As the Nordic Green Aphid panted toward the summit of Loveland Pass the next morning, Mead beheld something extraordinary. A parking area and a small tarn lay beside the road, and beyond them, a big rockslide tumbled down. At the base of the rocks stood a man holding what appeared to be a jumbo butterfly net and a large black object. “Holy cow!” he said. “What is that?”
He was riding in back between Kate and Lisa. “That’s Michael,” said CB, “and Maggie.”
By the time they had parked beside the lake and walked to the base of the rocks, the figure was still in sight, but now he was high up the talus slope. Mead watched with his binoculars and saw the man hold the black thing over his head and give it a toss. Down it came, almost directly at Mead. He could see that it was not free-flying, but gliding down a monofilament line that shone like a rock spider’s web in the sun. “What’s the deal?” Mead asked, but only a frightened pika replied: Weet! Then Mead made it out: the object was a giant Magdalena alpine, hang gliding down the rocks after the fashion of the real thing. “Holy cow,” he said again as the model butterfly reached the end of its tether and alighted—a bit roughly—among the rocks.
Michael Heap climbed down the slide. He reached his model about the same time as the field team, Mead in tow, reached him. “Mike, you ol’ son!” crooned Carolinus, and the two big men embraced.
“CB! I thought you’d never get here, or the clouds would come first!” In turn, Heap hugged each of the Circus members on hand. Then he was introduced to Mead.
“I saw your mega-Magdalena fly,” said Mead. “Do you always do this here?”
“Well, usually—it’s the easiest place. Not much of a hike, and when you have to go up and down the rocks as much as I do, that counts. Plus, not too many rubberneckers, thanks to the I-70 tunnel under the pass. So—you figured out what this baby represents?”
“Sure! I have a big interest in Erebia magdalena myself.”
“Aha!” Heap exclaimed. “The two magic words!”
“So, Michael,” Carolinus butted in. “I didn’t bring these boys and girls all the way up here in order to get rained on, which we will pretty soon. Why don’t you show the kids what you’re up to with that big hunk of black cardboard.”
“Sure,” Heap agreed. “If you all want to watch and maybe help out a little, I’ll run a couple more trials.”
“So what’s the point of the experiment, Mike?” asked Sterling.
“Well, you’ve all read about Niko Tinbergen’s experiments with the European grayling butterfly?”
“They’d better say yes,” said CB, laughing, as most of their heads nodded.
It’s closely related to the arctics up here, which aren’t far from the alpines. Tinbergen found that super-female models elicit more intense courtship responses from the males than normal-size and colored females.”
“So what’s new?” came a male voice, bringing a female’s “Boar!”
“Be nice, kids. Well, back in those unenlightened days, this was called the Raquel Welch effect.”
Lisa: “Not the Bagdonitz principle?” Kate: “It’s good to know he’s not the only one.”
“I’m sorry about these guys, Michael. Cheap labor, you know,” said CB.
“It beats no labor, CB. I used to have an assistant, David Shawmutt from Cornell. But he got tired of the climb up and down the rockpile and went into premed. Wants to be a doctor—a real one, not a butterfly doctor, like us.”
“Smart lad,” said CB. “He’d never get rich in this game.”
Young heads nodded.
“Don’t I know it,” said Heap. “Still, I’ll take Maggie over myocardial infarction any day—she’s good medicine for what ails you, right? Well, anyway, I’m just trying to see if I can replicate Tinbergen’s result in black-and-white instead of gray. When it works, the males go bananas over Maggie May here. Now why don’t you all spread out up and down the rockslide and watch for responses. I’ll carry Maggie up, release her, and watch with binoculars. CB, maybe you could try to catch her down here so she doesn’t get so beat up on these sharp rocks.”
As Mead climbed the rocks behind Michael, he wondered if all lepidopterists were big. Heap was of average height, but bore his large head on broad shoulders over a deep chest. His short legs could have been hewn from the same Colorado cottonwood as his big net was. He was a man who fought the paunch, now more on top of the paunch than the other way around. Mead guessed the balance swung in wintertime, when he came in from the field, especially if he drank beer, as most of his kind seemed to.
Heap wore an old Panama with sweat-stained brim bent low over his high red forehead. Long, light hair hung behind in waves. His truly notable feature was his beard: sternum-length, full, and many hued, leaving little of the face showing but his high cheeks, harebell eyes, and sunburned nose over a long mustache and permanent smile. His pelt of many colors, hinting at a white future, reputedly waxed and waned, giving him a metamorphic nature not unlike that of the insects he studied. Right now he seemed to be between molting stages, beard just brushing his belly.
