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birthday.”
    “How do you know?” I whispered. This was a place to whisper.
    “Just know. Pick a day, stay with it from then on. Amounts to the same thing. Here.”
    He put something into my hand. Cloth, very fine cloth. Layers, lace. Hard knob one end, two sticks other end …
    “A doll.”
    “Yup,” he said. “Purtiest one I ever saw.” He took it away from me. “Chip, hush now. Wait till the wind dies.”
    I waited in the whispering dark. The breeze was fitful, careless. It would drop to almost nothing, until all the other breathings and stirrings could be heard, and then giggle on up to be a breeze again. Suddenly, then, it was gone. From before us, in the pitch blackness, a yucca whispered.
    “There she is,” Grantham murmured. He stepped forward, and an unreasoning terror sent cold sweat oozing in my armpits. I stepped after him. He was leaning forward, apparently putting the doll into the lower swords of a young yucca.
    Something touched my face and I bit my tongue. Then I realized that Grantham’s heavy hand had tilted the plant toward us. Without conscious motivation I reached up swiftly and closed my hand on a flower. Without conscious reasoning I was exquisitely careful to twist it free without a sound or a detectible motion. I slipped it into my side pocket.
    “ ’Bye, baby.” He stood up and nudged me. “Let’s go.”
    If anything, the way back was longer. I stumbled along behindhim, wondering if he were sane enough to write that resignation coherently. When we reached the trail a loom of silver was staining the eastern sky. “Easy going now,” was all he said.
    We trudged into the rising moon. I was deeply disturbed, but Grantham was calm and apparently deeply content.
    The yuccas thinned, and we started up the valley’s throat. Abruptly Grantham grunted and stopped.
    “What is it?”
    Silently he pointed. Fifty feet up the slope something wavered and flickered in the moonlight. “Bless her heart,” he said. “Come on, Chip.”
    He struck off toward whatever it was, and I followed him, walking on the balls of my feet, my eyes too wide, so that they hurt.
    When I caught up with him he stopped, turned to me, and drew his knife. “Symbiosis, Chip.”
    I don’t think he could see my face. I wouldn’t want to.
    He dropped to one knee and I leapt backward, stood spraddled, gasping. I watched him digging carefully in the ground, while over and around him fluttered a silent cloud of small white moths. They were not yucca moths. I know they weren’t because yucca moths never,
never
cluster near the ground. I mean, moths that cluster that way are not yucca moths, they aren’t, they were not, they couldn’t be.
    Look it up if you don’t believe it.
    Grantham grunted, pulled, and up out of the ground came an object that looked like a large parsnip. “Ever see one of these in the flesh, Chip?”
    Gingerly, I took it, squinted at it in the brightening moonlight. It was like a tuber, spineless, and with the upper end rounded and ribbed. I slipped my fingers along the grooves between the ribs and felt the small round protuberances.
    “Lophophora,” I said. My voice sounded odd to me. “I don’t know which one.”
    “Doesn’t matter.” He trimmed off the grooved part and dropped it into his satchel. “Long as it’s peyotl, who’s quibbling?”
    Back on the trail, I swallowed hard and asked, “That’s symbiosis? You leave a doll on a yucca, and moths find peyotl for you?”
    He laughed his big laugh. “You can’t see further than your nose,” he said gaily and insultingly, “let alone as far as your front teeth.”
    “If you’ll explain,” I said stiffly, “I shall listen.”
    “The doll’s a symbol,” he said, suddenly deeply serious. “It represents something as vital as cellulose to a bacterium, or bacterial products to a termite. I didn’t need the doll itself, except it was her birthday. Long as I bring what she needs—and I do.”
    “And it—she—I mean, you get