By six-thirty the upper meadow was already warming, and Iulia Petrescu had taken her gloves off twice and put them back on once. The glacier lilies were two weeks done. What was up now was Mertensia still hanging on in the wet seam below the rockfall, Delphinium nuttallianum in patches that were not where they had been when she started doing this in earnest in 2030, and the first Ipomopsis spikes pushing through, three days earlier than her five-year running mean for plot four. She wrote the number down anyway. The tablet would have logged it from the camera, but she still wrote the number down.
The printout was folded into the back of the notebook. She did not need to look at it. She had already looked at it twice last night at the cabin and once on the walk up, sitting on the rock above the first switchback where you could usually get one bar of signal and this morning could not.
Seven plots. She could carry four at full protocol. Maybe five, if Devraj's field season ran longer than his committee wanted, which it would, because Devraj was Devraj.
Plot four was not in question. Plot four had the longest continuous series in the basin for Ipomopsis flowering onset relative to snowmelt, and the snowmelt record for plot four went back to 1975 because someone had stuck a stake in the ground and someone else had kept measuring against it, and the someone-elses had not stopped. Plot one was not in question either; plot one was the cold-air-drainage anomaly, the one that flowered ten days later than everything else at the same elevation, the one she had three papers on and a fourth in the drawer. Plot two she would keep because it co-located with the meter-scale microclimate array she had finally gotten the foundation to fund in 2039, sensors at twelve points across thirty meters of slope, reporting to her tablet now with their little green confirmations, all twelve alive this morning, which was not always true.
Plot five she would keep because of the bumble bees.
That left plots three, six, and seven. Three was the easy cut — it had been a comparison plot for a hypothesis she no longer found interesting, and the data would archive cleanly. Six and seven were the question. Six was the upper-elevation analog, the one that mattered most for the elevation-tracking question, the one whose flowering windows had compressed by nine days across her tenure and were doing something genuinely strange with Boechera stricta recruitment. Seven was the talus-edge plot, established in 2018, the youngest, the most exposed, the one whose snowmelt date she had been working around because the original stake had been lost in the 2031 rockfall and the replacement was — she was almost sure — in the wrong place by about a meter and a half.
She squatted at the corner pin of plot four and ran her thumb across the cap. The cap was warm. The pin was the original 1976 rebar, repainted twice, last in 2034. She had repainted it herself.
Devraj was over at plot two, doing the bee counts. She could see his orange field shirt moving and stopping, moving and stopping. He had figured out the rhythm last summer and it had taken him a third of the season to do it, and he had been frustrated, and she had let him be frustrated, because that was how you learned the rhythm, and now he had it and he would have it forever.
"Three minutes!" he called, which meant he wanted her to come read the Bombus with him before they went to nectar volumes, because his identifications on B. bifarius versus B. flavifrons were still about eighty percent and he knew it.
"Coming." She put the notebook in her hip pocket.
The walk between plots took her past where the secondary repeater used to be. There was still the conduit pipe sticking up out of the rock pile, capped, the cap weathered now to the same gray as the granite. She had stopped registering it three summers ago. This morning she registered it because she had a three o'clock with Hanne and she would have to walk back down to Gothic for signal to confirm, and she was trying to decide whether she could do the bee counts at plot five and still make it down by two-thirty, which was the question, really, every day.
Devraj had two Bombus in the kill jar — he hated the kill jar and so did she, but the molecular work needed them — and a tally sheet that said he thought one was flavifrons and was not sure about the other. She looked. The not-sure one was B. balteatus, which would have been a real find five years ago and now was the third one she had seen this month, because balteatus was coming down off the talus the way everyone had said it would and no one had been sure how fast.
"Balteatus," she said. "Look at the face. The whole face."
"Oh come on."
"Write it down."
He wrote it down. She watched him write it down. He had the careful handwriting of someone who had been told too many times that the field notebook was the actual document, not the tablet, and had eventually believed it.
"You're cutting six," he said, without looking up.
"I haven't decided."
"You're cutting six."
She let that sit. He went back to the next bee. The morning had the smell it got in the third week of July, the Ipomopsis and the warm gravel and something resinous from the spruce edge, and she breathed it in and held it. Her daughter had asked, on the phone last week, whether she would be home for the second week of August or the third. The second. She had said the second. She had said it twice because the signal had cut out.
She thought about plot six. The compressed flowering windows. The Boechera doing whatever it was doing — she had a guess, and the guess required the microclimate array, and the array was at plot two, not at six. To move four of the twelve sensors to six would degrade plot two's resolution and would not, by itself, answer the question at six. To get a second array at six she would need money she did not have and an install crew RMBL could not provide and a data pipeline that would have to come through Hanne, who was one of two, and who had told her in June, kindly, that she could take on one new sensor stream this year and one only.
The sensor stream was going to be the soil-moisture extension at plot four. She had already told Hanne yes. She was not going to un-tell her.
Plot six, then, would go to reduced protocol. Phenology dates only, by the camera, no bee counts, no nectar, no Boechera census. The compressed-window record would continue. The mechanism work would pause. Someone else, in some other decade, with some other funding, might pick it up. Or not.
She wrote 6: reduced in the notebook. She wrote 7: pause, document stake position uncertainty underneath. She underlined document.
"Devraj."
"Yeah."
"After lunch you're going to walk plot seven with me and we're going to figure out where the original stake was. I think I know within a meter. I want your eyes on it before we write it up."
He looked up from the bee. "We're pausing seven?"
"Yeah."
"Okay." He went back to the bee. Then he said, "The 2018 establishment notes had a photo from the south corner. The one with the big Salix in it."
"The Salix is dead."
"The stump's there."
She looked at him. He had not been at plot seven in two years.
"Show me at lunch," she said.
He nodded and did not look up, which was how he handled being right about something.
She walked back to plot four to finish the Ipomopsis count. The sun was fully on the slope now and a marmot was whistling from somewhere up toward the trapping grid, which meant the trap crew was already up there, which meant it was later than she thought. She would make the two-thirty. She would tell Hanne four plots at full, two at reduced, one paused with a stake-position note for whoever came next. She would ask Hanne whether the archival flag for plot seven could be set to paused-recoverable rather than paused, because she wanted the difference on the record, and Hanne would say yes or would say let me see and either way they would figure it out, because they had been figuring things out together for eleven years.
She knelt at the first transect line and started counting spikes. One, two, three. The number she wrote was higher than last year. She circled it. She would think about why on the walk down.