Flight Behavior (39 page)

“Was there some difficulty with Pete?”

“Pete’s great. Bonnie and Mako, they all were. For some reason you all decided to let me in. But trust me, if you’d first run into me as your waitress down at the diner, you would not have included me in the conversation about your roosting populations and your overwintering zones. People shut out the other side. It cuts both ways.”

She could imagine herself in an apron bringing them coffee at one of the grease-embalmed booths at the Feathertown Diner, rest in peace. Ovid actually might have asked her opinion, even there.
I never learn anything from listening to myself
, he’d said that first night. The moment for her to shut up would be right now.

“Humans are hardwired for social community,” he said. “There’s no question, we evolved with it. Reading the cues and staying inside the group, these are number-one survival skills in our species. But I like to think academics are the referees. That we can talk to every side.”

“Could, maybe. But you’re not. You’re always telling me you’re not even supposed to
care
, you just measure and count.” Okay, she thought.
Now
shutting up.

“It’s a point,” he said. “If we tangle too much in the public debate, our peers will criticize our language as imprecise, or too certain. Too theatrical. Even simple words like ‘theory’ and ‘proof’ have different meanings outside of science. Having a popular audience can get us pegged as second-rank scholars.”

Dellarobia was surprised to hear it. If people behaved sensibly anywhere, surely it would be in an institute of higher learning. Although “second-rank scholar” was not an exact equivalent to “whoring with the enemy.”

“Is that why you don’t talk to reporters? Because, honestly, you’re good.”

He exhaled such a long breath, she wondered if he might collapse. “It’s a hazardous road. For ecologists especially, my field. Ecology is the study of biological communities. How populations interact. It does not mean recycling aluminum cans. It’s an experimental and theoretical science, like physics. But if we try to make our science relevant to outsiders, right away they look for a picket sign.”

“I could see that,” she said.

“If I hear one more milksop discussing the environment and calling it ‘the ecology,’ honestly, Dellarobia. I might break a Mettler balance on his head.”

“Wow.”

“In my field, we can be touchy about this,” he said.

No kidding, she thought.

The cloudburst was winding down. The rain would move on, sweeping its chill up the valley. Ovid stood up from his log and smacked the tarp with the flat of his hand, discharging the puddle that had collected there. He drained his coffee cup and set it with finality on the plywood table. “I think we can safely return to our posts,” he said. “I should get down to the lab. I want to dissect some of these females under the scope to see if they might be coming out of diapause. What did you see this morning?”

“Some flying around,” she said. “A lot, early on when the sun was almost out. Mostly they were headed down the valley to the west.”

He shoved his hands into his raincoat pockets. “If the rain stays away, it would be good if you could keep watching this afternoon. I’m curious to know if they’re coming back to the roost. Probably these are short forays for water or nectar, rather than the start of a spring dispersal. But we really don’t know.”

He picked up the red-and-white cooler they used for transporting live butterflies and stepped outside the shelter, squatting on his heels to pick through the fallen pile. He was choosing among the already doomed to get specimens for his afternoon’s dissections. At least they would give their bodies for science. Dellarobia knelt beside him to help. They would need to pack up the equipment. This front was supposed to bring a lot more rain and possible high winds. “When they do that, the spring dispersal,” she said, “if we get that far, where will they go from here?”

“Where will they go from here,” he repeated. He said nothing else for such a long time, she stopped waiting for an answer. She picked up stiff, brittle bodies, one after another, and flicked them away. Most of these were already too dead.

Finally Ovid said, “Into a whole new earth. Different from the one that has always supported them. In the manner to which we have all grown accustomed.”

She found a live female, still pliable, faintly flapping, and dropped it into the open cooler. These little six-pack-size coolers were also used to carry organs from a deceased donor to the hospital where someone waited for a transplant, maybe with an empty chest, the old heart already cut out. She’d seen that on television. It seemed such a dire responsibility for just an ordinary cooler.

“This is not a good thing, Dellarobia,” he added. “A whole new earth.”

“I know,” she said. A world where you could count on nothing you’d ever known or trusted, that was no place you wanted to be. Insofar as any person could understand that, she believed she did.

S
he was unprepared to meet Leighton Akins at the top of the trail, still occupying the small gravel territory she would like to have had to herself. He was sitting in her lawn chair, no less. He had made a sort of tent over himself and the chair with a plastic poncho and seemed to have entered a dreamy state. He jumped when she hailed him.

“I was just about to go,” he said, surrendering her chair. “I ran out of my flyers. The paper airplane, that was all she wrote. But I had to wait out that rain.”

