Or call it Tahosa, the local Indian name for “dwellers of the mountaintops.” The mountain was scaled hundreds of times by Enos Mills and those he guided, by thousands more since, and was admired by millions. The next day, one or two hardy truants from the BFC became the latest to reach the summit by way of the Keyhole, a steep and stony route. The others worked its flanks. At night they all pupated in thick down against the deepening cold, as strange, hardy moths that generate their own body heat circled in toward their black lights.
The catch for three nights numbered only 203 moths, but among them could be counted several rarities, moths new to the state and park lists, a postglacial relict tiger moth with sharply striped primaries and hindwings of delicate rose that had been found no nearer than Montana, and a species of owlet moth possibly new to science. The cracks flew as to whether it should be dubbed Icyassus bagdonitzii or Longspikus marmota. Randy suggested Humberta lolita, since the moth had a slender, golden-haired thorax, and it had been collected by the youngest female member of the BFC, Elise, a new recruit to CB’s tutelage.
“Very funny,” said the prof. “You are not walking the intelligent trail he talks about. But there actually is a connection to Nabokov here. Professor Strelnikov told me that when Nabokov was a boy in Russia, he proposed a new species of Plusia to the experts, only to learn that he had been gazumped by a German named Kretschmar. Out of revenge, Nabokov gave that name to a blind man in one of his stories. And this moth appears to be a plusiine; we could redeem things by naming it Plusia nabokovii—though there’s already a Nabokov’s blue and a Nabokov’s satyr.”
“I know what Tiny would call it,” said Lisa.
“What’s that?”
“Bait!”
The third morning out, ice on their sleeping bags, food depleted, schnapps extinct, beer back at the cars, and diminishing returns setting in on the traplines, CB and crew decided to head down. Their planned route out, not exactly direct—as no one was eager to trade the high country for the parched plain below—would take them under Columbine Falls, below Ship’s Prow and the north summit of Magdalena Mountain, down that peak’s north ridge to the Roaring Fork, and thence back to the main trail again, with a fair bit of bushwhacking along the way. Sterling’s band would meet them at the Longs Peak campground, having driven back across Trail Ridge Road from the Never Summer Range. If they got there on schedule, there might be some beer left.
Late afternoon found the trekkers taking a break in the lee of Magdalena Mountain. The weather began to close in, and they all looked up and around. The wind got up, and a few clouds rose. Kate said to Lisa, “Magdalena Mountain! What a name.”
“Yes, it is. So Bel saw the Black Butterfly at Peacock Pool, but I wonder if anyone’s collected E. magdalena up there on the mountain itself.”
“Should be perfect habitat—rocks, rocks, and more rocks. We really ought to have a voucher specimen from here.”
“It’s too late in the season, too late in the day, and too cold, isn’t it?” This from Andy, the most promising ecologist in the group.
“Maybe,” said CB. “But that’s never stopped us before. Anyway, Mike Heap would never forgive us if we didn’t try. Shall we take a look?” That was all the challenge the BFC needed to delay their descent a little longer. No one was quite ready to abandon the field for the classroom, least of all the boss.
No sooner had they taken to the rocks than the clouds grouped overhead like a rugby scrum and a light rain began. They donned their army surplus ponchos, stinking as old rubber does, but serviceable. Then the rain slackened, and the sun came back out for an encore, as it sometimes will in the arctic-alpine zone, just long enough to put butterflies to flight and make a rubberized poncho a sweaty thing.
The butterfly in question was a chimera, a swirling sliver off the black cloud. So fresh was its image in his mind’s eye, it took CB a second to realize that he was actually seeing a Magdalena in real life. He hadn’t given it any odds at all, in spite of his pep talk. But always the enthusiast, he was never one to dampen the plan for fun or adventure. He figured that if he was able to get these kids excited about anything out here, long odds or not, he was doing his job. Who knew? Maybe the day would come when young people would no longer go outside to get their thrills. But not for now, not if he could help it. And there it was—or was it? “Look!” he called to the others, who were debating turning back downhill. “There’s Maggie after all!”
