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"As opposed to this one"

She found she could not make herself say Ovid’s name "Is he worried?" she asked finally "Is this really terrible for the butterflies?"

"It could be worse" Pete see no eht, so thetheuess he wants a teh this cold stretch to see what they can actually survive"

"Where did he go?" she asked

"He had the ca a photo census"

She reotten: to record the serial nu it up the tree He did sees orse than he illing to say She asked about the plan for the pillowcases

"Oh, right," Pete said "Those can’t lie around up here all day, somebody needs to take theiving her to knoho somebody would be, "is you shake the butterflies to the botto Open-side up You can rig up a line in the lab And then you just watch them"

"You watch pillowcases full of dead butterflies?"

"They’re not all dead There’s a bunch of sleepers in there, you’ll see When they war up the inside of the pillowcase At the end of the day you count the living and the dead, and do the ure tiround, and that’s your mortality estimate"

She thought this through, stepwise "Could I hang them up in my house?"

"Sure It’s probably warmer than the lab," he said, which was true, but she was thinking of Preston when he cae of a chair and watch those pillowcases for all he orth He’d race to tell her each tiin the slow climb, pressed between soft walls of fabric She and Preston would cheer for the stragglers, because at the end of the day, it was so and the dead, and do theher lunch until well past noon Pete had left her rigging up more lines for buttons while he shot more arrows Sometimes he crouched on his heels at the plywood table and entered sequences of mystery data into Ovid’s sained its legs in the forest throughout the rees until she realized her fingers had thawed and she no longer needed some of her outer layers Around the time she shed her coat the teant spectacle of butterflies twitching open and even launching The air got croith little celebratory bursts of action, like rice at a wedding She stopped tying fishing line through bracelets of pipe and lifted her gaze Pete looked up fro bodies and rose unsteadily froation they lifted their eyes in thanks There was no whooping or backslapping, as when Pete’s arrow bested the tree The difference was understood