Michael Heap was not graceful as he lumbered up the boulders like a silverback marmot, but he knew his way around a rockslide and had good wind, climbing the scree faster than students half his age. More than once he tottered on a loose rock, but then he would leap to a sounder stepping-stone or balance himself with his net pole as a logroller might use his pike. A livid purple scar across one massive calf testified to a rockslide mishap of yore, when a companion loosed a sharp slate right above him. But Heap seldom if ever fell. Mead, naturally coordinated, nonetheless beat his knees to a pulp the first few times he tried to navigate the talus.
Mead positioned himself halfway up. As he awaited takeoff, he watched the pikas arrayed along the ridgeline every fifty feet or so. They shouted their opinions of the invaders’ impertinence with shrill geeks and stern little peace-sign faces. One, skinny as pikas go, lifted its right paw each time it squeaked, like an action doll. Another, a plump one with its head up, was a mere fluffball against the Rockies themselves—just a pellet with little rabbity ears no longer than the wind would allow.
Heap reached the anchored top of the fishline and held Maggie May aloft. She consisted of a matte-black silhouette cut from thick photographic board, two feet in wingspan, affixed to a pinewood body. A brass ferrule on her thorax channeled the heavy-test leader that kept her from gravity’s grasp. Heap drew Maggie May behind his head with both hands, counted down, and made the launch. The Flying Circus cheered as one, sending all the marmots scurrying.
Two pikas dove for cover with extra sharp geeks as the shadow of the dusky flier passed overhead. The last fifty feet of its glide drew four real Magdalenas who shot up at Maggie with terrific zeal. Mead watched openmouthed as the optimistic male Erebias made none-too-subtle advances toward the impressive sex symbol. Just before Maggie reached the bottom of her flight path, her line snapped, and the heavier-than-air kite crashed onto the rocks, out of CB’s frantic grasp. That signaled the end of the day’s trials. Heap rescued Maggie, not badly damaged, while Mead reeled in the line. Everyone met at tarnside to compare notes while Heap entered the data. “Not bad for the butterflies,” said Randy, “but it really works for pikas!”
“Maybe they thought it was a raven,” suggested Lisa, “or a golden eagle.”
“The boy butterflies worked out too,” said Sterling. “She sure does something for them. I wonder if it cuts both ways?”
“Well, try this,” said Michael. He drew an envelope from his collecting bag, a little leather pouch with a willowware pattern toffee tin in it to protect the butterflies, and removed a live alpine with his forceps. This he gently placed on a surprised Randy’s nose, where it remained, basking for some minutes. “See if that does anything for your popularity,” said Heap. Apparently it worked, as the girls all gathered around him.
Heap stored away the tableau as a vision not to be squandered; Mead memorized the technique for future reference; even CB was stilled. There stood Randy, hard young chest held high in his white tee, chin back, beatific smile curling his sculpted mouth, his strong arched nose, as yet unmarred by alcohol or hard knocks, graced by the pure black oval of an alpine the same color as his curls. And all about him, a roundel of bewitched young women: Alice, forehead shining in the alpine sun, her smile one of unaffected bliss, her hand on the shoulder of Lisa, who held her hand over her heart as if in a swoon; Nancy, on the other side, simply rapt. Kate, harder, less readily beguiled, and already distracted by Mead’s nearness, still cracked a down-curved grin that drew her ample dimples, as well as Mead’s eye, down toward her low-cut halter, making dark declivities that an alpine at evening or an imprudent graduate student might drop into, forever.
Then the sun hit it full on, and the butterfly on Randy’s nose flew off. Randy, handsome lad though he was, became just one more dude on the field team, and the tableau dissolved. “I think he’s got something there,” said Sterling to CB, sotto voce.
“No shit,” said CB. “That’ll be on the test.”
Just then an uncommon bog fritillary appeared in their midst and weaved its way between their legs. Four or five nets swung at once, like jousting janitors, and about as effective. “Boloria eunomia,” said Mead. “Dr. Freulich says it’s the rarest one up here.” Sterling zigzagged after the butterfly, took a wild swing, and fell into the willow bog.
“Sterling bricked it,” Carolinus observed to Mead. “They’ve gotta do better than that, or no tall coolers tonight.”
Mead wondered whether it wasn’t last night’s tall coolers at fault here, but he held his tongue.
The BFC made its farewells, thanked Michael Heap for the demonstration, and headed up the far slope for a little collecting before the clouds closed in. “Come on, you guys,” rang CB’s injunction. “Let’s go see some biology!”
