She reentered her cabin, leaving the door slightly ajar.
Green frowned at the place she’d been standing, then followed.
He pushed open the door and stumbled over the high log sill to enter.
The interior was warm and smelled like earth, smoke, and burnt coffee.
The floor was packed dirt. One wall was all wire shelves filled with storage containers of every description. A broad hearth dominated the rear wall, smoldering with dying embers.
A cast iron stove flickered in the corner and a caged lightbulb hung low over a wide wooden table.
On the table a moth the size of a bathrobe was splayed out for study beneath a huge gooseneck magnifying glass. Valentina stooped over the moth, apparently returning to the work Green had interrupted.
The massive insect was a tattered thing. It was obviously dead. At first glance, it looked like a model made from burlap and old cardboard. But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. A closer look confirmed it.
The folded legs were too perfect for it to be a fake. The byzantine pattern of hairs on the abdomen. The dull inner light of the faceted eyes. The broad antennae like drought-parched ferns. It couldn’t be real, but it was.
It was real and, like the wolf and the deer, it was impossible.
“Do you study…monsters?” Green said.
Valentina repositioned her magnifying glass. She didn’t look up.
“That is a child’s word. Too simple and too subjective to be useful.”
Green felt his cheeks grow warm. It surprised him. For the second time that morning, he had walked into the role of scolded student. He was getting tired of it.
Sure, he had been more concerned with ad copy and SEO in the past few years, but he had a master’s degree in literature. Maybe he didn’t know anything about camping or wildlife, but he could talk about words. This wasn’t like Dancer criticizing his camping ignorance. He decided to hold on to this one area where he could claim expertise.
“Monster seems like an appropriate idiomatic term in this instance.”
She still didn’t look up.
“Mr. Green, idioms are useful insofar as they transmit meaningwithin the communities that share them. Yes? Tell me what ‘monster’ means in this instance.”
He had a sudden sinking feeling that he had just picked a fight above his weight class. Again. It was too late. He had to try.
“Strange or frightening creatures of unknown origin. Like…this moth.”
Valentina spared Green a strange look.
“So, it is a subjective qualifier. Strange to you. Frightening to you. Akin to ‘cute.’ Or ‘favorite.’ ”
Valentina continued to scrutinize some structure on the moth’s wing.
“Might it be fair to suggest, within the context of biological study and taxonomy, that categorizing organisms by purely subjective terms such as ‘cute’ or ‘favorite’ or ‘monstrous’ is overly broad? Even childish?”
Green swallowed.
“Yeah. I suppose that’s fair.”
Valentina nodded the tiniest of nods.
She pulled two long, red glass chopsticks from a pouch and used them to pluck a feathery scale from the moth’s wing and deposit it in a glass vial. She held it up to the light and the scrap of fluff sprouted black legs that wriggled before the object righted itself and began crawling up the glass.
“What is that thing?”
Valentina cocked her head and held up the vial.
