"This is what fairyland must look like,” thought Juanita as the mid-morning sun shone white sheets of light through the dense spruce and fir forest turning the thousands of fluttering wings into a floating rain of silver and gold.  She held up both hands in hopes that one of the myriad creatures that surrounded her might land on her fingers but the butterflies swirled around her in all directions, never touching and always in movement. The surrounding trees were heavy with thousands more, constantly opening and closing their wings as though the entire tree was breathing.   The sweet smell of the oyamel evergreen trees in the clear high mountain air gave the whole scene the appearance of belonging to another world, one of light and beauty and the best of nature.

Her friends Leora and Mariana silently walked over the thick layer of sweet-smelling needles and stood beside her, caught up in the beauty and mystery of the moment. 

Finally Mariana, daughter of the archeologists working on the burial cave the Palo Alto friends had found, spoke, “The boys hiked on up the trail with your cousins Juan and Carlos and his friend Fernando to find the hut. We just follow that trail straight up the mountainside. There’s no way that Juan could have gotten his truck up there.”

The three girls stayed watching the beautiful glen where the reflections from the sparkling drops of water from yesterday’s rain played a kind of light show accompanying the music of the wind, fluttering wings and sighs of the trees.  Finally a cloud covering the sun made them turn toward the steep trail. 

“Juan said we must be back on the road before the afternoon rains begin and I do want to see the hut before we leave, Seems amazing to me that that old man has lived up in the same one-room cabin all his life and that he will not come down no matter how Fernando’s family pleads with him. I can’t imagine living with no water except a mountain brook, no electricity or lights except a kerosene lantern and no neighbors.” mused Leora, “I come from such an industrialized nation, it just seems impossible.”

The girls followed the steep trail; the skids made by the boys’ tennis shoes showing the way. “Maybe he doesn’t come down just so that he doesn’t have to climb back up.”  panted Mariana as she slid down an especially slippery part of the trail and was caught just in time by Leora.

“Maybe it’s better in the dry season but then it must be terribly cold this high in the sierra,” replied Juanita, remembering the icy winds she had felt during the trip over the sierra  that had brought her to her grandparents’ house that past January.

After a hard climb, they reached an opening in the trees and saw a small meadow stretching up into the towering trees. On a steep side and buried in the trees was a small wooden hut made of flat planks with a peaked roof of red tile. Beside it was a small corral made of hand-cut logs and a long trough made of halves of trees hollowed out that leaked down the mountainside bringing water to a tiny pond surrounded by green moss and hundreds of butterflies silently opening and closing their wings.

As they approached, Juanita saw her cousin Carlos bending over a small mare, holding her foreleg and looking at her hoof while being watched by a tiny man with dark leathered skin and an old straw hat on his head.