Pyle - Magdalena Mountain

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

Nabokovs 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 Grays 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 authors 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 areasFiction. | NaturalistsFiction. | ButterfliesFiction.

Classification: LCC PS3616.Y545 M34 2018 | DDC 813/.6dc23

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

www.counterpointpress.com

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

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 Septembers 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 suns 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.

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 of light often signaled a coming storm, sending the alpine insects into hiding among the sod or stones. But this cloud passed quickly, so the sipping butterfly hunkered only briefly, then resumed its suck from the sweet-filled floret. A bigger black form took flight when the bright intruder entered its territory. The raven charged the big yellow bird to chase the interloper out of its airspace, succeeded, and resettled.

As the slope fell away toward the canyon below, more than keeping pace with the glide path of the Ghia, so fell the yellow missile. Sky whooshed aside to make room for it, otherwise there was no sound but for three shrieks on the alpine air: a nutcrackers alarm scream; the whine of the engine, gunned by the foot glued to the Ghias floorboard; and a third, muffled by the glass, growing into a hopeless wail.

The thin alpine air parted before the plummeting car, smelling of green musk, of the great high lawn that is the Colorado mountain tundra. The perfumes of a hundred alpine wildflowers filled the grille of the Ghia. Soon the sweet mingled scents would be overcome by the rank fumes of oil and gasoline mixing with the terpenes of torn evergreens as the grille split against pine and stone. But the rider smelled nothing.

The air took on a chill as the projectile left the sunny upper reaches, crossed over timberline, and entered the shade of the upper forest. Never once had it touched down since takeoff, nor could it fly much farther. Gravity never ran out, but the earth rushed up at last to meet it. All the elements of the alpine earthmineral soil, bare stone, grass, sedge, herb, shrub, and solid trunk of ancient limber pinemingled with the yellow metal when the Ghia went to ground. Soft parts met hard. Granite tore rubber. Branches smashed glass and pierced the cloth upholstery. The engine block escaped its mounts and flew a little farther before shattering against a boulder and coming to rest as shiny shrapnel in the streambed far below. The blow that tore the motor free, ending its long scream, ripped the drivers door from its hinges. That other shriek was loosed into the general clamor. Then nothing.

Almost nothing remained from this unplanned event to disturb the day up above, where it began. The nutcracker returned to its snag, the marmot to its post, the raven to its rock. The black butterfly nectared on, then flew. The forget-me-nots still flowered low against the ground. Not even the green verge of the road betrayed anything amiss. Only a black rubber streak in the roadway gave away the launching spot. Even the golden-mantled ground squirrel whose mad dash across the asphalt had started it all lay not dead on the shoulder, but basking on a boulder nearby in the late-summer sun, unabashed by her close call.