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Her heart lurched when a loud crash sounded suddenly frohed and said it was the lu Ovid and Pete Sometimes, he said, they climbed up trees and cut off so theet a count They’d done this same kind of work last winter in Mexico They had for branches per tree, trees per acre "Counting monarchs is, like, uy counting his herd of cows Count the legs and divide by four"

It didn’t seem like madness to Dellarobia, it seemed pretty methodical And she knew the butt of that joke would be a far it said "cows" instead of "cattle" Why was it so important to count these butterflies? She wished she could ask Instead she said, "I just found one with a sticker on it Is that i It was a little white dot stuck on the loing of one of her counted dead, soot free at the pediatrician’s At first she’d thought it was so household that had fallen off her clothes She’d been known to walk around orse things stuck to her But no, this dot was so official Mako pointed out numbers on it she could barely see, a code they would key into a database in Ovid’s co It would tell theed and by who how this information could help the creature in its present state Bonnie and Mako seeed butterfly in one of the wax-paper envelopes, and then inside a zip-sealed bag they tucked into a pocket of Bonnie’s pack

"That’s the first tag we’ve found at this site," Bonnie said

"Really" Dellarobia tried to get her es in this way across a distance "Where do you think it ca question," Bonnie said "Could be the next state over, or it could be Ontario God, Mako, what if it’s one of ours?" She and Mako had also done fieldwork in Canada over the su butterflies

Dellarobia was floored to think of these fragile creatures owning the span of a continent, fro back and forth across the wide face of a land Each one was so little and sure to die, yet they constituted a force, like an ocean tide She was relieved Bonnie hadn’t suggested the butterflies had co up here after the landslide and flood, displaced along with Josefina’s family, was a worrisoive her family’s ees of a horrible rearmer they took breaks to stretch their limbs and shed their coats Mako had to step out of his because the zipper was stuck at the botto The butterflies also began squir for a lot of overhead action that Dellarobia found unsettling Bonnie told her the monarchs couldn’t make their own body heat, so they were paralyzed in the cold, unable to rees

"Exactly fifty-five?" Dellarobia asked "How do you know that?"

Bonnie shrugged "It’s been measured It’s all published Dr Byron did a lot of the early work about temperatures inside and outside the clusters They’re ht it’s best on the outside, so they jockey around all the tiood position"

"Like puppies in a pile," Dellarobia said Rather than "pigs in a pile," which was the actual expression She went back to counting and finished her quadrats before the others, because they’d given her fewer of the, realizing she’d forgotten about sht-point-six minutes Which made it all the worse, now that she’d re, just to inhale soarettes out of her , scaly black and orange bouquets The clu bears up in the shadows She thought of deer hunting with Cub years ago, and the way they hung up a carcass to field-butcher it Wearing the same coat she wore now A versatile wardrobe, suitable for allto coht struck the drooping tresses of butterfly clusters they would light up, butterfly wings opening wide in response, fanning slowly, drinking in warmth Sometimes for no apparent reason a cluster see their le flight through the forest air, it was ih in the trees, and there were so lad when Pete and Dr Byron returned, even though she’d had no practical reason to , like Roy and Charlie, always relieved when the herd caether She helped spread out one of the tarps and they sat on it to eat lunch while discussing the area of the roost, the stors Dellarobia could understand and et in their way, but they went to sos The sa today, they had counted a week ago, so co the numbers would tell how many butterflies were downed by the stor track She was surprised to learn the ones on the ground were not all goners When the sun came out, a lot of them would bask and shiver to raise their body teain If the rain alone caused mortality, that would be different from what they’d seen in Mexico

Their line of as not just body counts, Dr Byron assured her Ovid They called him that, and he was their boss, so she could try to do the sa he’d coain But hisher into coht He called the butterflies a syste used to his accent "A coerating, when she recounted all this He’d been studying monarchs for twenty years, all over the North A the butterflies lived, and his ansas baffling: generally about six weeks The ones that lived through winter lasted longer, a fewlike hibernation "Diapause," he called it, a pause in the nor Somewhere in midlife, the cold or darkness of winter put the down their sex drive until future notice