The pilot light had been out for a week before they smelled gas. The gas had been present for a day before anyone connected the two facts. The connection, once made, took thirty seconds to act on. The week and the day could not be recovered. The thirty seconds could.

The beetle had been identified in 1988, described in a paper, and assigned a binomial name that included the discoverer's surname: Melanotus harrisoni. Dr. Harrison, who was twenty-nine at the time of discovery, had spent the following thirty-four years in the company of beetles without finding a second species. He had found many specimens and several subspecies and one probable hybrid, but no new species. This was not unusual. This was, in fact, the normal career arc. He knew this and continued anyway. What he had not expected was the specific quality of his relationship to Melanotus harrisoni. He collected specimens and mounted and studied them with the professional detachment appropriate to a taxonomist. He did not feel sentimental about them. But when students asked why he had stayed in a field with so few dramatic discoveries, he found himself talking about the beetle in a way that he recognized, afterward, as something closer to gratitude than he had intended. He gave a lecture each spring on the process of species identification and always began with the morning he had found the first specimen under a rotting log in West Virginia. He had not known what he was looking at, he told the students. He had put it in a vial and brought it to the lab and spent three weeks in the literature before concluding it was new. The certainty, when it came, was the most precise feeling he had ever had. He spent thirty-four more years in the field hoping to have it again.