For Erebia’s part, he shouldn’t have been here at all. But his recent proclivity for the upper slopes, two alarming encounters with large moving objects, and his subsequent pursuit of a fresh female had brought him to the lip of the arête. And when the wind arose, he found himself lifted over to the north slope for the second time in his life. But unlike the other time, when he landed on the snowfield and nearly died there, he was now much lower, and most of the snow had melted. Now he was in new territory, and the weather was unsettled: one moment wholly threatening, the next alluring for a last forage before what could be his final night, if he only knew. But he did not. He merely followed the mercurial cues of the fugitive sun, as always.
“This late, it’s probably a female,” said CB. “Maybe we can get some eggs to rear them.”
Bagdonitz, fit but you couldn’t say lean, puffed after the insect, raised by a shaft of sun but about to take to its sepulcher before the rain came in earnest. “You come up from below, Lisa—we’ll double-team her.” Between the two experienced netters, Erebia fluttered, fell, and basked to suck the last warmth from the late beam. “Hold on—nah, it’s a rag—an old brown one, probably a spent male.” Then, “Aw, heck—let’s go for it anyway, for the voucher. The NPS folks will want it for the database. Old guy’s done his job.” Several members spread out in a circular gauntlet around the late-season Magdalena.
Deviating eastward toward the high ridge, they tracked the insect from perch to perch. Rain and sunshine and even a spit of sleet kept trading places, putting the butterfly up and down like an ebony yo-yo, and still they followed. One or two snapped a net down, but each time the elusive animal squeezed out through the rocks like oil. It was as if they each knew that their idyll was over, and only this hunt could prolong it. All Erebia knew was that something beyond his experience kept disturbing his perch as his old muscles grew colder and weaker.
“I think he went behind that boulder up there, Boss,” Kevin called as he went on point. “Maybe we can find it in the rockpile.”
CB looked, spooked it again, then followed the alpine down into a hidden depression at the base of a broad scree that assumed the angle of repose below the ridgeline. Having lost sight of the creature again, he scanned the rocks around him. At last he saw it, attempting to bask on a wet bare stone of little warmth. “What that butterfly is,” he huffed, “is tough.” He was of half a mind to let it go for its valor.
The butterfly hunkered. Bagdonitz approached, raised his net, and paused, savoring that moment of suspense just before the strike, that nanosecond of indecision that often costs collectors their quarry at the very last moment. About to clap his net over the brown butterfly, he heard a strange, gargling noise on the wind. It sounded almost human. He looked up, and the butterfly flew. “Damn!” he said, and took up the pursuit again around a massive boulder and across the open rockslide. On the last of the day’s sunbeams, Erebia fluttered feebly over the ridge, back to home territory, escaping onto the infinite and kindly face of Magdalena Mountain. Then clouds closed for good and the rain came hard, as if someone had pulled a plug in the sky.
Bagdonitz abandoned the chase and wished the butterfly godspeed. Then he heard the strange noise again, and it sounded even more like a human voice raised in anger, though he couldn’t make it out. He turned in the direction it seemed to come from, covered some ground, and rounded another great screening rock. And there, straight ahead, he beheld a monstrous spectacle: thirty feet beyond, a man was lofting a boulder overhead, looking for all the world as if he w
as about to drop it on a woman lying still at his feet. The man screamed, “Sorceress! Whore! WOMAN—DIE!”
“Hold it!” Bagdonitz shouted. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He lunged toward the crazy scene. Some of the others followed on his flying heels. None could fathom what seemed to be happening. Scrambling up the rocks toward the gruesome tableau, they gave out shrieks, squeals, the flight honks of wildebeests on the run from lions, the roars of the lions in pursuit, all the noises a circus should make when busted loose in chaos.
Attalus wheeled to see what this commotion was that rose over the wind and his own wails. His foot slipped on the rain-licked granite. Slowly but irrevocably, he tipped, and as gravity took over, he lost his hard-won grip on the hundredweight stone. The jealous mountain sucked its own back down to earth. Attalus struck ore with his bare head one second before the boulder went to ground in the same place. His brain burst from his smashed skull, returning its only true knowledge to the lichens whence it came, and freeing its madness to the palpable ozone of the sane, sane sky.
