We spoke little but frankly on the way to my trailhead. When I told her about my unscheduled bivouac, she said I was slightly silly and damned lucky, but she admired how I had kept my head. “So you bagged the peak, huh?” she asked. I told her I didn’t think of it that way . . . seemed more like the peak bagged me. She said I must be a man who loves mountains more than himself. “I get so tired of these rock jocks and cowboy climbers for whom the mountains are mere foils for their egos and escapades than companions,” she said, pretty much like that. And that the mountains respected bravura above bravado, and maybe that’s why I came out all right. I said I found the peak pretty overwhelming, and she said it will always be that way, or should be.
I showed her where to stop, and I got out. “Is that the one?” she asked, pointing off toward the rocky pyramid where I’d perched some twelve hours before. I nodded. “Well, it’s not quite a fourteener,” she said, “but almost.” I was about to ask its name when she pulled out. I still don’t know that mountain’s name. Or hers.
19
Erebia skims the rocky face of Magdalena Mountain like a floater gliding across the surface of a big pale eye. His own eyes, paired black globes dominating each side of his head, survey a broad periphery for patches of pink that might mean nectar and for shapes of dark that could be females. Able to see the visible spectrum as well as ultraviolet, he can pick out many hues, though a flower we call yellow might fluoresce some other color to him and stand out even more. And while his compound eyes have thousands of lenses, Erebia sees no honeycomb image, but a single picture of fair clarity. Or so science believes, as butterflies decline to reveal their visions.
On his first flight, Erebia looks down and all around over the granite boulders that make up his rockslide. The stones lie as they fell when the mountains broke apart. Their colors are the pink and gray of feldspars, the white of quartz, the black and glass of micas, and the greens, yellows, oranges, and blacks of lichens. These rocks are home to Erebia and most of what he sees, aside from the sky. As for the sky, when it is blue, Erebia flies; when white or gray, he basks; and when purple, he creeps into the rocky cracks and holes. And when the sky turns his own color, it is time to take to the deeper shelter beneath the boulders until morning. Stone and sky make up most of his world.
There is more. Green grows now among the rocks, wisps of alpine grasses that give sustenance during Erebia’s larval months. These blades will be sought by his future mates and all other female Magdalenas for egg-laying as they fly from stone to basking stone. Erebia is not unaware of these patches of grasses. Were his flight to graze the edge of the rocks or to reach the fellfield or the beginning of the tundra, Erebia would see much more green. Here, in July, if the snow melts, the whole of the arctic-alpine seed bank bursts its vaults, as if entire field guides spilled their flowered pages across the slopes in leaf and bloom. No one unfamiliar with the tundra, while surveying the winter mountain, could picture its summer profusion. No one having seen it once could but wish to behold it again. Magenta paintbrush daubs the variegated green canvas among a pointillist array of blue and white and gold and lavender. Insects hover and dart over all, nectaring and pollinating, mating and preying, laying eggs and eating leaves, feeding birds and one another as from the boggy turf rises a sweet stink of Ordovician richness.
But that rich turf is not this Erebia’s realm. Other species of the genus fly there, such as the small chocolate and cinnamon Mead’s alpine (Erebia callias), whose rabbit-gray underside blends so well with the lichened cobbles on which it basks. The still smaller Theano alpine (E. theano) haunts wet hollows, bogs, and swales among the tundra and subalpine forest and suns on the broad, round leaves of marsh marigolds. And the eye-spotted Butler’s alpine (E. epipsodea), typical of its many relatives in the Alps, with dark brown wings and eyed russet bands, might be found as well on the tundra as in any other montane grassy habitat from ponderosa pines up to subalpine firs and beyond.
Of all the alpines, only Magdalena restricts itself to the rock realm. Anyone wishing to see it must take to the boulder fields as well. These dark dryads hold a special attraction for arcane cadres among lepidopterists who call themselves Erebia freaks. Most collectors prefer the cheaper charms of gaudy swallowtails and iridescent blue morphos to the understated hues of the dun, striated satyrs. Among those smitten by the subtle mystique of Erebia and its kin, magdalena stands out as a special favorite.
