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She was unsure nohether he’d disular glass slides in a slotted box "I know Pete needs you back," he said a little absently, pulling out one slide after another and holding it up to the , closing one eye to peer through "Our Pete is never satisfied without a lovely assistant at his elbow But I want to show you just oneAh Here" He fitted the slide under theit to the platfor to put you on O-E counts This is interesting Have a look"

She fiddled with the focus, and it jued, transparent ovals that overlapped slightly like roof shingles These were the scales that covered a butterfly’s wings, he said,the scales she saw smaller, darker shapes like water beetles, and these, he told her, were the parasites OE for short He would write down the whole name for her later, it was easier to learn that way This was a prepared slide he used for teaching, but they would start looking for these parasites on the monarchs Infestations were associated with butterfly populations that did not succeed in rations

"So parasites could be the cause of the here instead of Mexico?"

"The cause," he said with a rueful s his head, and suddenly there he was, the man who’d sat at her kitchen table He must be everyone’s favorite professor "Cause," he said, "is not the same as correlation Do you knohat I er novice’s sn vacations also tend to own more televisions than those that do not Is that second television causing families to be more adventurous?"

"No, that would be the cash flow"

"Probably, yes So else is the cause of both Cars with fla tickets Are the flaether"

"And when they do, they are correlated It is the darling of all hu, that one is the cause of the other"

"I get that Like, crows flying over the field will cause it to snow to, no way Maybe it’s a stors happen, but the crows move first"

"And there you are, Dellarobia Ahead of half of e students"

"And all journalists," Pete piped up from across the rooht"

"New proof!" Pete shouted "Facebook use lowers kids’ grades! Breast ievity!"

"Many journalists," Ovid said

Correlation, cause She would write the words in the corner of her lab notebook, which was starting to fill with s the ration?" Ovid asked "We don’t know We are seeing a big increase in these parasite infestations And we have recorded rising average te the parasite an advantage? It’s teain, we don’t know for sure Not unless we can create experi steady except for temperature We cannot jump to conclusions All we can do is measure and count That is the task of science"

It seeood deal larger than that Sos Ifback, the Tina Ultners of this world were going to take their shots

She stayed a while longer at the ain to Pete’s elbow to record his sa better at the Mettler balance and dispatched the pans quickly, so to wait for Pete to catch up It thrilled her that Ovid felt she was ready for so nu skeins of yarn and recording her crabbed coluo day when they’d dyed the yarn Two o Impossible Her world had been the size of a kitchen then Now she had a life in which sheleft her with so little tis with the kids were a ind of preparation and catch-up She’d skipped church two Sundays in a row, first for the chance to hose down theparlor before Ovid and Pete arrived, and the next week doing more or less the same in her own home, which she’d had no chance to clean If neither of these qualified in Hester’s ed to differ

She wondered how the environht now at Bear and Hester’s, if they even ed to find their way over there They’d seemed disoriented, inwas on hold for now And that evidently it was not the worst thing likely to happen to thetrack as the te the doardmonarchs and their beautiful mysteries, he would noith them at the end, for reasons he had never in his whole life foreseen She wished he could explain this to those kids who’d been in her yard Some deep and terrible trouble had sent theaddress, like the protesters themselves The butterflies had no choice but to trust in their world of signs, the sun’s angle set against a turn of the seasons, and so inside all that had betrayed them

And what could any person do to protest the likes of that? Bear Turnbow’s business plan was stoppable in theory, but you couldn’t stand up and rail against the weather That was exactly the point of so way, confidence swaggering into the storainst Nature Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless Even a sliht her this much: Man loses

10

Natural State

Januaryone foot, then another, on the freezing line It wavered, rising to forty, dipping to thirty, but never plunged A shts Dellarobia could not sleep for thoughts of cold air creeping down along the ridgelines It would fill the forest secretively like a poisonous gas and surround the butterflies in the quarters where they crowded close, riveted to their family trees, lulled into a dorht it would happen