This morning, we climbed Mt. Moffett, that old volcano, to the snowfield. We walked left of what we estimated was the perimeter of an inadvertent minefield of UXOs and unidentified scrap metal—except for that one piece of rusted steel I planted my boot right on, because it was right in the middle of a faint footpath and every boot before mine had taken the same step. We crossed no fences.

Just below the snowfield, we ate lunch by a meltwater stream. Logan pointed to some wet rocks near the water and said that was where his beetle, in the way science adopts rare and stray animals, would live. Logan climbed down into the gully and overturned the rock he had pointed to—and there they were, three of them, small and black and hiding under the wrong shelter. He relocated them to his pocket vial.

—from “The Little Boxes have Holes,” (The Coachella Literary Review)

—Thanks to the US Fish and Wildlife Service; UA Museum of the North, Entomology Collection (2015)