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Why the butterflies, why now Why here?
Ovid had three theories Not at first In the beginning he resisted, wielding nonansith the best of them: untestable hypotheses, too many variables Herbicides, for example Their sole larval food is milkweed, a plant whose last na on the increase, as war in the West Nile ratory pathways Both the fire and the flood But at length he consented to certainty about these few things: It has become e the whole forestuphill, a thing she could iine The trees have their requiree toward the peaks, and from there they cannot levitate
But that explains why not there That is not why here
His second line of thinking was the OE parasites he’d shown her under the hly infected with this parasite cannot fly very far The annual trip to Mexico see the population healthy But west of the Rockies is a different group, an outsider’s club of monarchs that are very infected, and do not fly to Mexico but seek their winter shelter in scattered groves of trees along the California coast Maybe they portend what is co infection rates If the parasite reached a critical level in eastern populations, natural selectioneverywhere, not just in California The hypothesis is immense, with its multiple bonds of cause and effect, some of them testable To this end she cut sainst the abdomens of one hundred live monarchs, and under the scope, counted the dark parasite spores nestled aed, translucent scales It took hours of acute ocular focus, a headache beyond all known proportions, and an appoint the microscopic dots on every centi butterflies on squares of forest floor, except that the nu are the tasks of science Not guessing, and not wishing The potential answers are infinite, and no preference a them is allowed: there will be no just-because, or unjust-because
She understood But still, it’s why not there Not why here
His third theory concerned devastation in the "spring range," which is what he called a funnel-shaped area on the map, fundamentally Texas Monarchs that eke out winter in the Mexican Neovolcanics awaken from their torpor to an unruly sexual --a quaking leaf, otherwithin their eated females, and afterward they are spent, fulfilled Their otiable deadline, the deposit of perfectly ti leaf of a Texanearth This, he said, tapping the s in one basket The spring range Steady through the ages, now its rhythht and unquenchable fires By fire ants100 percent of the enetic rants just to the northern edge of this realm of fire ant and firestorm This far south in the autuer frorants overwintering here, where they would not be forced to come back across that desert A Bible Belt latitude, favorable for its h to cool an insect pulse to dormancy for the winter wait Suppose there is only one such place And that they had been co here for years, in s Until precipitous natural selection against the Mexicanfavor on these pioneers Their gene, suddenly, the inheritance of a species
The explanation was far from complete A population was only as valid as its habitat Winter nectar sources remained problematic, when repeated war ence There are always more questions Science as a process is never complete It is not a foot race, with a finish line He warned her about this, as a standard point of contention People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their caer to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the , he said They conclude there was no race As long as on’t co
And even while he warned her of these caveats, Dellarobia felt a settling down of her lifelong plague of impatience He did not claim that God moves in mysterious ways Instead he seeh they never could have discussed it, that everything else is in motion while God does not move at all God sits still, perfectly at rest, the silver dollar at the bottom of the well, the question
On the way to the study site a pine cone war broke out aartners The boys took it , rough girl in a decrepit parka whose fake fur hood wascarpet She shi Miss Rose’s escalating threats about getting sent right straight home hat she called a pink note Dellarobia had a whole new ieneral This girl, Coory of children whose parents, if applicable, would not be iood and ready, with gummy black stains all over her clothes and hands that Dellarobia kneould not give in to soap and water She’d had her own tangles with pine sap up here Preston see to tell her the munitions were cones, not "pine combs" Undaunted by her indifference, he sidled up to her with this inforain, just the way Roy would carry around his old tooth-punctured Frisbee to drop at your feet while you did yard work, all afternoon if need be
Dellarobia held herself a little apart froularly navigated without her She saw that he was reserved but not shy, that other kids ran to him with their special finds such as beetles, and that he stuck close to the y, confident Josefina She was his partner or protector--Dellarobia couldn’t quite read it For all she knew, they h she doubted it Sosters appeared to be well-heeled--she’d actually spotted a cell phone--and others, like Coenerations of hand-me-down But Josefina and Preston seemed to represent soation of seniors from sopho, that first day Josefina’s family showed up on their porch In retrospect she saw in it some element of rescue