Magdalena Mountain. Robert Michael Pyle
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found them by accident in the Petrunkevitch Alcove, stacked on a deep shelf behind some works on amber spiders. I couldn’t help looking them over.” Then, afraid he might have trespassed where he ought not to have been, he said, “Gosh! I hope—”
“No. No, it’s all right. They’re no secret. I’m just relieved to know they are intact. I haven’t seen them in a couple of years, and I was worried that they’d been discarded while I was on sabbatical at Oxford. My collections manager must have been short on space, tucked the journals back there, and promptly forgot about them. I’ve been unable to locate them, despite intensive searching. I’m delighted that you turned them up.”
“Just a fluke,” Mead said. “Who is he, and why are his journals important?”
“In the opposite order,” Winchester replied. “The journals contain original field notes on many western butterflies by an excellent self-taught naturalist and very careful observer. Also, if I recall, they give something of an intimate look at a fascinating man.”
“He seems to be,” said Mead.
“Because of Carson’s unusual habit of mixing field notes with personalia in his diaries, one cannot mine the former without eavesdropping on the latter.”
“So I’ve noticed. Although some entries are more skeletal, others go on and on. I wonder when he slept! But then, I gather he often didn’t sleep, stranded by the roadside and such. But who is this guy? And how did you get the books?”
Winchester leaned back in his swivel chair, his big hands behind his fuscous hair, and considered for a moment before replying. “I don’t actually know very much about him.” He became pensive, as if trying to recall the name of a boyhood pet. “I’ve never met him, and our correspondence was slender. But he supplied the museum with much good material, in superb condition, always meticulously labeled, and eventually he sent me his field books as well.”
“So he was a professional collector?”
“Yes, among other things. What used to be called, in Alfred Russell Wallace’s day, a ‘flycatcher,’ but much more curious than most and, in his way, more scientific too. And more than that . . . he was, I would say, sort of a quixotic searcher and scavenger. He moved about a great deal, never married, as far as I know.”
“Footloose?”
“Very. He filled the niche of a kind of peripatetic forager of patchy habitats—like a high-class, curious tramp or rambler.” He paused, looked thoughtful, and went on. “Maybe he sought to escape some past, somebody? It seems as though he was always after something, anyway. Butterflies filled that need to a substantial extent in summer, and the market we provided gave him a modest grubstake. I could always weasel some funds from museum sources to buy his best material, just as I set aside a little fund for the purpose of scouring the amber markets in New York for spectacular specimens and new species. But beyond that, I know little of him.”
“How about his name?” Mead asked, unwilling to let it lie.
“I asked him the origin of his interesting first name once in a letter. I think you’ll find his reply in the files—let’s look now!” At that sudden inspiration Winchester wheeled about and the two of them stalked over to the prof’s rank of filing cabinets. “Carson, Hampton . . . great picture-winged fly man in Hawaii . . . Carson, Rachel” (ignoring Mead’s incredulous “Golly, you knew her?”) “. . . should be in between—yes, here it is.” A thin sheaf of letters emerged from the gray filing cabinet in the great paw of George Winchester. “Here, you may as well read them all, since you’re reading the journals. Please make a photocopy of each, charge it to my account, and put them with the journals. Then return these precisely here. I’d not like to lose the originals.”
The letter in question began, “Dear George,” and went on: “Since you ask, I’ll tell you what I’ve been told about my name. My parents had five children, of which I was the last. The first four were named for their birth months—April, May, June, and August. Those were fairly ordinary names. So when I came along, the pattern stuck, and I was called October. Only sometimes I think it was an expression of the bleakness my mother felt as a recent widow during that lonely Depression autumn of 1932.”
“And that,” said George, “is all I know of October Carson’s early life. And that he wandered the West for some ten years or more.”
“And since? What’s become of him?”
“I honestly don’t know. The letters tell nothing, and the journals stop just over three years ago. That same fall, I received a large package containing the journals and a very extensive consignment of butterflies from all over the West. There was a brief note that I must not have saved, asking me to send payment to general delivery in Allenspark, Colorado . . . I’d never have remembered that, except that I used to frequent that part of the Front Range when I worked out of CU’s Science Lodge above Ward.”
“So that was it?”
“I sent the museum’s check, it was cashed, and then I heard no more. I’ve never known whether he simply resumed his scavenging rambles, minus his butterfly net, or vanished somewhere, like Gauguin in the South Seas. I hadn’t thought about Carson for many months, until you mentioned the journals just now.” Winchester sighed and smiled high in one corner of his mouth. “So you see,” he mused, “I’m just as curious as you are.”
“I’ve just begun the journals. But with your permission,” Mead said, forgetting his resolution, “I’d like to read the rest. Maybe I’ll catch some clues.”
“If you have time, feel free. Just don’t let it become a detour from your important work. Do let me know what you discover. Well, I must get home, James. Jane and I have a rare date with the TV. Peter Freulich’s going to appear on The Tonight Show, with yet another Carson, not yet represented in my files—and I want to see him. You know his important work on fritillaries and their population biology, but did you know we cofounded Natural Limits to Growth?”
“NLG—really!”
“Yes, and his famous book, Nuking Ourselves, has gained even more notoriety than his scholarly work and has had him on the talk shows ever since. He’s a special favorite of Johnny Carson, who really seems to get the message. In any case, you’ll be needing to see to our mutual friends down the hall.”
For once, Mead didn’t feel a bit like seeing to the noble roaches. He’d been learning some interesting things from their nighttime revels, but now, spurred on by Winchester’s revelation and invitation, he was truly piqued by Carson and eager to learn more about him. So, after a perfunctory feeding and cleaning, he made a fresh path in the snow across to the museum, gathered up the journals, and returned to Osborn, his tracks already covered. As the snow swaddled the world outside, Mead took to his tower with the first volume of Carson’s journal and a flask of hot tea from the Bunsen. He followed as Carson carried on across the pallid, frigid sagelands, eking food and shelter from his chancy pursuits through the coldest winter in almost forty years.
10
Mead’s own winter passed too. His mental distance from New Mexico and his mother grew with the sum of the weeks. She wrote no more; his father sent short notes instead with family news of the light sort and the occasional check folded inside. The pain of his mother’s frost became the kind of dull background ache that one mostly forgets, most of the time.
Something else troubled Mead when he thought about it, but in a very different way: that one young woman’s smile, from his first visit to the department. He’d scarcely dated anyone in New Haven and was stewing in a stale winter’s brew of his own testosterone. A remarkable face, he thought, the one he’d glimpsed flitting out of George Winchester’s office that first day at Yale. He’d been right about her being part Asian—Hawaiian, in fact: some indigenous, some Japanese. Her smile infected him, made others smile; also made him want to kiss her mouth and lick her teeth. As he thought such thoughts, Mead realized he had been too long in the roach room at night, too long cooped in his monastic tower. When he next encountered