So, as Erebia surveys his rockdom, he perceives a butterfly collector: an anomaly in the landscape, an excrescence on the scene differing from any rock, which could be a tree, except that trees don’t grow up here. With his bright clothing, his waving white net, and his erratic progress over the rocks, the human hardly blends into the scene. Generations of Magdalena hunters will testify that the black beast comes down the rocks directly toward them, only to swerve away at the last moment. Their futile sweep of the net results in the capture of nothing more than a black shadow on the breeze. Not a few such hunters take only air away as their trophy, and they blame not only the rocks, not only the altitude, not only the clouds that always seem to close in too soon, but also the sharp eyes and quick reactions of the butterflies themselves. Erebia is a dodger.
And so this July morning, as Erebia takes wing for the first time, he sees such a foreign object in his path. How can we know what goes on in his poppyseed brain, as, with a strong stroke of wing, he changes course? More predictable is the mental process of the English butterfly collector who leaps, sweeps, misses, swears, falls between two knee-abrading boulders, and curses the much-maligned, much-coveted animal who has sailed far beyond his reach across the scree. The hobbyist resolves to apply himself and do better at his next opportunity. The closest he has come to this experience was pursuing the mountain ringlet, Erebia epiphron, across the fells of Helvellyn in the Lake District, and the Scotch argus, E. aethiops, in the Cairngorms. Those places are fine and wild for Britain, but they’re not like the Rockies; nor are those alpines the match of Magdalena when it comes to evasiveness. Now the hunter is eager to add this storied species to his cabinet.
Watching, watching. But there are other nets on the mountain, much more difficult to see. They cannot move about, yet they take a far greater toll on alpine insects than all the clumsy and adept collectors can manage together. These are the great webs of Aculepeira carbonarioides, the dark, granite-colored spiders that hunt the rockslides for flying prey. Their three- or four-foot orbs anchor boulder to boulder by ten-foot guy-wires ballooned into place and not renewed daily with the rest of the web. These impressive nets are invisible when the angle of the sun is right. The collector is an expert, but Aculepeira is better.
Having missed another magdalena and once more fallen among the rocks, the Brit hauls himself up and steps face-first into one of these massive webs. A mild arachnophobe, he panics and flails wildly. Had he been less frantic to escape his own entrapment, he might have noticed near the center of the web, a few inches from his nose, a black mummy hanging lifeless. A brother of Erebia’s who had survived until that morning, the hapless butterfly flew into the trap, and though he struggled with powerful wings and shed many a scale in the effort, he’d never had a chance. The female spider fell upon the insect and paralyzed him with a nip from her venomed fangs. Then she spun the fresh prey into a silken sandwich bag and sucked his hemolymph dry.
Now, alarmed by the collector’s failed attempt, Erebia dodges, corrects too late, and he too strikes an orb weaver’s web. But only by a tarsus on an outer, unsticky line. Lucky, he is away again unscathed before the spider can reach him.
Not every butterfly that lands in a spiderweb becomes a sacrifice to Arachne. Strong strugglers, many break the webs and get away. Others slip out with the loss of only scales. In fact, the scales of Lepi (“shingle”)-dop-tera (“wing”) may have evolved partly in response to selective pressure from spiders. To their owners, the survival advantage of such a slippery, deciduous coating can be great. Together with their oth
er helpful properties, such as sexual communication, predator deception, solar collection, and rain deflection, the adaptive value of the scales as a spider escape kit could push along their evolution at a speedy pace, bringing on this major advance in insect upholstery. Collectors, too, have been known to help stuck butterflies escape from their rival netters either inadvertently, by striking the webs with their nets, or on purpose, torn three ways between seizing the specimen for themselves, letting nature take its course, or playing the god of mercy in expiation for their own lethal take.
Sailing, watching. Collectors and spiders are not the sole butterfly predators on the mountain. Erebia glides over a persistent snowbank. On the edge of the ice that still lids a small tarn, a flock of rosy finches forages. Their soft brown and blackish plumage contrasts with plummy highlights on cap, wing, and rump. They are pecking seeds and insects that have fallen into the snow and been immured there this season or last. It would not be beneath a rosy finch to turn flycatcher and go for an alpine, should one drift into nabbing range; even less so for a water pipit, that bobbing, straw-colored bird of the high meres, chiefly an insect eater. Nutcrackers will eat whatever they can, and the slow-gliding raven would not pass up a minor meal of its own dark shade.
