up to them. The older man is on the ground, on his side, popping tiny creatures into specimen bottles.
“Ambrosia beetles?” The two heads turn toward her, startled. Dead logs: the topic was her passion once, and she forgets herself. “When I was a student, my teacher told us that fallen trunks were nothing but obstacles and fire hazards.”
The man on the ground looks up at her. “Mine said the same thing.”
“ ‘Clear them off to improve forest health.’ ”
“ ‘Burn them out for safety and cleanliness. Above all, keep them out of streams.’ ”
“ ‘Lay down the law and get the stagnant place producing again!’ ”
All three of them chuckle. But the chuckle is like pressing on a wound. Improve forest health. As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come cure them. Science in the service of willful blindness: How could so many smart people have missed the obvious? A person has only to look, to see that dead logs are far more alive than living ones. But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine.
“Well,” the man on the ground says, “I’m sticking it to the old bastard now!”
Patricia smiles, hope pushing through the ache like a breeze through rain. “What are you studying?”
“Fungi, arthropods, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals, frass, webs, denning, soil. . . . Everything we can catch a dead log doing.”
“How long have you been at it?”
The two men trade looks. The younger man hands down another sample bottle. “We’re six years in.”
Six years, in a field where most studies last a few months. “Where on earth did you find funding for that long?”
“We’re planning to study this particular log until it’s gone.”
She laughs again, a little wilder. A cedar trunk on the wet forest floor: their grad students’ great-great-great-grandchildren will have to finish the project. Science, in her absence, has gone as crazy as she always thought it should be. “You’ll disappear long before it does.”
The man on the ground sits up. “Best thing about studying the forest. You’re dead by the time the future can blame you for missing the obvious!” He looks at her as if she, too, is worth researching. “Dr. Westerford?”
She blinks, as baffled as any owl. Then she remembers her uniform badge, on her chest for anybody to read. But that Doctor. He could only have gotten that from her buried past. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t remember ever meeting you.”
“You haven’t! I heard you talk, years ago. Forest studies conference, in Columbus. Airborne signaling. I was so impressed, I ordered offprints of your article.”
That wasn’t me, she wants to say. That was somebody else. Someone lying dead and rotting somewhere.
“They hit you pretty hard.”
She shrugs. The younger scientist looks on like a kid on a visit to the Smithsonian.
“I knew you’d be vindicated.” Her bafflement is enough to tell him everything. Why she’s in the uniform of a wilderness ranger. “Patricia. I’m Henry. This is Jason. Come visit the station.” His voice is soft but urgent, like there’s something at stake. “You’ll want to see what our group is doing. You’ll want to learn what your work’s been up to, while you were gone.”
BY DECADE’S END, Dr. Westerford makes her most surprising discovery of all: she may just love her fellow men. Not all of them, but robustly and with enduring green gratitude, at least those three dozen regulars who take her in and make a home for her in the Dreier Research Station, Franklin Experimental Forest, the Cascades, where she spends several dozen months in a row that are happier and more productive than she imagined possible. Henry Fallows, the group’s senior scientist, puts her on a grant. Two other research teams from Corvallis add her to their payrolls. Money is tight, but they give her a mildewed trailer in the Ghetto in the Meadow and access to the mobile lab—all the reagents and pipettes she needs. The latrines and the community showers are sinful indulgences, compared to her BLM cabin, with its frigid sponge baths on the porch at night. Then there’s cooked food, in the shared mess hall, although some days she’s so immersed in work that someone must come remind her that it’s time to eat again.
Her public reputation, like Demeter’s daughter, crawls back up from the underworld. A scattering of scientific papers vindicates her original work in airborne semaphores. Young researchers find supporting evidence, in species after species. Acacias alert other acacias