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By Root 6700 0

and flew eight hundred miles across the Gulf, burning up half their body weight, and landed in Galveston to catch their breath. Terns came up from one subarctic to the other, swifts took airborne naps and never landed, song-filled thrushes waited for a southern wind and then flew nonstop for twelve hours, traversing whole states in a night. High-rises and power lines and wind turbines and cellphone towers and road traffic mowed down millions of migrants, but millions more made it through, many of them returning to the very same tree they’d nested in the year before, the same ridgeline or wetland they’d been fledged on, and there, if they were male, began to sing. Each year, they arrived to find more of their former homes paved over for parking lots or highways, or logged over for pallet wood, or developed into subdivisions, or stripped bare for oil drilling or coal mining, or fragmented for shopping centers, or plowed under for ethanol production, or miscellaneously denatured for ski runs and bike trails and golf courses. Migrants exhausted by their five-thousand-mile journey competed with earlier arrivals for the remaining scraps of territory; they searched in vain for a mate, they gave up on nesting and subsisted without breeding, they were killed for sport by free-roaming cats. But the United States was still a rich and relatively young country, and pockets full of bird life could still be found if you went looking.

Which Walter and Lalitha, at the end of April, in a van loaded with camping equipment, set out to do. They had a free month before their work with Free Space commenced in earnest, and their responsibilities to the Cerulean Mountain Trust had ended. As for their carbon footprint, in a gas-thirsty van, Walter took some comfort in having commuted on bicycle or on foot for the last twenty-five years, and in no longer owning any residence besides the little closed-up house at Nameless Lake. He felt he was owed one petroleum splurge after a lifetime of virtue, one nature-filled summer in payment for the summer he’d been deprived of as a teenager.

While he’d still been in the Whitman County hospital, having his dislocated jaw and split-open face and bruised ribs attended to, Lalitha had desperately spun his outburst as a trazodone-induced psychotic break. “He was literally sleepwalking,” she pleaded to Vin Haven. “I don’t know how many trazodones he took, but it was more than one, and just a few hours earlier. He literally didn’t know what he was saying. It was my fault for letting him make the speech. You should fire me, not him.”

“Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying,” Vin replied, with surprisingly little anger. “It’s a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.”

Vin had organized a conference call with his trustees, who had rubber-stamped his proposal to terminate Walter immediately, and he’d instructed his lawyers to exercise his repurchase option on the Berglunds’ condominium portion of the mansion in Georgetown. Lalitha notified the applicants for Free Space internships that her funding had been cut off, that Richard Katz was withdrawing from the project (Walter, from his hospital bed, had finally prevailed on this), and that the very existence of Free Space was in doubt. Some of the applicants e-mailed back to cancel their applications; two of them said they still hoped to volunteer; the rest did not reply at all. Because Walter was facing eviction from the mansion and refused to speak to his wife, Lalitha called her for him. Patty arrived with a rented van a few days later, while Walter hid out at the nearest Starbucks, and packed up the belongings she didn’t want put in storage.

It was at the end of that very unpleasant day, after Patty had departed and Walter had returned from caffeinated exile, that Lalitha checked her BlackBerry and found eighty new messages from young people all over the country, inquiring whether it was too late to volunteer for Free Space. Their e-mail addresses had more piquant