The Orchid Hunter

“I’ll do better than just tell you.” I set the brown paper bag on the chair next to me and took out Phalaenopsis donerii, a delicate beauty whose petals gleamed a pure, bright yellow. The lip—the insect pollinator’s landing platform—resembled a leopard’s skin, dark brown and golden. “Fresh from Micronesia,” I said. “She’s small, but she’s fertile. I made sure of that before I turned her siblings over to the boss.”

Scooter’s liver-spotted hand stopped trembling as he touched the plant’s shiny leaves. Just like some stutterers can sing flawlessly, so his hands became steady as a rock around an orchid.

“Wide leaves. Understory t’rrestrial,” he murmured, turning the pot gently. “Monopodial. Better not keep your feet wet, lovely girl.” His fingers lightly traced her lines. “What pests?”

“The usual. And spider mites on the underleaves.”

“Pollinator?”

“The male leopard moth. She blooms for two weeks before the female moths hatch.”

“So the gents make love to her until their lady friends show up.” He shook his head. “Somethin’ else, ain’t it?”

“Timing is everything,” I admitted.

“This is the prettiest since my Laelia anceps. My first orchid.” His voice softened. “Long time ago now.”

“What about the Draculas I brought you last year? Or the Brassia verrucosa the year before that?” I’d nearly broken my neck for the blood-red Brassia.

“There ain’t nuthin’ like the first.” He seemed to want to say more, but didn’t. His eyes sharpened when he tore his gaze from his orchid to look at me. “Couldn’t catch me a couple of moths?”

“You know I don’t do moths. I’m only licensed for plants.”

He nodded. “Appendix One?”

He was referring to the CITES, pronounced sigh-tees, regulations about transporting animal and plant products across international borders. Had I been caught in customs with Scooter’s little Phalaenopsis, I’d be in jail and facing a hundred-thousand-dollar fine. It would have been fun because I’d had four of them packed in my luggage at the time.

I shrugged, noncommittal. Best I not admit to anything in front of Hank, who was, after all, the law. Better for Scooter, too. U.S. Fish and Wildlife raids on orchid growers, even here in the free United States of America, weren’t unknown. Heck, a well-respected Florida botanical garden got nailed a few years ago because they neglected to tell Fish and Wildlife they were preparing to formally register the previously undiscovered Phragmipedium kovachii.

Abruptly, Scooter smiled. “Good girl,” he murmured.

I swigged my ice-cold Saint Arnold while my gut warmed with pleasure. Getting rare orchids into the States under the noses of customs and wildlife agents satisfied us both—me because of the challenge and ultimate monetary payoff from von Brutten, and Scooter because he was a true conservationist.

Scooter had explained to me how the CITES rules worked when I first decided at the ripe old age of ten I wanted to find orchids for a living. It’s simple. You can’t take a plant listed in CITES Appendix One out of its country of origin. It doesn’t matter whether you want to conserve it, study it or clone it. It doesn’t even matter if everybody knows that same country of origin is about to bulldoze the last one under to build a road. That plant can be the only one in existence, and CITES won’t let someone like me save it by taking it out of the country. It’s just one of those things: good intentions gone bad.

Scooter got me started on orchids with his collecting hobby, but I’ve never had the love of the things he does. I like the grittier side. Ever since he told me the horror stories about the Victorian hunters—Roezl losing his arm but tramping across the Americas for the sake of a single orchid, the intrepid von Warscewicz hunkering down in the wildest Colombian floods with his foul-smelling guide—I’ve wanted to be a field collector. For me, it’s the chase, the challenge. If I have only the foggiest idea of what I’m looking for, nothing grabs my gut more than trying to track it down in the middle of a choking jungle. And the tougher the job, the better.

“What else you got for me, Ladybug?” he asked.

I spread five plastic sleeves across the table like a winning flush. As I named the powdery seeds inside them, Scooter’s smile got wider and wider until I thought his jaw must hurt.

“Marian!” he called. “Take these into the greenhouse office for me.”

“The plant, too?” she asked, sweeping up the sleeves.

“No.” He caressed the orchid’s pot with a tremorless hand. “I wanna look at it for a while.” He raised his liquid gaze to my face. “I’m glad you came to see me, Ladybug.”

“Me, too, Scooter.”

An hour later, I watched Scooter row himself to the office for his late-afternoon nap. Marian hovered over him like a hummingbird, carrying his orchid.

“His Parkinson’s is getting worse,” I said to Hank, “and his color’s bad. His skin’s gone gray. He was barely stage three when I left and now he seems like he’s gone all the way to stage four. Have you talked him into seeing the specialist yet?”

Hank tapped his beer bottle on its coaster. “You managed to do that your last visit.” He took a deep breath, his barrel chest broadening under a short beard just starting to grizzle, his craggy face grim.

“Thank God. One more trip to that witch doctor and I thought he’d start howling at the moon.”

“He’s dyin’, Jess.”

I waited a few seconds for him to add just kiddin’. Or to say that we’re all dying and Scooter is seventy-four, after all, so he’s just a little ahead of the game.

But when he continued, Hank said, “The doctors gave him a cocktail that was supposed to help the Parkinson’s, but it’s damaged his heart.”

“Okay, so they can fix that—”

“It’s irreversible.”

Tears stung the backs of my eyes. “Is that what the cardiovascular surgeon said?”

“It’s what a team of specialists—heart surgeons and neurologists—said.”

“They took an oath,” I protested. “What happened to ‘do no harm’?”

“They did their best.”

“No, they didn’t. They broke him.” My gut tightened. I knew the question to ask, but waited until I wouldn’t cry when I asked it. “How long?” I said finally.

“A month at the outside.”

After the next wave of pain passed, I asked, “What are they going to do?”

Hank shook his head, squeezing my hand once before letting go. “Nothin’. He’s too old.” Before I could get up a good head of steam, he added, “He wouldn’t let ’em do anything about it now even if they wanted to. You know him.”

“Yeah, I do. He’d rather waste his time and money carrying around rabbit’s feet and drinking herbal concoctions Old Lady Fenster cooked up in her backyard than take a vitamin.” I shoved away from the table and stood. “I need to have a talk with that old bat.”

Hank grabbed my arm. “Don’t, Jess. There’s nothin’ wrong with what she was doing. It may not have helped him, but it didn’t hurt him none, neither.”

“Didn’t hurt him? You mean when he didn’t go to the doctor early enough to get help or when she gave him false hope that she could stop the Parkinson’s?”

“It’s Scooter’s choice. It always has been.”

His grip felt like iron, completely unlike Scooter’s feeble grasp earlier. The contrast made my throat ache. “She had no right filling his head with that crap,” I said. “If he’d listened to me years ago and gone to a doctor then, they could have prescribed L-dopa to slow the symptoms.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Hank replied, his voice soft. He let go of me as I sat back down to listen. “This drug treatment they gave him is in trials.”

I stared at him for a moment while my brain struggled to work. “He let them experiment on him?”

“Only because he’s already so far gone. But now they know more about the side effects—”