Magdalena Mountain. Robert Michael Pyle

still on his mind. “Interesting guy, for sure. Thoughtful, too—maybe a tad cynical, though he seems to care about things. But that last bit”—he went back and reread the final entry—“about wanting a Magdalena—what the heck is that supposed to mean? What is a Magdalena? Maybe he was lonely or horny, and that’s some sort of slang of his for a woman. Or a prostitute—wasn’t Mary Magdalene supposed to be a harlot? Might make sense, after all the time he spent alone on the road. But why would he have to wait till spring to find a hooker?”

      Mead liked having the amber spiders there because they were good listeners. He continued his exegesis of Carson’s entries: “But then he also refers to ‘his Maggie, flying high and free’—that hardly sounds like a pickup. Maybe Magdalena is a particular woman—a lost love, a summertime sweetheart? Somehow, I don’t think that’s it either. I wonder . . .” But he didn’t wonder much, as he nodded onto the laboratory table.

      He roused himself and put the notebook away with his thoughts. “Well,” he told the patient spiders, “it’s too late to go home. Maybe I’ll mount some butterflies.” But before he had a chance to lift the lid of the relaxing jar, Mead’s head dropped again onto the table and he fell into a deep sleep. All night he slept there as the wind off Long Island Sound pelted the museum tower with snowballs. In his strange, wintry dreams, jolly beachcombers and Hollywood Indians in full Plains regalia rubbed shoulders in a truck stop named Maggie’s, where oysters and crabs held court with the walrus and the carpenter. The carpenter turned into the Cheshire cat, then a waitress in pink, serving little black biscuits like comic-book arrowheads to spiders in amber jars who morphed into hungry humans pawing at the windows and freezing to death outside.

      When Mead awoke at seven, he was chilled, cramped, and agitated, and his neck felt like iron. He skipped class, spent the day wandering aimlessly around the snowy town and campus, and finally drifted home. “That journal is getting to me,” he muttered as he unlocked the door, and then and there he resolved to ignore the rest of the diaries.

      In his mailbox he found a letter from his mother. He wondered if it would be like the others, factual and antiseptic, about as personal as a Christmas newsletter. He took his time opening it. “Dear Son,” he read.

      We are well and hope you’ve avoided the flu they say is so rampant back there. Your brothers are both heavily into basketball and dating, but their grades are OK, so I suppose that’s fine. They promised to write and send scores, but don’t hold your breath. Lance is still over the moon about that game-winning basket he made against Raton. His head’s about as big as the basketball, so I hope that doesn’t set him up for a fall. Roger’s spending a lot of time warming the varsity bench, but he’s happy to be there. You know he’s always been the more even of the two. I’m just glad that neither one seems to be interested in drugs.

      Your dad is looking forward to his conference in Maui, his class load has been so heavy. He invited me to come, but I think I won’t. Here are the boys’ school pics. They still look nothing like you. Roger asked was it the milkman or the mailman? Very cute.

      James laughed, and wondered if she had too when she wrote it. He didn’t think he’d seen her really laugh since Molly had died. There was more family stuff, but almost nothing about her. And why in the world wouldn’t she go to Maui with his father?

      Then a scrawl, crossed out, and this: “James, some days I almost don’t think I can make it. But I do. Will it get better? Dad says yes, but I don’t know whether I believe him—what else is he going to say? Sorry. We’re so proud of you. Write. Love, Your Mom.”

      James tried to write back right away. He felt vaguely excited, since this was the first sign of his mother’s reaching out to him since the backpacking trip. But he gave up and talked himself to sleep instead. I haven’t a clue what to say to that: Will it get better? Does it get better? Ever? I wish I knew! Sounds like this Carson is none too sure either, and I don’t even know what’s bugging him. Oh, hell. But what the hell is a Magdalena supposed to be? Maybe I need one, too. I need something. So, Mom? God, I don’t know. He left his words unwritten and slept like a woodchuck in winter.

