During the early eighties, the montana issue was quiescent. Scott and Stanford brought out their paper in 1981, but it wasn't widely read. Not until 1985 did montana reemerge on the scene. This time, it took center stage. The Water Department had started work on its obligatory system-wide environmental-impact statement, and also on a site-specific impact statement for the Two Forks Dam. It wanted these documents to be legally defensible from every angle-watertight, as it were. If there were questions about the Pawnee montane skipper, it wanted them settled now, before construction started. The last thing it needed was a snaildarter situation on its hands.

       The snail darter is a small fish-a perch-that delayed the filling of the Tellico Dam, on the Little Tennessee River, and nearly scuttled the project altogether. It became an environmental cause celebre during the seventies. After the Tennessee Valley Authority had the site preparation for the dam well under way, and early stages of construction had begun, the darter, a previously undescribed species, was discovered in the water below. A lawsuit was filed on its behalf. When the suit was filed, the T. V.A. immediately shifted to a twenty-four- hour-a-day construction schedule-a common practice among builders who are being sued, for they know that the more of the structure they can finish the better its chances are of staying up. By the time the darter was described and put on the endangered list, the concrete portion of the dam had been completed, but the Fish and Wildlife Service gave a "jeopardy opinion" on the fish's behalf; that is, it decided that the fish's continued existence would be jeopardized if the dam was filled. There matters stood, with dam and darter deadlocked, until the case was referred to the Endangered Species Committee, which had just been created by Congress to resolve irreconcilable differences between construction projects and species for which a jeopardy opinion has been rendered. Some of the highest officials in the land sit on this committee: the Secretaries of Agriculture, the Army, and the Interior, the administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and a representative of each state concerned. Environmentalists nicknamed it the God Committee. Snail darter v. Tellico Dam was its first case, and it ruled in the darter's favor, saying that the dam would cause the fish's extinction and that the T .V .A. hadn't explored all the alternatives. But then Senator Howard Baker, of T ennessee, incensed at the trouble the little fish was making, introduced a bill in Congress exempting the Tellico Dam from all federal law. Congress passed the extraordinary bill, and the dam was filled. The T. V .A. hired frogmen to catch the darters below the dam and transplant them to other rivers. Subsequently, the snail darter was found to be more widely distributed than had previously been supposed. Tiny populations turned up not only in several other rivers in Tennessee but in a couple of adjacent Alabama and Georgia rivers as well-and its status was downgraded to threatened. So in the end the T. V .A. got its dam (even though Boeing had by then backed out of a proposal to build an industrial city near the dam, and one of the main reasons for building the dam had disappeared). But it was a traumatic experience, and one that the Denver Water Department had no desire to repeat.

       In the spring of 1985, the department hired two biologists-Scott Ellis, who was with an outfit called E.R. T. (for Environmental Research and Technology), and Lewis Keenan, of PEST (Professional Entomological Services Technology)-to do a study of the Pawnee montane skipper. Thirty-five thousand dollars was allocated for the study, and Ellis and Keenan hired a number of assistants, including Ray Stanford. He spent a lot of time in South Platte Canyon that summer. It was the first time he had been paid for what he likes to do best-go out and look for butterflies. By then, the press, sensing a potential snail-darter situation, had picked up on the butterfly. The Denver Post printed a story on April 20th, with a photograph of the insect, that
was headlined "DO BUTTERFLIES SWIM? TWO FORKS A COSMIC QUESTION FOR RARE SKIPPERS." In July, the Rocky Mountain News put a much-larger-than-Iife montana on the cover of its Sunday magazine and captioned it:

IN DANGER
THE PAWNEE MONTANA SKIPPER IS ITS FUTURE WORTH A DAM?

The story inside spoke of an "olive drab speed-demon" that had been "suspended in silk every Colorado summer for a million years, maybe." It went as far as to quote a famous remark made by the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu upon awakening from a strange dream some two thousand years ago: "I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man." The Post story called the insect "the Pawnee montane skipper," and the Rocky Mountain News "the Pawnee montana, nicknamed montane"-the first crude attempts to give the insect a common name. While Stanford was interviewed in both articles, apparently neither reporter was aware that he and Scott had reclassified pawnee and montana as distinct subspecies. Either "the montane Leonard" or just "the montane skipper" would have been more apt, but "Pawnee montane skipper" it became, joining the ranks of "the American Indian," "New Jersey the Garden State," and all the other misnomers that have made their way
into the language.

      I WAS alerted to the flurry that the skipper was causing by a letter from a woman who lived in Boulder, Colorado, and was aware of my interest in butterflies-an inherited one, which has run in my family off and on now for six generations. Catching and mounting butterflies and making watercolors of them had been part of growing up for me, as it had been for my father and his uncle (both did scientific work as adults) and his grandfather, who grew up in the mid-nineteenth century, when a rounded education included a solid dose of natural history. Enclosed with the letter was a recent article in the Denver Post headed "$65,000 OK'D FOR STUDY OF TWO FORKS BUTTERFLY." What had happened, I learned after making a few calls, was that the 1985 study by Ellis and Keenan had concluded that only about seventeen per cent of the montana population would be inundated-an estimate that Stanford, Scott, Opler (who by then had moved to Colorado and become more involved in the skipper's future), and James Miller, Fish and Wildlife's regional listing coordinator, all thought was far too low, Miller raised a number of questions about the methodology of the study. The census had been conducted only in places where the skipper was already known to occur, he complained, and was therefore not representative; the census plots should have been chosen at random. So Fish and Wildlife, which was in a position to declare the reservoir site a critical habitat and to stop the dam in its tracks, recommended that a second study be undertaken. "We insist that the species remain around," Miller told me over the phone. "When you're in the West, there are two sides: the people who want it and the people who don't. If you go out to the canyon and look at the scenery, you'll see that it's asinine to put a dam in there. But the water needs of Denver are getting larger by the day."

