Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly

Chapter 1 Bill Calvert eased his truck off Interstate 281 near McAllen, Texas, pulled into a mall parking lot, and drew a knife from his knapsack. It was late in the day, about eight o'clock, and he had been driving for the past five hours. "What you want to do is make the cut like this," he said, unfastening his belt buckle and the top button of his jeans. He peeled back the waistband to reveal the smallest of incisions. "Nothing too obvious." Calvert pressed on the fabric, and it opened, exposing a tunnel the width of two fingers. He reached in and extracted a wad of cash that was folded to the size and shape of a stick of gum. Three hundred dollars, it looked like. "You try," he said, handing over the knife. I got out of the truck and began to slice at the inside of my jeans. People walked by, mothers and fathers towing small children, for the most part, but also the occasional solitary individual or couple, and if they found it odd to see a woman with a knife in her hand fiddling with her pants not two hundred yards from Montgomery Ward, they weren't saying. "It's so uncomfortable to walk around with money in your shoes," Calvert was explaining. "It gets real damp. And smelly. This is much better." We were ten miles from the Mexican border. I threaded my money into its hideaway and followed Calvert into the mall restaurant, a Luby's cafeteria. We were the only diners. "I always come here before I go to Mexico," he said happily, sliding his tray along the steam table and overloading it with plates of green beans, broccoli, and peas, all of which looked like they had been through the wash. "These are the last green vegetables we'll see for two weeks." I couldn't say I was sorry. Bill Calvert is a biologist. Not the kind of biologist who wears a lab coat and not, especially, the kind who has a lab. He works out-of-doors most of the time, observing and cataloging and trying to come to terms with natural phenomena. Among people who study monarch butterflies, which is what he himself has done for the past twenty-five years, Calvert is considered the best field researcher in the pack. This may have something to do with the fact that Bill Calvert isn't really part of a pack. He works by himself, getting grants here and there and leading trips for science teachers and wealthy ecotourists, just scraping by. Although he has a doctorate in zoology, academia doesn't interest him. A "real" job doesn't interest him. Calvert is fifty-eight years old. Going to Mexico to look for monarchs-what we were doing-interests him. "I took an aptitude test when I was in my thirties, and I scored two sigmas past a seventeen-year-old for 'desire for adventure,' " he said a couple of hours after we crossed the border at Reynosa, as he leapfrogged eighteen-wheelers along the rutted two-lane Mexican highway to Cuidad Victoria, where we planned to stop. It was close to midnight. We had just breezed through two military checkpoints with the words "Biologico" and "Mariposa monarca," and now ours was the only passenger vehicle on the road. "I thought you weren't supposed to drive at night in Mexico," I said to Bill, who smiled at me and tugged on his mustache. "Why not?" he asked thoughtfully, as if it were a real question. "Bandits," I said. "Maybe," he said, and smiled again. It was an enigmatic smile, nothing comforting. I didn't know Bill Calvert. Or rather, I had known Bill Calvert for about ten hours, ever since he picked me up at the Austin airport earlier in the day. He was late, and I had begun to have my doubts, but then he'd rushed through the door and though I had never before laid eyes on him, I recognized him instantly and was reassured. He was a familiar type. Tall, thin, with a professorial moHalpern, Sue is the author of 'Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly' with ISBN 9780375402081 and ISBN 037540208X.