“Oh, God!” cried Bagdonitz, struggling to believe what his eyes told him.
“Oh, Christ!” said Lisa, turning aside to vomit behind a rock.
All the others, for once dumbstruck, were thinking, Oh, gross!
Carolinus hastened to the woman. She was alive, but this storm was gathering force, and she lay wet and cold as well as bleeding. “We’ve got to get her to shelter,” CB cried above the whining wind. He knew that caution would dictate making her warm and leaving her inert and still against possible back injury, then sending for experienced rescue help. But given the danger of lightning and exposure, there wasn’t time for that. He ripped open his pack for the first-aid kit, applied a couple of bandages, and wrapped Mary in his parka.
“We’d better head straight for the trailhead and the ranger station,” CB said. Handing Randy his net, he adjusted his pack and collected Mary in his arms. She hung limp, her bloodied head resting against his big shoulder. Blood cemented her dark hair to his face as he carried her down the rockslide one stone at a time.
“Can you handle her alone, CB?”
“I am a giant of a man,” he said. “I can manage.” But they knew their leader, and behind his confidence they heard fear for this woman, so hurt, so terrorized, and, for all they knew, so near death.
39
Sylvanus sat alone in a corner of the Great Hall of the Mountain Monastery, his leg propped up, trying to read without success. His ankle throbbed, and his anxiety grew as the sky over Magdalena Mountain darkened from lapis through steel to graphite, then slate. The wind gathered; it whispered down the great stone chimney that Sylvanus had better build a fire, for if Oberon and James ever did return, with or without Mary, they’d need it. He hobbled to the grate and wrestled a big beetle-mined log into place behind the andirons. Then he laid kindling of ponderosa pine needles, beetle-bark, and old Catholic tracts underneath, and applied a long wooden match to the pyre.
Soon a fire blew back at the wind, driving the chilly howl from the chimney. Warmth began to flow from the reddening wood and reflect from the black stone fireback. Sylvanus pulled his chair close. Tending the blaze, he murmured into it, as much to drive off loneliness and apprehension as to romance the licking flames.
“A fireplace: perfect altar to Pan. Here we give wood back to ash and air, taking warmth and cheer for our part. No tree that grows escapes the cycle, though it may be petrified for the ages. Here we hasten the process, making warmth, not war, with trees, leaving the better part of the forest to grow and die and rot and grow again so that our Grove too might prosper. In the benevolent shade of the ambered aspen, in the beneficent glow of the embered pine, all things thrive and nothing diminishes.”
Sylvanus extemporized. He enjoyed making up reverential homilies to express his idea of the Pan-Pacific principle. But he did so mostly alone, in company of firelight, sunshine, or moonglow, and he always found it a soporific practice. Now his fringed chin tumbled onto his trunky chest and he dozed before the fire, comfortable yet troubled in his dreams of dark figures playing a deadly hide-and-seek among the rocks above.
Outside, aspens trembled more than usual as the wind stiffened. Daylight diminished and firelight flickered, casting between them a strange warm glow. If crickets watch rooms, as they seem to do, those posted in the cracks about the hearth—that classic cricket habitat—would have seen in that glow a chamber a hundred leaps long and fifty across, bottomed with old, scratched, once-polished pine and topped with rough beams so high that only by crawling up the scroll-carved wainscoting might they gauge the loft of the ceiling; long walls window-lined; others, once hung with portraits of saints and abbots, now lined with a neo-“Belgian” Taiwanese tapestries of The Peaceable Kingdom, only vaguely suggestive of the originals in Bruges.
Yet a warm hearth nonetheless, nocturnal lodgings for hundreds of generations of their ancestors, where the gryllids would note the flagstone floor, the terra-cotta sunrays set into the chimneybreast built of massive, lichen-painted blocks of granite; ornamented iron screens at the sides, cast in a fancy fish-and-seaweed motif; the oval mouth opening into a gaping fireplace with deep inglenooks on either side intended for rising bread, dripping roast on a spit, or bone-chilled grandparents; the heavy andirons and grate containing just now a live fire; and, before the blaze, a dozing Druid in a rocking chair.