      7

      Snow tries to accumulate on the stony face of Magdalena Mountain, but Boreas scrapes it away with his rasping breath. As the storms grow in force and frequency into December, even the gale itself cannot remove its own white detritus. Then the peak changes color like the ptarmigan secreted on its slopes, from the gray-brown pelage of November to the pure white snow cone of January.

      Marmots sleep their deep sleep that will last the mountain lion’s share of a year, while pumas prowl hungry across the frozen hems of the boulder fields and retreat, finally, to the forests below. The pikas slumber less—and less deeply—than the marmots. They awaken later than their brief summer somnolence allowed, but awaken just the same each day to preen their lice away and to munch on the fragrant hay they’ve so busily laid by. Toward spring, both the sacked-out rock chucks and the catnapping conies will give birth and suckle their young in the crannies made cozy by their own body heat.

      Now the ptarmigan and the varying hares make only tracks and shadows, not patches of brown, on the pallid winterscape. They forsake the wind-ravaged fellfields for the relative shelter of the forest fringe, twisted and clumped subalpine fir and Engelmann spruce almost bare on top but thick-skirted below the trimline of the wind. The ptarmigan especially haunt the edges of the willow swales, feeding on their tight-packed buds. These snow ghosts are followed by hopeful coyotes, still brown and leaner than ever.

      No one comes to Magdalena Mountain in the winter except a few foolhardy climbers and the helicopters sometimes sent to pluck them off. Cross-country skiers remain far below, and jets swerve north to avoid this conical object in their takeoff path as they gain altitude on their way from Denver to Salt Lake, Boise, Portland, or Seattle. Any climber reaching the summit has to clamber across hundreds of boulders, ice-rimed, slick, or cracking under winter’s weight. Frost probes every cleft, then swells and splits the stones asunder. But no climber, sure to be quick or be dead, would hang around to watch the prying frost do its work, nor to listen for the slow heartbeat of marmot or the faster pulse of pika in the rockpile below.

      With the summer sounds gone, the piping of the marmot stilled, the sentry-squeak of the pika silenced, Magdalena Mountain seems all but lifeless on the surface. But beneath the snow and the stones, life carries on, if not exactly teeming. Among the few creatures as happy now as ever are the grylloblattids. Wingless, primitive relatives of crickets, more resembling roaches, these ice crawlers (as they are called) cherish the cold and die if they become too warm. Glaciers, snowfields, and rockslides are their natural homes. In the dead of winter, a grylloblattid prowls the talus slope in search of any animal food it can find. With its slender antennae it probes here and there as its six legs carry it speedily over cold stone, solid ice, and rotting vegetation. A pale amber predator, the ice crawler works the frozen, uncrowded territory in its search for winter food.

      Among the candidates are the winter-passage stages of arctic-alpine butterflies: eggs, caterpillars, and chrysalides, proof against the wind, carrying their fragile selves through hostilities so severe as to be found only in such high ranges of rock as these. For Erebia, winter is a time of passive repose, to be gotten through alive. Antifreeze in the tiny larva’s blood keeps ice crystals from rupturing delicate tissues. His metabolism has dropped to near nil. Winter for the Magdalena alpine is a time when nothing happens at all other than bare, tenuous existence. This terrible season claims few lives among his brood. The flash freeze keeps most predators at bay while cold-storing the frost-free larvae for spring. Erebia, curled and still, guards a flicker of life inside his sliver of self, and that is all he has to do. Chances are, no one is going to interfere.

      But the grylloblattid creeps into the hollow where Erebia and several of his siblings have gone to ground. It palps a beetle grub and consumes it in minutes before moving on to an egg mass of a rock spider, which it nibbles like popcorn. Two Magdalena larvettes, minor morsels that they are, fall prey to the grylloblattid before it swerves out of this particular declivity and moves on to a pika’s den, looking for lice, and is fulfilled. This is winter’s last close call for Erebia. He’ll ride out the rest, secure in his alpine tent of silk and grass.