Mead stuck around Loveland Pass for a while with Heap, hoping to romance one more Magdalena out of the shattered granite for another look. But when the early-afternoon clouds rose over the rim of the pass like sinister blimps fixing to drop water bombs on their heads, they retreated to the shelter of Heap’s old maroon VW bus. “Where to?” he asked.
“Your call,” said Mead. “I’m in your hands and at your mercy.”
“Right. To the Red Ram, then!” And so the two fellow sufferers of their particular infatuation repaired to the Red Ram saloon in Georgetown, down canyon from the pass. Over a malt whiskey at the massive mahogany bar, Mead’s first ever, Heap’s first for the day, the younger one picked the other’s brain about the black glider of the stonefields as a gray mountain storm pounded the tin roofs of the old mining town. “You know, don’t you,” Michael asked, “that Georgetown was named as the type locality of Erebia magdalena?”
“No!” James choked on his Scotch. “Here?”
“Of course it’s a couple thousand feet too low. But in those days it was common to generalize localities. Collectors often used the name of the nearest rail or stage stop for their specimen data. You were lucky to get more than ‘Rocky Mountains’ on a pin label! Anyway, Herman Strecker described the species in 1880 from material sent him by a Professor Owen of Wisconsin who labeled the locality ‘Georgetown.’ I strongly suspect that the type specimens actually came from Loveland Pass—a classic Magdalena locale on an early stage route—where we’ve just been.”
“So that one on Randy’s nose could be a topotype?”
“Right—if it had a pin in it, which Randy might resent. I reckon that first collector drove down to the Red Ram, just as we’ve done, except by horseback or stagecoach, and wrote ‘Georgetown’ on his labels as the nearest depot—maybe at this very bar!”
Mead drank to that, bought a round, and drank to it again. Then, while still able, they went in search of food. Mead, elevated somewhat by the malt, felt a twinge of envy for the early collectors, traveling by stage and steam, discovering fabulous new species, but he suspected that they fared worse when it came to dining. They entered a small trattoria where the several inches, difference in their height and girth melted as they pulled up to a red-checked tablecloth. Awaiting their order, Mead said, “Look, Mike. I know Maggie’s your bug . . .”
“Mine! Last I heard, nobody was patenting insects. Remember, butterflies are free, as the saying goes—nobody owns them, or the research rights to them.”
“I mean, you’re working on it.”
“I guess you caught me black-handed on that.”
“Well, I’ve noticed that biologists can be a little proprietary about their chosen topics. I really don’t want to trespass on your turf, so if you feel there’s no room for both of us in this here town, just tell me, and I’ll retreat to my roaches.”
“Heck, no! Forget that, James! Several folks are looking at Maggie already, such as Gerald Hilchie in Alberta, Charles Slater right down the road in Central City, Ken Philip in Alaska for mackinleyensis, and Piotr Rombostislov in Siberia, for starters. This butterfly is a big black tent—no one has a corner on it. She presents so many fascinating questions that no one worker could answer them all—just as with Peter Freulich and his frits or Vern Volte with his sulphurs. Why do you think they have grad students doing so many projects on them? It takes all hands to the wheel to get a three-D picture of these complex beasts.”
Mead sat back and sipped his Chianti, digesting that, as their food came.
“I couldn’t begin to do justice to all of Maggie’s charms by myself,” Heap went on, twirling his spaghetti. “Besides, I’m an amateur now. I dabble at it endlessly, but I don’t publish much. Maybe you can get something really useful done.”
By now Mead felt easy with Heap, so he brought up the subject of October Carson. Heap had never heard of him, though he knew George, having done his own doctorate with Winchester’s first grad student, Abe Brewer, at UConn. Mead took the first bite of his lasagna, then told Heap about Carson’s procession across the West and his own flirtation with Erebia magdalena. “So what do you know about Maggie’s name?”
“Well,” Michael garbled through his pasta, “I’ve often wondered. Obviously it has to do with Mary Magdalene. Turns out her Saint’s Day is July twenty-ninth. Since that date falls well within Maggie’s flight period, maybe Owen caught the first one on that day and Strecker named the species in her honor. I don’t know whether he was Catholic or not. Anyway, that’s my only hypothesis on the question. You might want to ask Brownie about it.”
“Brownie?”
“F. Martin Brown, author of Colorado Butterflies, my New Testament. Holland’s Butterfly Book and Klots’s Peterson Field Guide were my Genesis and Revelations.”
“I loved those books too; being from New Mexico, I ought to know Brown’s.”
