Our caterpillars are advancing into pupage. We’ve got four now.

Some of the little fellers, having been out-eaten, have sunk, disconsolate and disoriented—a condition common to caterpillars, given the marked similarity between their fores and afts— to the bottom of the milkweed pot.

It is sad and it is the way of all life, I guess.

But the poor caterpillars on the bottom reminded me of my hitch with the Seventh Cavalry, when we rode into the Valley of the Greasy Grass in Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-Six.

Nothing takes the sand out of a man quicker than a jammed ejector in his government-issue Springfield carbine combined with the sudden appearance, like a swarm of enraged hornets, of 3,000 Lakota and Cheyenne, Dog Soldiers and dare riders and the coup counters who’d bonk a soldier on the backside with a crooked stick to humiliate him. At sights like this, those poor boys in the Seventh just dropped to the bottom of the pot.

It was a hard day.

Hoka-hey, little caterpillars.