I padded softly down the narrow trail, the needles of the pine trees on either side jiggling in the sunlight, dancing and leaping in the wind and sending shadows skittering across the path in front of me.
I slithered down a damp, rocky incline and felt the pack try to take me in one direction. I lurched the other way to compensate, just as a green beetle gyrated past my nose and landed ten feet in front of me, right on top of a large piece of some dead animal, its smell ripe and pungent. I came to a sudden halt, struggling to keep the pack’s momentum from taking me with it.
“For God’s sake, Cor. Give me some warning, will you?” said Ryan as he endeavoured to stop himself from slamming into me. But I ignored his flailing and kept my eye on the bug. I didn’t want to lose it.
“This one’s a beaut!” I said.
Ryan struggled up beside me.
“What’s a beaut?” He stopped dead, as the stench reached him. “Oh, Jesus! What’s the stink? Who died?”
“Probably part of a raccoon or porcupine, or maybe a deer. But there’s no hair so it’s impossible to tell.”
“You would call a dead raccoon a ‘beaut.’”
“Not the animal, Ryan. Take at look at what’s on it.”
“Oh, gross. This is revolting, Cordi. How can you stand the stink?” Ryan pulled his shirt up over his nose. “It’s crawling with bugs!” he said in disgust and looked away.
“They’re not bugs —”
“I know, I know.” Ryan cut me short, pitched his voice higher, and I heard my own words coming back at me. “‘All bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs.’ You biologists are all alike. But to me a bug is an insect is a bug. It’s such a good guttural sound. Why waste it? You can really wind your disgust around that one little word: bug.” He dropped his voice so low that “bug” came out sounding like a twin of “ugh.”
Ignoring Ryan’s diatribe, I pointed at the big green beetle balanced on a piece of the dead animal, its little antennae quivering in the wind, but Ryan kept his back studiously away from the beetle and moved upwind.
“Oh, come on, Ryan. This’d look terrific on the cover of one of your magazines. Maybe Insect News would buy it? Lime green. The art department will go nuts, and besides, I don’t recognize it. Maybe it will be a brand new species and I’ll become famous.” I heard the wistfulness creep into my voice and smothered it with a nervous laugh.
“Yeah, right,” said Ryan, who to my relief hadn’t seemed to notice. He was too preoccupied with the stink of the dead animal. “I can see the headline now: ‘Beautiful bug on putrid porker.’ Besides, you know Insect News pays diddly-squat.” Ryan sold his photos to the big-name magazines for good money, but bugs were seldom in great demand by the big guys, and so he usually tried to avoid taking their pictures at all.
I simply ignored him, having heard it all before. I eased off my backpack and pulled out another, smaller knapsack. Inside was a fisherman’s tackle box where I kept all the vials and live jars for my day’s specimens until I could transfer them at night to other large containers strapped to the undersides of our canoe seats. Insects weren’t really my main line of research, but I’d taken enough courses and done enough research to know quite a lot about them, and that had landed me Jefferson’s notoriously boring entomology course. That, and the fact that I was low woman on the totem pole. I rustled through the plant specimens, scats, and other animal paraphernalia I’d already collected and pulled out some jars with mesh lids.
“Cor, do we really need this? It’s crawling with bugs.” Ryan’s voice was muffled through his shirt. “Can’t we just pretend we didn’t see it? God, when I agreed to help you on this trip you never said anything about collecting bugs from dead animals. I’m fine with the mice and shrews and frogs, even the butterflies and spiders and the little nets and stuff, but frankly, this is revolting.”
“Look, I’m not sure I’m any happier about this than you are.” I sighed. “But I don’t have any choice. I’ve got to come up with something for this taxonomy course that’s not boring. Maybe if I offer some live labs along with all the dry dead stuff I can generate some interest.”
Interest my ass, I thought. How many undergrads were going to flock to the taxonomy course this year? And if they didn’t, what would the tenure committee think? Jim Hilson’s smirk floated in front of me like an irritating mote in my eye. He’d make himself too valuable to lose, and it was either him or me. I had less than two months to pore over the old course and come up with a new, madly exciting course before the fall term started. To boot, I had a paper that was close to being accepted for publication, but the reviewers wanted some extra analysis of my data. I wanted to concentrate on that, not on the entomology course.
Ryan dumped his pack rather noisily on the ground next to the dead beast, but the insect miraculously stayed put.
“You move the insect away from that ‘thing’ and I’ll snap its picture. Then you can collect your grubs for your live labs,” said Ryan in a voice that held itself away from the gruesome scene like a pair of verbal tweezers. He didn’t mind taking the photos for me as long as he didn’t have to get cozy with the bugs themselves.
“Really, Ryan. If I try to do that he’ll fly. Just plug your nose.”
Ryan resignedly squatted down beside me. He unclipped his camera gear from his pack and extracted one of his close-up lenses and a tiny tripod and set to work. Once the photos were done I cornered the little bug with a miniature bug net and put it in one of my jars. I then collected a number of the grubs, some of which were stuck to a cedar twig that went into a jar as well. While I was waiting for Ryan to store his equipment away I slung my collection bag over my shoulder and padded back down the trail. The pines lining the portage acted like a sieve for the early afternoon sun, which squeezed through the cracks, weaving a tapestry of light patterns that swarmed over the forest floor. The thumping roar of the rapids, the moist smell of rich humus, and the sticky heat of the sun were like an elixir — it just was not possible to stay depressed out in the wilderness.
I walked further along the path a short way to see what lay ahead of us and suddenly stopped, cocking an ear in the gentle breeze. I could hear something crackling in the woods off to my left, but it quieted when I stopped and all I could hear was the loud buzzing of a bee as it flew past me, the hot sun dripping on me like heated honey. The crackle began again and slowly approached me. I could see the bushes jerking and could clearly hear the soft sound of an animal swishing toward me. I waited, watching the branches moving, judging the animal to be small: maybe a coon, maybe a weasel. It couldn’t be anything much bigger. I hoped Ryan wouldn’t come gallivanting down the path and scare whatever it was. I stood statue-still on the path, holding my breath as the animal came closer until I caught a glimpse of a small, slim black form. Not a coon. Maybe a marten. Too big for a weasel. And then it was there on the path in front of me, its golden eyes glowing in its black face, one small black ear dangling at a strange angle. The cat stopped and stared back at me. Slowly I stooped and held out my hand.
“Hey ya, kitty.” The bedraggled cat held its ground, the leaves swished gently overhead, and then slowly, carefully, the cat moved, stiff legged, toward me; I noticed that it had only three legs as it brushed its body against my own.
“What happened to you, eh, puss?” I asked as I glanced uneasily at the cat’s ear, matted with blood, its tip hanging on by a thread. There