But the blaze shrank to a flicker, the wind in the chimney (its fingers fiddling at the battens) gained the advantage, and the warmth of the scene threatened to flee before the glowering cloud of the late afternoon. One of the crickets chirruped louder than usual, waking up the watchman who then rallied the fire back into life.
Sylvanus checked the old carriage clock on the rock-and-pine mantelpiece. Annie had instructed him to call NPS and request a full-scale search for four or five persons missing on the mountain if she failed to return by six o’clock. They both knew that that was foolishly late, but the order tried to keep as low a profile as possible with the Park, existing as it did at the superintendent’s pleasure. The order owned the buildings, but much of the land was occupied under a special-use permit that was vaguely grandfathered in place. Piss off the Park Service, and they could be out. The carriage clock read 5:48. Sylvanus jerked alert and began to prepare his speech to the ranger, who would not be remotely amused at anything he had to say.
Then the fire guttered as the wind blew in from a new direction. Mountain Annie stood in the open doorway. “I’ve got them,” she said in a cryptic whisper, and disappeared again without. Sylvanus let out a deep sigh of relief that changed into one of worry when he realized that she could be bearing corpses. He clumbered to the tall, heavy door and pulled the hasp, opening it inward in time to see Annie tugging the second of two limp, Indian-blanketed forms from a travois hitched behind her big gray. They looked like corpses, after all. But Annie said, “Help me if you can, get them to the fireplace.”
Between them, the two sentient ones in the room hauled the two who were still to woven mats before the hearth. The crickets gave up their places to those in greater need, who breathed, barely. Slowly, blue lips purpled, waxen cheeks were massaged to milky pink. “Their pulses seem okay, if not strong, but they could have arrhythmia. Please hurry and call 911.”
Sylvanus reached for the telephone to summon an ambulance.
“Annie, the phone is dead. It must be the storm. And there are no cars here. We’d better forget about getting an ambulance. But Thomas is up in his hut, behind a big pointed boulder, a hundred yards northwest of the Forest Grove. He set my leg—he should be there.” He kept on warming the storm’s first victims while Annie ran for Thomas. Though not one of the new brotherhood, the old relic of the previous order of healers had remained on the premises, sometimes ministering to the members, as he had to Mary.
Annie returned in fifteen minutes with Thomas in his ragged brown robe and Gore-Tex poncho and carrying an old-fashioned black doctor�
��s bag. Shyness and worry vied over the little man’s face. Weathered yet smooth, ageless but growing old, his skin glistened with rain and perspiration after the dash through the pines in Annie’s tow. She took him by surprise, the first woman to visit his hermitage since the nursing nuns, decades ago. But he came without question.
Annie wrung her wet, chilled hands before the fire, wondering whether to try to get out through the storm on her horse. “I left my truck and trailer in Allenspark,” she said. “If I ride there on Grimalkin, I could drive to the hospital in Lyons . . .”
“No need, no need,” Thomas called from the hearth. He was administering shots of epinephrine to the men’s bared arms. “Their heartbeats are steady and regular, vital signs all stabilizing, from what I can tell. They’re cold, but in the nineties—not dangerously hypothermic. You got there in time, thank God.”
“What do you think happened to them?”
“I’d say a little ground flash from lightning. Light case, no obvious burns or cardiac arrest. I’ve seen much worse. But it’s good that you got to them when you did, Miss Cloudcroft, and with blankets. Those are the good ones Charlie Eagle Plume sells, aren’t they? Every now and then I slip out to barter some dried venison for one.” Sylvanus raised an eyebrow. All these years, he’d never known that Thomas ever hunted, or left the place. “And your fire, Sylvanus. They couldn’t have lasted long without that.”
“But they’re okay?” Annie begged for confirmation.
Magdalena Mountain Page 32