“It didn’t get around enough—sold mostly at the Denver Museum of Natural History, my childhood haunt when I couldn’t be outdoors. Hell of a book. Check this out.” Michael cleared his throat and recited from memory: “ ‘This large and uniformly black alpine is a real prize. It cannot be confused with any other Colorado butterfly. Its dark wings, free from markings, make it easy to recognize . . . The Magdalena Alpine haunts the rockslides at timber line’ . . . Let’s see . . . yes, that’s it: ‘It is very difficult to capture because of the treacherous footing afforded by the tumbled rocks . . . Once in a while conditions have been such that a large brood of the species is produced. Then if a collector is around he has a field day.’ Page twenty-nine, Colorado Butterflies.”
“Bravo! Chapter and verse, yet. A real devout.”
“You should see my copy of the book,” said Michael. “Dog-eared is hardly the word. The dust jacket, with the beautiful purple Colorado hairstreak, is in tatters, and the red buckram binding is pretty soft at the corners.”
“And Brownie’s still around?”
“You bet. These days he studies fossil butterflies at Florissant, along with the itineraries of the early Colorado butterfly explorers, among other things.”
“Sounds like a real Renaissance man.”
“Or polymath. He’s taught almost everything at Fountain Valley School in the Springs. He could tell you about your namesake, Theodore L. Mead, of Mead’s sulphur and Mead’s wood nymph fame. He’s studied Mead’s itinerary in the West. Do you know about him?”
“Of course I’ve noticed the butterflies with his name. CB started to tell me about his travels in Colorado back on Weston Pass yesterday, but we were . . . interrupted. Another stagecoach butterfly hunter, wasn’t he?”
“Among other things. In the summer of 1871, Teddy Mead and his brother Sam came out collecting for W. H. Edwards of West Virginia, the great butterfly man of his day. Mead covered a lot of territory, reaching lots of remote places by horseback, rail, and stage. He even came right here to Georgetown. His letters home were full of tales of Arapaho after scalps, Utes running them back to their reservation, and marauding bears, bandits, and bedbugs. Those guys were tough, don’t you think? To come into a gold rush saloon like the Red Ram with butterfly nets?”
“No kidding. I wouldn’t even do it these days.”
“He also had his priorities right. In one of his letters home he compared a visit to Europe with his western adventures: ‘what profiteth a man that he sees twenty miles of pictured saints and “Holy Families” and loseth the sight of the Rocky Mountains?’ ”
“I’ll drink to that,” James said, raising his glass. “So what did it profiteth him coming here, other than having some beautiful butterflies bear his name forevermore?”
“Well, I’ll let you be the judge. Mead was one of several entomological suitors of Edwards’s daughter, Edith. He named Edith’s copper after her. And yes, he eventually won out over his rivals. The couple were wed and lived pretty happily for a long time after, raising oranges and orchids in Florida. But not till he fulfilled his quest out west and brought back a dowry of new butterflies—twenty-eight new kinds!—did Edith’s dad give her hand to Mead.”
“Nice story. Florida, eh? So he got the girl and the best of both worlds.”
“Florida might look pretty good pretty soon if an early autumn is riding in on that storm out there. Anyway, I’ll bet you’re related to ol’ T. L.”
“I wonder. Can you inherit scientific patronyms, like titles? I’ll take Mead’s alpine! Well, I’ll be sure to get in touch with Brownie if I do dive into Magdalena.”
“Okay, and while you’re at it, here’s a nice mystery for you. One of the best Magdalena habitats I know is a mountain on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, in the Front Range. It’s got the most extensive rockslides for miles around.”
“Oh?” Mead’s ears pricked. “So what’s the mystery?”
“The peak is called Magdalena Mountain, and the place at its foot is known as Magdalena Park. And there’s an old log hotel there called Magdalena Park Lodge.”
“Too much! So what’s the connection with the butterflies?”
“Beats me,” said Heap. “I’ve admired the mountain and the lodge for years, but I’ve always been too lazy or busy to look into it. If you should discover the reason for the many Magdalenas, if there is one, please be sure to let me know!”
“For sure. So where is this Magdalena Mountain, exactly?”
“It’s on the Peak to Peak Highway, between Allenspark and Estes Park. Let’s see, it’s not too far from . . . What’s the matter, James? Is the lasagna bad?”
Mead, a little too much wine in his belly, slept while Heap, with more body mass to absorb it, drove down Highway 40 and then north out of Clear Creek Canyon. He awoke only when the handbrake squeaked. “Where are we?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.
“Central City,” said Heap. “Someone I think you ought to know lives here.”
