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split-level house were young woods, and a steep gully going down to the riverbank and the little brown river. The trees hung over it and lifted their slimy knuckled toes out of it and the undergrowth was dense.
    “Bugs,” Ben said as they climbed down. “Bugs and more bugs.”
    “You don’t say bugs,” Kit said, coming down after him with the collecting stuff, the jars and the cotton soaked in carbon tet, notebook under her arm. “That’s the first thing they said. Bugs doesn’t mean anything.”
    He smiled that serene smile of his, the one that meant he felt no need to respond and yet remained in the right. He had the net, and with it he brushed bugs—deerflies, mosquitoes—from his head.
    Kit had been enrolled in a Catholic school for the coming year, St. Hedwige’s, and at registration was told that over the summer it would be her job to make an insect collection, fifty species at least, to be mounted, labeled, and brought to Biology class on the first day of school, which now was only a couple of weeks away.
    She didn’t hate bugs, especially. She withdrew from them: ducked beneath the flight paths of hunting wasps, stayed far from June bugs and darning needles. Going down to the river just because that’s where they were, parting the layered leaves and upturning stones out of their sockets in the mud to find them, messing with them—she felt a deep reluctance that Ben made fun of. A girl’s reluctance, he implied, and it seemed to be so, for it was like the feeling that her own girl being was 26

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    just then causing in her, unable to be ducked, her own swelling slug’s alien aliveness.
    So she had let the days slide away, and read her small books, which were full of earth’s music and the river too, of course, and the mur-murous haunts of flies on summer eves, but that was different, until it was August and her few specimens (a couple of June bugs she had found already dead and a great moonstone-colored luna moth she wrote a poem about) had already decayed, improperly mounted; and Ben started taking her down to the river in the mornings and the evenings.
    “Listen,” he said, standing still in the green.
    The noise really was ear-filling, an orchestra endlessly tuning, strings here, woodwinds there.
    “Good hunting,” he said, and rubbed his hands together. At first she only followed; he was fearless and soon fascinated by the job, finding amazing beings in the city of leaves that he might have seen at any time but never had, a robber fly, a cicada killer (huge slow wasp like an attack helicopter), or a camel cricket with glossy russet hump. He learned to step up to a hornet or a wasp as though he meant to tame it, and slip the net smoothly over it like an executioner’s hood; he made Kit try it.
    “He’s gonna get me, I know it.”
    “He’s not. He doesn’t even know you exist.”
    “I got him I got him.”
    “Easy. Don’t catch his wing, don’t hurt him.”
    “Hurt him! We’re trying to kill him.”
    “Give him a little shake. There, now he’s dropped in. Now the cap.”
    In the jar she had caught, yes, quite a specimen, a beetle painted in clown colors and in fact named (they looked it up as they sat to drink the Cokes he had brought too) a harlequin. So there.
    And this was how she learned to be unafraid of the world, at least unafraid of this modality of it: how she became a hunter and an explorer and a namer, a taxonomist. By summer’s end she was crashing through the shallows and the reeds in pursuit of some glamorous

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    something whose wing-hum she had heard, digging into a black crevice where a centipede, not actually an insect, was escaping, one of a kind she hadn’t seen before and wanted. The more she learned the more she wanted to know, and wanting to know displaced fear. Her poem “The Split Level” would be about that: about a woman learning the names of flowers, and thus (she believes) coming closer to nature, and