None of these, but yet another black bird now stoops toward Erebia at great speed. Nine times out of ten, ravens, finches, even pipits might be too slow and clumsy to catch an active alpine on the wing, but now, in his third perilous encounter in as many hours of flight, Erebia is engaged by one of his few superiors in the air: a black swift. Covering vast areas of mountain sky in a day, the swift (her name is a great understatement) normally feeds at a higher level. But drawn down over the snowbank by the cloud of insects chilled in the updraft, the jet hunter swoops low over adjacent rocks, where she spots Erebia. In a flick of her sickle-shaped wings, the bird dives for the butterfly like a heat-seeking missile locked onto its target, like the black bullet her body resembles.
Had he swerved and dropped, as he did before the foreign white shape of the butterfly net, Erebia might have escaped. Instead, he actually changes course to fly directly at the predator. A male butterfly first locates his mate by sight; size and shape mean less than color, or even amplify the attraction. Any swarthy form passing near a male Magdalena is likely to elicit engagement on the wing. Now, in pursuit of a potential mate, Erebia flies in the face of danger.
No gentle lover, the swift opens her broad, froglike bill—a mousetrap triggered by sensitive vibrissae around the mouth—and clamps it shut on the insect. A friendly zephyr shifts Erebia’s wings just enough to remove his body from that gaping maw, so that only the left forewing is caught. In another second the bird would have pulled Erebia into her gullet by tug of tongue and air and been off to another meal on the run, spitting bits of black wrapper into the wind. The catch takes place just over a large boulder, behind which the bruised and web-faced lepidopterist has been lying in wait for another alpine to course down the declivity. His move, from a concealed position this time, might have been successful—but the “bloody bird,” as he calls it, beats him to it, sweeping the prize right out of the air above his head. Yet his net stroke has already been launched, and it nearly apprehends both black objects, parva and magna. It so alarms the swift that she shrieks, as swifts will in play, fear, or rage. Agape, she releases Erebia from her grip and speeds skyward, filled with a bird’s version of frustration.
The butterfly flutters to earth, shaken but unhurt, and the entomologist falls upon him. The air rings with a metallic clink as he snaps his net over the grounded black Icarus. “At last!” he exults as he prepares to bottle his second-chance catch in a cyanide jar. But first he examines the specimen, held firmly and gently in his flat-bladed stamp tongs. “Bloody hell!” he curses. “Buggered up by that bloody bird!”
The fact that the collector is a true Erebia aficionado, intent upon bagging all the Rocky Mountain species on his brief holiday in the States, enflames his ire. Like many of his ilk, he desires only perfect specimens. Unless a “mint” individual were unobtainable, he would not place a “rag” among the ranks of meticulously spread, flawless butterflies in his cabinet. He fails to consider that his collection, which holds considerable scientific value and is willed to the British Museum of Natural History, would be still more worthwhile if it also documented the vagaries of butterfly life by including such damaged goods as he routinely rejects. But the collector fancies himself a conservationist, so he punctiliously releases his rejects unharmed so that they might still reproduce—just as he does when angling on the Thames or the Avon.
This fellow already has one satisfactory pair of E. magdalena magdalena from Alberta in his Satyrinae drawer, for which he swapped a series of Tasmanian beech satyrs (six males, six females) with a Canadian correspondent, who in turn had purchased them from an itinerant professional collector. So he has no need for a flawed male. Even for exchange, only A-one specimens will do. His desire now is to capture for himself a cabinet-quality, perfectly fresh and unfaded pair of the legendary black butterflies of the High Rockies. So, with further dark mutterings of bad luck, he replaces the cap on his killing bottle, stows it away in his collecting bag, gently sets Erebia upon a bright clump of moss campion, and quits the scene. But before he leaves the mountains later in the day, two perfect males (but no females) of E. magdalena, a pair of Melissa arctics, three rockslide checkerspots, and a pair of Snow’s coppers will lie carefully stowed in his bag, bound for the setting boards in Rosebay Mount, his West Sussex semidetached cottage. Over a pint or two of King & Barnes bitter, he will show them to his admiring friends of a December evening in his study, far, far away from Magdalena Mountain.