Mead followed Heap up to an old cabin. Its clapboards as black as the unlit night around them, the cabin perched near the very rim of a deep ice-cream scoop out of the ground. “The Glory Hole,” said Heap. “They used to mine gold this way here. Richest Square Mile on Earth, they called it. That money went down to Denver, except for what stayed in the opera house and gingerbread Victorians here in town.” He gestured with a thrust of his shoulder. “It won’t last, but for now, life is still cheap enough up here on the tailings for a destitute lepidopterist to hole up.”
Heap’s knock was answered by a thin man with a thin brown beard and a look of constant surprise. Sure, he was surprised by a knock at the cabin door way up here late at night, but the look never left, through smile or frown. Mead came to understand that this was the look of infatuation with the world and all its working parts.
Heap introduced him to Charles Slater and his wife, Ellie. “If you think I have a claim on Maggie,” Heap whispered, “just talk with Charles for a spell.” And so James Mead, for the third time in three days, settled into the company of someone who put his own knowledge of his chosen subject to shame. Slater, the softest-spoken of men, not only had a close acquaintance with all the Colorado species of Erebia and Oeneis in the field, he also kept various life stages of each of them in his makeshift cabin “lab.” So came James to see his first immature magdalena—a pale green tube with reddish lines and a black head—as well as those of several other arctics and alpines. And by the time they left, he held under his arm a copy of a sheaf of notes headed “magdalena: Loveland I. elev. 3680 m.” His to keep! So much for proprietary egos in natural history. Mead didn’t know how to thank him, so he simply said, “I’ll try to do them justice.”
The next day, he found himself on his own, sitting on the asphalt of the Peak to Peak, reading Slater’s Maggie notes. Heap had spent the night in his bus in a campground near Rollinsville while Mead laid out his sleeping bag beside the VW. In the morning they shared a breakfast of granola with wild currants and raspberries, just coming ripe, and boiled coffee. “I hate to leave the hills for what lies below,” said Heap, “but I’ve got a brother down there expecting me today—if he even remembers that I’m coming.” They made their goodbyes, and Michael left Mead happy to hitch north. But it was a Monday morning with precious little traffic, so Mead finally gave in, recoiled his thumb, and sat. It gave him a chance to get into the precious notes, which he was eager to do.
Slater must have been a soulbrother of Carson’s, each approaching the world as both poet and scientist. The eight xeroxed pages mixed typed third-person notations of careful observation and data with handwritten flights of lyrical first-person appreciation: a complex graph of daily flight patterns next to a judgment of July 19, 1973, as “a day of haunting beauty so intense as to remain in memory for life.” Slater gave away his conservationist bent, lamenting truck traffic excluded from the tunnel and forced to drive over the pass. “Despite heavy jet and car traffic,” he wrote, “magdalena, damoetus, and cupreus survive, classic alpine glacial relicts sequestered by drifting snow in their last refugia, indicators of intolerable environmental change.”
This was followed by pages of rearing notes—the first successful rearing of this species ever, as Edwards had got only to first instar with an egg sent him by T. L. Mead, and no one had tried since, until Slater. Charles had been enjoying scrambled eggs and puffballs fried in butter
when a fresh female Magdalena Alpine flew by as if to flirt with possible capture. Right at that moment, I was thinking how observation sometimes reveals clues to the secrets of nature and how it works. There was lightning in the dark cloud to the south of the divide and thunder rolled far down into the valleys with a slow grumbling. In a burst of sun from behind the cloud I dropped the net on the ground as if hypnotized and followed the female magdalena up the steep slope of the rockslide. She flew to a place where bedrock outcropped. Below the outcrop was a little hollow, and in the hollow, a mound, and on the mound some grass and flowers. And on a rock below and to the left of this mound, she found a cleft which will be in shadow, except for about two hours a day. And in this small cleft on the rock, she laid an egg by backing up to it and reaching over the edge with her abdomen. It seemed to be placed very carefully, on lichen.
This was the first oviposition by a Magdalena alpine ever reported from the wild.
Mead read all this as if he were buried in a novel that he couldn’t put down. A dozen cars went by without him so much as lifting a thumb. He could see why Slater would probably never get this material published in a journal, and also why Heap had told him that it was a rich lode, mined by a fine naturalist. The experiments realized and imagined, the observations, the experience—all there, offered to him for his use.
And when again Mead stood, brushed off his butt, and ran for a jeep that slowed for him, he knew something that he had only hoped before. He knew there was help for him in his deepening desire to know this creature intimately—help all around, everywhere he looked and didn’t look. He knew he could do it and that it was right for him to be here.