“Shoot,” she said. “I wanted to see one of those.”

“I have
one
,” he said. “But I need to keep it. To make more copies. Is there a copy shop in the little town here? Because I’ve looked, and I see
nada
.”

“Did you happen to see the bank?” She settled into her chair, grudgingly grateful he’d kept it dry. The sky was beginning to lighten, and she saw movement in the lower valley. She scanned a stretch of empty fog. These binoculars took some skill.

“The bank?”

“Yeah. They’ve got a copy machine they’ll let you use. Everybody does.”

“The bank. Who would have thought.” Mr. Akins just stood there. She wondered what he went home to at night, if anything. Probably the Wayside.

“So it’s a pledge?” she asked, keeping her binoculars trained on the mist of the valley, hunting out the bobbing specks. Finally she caught it, one butterfly. Three butterflies. “So what are we people here supposed to sign on to?”

In her periphery she saw him digging in his backpack. “I could read it to you,” he offered. “It’s a list of things you promise to do to lower your carbon footprint. That means to use less fossil fuel. To relieve the damage of carbon emissions to the planet.”

“I know what it means,” she said.

“O-kay. Sustainability Pledge,” he read. “The first category is Food and Drink. You want me to read down the list?”

“I could just look at it.”

He gave her a clouded look, clutching that paper like a last will and testament. Was he thinking she might pull a Dimmit on him and launch it? “Okay, fine,” she said. “Hit me. I’m supposed to be keeping my eyes on the prize here.” She had five butterflies in her sights now, moving together in no solid direction. She thought of the flying ants in Preston’s book. If Preston came tomorrow, they would remember to ask Dr. Byron about the mysterious reference to “perfect females.”

“Number one. Bring your own Tupperware to a restaurant for leftovers, as often as possible.”

“I’ve not eaten at a restaurant in over two years.”

“Jesus. Are you serious? May I ask why?”

She was tempted to glare, but didn’t want to lose the butterflies in her sights. Cub had been known to get fast food while he was on deliveries. She’d find the evidence on the floor of his truck, and he’d swear it wouldn’t happen again, like a man caught fooling around. He knew it was not in their budget. Cub was not the subject of this discussion.

“Okay, number two,” Mr. Akins said. “Try bringing your own mug for tea or coffee. Does not apply, I guess. Carry your own cutlery, use no plastic utensils, ditto ditto. Okay, here’s one. Carry your own Nalgene bottle instead of buying bottled water.”

“Our well water is good. We wouldn’t pay for store-bought.”

“Okay,” he said. “Try to reduce the intake of red meat in your diet.”

“Are you crazy? I’m trying to
increase
our intake of red meat.”

“Why is that?”

“Because mac and cheese only gets you so far, is why. We have lamb, we produce that on our farm. But I don’t have a freezer. I have to get it from my in-laws.”

Mr. Akins went quiet. His dark eyes swam like tadpoles behind his glasses.

“Is that it?” she asked.

“No. There are five other categories.”

“Let’s hear them.”

“We don’t have to.”

“No really. You came all this way. To get us on board.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding a little nervous. “Skipping ahead to Everyday Necessities. Try your best to buy reused. Use Craigslist.”

“What is that?” she asked, although she had a pretty good idea.

“Craigslist,” he said. “On the Internet.”

“I don’t have a computer.”

Mr. Akins moved quickly to cover his bases. “Or find your local reuse stores.”

“
Find
them,” she said.

“Plan your errand route so you drive less!” Now he sounded belligerent.

“Who wouldn’t do that? With what gas costs?”

He went quiet again.

“What are the other categories?” she asked.

“Home-office-household-travel-financial. We don’t have to go on.”

She put down the binoculars and looked at him. She’d lost track of the butterflies anyway. “Let’s hear financial.”

Mr. Akins read in a rushed monotone: “Switch some of your stocks and mutual funds to socially responsible investments, skip, skip. Okay, Home-slash-Office. Make sure old computers get recycled. Turn your monitor off when not in use. I think we’ve got a lot of not applicable here.” He gave her a fearful look. “Household?”

“Good one,” she said. “I have a household.”

“Switch your light bulbs to CFLs. Upgrade to energy-efficient appliances.”

She needed to talk to Ovid again about the electric bill, because February’s had come in. Electricity, on or off, being the household question of note. “Sorry,” she said. “If it involves buying something, check me in the bad-girl column.”

