The Hunter

Drawer on top of drawer of specimens. These over here are all indigenous. That other stack, and the drawers in the hallway, those are exotics. And he collected them all himself. Although "collected" sounds so dry. As though he simply called on a shop and turned in his ticket and they passed a package wrapped in brown paper across the counter!

No, he was a hunter. Still was. Until the season returned, he had his trophies. He didn't even know how many, exactly. Something he learned from Professor Pines, not counting them. Oh, he knew that he had approximately eight hundred different species, affixed in their "sets," as they were called, "pinned and pegged," as they say.

As he walked past them, on his way to the living room, or out the front door to gather the morning paper, he still felt a charge. Even after all these years. Just knowing that so much color—colors like most people never see, not the watercolorists, not the botanists, not the birders—was stashed away in his stacks. It was still a thrill.

He was solving mysteries he couldn't even name. Amassing evidence. Taking one chaotic corner of Gaia's domain, and with a sweep of his hand, and a swish of his net (yes, don't laugh, he still used a net) he imposed order upon it. Nature might abhor a vacuum, but man abhorred a secret. So he collected the Iris Fringe, the Maubry's Fruitillary, the so-called "Lavender Hover," and the rest of their kind, these magnificent peoples of sunlit places. To know. To understand. To have. To travel into her secrets and find a prize and return with it aloft, a flutter still in its wings.