National Geographic

when he was a small boy. Now he pays an armyof small boys himself, all equipped with gos-samer nets. Together they make up the loweststep in a butterfly market that ends in privateparlors and corporate boardrooms in farawaylands, where some collectors pay thousands ofdollars for specimens they display under glass.In the near darkness the women laugh atJasmin’s prone figure as they cook. The olderis Mujiauna, his wife of almost 30 years. Theysmile at each other a lot.Jasmin sits up. “You must have a wife?” he says.It’s the first time he has veered from the sub-ject of butterflies, and the question is so unex-pected I struggle with it.“No,” I say. “Or not anymore.”“Something happened to her?”“Yes.”He sits in silence a moment and lies downagain.THE HUT SITS ON THE WESTERN FACE of themountain, so that the next day arrives as a slabof light sliding between the mountainside andlow rain clouds.Jasmin rarely climbs all the way to the topanymore, he says, but today he’ll accompanyhis favorite catcher, a young man named Aris,part of the way. They each carry a net.A stream runs past the paddies, and theyfollow it to a small river, and then follow thatfarther up the mountain. Along the way Jas-min talks freely—butterflies are deaf to humanvoices—but his eyes read the forest with a spe-cific literacy. In a scene of ferns and vines anddripping water he can pick out any tiny wingedthing resting on the underside of a leaf. “No,” hesays each time. “Too common.”Jasmin’s father caught butterflies before him,starting in the early 1970s. They lived in a vil-lage called Bantimurung, which Alfred RusselWallace, the great British naturalist, had visiteda century earlier. He described Bantimurungas “a beautiful sight, being dotted with groupsof gay butterflies—orange, yellow, white, blue,and green—which on being disturbed rose intothe air by hundreds, forming clouds of varie-gated colours.”The father’s technique was rudimentary.He caught whatever creatures floated near thefamily home and ofered them to foreigners whovisited the island. Soon the foreigners who cameseemed to know more about the butterflies thanlocal people did. For example, when Jasmin wasyoung, a French collector showed him a glassbell in which he trapped butterflies with a bitof ether. “A killing jar,” Jasmin says.A government project forced his family tomove soon after that, he says, but that pecu-liar jar stayed in his imagination: the motionof the butterflies, and how easily they slippedinto stillness.The next turn in his life came a few yearslater, in the 1980s. A small group of Japanesevisitors arrived on Sulawesi with questionsabout butterflies. One of them, a man Jasmincalled Mr. Nishiyama, spoke some Indonesian,and noticed the boy. He thought Jasmin wassmart, paid attention, and seemed to have agenuine ainity for the butterflies.Over the next two decades Mr. Nishiyamareturned to the island many times, always hir-ing Jasmin to help him on expeditions into themountains. As they hiked, the Japanese manrevealed an entire world of butterflies: their pat-terns of flying, mating, resting; what drew themin, what repelled them. Only years later did Jas-min learn his teacher was Yasusuke Nishiyama,one of Asia’s great lepidopterists. He wrote booksabout the butterflies they found together.Now Jasmin points beyond a high waterfall.“There,” he says. That’s where the blumei live.Aris continues climbing. He springs amongwet roots and rocks like a leopard. Jasminremains below. As he recedes into the forest, hedoesn’t immediately turn away; he lets his eyeslinger on the mist above the waterfall. Absentlyhe lets his butterfly net sway in gentle arcs, withthe net drifting like a cobweb on the air.``````THE WATERFALL, IT TURNS OUT, is the first of aseries. Aris climbs them and eventually breakspast the cloud cover, emerging into clear skyframed by high jungle canopy. He stops andreaches into a triangular wooden box that swingsat his hip. From it he withdraws a triangularpiece of wax paper, and from that he tenderlyremoves a specimen of the butterfly he hopesto find. Papilio blumei.Its wings look like black velvet, each with astripe of peacock blue-green. It’s a startlingobject, like a jewel, and it’s immediately clearwhy collectors on distant continents woulddesire it.Aris cuts a tiny sliver of wood from a tree, nobigger than a matchstick, and sharpens it to a120 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC