His own talk, on how he’d determined the molecule responsible for the antimicrobial properties of a fungus found in Brazil, had been poorly attended, but he claimed that this didn’t bother him; with the exception of his twig-fingered advisor, few people here respected fieldwork or traditional knowledge and he didn’t expect them to recognize what he’d done. While he played with her hair—they talked in bed, only in bed—he praised what he’d learned from amateur naturalists rooted in their environments. In Alaska, near Sitka, where he was headed as soon as the conference ended, an herbalist in an isolated forest had collected mycorrhizal fungi never before described. Some Hawaiian families cured infections with mycelium found under particular logs; on Baffin Island, explorers from the time of Franklin and his followers had studied a puffball supposed to cure stomach ailments.

Sometimes it was almost dawn before they fell asleep beneath the open window. Her exhaustion, she would have claimed, was caused by that simple lack of sleep, not by boredom or irritation. Not by the way old acquaintances asked her the same questions they’d asked the previous year and the year before that and aired the same grievances. Not by the other repetitions, or by the fierce, quiet quarrels taking place in the background, everyone competing for jobs and grants and fellowships. When she found herself gnawing her knuckles, which she hadn’t done since college, she blamed her busy schedule. Whatever discord she recognized could be eased, she found, simply by stepping outside. At night, the planets gleamed in the dark sky like luminescent fish. At dawn the field was sopping wet and every creature, including her, left long trails in the dew. Moss grew between the trees, other mosses grew on the trunks, lichens silently decomposed rocks as chickadees flicked from branch to branch. The afternoon sky produced troops of clouds above the serpentine path. Surrounding her were people she mostly liked, with minds as dazzling as the aspen leaves that flipped to expose their silver parts. Sometimes, in the early evening, they played croquet with broken mallets while hooting loudly. Why would a person ever leave such a place?

A young woman plopped down next to Rosalind after dinner one night, peering intently through long, narrow eyes set deep in their sockets. Her thick hair, dark red, grew over her ears and neck, reminding Rosalind of the fox she’d seen snatching mice from the edge of the meadow.

“You came to my talk!” the woman said. “I saw you in the audience.”