I died on a Tuesday.
It was a Lycaeides argyrognomon, or close enough. Blue wings veined in black. Hindwing spots rimmed in orange that had no business existing this far west of its documented range. My thesis advisor would have cried if she'd seen it. She actually did cry, later, but for different reasons.
I was doing fieldwork in the Olympic Peninsula. Soil samples along the margin of a logging road. Tweezers, plastic bags, a clipboard I kept dropping. I had mud on my knees and a blister on my left heel that I'd been ignoring since morning because blisters weren't interesting.
The road cut through old-growth forest. Single lane, gravel, ferns and low brush growing thick along both sides where the tree canopy broke and the sun got through.
The butterfly landed on a fern about three meters off the road.
I stopped walking and held my breath. I'm fairly sure my heart skipped, though I can't confirm that now for obvious reasons. It sat there fanning its wings in a patch of sun. Thirty-one millimeters across, give or take. The orange spots were too bright. The wing pattern didn't match any variety in the current literature. I had the classification guides memorized. I'd memorized them for fun during a weekend when my roommate was having people over and I needed something to do in my room that wasn't listening to them.
I texted my advisor before I did anything else. Fingers shaking. L. argyrognomon variant, possibly undescribed, check wing spot pattern against Nabokov's 1949 reference. Then I put the phone in camera mode and started moving.
I moved slowly. Weight on the balls of my feet, breathing through my nose. A butterfly will bolt if you move too fast and this one was too important to spook. I stepped off the road into the brush, easing through the ferns, keeping low. It took a while. The butterfly lifted once and my stomach dropped. I stood completely still for two minutes, not breathing, until it resettled on the same fern. I circled wide, positioning myself so the light would hit the wing scales from the front instead of washing them out. Gravel crunched under my boots.
My phone was up, my focus was on the wings as I crouched. The angle was right. The focus locked, sharp enough to count individual scales. The blue shifted toward violet at the edges and my chest got tight, which happened sometimes when I found something new. I'd asked a doctor about it once and she said it was probably just excitement. That didn't sound right.
I took the photograph.
It was good, really good. Centered, clean background, the fern blurred to nothing behind the specimen. I was already writing the paper in my head because the photo was that good and the species was almost certainly undescribed.
The truck horn split the air.
The butterfly was gone in a blur of blue. I looked up. The truck was already on top of me, close enough that I could see the driver's face. He was standing on the brakes while the horn was still going.
I remember thinking: I got the shot.
Then the sky. Overcast, which was better for photos. No harsh shadows. After that it gets hard to separate what I actually remember from what a dying brain invents to fill the gaps. I didn't think about family nor my apartment or the thesis I hadn't finished.
I found out later that the phone survived. I say "found out later" because what happened next involved waking up in a different body in a different world, and it took a while to piece together how my first life ended. The phone was recovered from the road with the image intact. My advisor submitted it to a review board that confirmed the new species.
They named it after me.
Lycaeides parkeri. The paper thanked me posthumously for "exceptional field observation under adverse conditions," which is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me, including while I was alive.
Nobody told them about the truck, which i appreciated.
I woke up in a body with hands too small to hold a specimen jar, with something humming under my skin that most certainly wasn't blood.
But that came later.