Stunned by a whiff of cyanide, disoriented by the double jeopardy catches, Erebia perches on the clump. This, after all, is one of the objects of his search through all those repetitive flappings up, glidings down the rockslide: moss campion and other suitable nectar flowers to fuel his flights. He uncoils his watchspring proboscis, probes a pink floret, and sips the sweet substance, replenishing with sugars the energy expended in his first day as a butterfly—a day that the mountain’s annals (were there any such kept) might fairly describe as “eventful.” Then he crawls to a lump of granite, lays his folded black wings down against it, and basks, for a haze has come over the sun and cooled the mountain air. The haze darkens to a storm cloud, sending Erebia understone before the first cold drops fall. He will keep to the shelter of the boulders for the duration of the shower and all through to the next morning, when the sun will reassert itself.
And that might be just as well. Wasn’t this enough to ask of a first day on the rocks? Erebia eluded the collector and the spider, only to fall prey to both the swift and the human, then escape them both through each other’s agency. He has nectared several times, basked, and surveyed his stony domain as he carried out the age-old flight pattern of his kind: fly up to the ridge, float down to the bottom, investigate objects black, pink, and yellow, avoid all else. Then do it all over again, and again.
But so far, no female. Erebia and the collector looked in vain for females all day. It might be a week before any females even appear on the scene. As with many other butterfly species, the males eclose first, the female’s emergence somewhat deferred. This way the females take fewer chances at losing their precious load to a late freeze, and the stronger, fitter males remain to mate and pass on their genes.
Will Erebia survive to do so? It’s a toss-up at this point. At least a female of his species will not be put off by the flaw that caused the collector to reject him. As he basks one last time before roosting, that mark shines like a fresh brand on a black stallion: a bright, clear V, where the scales have been struck away and the thin membrane shows through—a permanent tattoo applied by the broad bill of the black swift.
20
Mead lay across his turret cot, Carson’s journal on the floor beside him. He’d thought there might be solace in those pages, but they seemed a taunt inst
ead. “If it weren’t for that lackwit Griffin,” he told a disinterested spider, “I could be following Carson’s spoor! No matter how stale the trail, it’d be fresher than the air in here.” He hoped a cola from the basement soda machine might quell his wormwood and cool his forehead. But leaping to his feet, he stumbled on the foot that was asleep and banged his knee against the iron railing of the trapdoor ladder.
“Shit!” chopped the stuffy air. Then, “Ah, shit!” again. Mead had heard his grandmother refer to a certain kind of mood as a brown study, and his Beat-era parents spoke of blue funks, but Mead’s mood just now had no color, no character: it was just a shitty mood. He suffered them infrequently. Normally slung somewhere between reasonable cheer and mild melancholy, he was an implacably calm person with low blood pressure who seldom struck the ceiling or banged the bottom. No manic, Mead, unless it was “manic medium.”
The only event over which he’d felt truly euphoric since coming to Yale was when Noni first took him to bed. The flipside of that high remained at bay until Noni left town that very afternoon. Graduation had been the day before. Seats in the Old Campus were limited to family ticketholders, so Mead watched from the street outside as Noni processed with the others in the 267th commencement exercises of Eli Yale University. Like a great ruly flock of crows with many-colored ribbons around their necks, they came in their hundreds. At the head marched the faculty ravens, interspersed with blue jays and cardinals in their blue and scarlet robes from Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard. President Coxley led, carrying a ceremonial mace. No possums were in evidence.
Afterward, Mead got Noni away from her parents long enough for a walk in the old burial ground, the most private place they could find. “James, you morbid man. Bringing me to a graveyard and then moping. We’ve got to live for the moment, and this is my moment—please don’t spoil it. And you’ve got to enjoy your summer. Don’t moon.” Noni looked especially lovely in the greeny-gold light filtered through thirty kinds of leafing trees. Her smile was so unaffected by the pending split that James wondered whether she really felt it as he did. But her face carried in its corners such a joy for the moment that he couldn’t doubt for long. Noni could dismiss her mopes at will, and could do so in James, most of the time, with a flick of her nutshell hair and a touch.
Magdalena Mountain Page 14