LITMIR.BIZ

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studied my face closely. “What happened?” she asked softly.

      I let my anger slide away from me, but I knew it wouldn’t evaporate. It would just go to ground until I hauled it out again, but at least it was being bumped by other thoughts.

      “I did get some live larvae. Most of them are in the lab,” I said. “I’m hoping we can get them to pupate and then identify what they are, see how long it takes, show their habitat, and try to incorporate that into a lab. Maybe the students will take a proprietary interest in their charges and not get bored.”

      “What happened to the rest?”

      “Two wonderful weeks’ worth. We crashed the canoe in the last set of rapids. We hadn’t intended to run them, but we accidentally got caught in them.” Involuntarily I saw again the boulder, the blur of something purple, and Ryan crashing into the canoe. I brushed aside the images.

      “Most of my collection was strapped under the stern and bow seats. We found only pieces of it below the falls. All I came out with was the stuff I collected that last day, and that’s only because I left the day’s collection at the end of the portage when we went back for the canoe. I don’t see how I’m going to get this course working for me. I’m hoping some great thought will jump out at me, rescue me from oblivion.” I didn’t put much faith in my thoughts, though.

      Those insects had taken me the best part of my two-week vacation to collect. We’d crawled over cliffs, shimmied down into caves, swept fields and trees, and raided the maggots off dead animals in search of the unusual and the mundane. Dozens of little kill jars and live jars, each with a tiny card noting date, location, and habitat in which the critters had been found, had been squirrelled away in my storage case. All gone, shattered by the rocks, I thought angrily, all but the ones inadvertently taken from Diamond’s corpse.

      Martha put on her holier-than-thou expression, nose in the air. “Well it serves you right, gallivanting down suicidal rivers miles from nowhere. Really, how do you accidentally get caught in a rapid anyway? I can’t think how you ever got it into that head of yours to go into wild country like that. Why, you’d think you had a death wish,” she said, as though her reputation had just been put on the line.

      She had seldom ventured into the wilderness in her life. The closest thing to it she had ever seen was my farm and the parks in Ottawa. An earthen path was a monstrous thing; give her good old cement and asphalt and she was happy.

      I smiled, remembering the near miss in the rapids. Martha, for once, wasn’t far off the mark, even though her sentiment was all ass-backwards, but if I told her the truth she would smother me in sympathy and dire warnings. I preferred being bawled out to suffocating.

      “I know, I know, Martha,” I said lowering my voice in a conspiratorial whisper, “but some of the best insects are up there, miles from nowhere, in the deepest darkest corners of the Canadian wilderness where bears and wolves and bobcats and dead bodies lurk around every corner and you take your life in your hands just venturing into the woods.”

      “Oooh, you see? I told you. Too effing dangerous. Sheer stupidity.”

      Martha took everything at face value, believed everything. Watching her as I told her my story, I could relive it through Martha’s facial features. They rose and fell and plummeted and bucked with the rapids, grew round and menacing with the sweeper, grew blank and then widened in fear with the falling of the boulder (I omitted the possibility that someone had hurled it at us and longed to know what facial expression would have gone with that), and finally grew exhausted as she mentally hauled herself out alongside me and Ryan at the end of the rapids.

      It was exhausting to watch, but at the end she collected her features, remoulded them into a business-like form, added a frown, and said, “Just what do you suppose we’re going to do about course material, with all your insects at the bottom of the river or wherever they go when they dump in a rapids. Classes start in less than two months and I have no specimens to set up your labs.”

      “We’ll have to phone around, find out if some colleagues have some extra unsorted material, and I’ll have to scramble and do some more collecting. I’m sure someone would happily lend us some material, especially if we tell them we’ll sort the insects from the leaf litter and identify them. ”

      Martha grimaced. Sorting was not pleasant work.

      “Worst case scenario we can use some of Jefferson’s collection, but they’re not in very good shape.” I sighed. “I just don’t have time to go on another field trip, with all my experiments needing to be written up. The Dean is on my case pressing me for papers. Publish or perish, as they say.” I was eager to get at my research. Animal Behaviour wanted more analysis before they’d accept my paper on what male praying mantids might gain from their lopsided encounters with their cannibalistic mates.

      “We’ll have to get the lab material somehow,” I said.

      “You don’t sound convinced.”

      “Well, I don’t want to have to admit I have nothing new and use the old collections, do I? Not unless I want to get the ass end of the lab next year too, and miss out on a chance at tenure by showing them that I can’t breathe new life into a hemorrhaging course.”

      Seeing Martha’s face, I realized I’d said too much. It was one thing to believe your career is stagnating. It was quite another to advertise that fact to your staff. Dreadful idea — too demoralizing, even if I believed everything I said, and Martha knew it. I added hastily, “Oh, it’s not that. I’m just disappointed. There were a couple of spiders that I collected that were really rather exciting.”

      Martha curled her upper lip and hooded her eyes in a look of sheer disgust.

      “They’re not that ugly Martha, really,” I laughed, but it was true that I had never seen anything like those spiders before. Now I wouldn’t get the chance to find out if anybody else had seen them either.

      “I’d best be phoning around then,” Martha said. In a flurry of activity, totally at odds with her considerable bulk, she corralled some vials and jars from my desk and started to leave. I watched in amusement as her face began a one-act play. The features moulded and changed into dawning realization of something, and the something became quite horrendous until her features once again puckered in a kind of silent scream of revolt. She stopped suddenly and looked back at me, her face spewing disgust.

      “Those larvae in the lab, they’re not from …” I raised my hands in self-defence. Martha’s face grew more disgusted still. Shifting like an ocean wave battering against the sand it ebbed and waned as her thoughts raced through her head, changing her features like the skin of a chameleon. I really believed that her features might disintegrate in imitation of what she was thinking. “Oh, lord save me, Cordi, how can you do these things?”

      I shrugged, stifled a smile. “Two of them are on the far wall in the two cages by the sink. The rest are in the common lab. There wasn’t room in mine.” Not surprising, I thought — my lab was almost as small as my office. I was always having to beg for space from my colleagues who seemed to have gobs of it … but then, they all had the perks that go with tenure. Martha marshalled her features back into a more or less normal position and waddled out of my office.

      I looked at the mail piled high on the desk, sorted through it quickly — nothing from the NSERC grants people yet. God, how they kept me waiting and hoping, second-guessing myself and my competence ten times a day. I was almost out of funds, and without the grant I wouldn’t be able to fund a graduate student next fall, and without a graduate student, the department might not be interested in granting me another year. Jesus, life could be a bitch. I stashed all the mail in a big box for some future free moment, and then I returned a dozen calls and put off the lecture planning people another two weeks — how could I give them the synopsis of my course when I had no material? I’d have to fudge it and hope the Dean didn’t call me in and grill me.

      I gazed out the window, wondering how to pick up my career, feeling the dark cobwebby entrails of depression reaching out for me. My heart lurched at the horrible feeling, and I struggled

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