“But the savings are worth the cost.”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay. Set your thermostat two degrees cooler in winter and higher in summer.”

“Than what?” she asked.

“Than where it is at present.”

“Technically that’s impossible. You’d just keep moving it down forever.”

Leighton evidently took this for a refusal, and leaped in for the kill. “Well, there’s only one planet! We all have to share.”

She nodded slowly, exercising what she felt was laudable restraint.

“Almost done,” he said. “Transportation. Ride your bike or use public transportation. Buy a low-emission vehicle. Sorry, no buying anything, you said. Properly inflate your tires and maintain your car.”

“My husband’s truck is on its third engine. Is that properly maintaining?”

“I would say so, definitely.”

She had a feeling Leighton Akins would not find the bank. He and his low-emission vehicle would just head on out of here. She and Dimmit Slaughter would claim their place among his tales of adversity.

“Okay, this is the last one,” he said. “Fly less.”

“Fly
less
,” she repeated.

He looked at his paper as if receiving orders from some higher authority. “That’s all she wrote. Fly less.”

12

Kinship Systems

T
he pregnant ewes looked like woolly barrels on table legs. They had scattered for their morning graze, facing this way and that all over the muddy field, but froze in an identical aspect of attention when the women entered the pasture. Every head faced them, each triangular face framed by its V of splayed horns. A thin horizontal cloud drifted from each set of nostrils in the cold morning light, trails of ruminant breathing. All those present waited for a cue to the next move, including the collie at Hester’s side and Dellarobia herself. She’d volunteered to help vaccinate the ewes this Saturday, with little idea of how it would go. Hester gave the grain bucket a loud shake, and that was the answer to all questions; the sheep began slowly to move. Hester whistled Charlie out in a wide arc to the right and the collie raced uphill in a smooth gallop, gleaming joy in black and white. The old boy still had it. Charlie was thirteen, in this family longer than Dellarobia herself. The sheep responded to the dog’s pressure, gathering in.

“Charlie, look back,” Hester called, and he altered his course, aiming for the back fence. A trio of white yearlings had perched atop a rock pile but gave up their game at the dog’s approach and leaped down. Higher up the hill, though, four of the reddish brown ewes Hester called moorits stood their ground, camouflaged against the mud. Charlie dropped to a wolfish crouch and inched toward them, one white forepaw at a time, until these four also conceded to join the flock. The multicolored flow converged, moorit, white, black, and badgerfaced silvers all loping together downhill in their lumbering gait, rolling fore-and-aft like an unsynchronized troop of rocking horses.

They were pastured here for the higher ground, but after the past week of torrents any former notion of high ground was called into doubt. Dellarobia’s spattered house loomed drearily, as did the old barn that contained the lab and now also sheep when they needed shelter. The ewes paid no mind to the mud, only to their pregnancy-tuned hunger. Their hooves threw clots of muck high in the air as Hester led them into the barn, holding her bucket of sweet feed up out of their reach, a ponytailed pied piper in cowboy boots. She had induced Bear and Cub to repair the waist-high walls subdividing two large stalls inside the barn’s front gallery, enclosures well separated from the lab in the old milking parlor at the back. Still, Dellarobia sometimes heard the rustle and bleating of the ewes through the plastic-sheeted wall, especially on long rainy days when they all gathered restlessly under roof. Hester now wanted Cub to build lambing jugs, where new mothers with tiny lambs could be isolated safely from weather and trampling hooves. Lambing would begin in late March. One month hence.

The enriched warmth of the barn struck all Dellarobia’s senses at once as they entered. The presence of animals had changed this barn, a long-dead place smelling of dust and fuel oil transformed into an environment rich with the scents of sweet feed and manure. She stepped over shiny mounds of sheep droppings nested on the barn’s hay-covered floor. They looked like whole boxes of raisins dumped out in piles on a carpet, a sight she had seen, thanks to Cordelia. Hester let Charlie do most of the work, pressing the animals forward when asked, otherwise holding back with faultless restraint. Charlie was Roy’s sire, the older of the two collies. The kids loved Roy because he could be drawn into their romping and tussling, but Charlie was old-school, above all that.

