Remainers

Search for the Golden Arch, Part 5

The next few days passed with no progress made on Caleb's search for the butterfly. While Joseph's advice was certainly helpful, in the end, there was still a lot of luck involved in discovering the elusive golden-arched butterfly.

Caleb woke up on a cold morning and stretched his arms. At this point, he had spent about six days here in the forest. He could already hear Hope's annoyed tone, subtly hinting that she wanted him to give up on this pointless search and move on to something more productive. To be honest, he was surprised she had gone this long without saying a word about it.

Caleb couldn't deny that she had a point. He was mostly doing this out of curiosity, and while the job was important, it wasn't something he needed to involve himself in. The responsible thing for him to do was to leave this job to the others and start taking on other work. He knew, yet he remained hesitant to actually do so.

Caleb emerged from the tent and found Hope idly stoking a small fire. She glanced at him with a raised eyebrow, as if asking whether or not he'd be continuing the search today. He exhaled a small sigh. At the very least, she deserved a deadline for what was essentially a personal whim.

"Three more days," Caleb declared. "If I don't find it in the next three days, we'll leave."

"Can I trust that promise?"

"Have I ever broken a promise to you?"

"You haven't made enough promises for me to have generated any empirical data on that."

Caleb frowned. It had been a while since Hope had said anything so computer-like. "I promise. If I stay even a minute longer, I'll let you decide what kind of job we do next."

"All right," Hope said as she stood up. "Let's get going, then. We're checking the sap spots like always, right?"

Caleb nodded. That had been his basic routine for the past three days. He would check the sap spots in the morning, then once after lunch, then once again before he gave up the search for the day. It was relatively quick, and it gave him the chance to scout out the areas they were in as well, leaving him with less places to manually search through the rest of the day.

Caleb and Hope trekked over to the first sap spot, which was only a short walk where they had set camp. The sap was placed on a large tree in the middle of a giant clearing. Caleb inspected it closely, but even far away he could tell that no golden-arched butterflies were around.

"How early does Joseph wake up to apply this stuff?" Hope asked as she also inspected the tree. "It's morning, but the sap is still wet and runny."

"Not sure," Caleb replied as he pulled out his map to look for another sap spot. "He's pretty diligent to be doing it this often, though."

"How interesting," a resolute voice declared from behind Caleb's back. "So this is what you've been looking at the past few days. Keeping this all to yourself, have you?"

Caleb spun to his left to see Tia and Aislinn standing behind him, peering intently at the sap-covered tree. "Gah!" he coughed out in surprise. "I didn't even hear you!"

Tia put her hands on her hips and huffed. "No need to get so worked up. I don't care what you keep secret. I'll still come up the winner anyhow."

"I wasn't really trying to keep it a secret," Caleb grumbled. "Besides, I don't know why you're so competitive about this, especially towards me. I don't even really want the reward that much."

"It's not like I really want it either. But since you're here, I won't let myself lose out."

"What? What does that mean?"