon unfurling, atom splitting, the new form lunges into the come-what-may with vigor. This is Erebia’s first molt of five—a shedding, a rebirthing that some of his siblings already experienced last fall, before their winter’s diapause. Now, out comes a more supple and pliant caterpillar, bigger, the size of a shaved pencil point, his head still black but his tube suit gray-green and darker striped.
Erebia eats more, no longer restricted to the baby food of the softest blades, and so grows faster. He has it in him to go either way: if heavy weather or an early snowfall should cut short the season, he can reenter that state of winter grace and pass a second season of chill. After all, many alpines are routinely biennial, taking two full years to mature. But, for the robust black Erebia magdalena, just one year usually suffices. So this particular wee one feeds on, and feeds, and feeds some more.
As he grows, Erebia’s range of potential predators only broadens. Rockslide rodents, passing bands of rosy finches, nesting pipits patrolling their territories,