The ewes pushed urgently into the larger stall, crowding to get to the feeding shelf where Hester poured out a ten-foot line of grain. These cunning Icelandics worked hard to find forage even in the dead of winter, stripping bark from fence posts and dead leaves from trees. She and Cub also threw out some hay every morning, bales purchased out of Oklahoma for a harrowing price because this farm’s meager hay crop had molded, along with all other hay within a hundred miles. Their cattle-raising neighbors were losing a fortune on hay this winter, with little choice but to start selling off calves for nothing. Dellarobia knew it had been Hester’s decision many years ago, over Bear’s objections, to switch over from cattle to this self-reliant breed, and finally the men were seeing the wisdom in it. These ewes only got extra minerals and a grain ration because they were near lambing, and plainly today they wanted that something extra, a craving Dellarobia knew from her own pregnancies. The winter she’d carried Preston she’d been possessed of such strange hungers she sometimes felt like chewing on wet laundry.

The sheep murmured and belched and shoved, arranging themselves by an order of dominance that Hester told her ran in family lines. Bossy brownies, she called the four moorits who’d been last to come in, now first at the trough. Hester pointed out the mother and three daughters, all from different years, who were now the leaders. The others knew to get out of their way. Hester sifted through the big metal toolbox she used for carrying supplies, picking out the necessary needles and vials for the booster shots they would give today. Dellarobia liked being with the sheep in close quarters. She was fascinated by the color lines and horn configurations and the odd tuft of wool on the top of each head, the sole body part that was never shorn. When she walked among these girls they parted slowly like heavy water and looked up at her with an outlandish composure, their amber eyes eerily divided by dark horizontal pupils.

Hester ordered Charlie to stay by the barn door, and Dellarobia to close all the sheep into one stall while she drew off a bottle of vaccine into her auto-repeat syringe. Administered this late in pregnancy, the vaccine would cross the womb and protect the newborn lambs from all the dire things that waited in the new world to greet them. Dellarobia’s lack of fondness for needles was average, but she’d argued for keeping the ewes here with the insistence that she could handle problems, so she knew it was time to show her mettle, if mettle she had. They’d already gone over the emergency kit Hester had organized for her in a plastic pail, and hung it on a nail on one of the barn’s upright timbers. Dellarobia was unnerved by Hester’s hasty accounting of iodine and towels and arm-length plastic gloves, things that might be needed for pulling a stuck lamb. Hester’s trust astonished her. Every night Preston and Dellarobia read from the manual about nourishing pregnant ewes, working their way up to milk fever and breech twins, the many things that could go wrong. Preston seemed steadied by the mass of information. But his mother’s imagination was poised to grab each new mention of danger and fly off with it, to worry and pick apart, like a crow on carrion.

Hester handed over a bright orange grease crayon the size of sidewalk chalk, with which Dellarobia was to mark each ewe after it was immunized. Hester handled the syringe, squeezing its V-shaped grip to land each shot through wool into skin behind the shoulder. The sheep hardly reacted to the needle, seeming more offended by Dellarobia’s swipe at their hindquarters as she marked them off. The bright, waxy orange streak across rough wool reminded her of crayon accidents on her living room carpet. Sometimes she missed on the first try and had to pursue one anonymous fuzzy rump as it swam among so many like it. Soon she and Hester both were wading through the woolly mass of orange-streaked bodies, chasing after the unmarked.

They stepped outside the barn when Hester needed to refill the syringe and have a smoke. Dellarobia quickly shook her head when Hester offered the pack. She studied the orange electrical cord looped neatly on a hook, and the perfect rectangle of very dead grass where the trailer usually sat. He’d been leaving on the weekends. He’d mentioned a place called Sweet Briar where he met other scientists. She felt the trailer’s absence as if she too had been unplugged and unmoored, deprived of her charge.

“You ought to start keeping a close watch on them in the middle of March,” Hester said suddenly, pinching out her cigarette and taking the syringe from its holster. “Sometimes one will surprise you and bring her lambs early.”

“How close?” Dellarobia asked. “Should I sleep out here in the barn?”

Hester kept her eye on the glass vial as she drew in the fluid. She wore a red bandanna on her hair and an old denim coat that looked stiff as cardboard. “You could. Your other job’s winding down right then, you said. So you’ll start you a new one.”

“Minus the thirteen dollars an hour,” Dellarobia said quietly.

Hester glanced up, a brief flash of surprise, then looked back to her business. So Cub hadn’t told her. That Dellarobia was tops in the family, wage-wise.

Over the next hour the sharp chill receded and the stall filled steadily with orange-striped backs. Hester asked her to get some of them out of the way so she could see what she was doing. Dellarobia opened the stall door and guarded it like a valve, shoving in or scuttling out ewes as needed, grabbing horns low near the skull, as she’d seen Hester do. Most of these girls outweighed Dellarobia, but she managed to sort out a few dozen of the moderately willing. They waited in a nervous clump near the stall door, still inside the open barn. Charlie remained at his post in the bright open square of its doorway, his tranquil gaze fixed, his body immobile, like a bronze statue of all dog virtues.