       Though the Water Department was "initially teed off," Miller recalled, it complied with Fish and Wildlife's recommendation. Sixty-five thousand dollars was allocated for the new study, and ten thousand more for the assistance of Fish and Wildlife entomologists; Scott Ellis, of E.R. T., was again retained. This was a modest sum to invest in the future of a rare life form, and a tiny fraction of the cost of the whole environmental-impact statement.

       Early in September, I took a plane to Denver. My plan was to see the butterflies in the morning, get the Water Department's side of the story in the afternoon, and then discuss the skipper and its prospects over dinner with Stanford, Miller, and Opler.

       At nine o'clock, Scott Ellis stopped for me in a big blue-and-white Blazer, and we drove over to the Water Department to pick up a biologist in the environmental section named Chip Dale and then headed out to South Platte Canyon. Except for one overnight stay, I hadn't been to Denver in nearly twenty years. The place was unrecognizable. In the last decade, with the help of Canadian and oil money, a dense stand of tall glass towers had shot up downtown. One of them was shaped like a gigantic cash register. Ellis said that that was the United Bank Center. "We're living in a growth syndrome," he explained. Tall, blond, lanky, earnest, Ellis was thirty-seven. He had grown up in western Colorado, in a little town called Hotchkiss, in a family of fruit farmers (apples, plums, peaches). One day when he was eight, a cousin came over with a butterfly net. "I got kind of hooked," he told me. "I wrote F. Martin Brown, and he gave me a lot of encouragement." Ellis went away to college-Cornell-and graduated with a degree in English and biology. "I thought I'd become a bio-poet," he said, "but after spending a year living in a trailer in Fort Collins and getting a good taste of poverty I decided I didn't want to be some kind of hippie general-purpose ne'er-do-well, because it was so damned miserable." He got a job with E.R. T., a new environmental-consulting firm based in Concord, Massachusetts, and he'd been with it ever since. "Our main game is air-quality analysis and hazardouswaste management," he said. He had been doing a lot of plant-ecology and endangered-species work. With his background in butterflies, he was tailor-made for this assignment.

       Leaving the city limits on a freeway, we passed through the southwestern suburb of Lakewood-a maze of attached two-story or three~story condominiums and apartments and detached, densely clustered single-family houses. The buildings were brandnew and quite handsome, with narrow, slanted natural-finished board siding, portholes under the eaves, stained-glass windows, greenhouses, patios, and other nice touches. Glamorous, nostalgic versions of the local vernacular architecture that they had replaced, they were best described, we decided, as ersatz mine shack-the Rocky Mountain subspecies of modern American tract housing, a Colorado cousin of New Mexico's ersatz pueblo, Kansas's ersatz grain elevator, Vermont's ersatz country store. Even the shopping malls harked back to the clapboard hammer mills where ore was ground, or to the headframes that had perched over shafts in the old mining days.

       Chip Dale, who was thirty-one, had grown up in suburban Aurora but had been drawn to the backcountry; he liked to hunt and fish and be outdoors. For a master's degree in wildlife biology from Colorado State University, he had spent a year observing a herd of bighorn sheep that have a lambing site where the north abutment of the dam is supposed to go. "Between 1978 and 1980, the herd rose from forty-eight members to seven~-sevenj then it suffered a pneumonia die. off, and it's now down to around fifteen," he told me. "Bighorns have a highly integrated social structure and a strong collective awareness. One sheep sees a predator-a cougar or a coyote-and does an alarm display. The others key to it, and they all head for the rocks, where they can outrun it."

       Dale explained that he was "scoping out" the field studies necessary for compiling the system-wide impact statement. The impact on the terrestrial wildlife, excluding the bighorn herd, was being assessed by a Boulderbased firm called Stoecker-Keammerer Associates, which was getting two hundred and forty-three thousand dollars for its study. The sheep were going to be a problem. Dale himself was weighing the alternatives: improve the adjacent habitat to entice the sheep off the sitej move them temporarily during constructionjpermanently relocate themj or leave them alone and see how they did. E.R. T., whose
total slice of the impact-statement was four hundred and eighty-eight thousand dollars, was looking into the matter of peregrine falcons that had once nested in the canyon. Their aeries were no longer in use, but with the endangered birds making a comeback in recent years they might return to them. E.R. T. was also responsible, with several other consultants, for determining the impact of Two Forks on the critically endangered whooping cranes, on the magnificent but not yet endangered sandhill cranes, on the locally endangered interior least terns, and on the locally threatened piping plovers, all of which visit or nest along the Platte as it flows through Nebraska. How would their delicate existence be affected by changes in the water regime hundreds of miles upstream?

       Chadwick & Associates, of Littleton, was receiving just over six hundred thousand dollars for the aquatic study. The South Platte is one of the most productive trout streams in the state. And another firm, R. A. Valdez and Associates, was studying the effect that increased dIversion of the Blue, the Snake, the Ten Mile, and other West Slope rivers would have on the endangered bony tail chub, the humpback chub, the Colorado squawfish, and the state-endangered (that is, not federally listed) razorback sucker in the Colorado River. A substantial amount of the ninety-eight thousand acre-feet of water a year that Two Forks would add to Denver's water supply would be taken from the West Slope, and this might alter the flow of the Colorado enough to disturb the spawning grounds and nurseries of the fish. "As you can see, we're leaving no stone unturned," Dale told me. 

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