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looking for her, too, after the old lady died. I guess he wanted his tortillas pounded. He looked real hard.’
    “I told him thanks, and came out here. I wish you had the makings, Chip.”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    “I came out here and wandered for a while. A man can eat out here, sleep out here, right time of year. You could, Chip, knowing it just from books. I guess I felt real bad. Funny thing,” he mused. “I wanted to call her, but I had never found out what her name was.”
    He was quiet. The evening breeze sprang and died, stopped and pressed and sprang again. The yuccas whispered and whispered.
    “Hear?”
    “I hear,” I said.
    “I heard it one night, sleeping here, and came up standing. There was no wind. She was here, right here, Chip. Dancing like a yucca, whispering.”
    “See her?”
    “No, I didn’t see her.” I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was smiling, and I wondered what in time he was smiling about.
    “You, Professor, you want something more than you want anything else there is, more than money or your name in books or a woman. You want that Pudley Chair in Botany. I bet you’d kill anyone who tried to get it away from you.”
    “Anyone but you.”
    His fringed shirt rustled as he twisted toward me. “You mean that. You do mean that. That’s fine, Chip. That’s nice.” He rested his chin on his knees and paid attention to the evening star. “Everybody wants some one single thing that bad. Some get it, some don’t. Some know what it is, some never find out. You found out. I found out.”
    “Want to tell me?”
    “Sure I do. Sure. Chip, no offense, but you and I are different kinds of botanist.”
    “I know that. But—well, go on.”
    “You want botany out of books. Some window boxes, some lab, sure. You learned it right; there’s not a thing wrong in being that way, you see? Very valuable. You learned botany so’s you could be a botanist, the best damn botanist in the world, if you could make it. You might make it, too.”
    “And you?”
    “I got to be a botanist so I could be—close to something. Something like that symbiosis you were talking about. I’m a man, but man and cloverleaf, man and Chaya, man and piñon juniper—is that so much crazier than moth and cactus?”
    I said nothing. I try to form my spoken opinions from some sort of precedent.
    “Heard a story once about a man went away to a river island to carve statues. He carved statues for fourteen years and stashed ’em all in a big barn, dozens of ’em. When he figured his time was up, he dynamited the barn. Was he crazy?”
    “Out of my field,” I said briefly.
    “I think I know why he did it. Other sculptors wanted to get close to people—moneywise, socialwise, what have you—and used sculpture to do it. This fellow, he just wanted to get close to sculpturing. Maybe people mattered to him, but sculpture mattered more. Now do you see?”
    “You’re trying to tell me that you want to go on with botany by yourself—no texts, no classes, no references.”
    He waved a hand; I saw it pass against the dark skyline. “Texts and references all here, Chip. Just not strained through a book first, that’s all.”
    I said, “Then no reports, no books written, no articles in the
Journal
.”
    “That’s right. This is for me.”
    “Selfish, isn’t it?”
    He said, very gently, “Not after eleven years in the Pudley Chair.”
    I understood that, and had nothing to say. Instead I asked him, “How close do you think you can carry this symbiosis of yours? Or was it just a figure of speech?”
    “Time to show you, I reckon,” he said. He rose. I followed.
    “It’s dark.”
    “Sure,” he said. “I know the way. Hook on to the back of my belt.”
    I did, and he strode off purposefully into the pitch-black shadows of the yucca. How we turned, climbed, slithered, I couldn’t say. It might have been a long way, and it might have been a circle.
    We stopped. He fumbled in his pouch. “It’s her