“That’ll do, Charlie,” Dellarobia called, again in imitation of Hester. She felt an odd thrill of power as Charlie came to her side and the ewes moved like magnets on an opposing pole, skirting the opposite side of the barn to flee out the doorway as Charlie left it. Move the dog, move the sheep, a ton of body weight at her command. She hoped Hester would not catch her childish flush of pride.

Only the flock’s shyest members now remained, nervous, flighty girls that Hester had to grab left-handed by a horn while she swung the syringe with her right. Rebelliousness ran in families too, Hester told her. Everything ran in the genes, to be culled or preserved at will. “It’s no good to complain about your flock,” she advised. “A flock is nothing but the put-together of all your past choices.” She told Dellarobia she never kept polled ewes, born without horn buds, preferring the convenience of sheep with handles. Likewise she culled lambs with short-stapled fleeces or puny dispositions. A big white ewe with a freckled nose, Hanky by name, was one of the last holdouts against today’s vaccination program, and Hester declared her a misjudgment. There are always a few, she said, that you wish had gone in the deep freeze.

“Why don’t I hold her and you jab her,” Hester said, abruptly handing Dellarobia the blue-handled syringe while she struggled with the thrashing animal. Hester gripped one of its horns in each hand and used her hip to pin Hanky against the barn wall. “Now,” she grunted, not a question, and Dellarobia moved without thought, aiming up on the shoulder, following the point-squeeze motion she’d watched in infinite repetition. She felt the needle sink, then stepped back as the big ewe struggled free and leaped away, landing hard but scrambling to her feet. Her eyes rolled hard, showing the whites.

“You didn’t make too bad a job of that,” Hester said.

Dellarobia replayed the event as if watching it from the outside: herself in a green windbreaker, red hair swinging as she leaned down to deliver the injection.
I see how you take to this.
She did this all the time now. Imagined how he would see her while she stood at the stove cooking supper. While she read to the kids, putting them to bed. For no good reason, it made these routine parts of her life seem consequential.

She asked Hester, “How’d you learn to do all this vet stuff?”

“Well, you know. Dr. Gates won’t come till death’s at your door, and Dr. Worsh won’t come even then. They both charge sixty dollars to step out of the truck. I’d say I got tired of paying sixty dollars to hear that I had a dead sheep.”

Hanky milled with a few others near the hay manger, eyeing her options. One of which might be to leap over the waist-high wall of the stall. “There ought to be more vets in this county,” Dellarobia said. “As much livestock as people have. That’s crazy.”

“I’d say it is,” Hester agreed. “Steady work for the asking. Worsh and Gates are old men. Kids ought to be lining up to take their place.”

“Oops.” Dellarobia pulled out the grease crayon she’d stuck in her pocket while sorting out the takeaways. “We forgot to mark Hanky.”

Hester laughed. “Think we’ll forget and chase down that she-devil twice?”

T
hey finished by midmorning and turned out the ewes to settle down again in their muddy country. Dellarobia could see now how they assembled along family lines. A hole had broken in the clouds overhead, a ragged blue scrap ringed with cold white that made her want to bellow her small relief. This last week of rain had stacked up more layers of crazy on folks who had lost whole harvests and the better part of their minds to a year of drizzle. Water torture, they were calling it on the radio. This morning she’d heard about a man in Henshaw who walked outside and unloaded his Smith & Wesson into his old horse, claiming he’d seen a vision of it drowning in mud. The vision was familiar to most by now. Dellarobia had never known to be thankful for so simple a thing as a dry, white snow.

She and Hester passed through the upper pasture gate with its empty donation bucket nailed to the post. If someone could find the time to watch this gate, it would help. Maybe pass out leaflets, like Leighton Akins. Dellarobia considered what she would put on her questionnaire:
How ’bout this weather? Do you know the difference between correlation and causation? Do you have thoughts of shooting your horse?

“Do you ever find yourself just thinking about the
sun
?” she asked aloud. It was not a Hester kind of question, so she didn’t expect an answer. Her mother-in-law had agreed to help her look for nectar flowers that might be blooming the last week of February. Both struck Dellarobia as long shots: winter flowers, and Hester’s cooperation. But she’d promised, and now here they were on the High Road, with no idea how to talk to one another. After a minute Hester paused on the gravel, turning this way and that.