Chapters 9: Continental Ecosystem Summary

As January progresses, Ovid and Pete have returned and set up the lab. Ovid interviews Dellarobia for a job assisting with their research. She is amazed and almost appalled at the amount of money Ovid's university and the government are able to lavish on the lab, putting luxuries she could never afford in her barn, like a stand-alone freezer. Ovid has leased the barn from Hester and Bear, which gives them some financial security as they decide how to handle the logging, and Ovid expects the butterflies, if they follow seasonal patterns, to leave their wintering spot by March anyway.

Dellarobia answers Ovid's questions with a mixture of shame, defensiveness, and a strange pride that she knows something that he doesn't: that people in her part of the world grow up with sports coaches as math and science teachers...