Seven Beetle Morphs

I nudge Lilac with my snout as the first beams of sunlight enter our cave. She’s a deep sleeper, so it takes a few quick jabs with my snout to wake her up. “Lilac, we’re going on a trip today.”

She yawns and gets up. She looks at me and then tilts her head, obviously a bit confused. “Are you springing impromptu trips? I thought that was my thing. Making you go to Atlantis a few weeks ago, for example. I thought I was being nice letting us take a break before helping the Oviraptors, Eucephalus, and Iguanodons move to that other island. Now you want to do another trip? Have I perhaps infected you with my energy?” She pushes me with her hip lightheartedly.

“No, no, don’t worry. I’ve done this trip multiple times before you arrived. The only reason I haven’t done it in a while is because someone needs to take care of you, since food is so scarce. It rained recently, though, so we’re pretty well off because of the attraction of prey to the new plants-”

Lilac interrupts. “Sure, sure, but what is the trip for, and where?”

I sigh. Lilac can be very impatient sometimes. “So, you know how I have a collection of bugs?”

Lilac looks at the corner of my cave where I keep my collection. There are dozens of repurposed glass jars scavenged from human ruins, each filled with different levels of soil, leaves, and twigs. In each jar there is a different type of insect. Praying mantises, spiders, scorpions, large beetles, butterflies, and even a small ant colony with a dozen workers contained in a rather large jar. Separated from it all is the hollowed out carapace of a horned beetle that I hunted and consumed as a hatchling.

Lilac nods. “Kind of hard not to. If you’re not hunting, drinking, or sleeping, you’re taking care of your creepy-crawlies or looking for more of them to add to your collection.”

I nod, admitting my hyper-fixation on all things that could be described as chitinous. “Well, I’m lacking seven rare beetles. Same species as each other, but they come in seven different colored morphs. I’ve seen red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet morphs. Every color of the rainbow. I haven’t been able to catch any, though. They’re hard to find, and nearly impossible to catch. They keep flying away before I can put them in a jar.”

Lilac pauses for a second, before a look of pure delight appears on her as she figures out what I’m subtly asking. “Do you need my help, Duststorm? That’s rare for you. Usually you just tell me to get out of the way and stay here at this burrow.”

I stamp my foot. “I do not.”

Lilac pokes me with a claw. “What about last time you went outside our hunting range to look for deer? Or when you went to look for a secondary water source? Or how about when-”

I lightly slap her with my tail. “I get it, I get it!”

Lilac backs off a bit, but chuckles while doing so. I don’t show true annoyance often, so she’s amused when I’m truly annoyed. After calming down, she starts talking again. “So, what I’m getting from your oh so subtle hints is the following: you need me to help you catch these seven different varieties of this beetle? Probably by guiding these beetles into your glass jars?”

I sigh. “It’s morphs, not varieties.” I change my tone quickly. I do kind of need her help. “But, yes. I do need your help. I’ll hold the jar, since I’ve spent years teaching myself to put bugs in jars without hurting them. So, you will scare the beetles towards me. Once they start flying, they don’t change direction very quickly, so it shouldn’t be too hard now that I have a second dino to help.”

I start collecting some jars, putting them and their caps on a cool thing I made. It’s a deer pelt that dried out once I brought it to the desert. If I drag it on the ground, stuff I put on it will follow me. It’s helpful for carrying more than I can carry in my mouth or claws. “We’ll start looking in a few minutes.”

…

I look as Duststorm puts jars on his dried deer pelt. Empty jars, jars filled with dirt, jars filled with sand, jars filled with twigs, and jars filled with leaves. He says he does this so he assembles the environment in a separate jar before putting the bug in. If he makes the terrarium before, the soil and stuff gets shaken around and ruined.

I don’t really know the intricacies of his beetle catching. Since our little trip to Atlantis, we haven’t really done anything. Well, less stuff than usual. Still, excited am I when we get to go do something fun.

Finally, after minutes of Duststorm carefully placing jars of various matter onto his pelt, he looks at me. “Time to go. I’ll pull the pelt.”

…

It’s been a bit. Perhaps a little over half an hour. Lilac is starting to get a bit impatient. “So, how rare are these things? How many do you see a day? How much when you’re actively looking for one in a day?”

I let go of the pelt and turn around to face Lilac. “As I have said, they’re rare. I have only seen one every few days, and only for a moment before I lose sight of them. So, I would guess that it would take seven days of constant searching to get all seven morphs. So, one for every day. In short, the chances of-”

I notice that Lilac is looking behind me, not at me. She’s also silently chuckling. “What? You know, if you won’t take this seriously, you can go back to our burrow. You know where it-”

I feel the easily identifiable sensation of the six legs of a chitinous creature on my head. You see, having feathers makes it a bit hard to feel the light touches of the feet of a beetle. However, my feathers are much shorter and finer on my head, making it easier to feel if, for a completely random example, there’s a really rare beetle that’s been on my body for about ten seconds that’s now on my head. Perhaps even one of the ones me and Lilac have been looking for for the past half hour.

I speak quietly and slowly. “Lilac, get the jar and put it over the beetle. Gently.”

Lilac goes over to my pelt covered with jars, carefully picks one up in her jaws, and goes to me. She speaks, a little awkwardly but still easily recognizably. “So, wanna know what color it is?”

I don’t sigh. That might scare the beetle. “Fine, tell me.”

“Blue.”

I jump a bit, causing the blue beetle to start flying. Lilac panics a bit, and throws the jar at it. The jar flies through the air, envelopes the beetle, and lands in a soft path of dry grass amid the mostly sandy area. The top is faced down, keeping the beetle trapped as it bonks into a side of the jar.

Lilac, unlike usual, glares at me. “What was that for!?! Usually you’re the calm one! And what’s so special about it being blue? You didn’t say anything about blue being especially rare or anything like that, either.”

I look at the jar containing the beetle, a bit surprised. After a bit, Lilac’s words register. “Um, sorry. Blue ones aren’t extremely rare, but I usually see them around bodies of water, like streams or that small lake a bit away from here. This one ranging away from its usual territory is rare, and an interesting discovery!”

She starts walking away and looks over her shoulder, lightly chuckling. “Nerd!”
…
After many days of searching, seven weeks like I predicted, we’ve caught five of the seven beetles. The red one by some red stones, the orange one by a mesa plateau,  the yellow one by some yellow rocks that definitely had a lot of sulphur, the green one by some especially lush and alive grass, and the indigo and violet ones in a field of lilac by a decent-sized pond.

Sitting around us by this pond’s sandy shore are all the beetles in their own jars, in the order of the rainbow in a clockwise rotation. Besides that, there is the meat of a deer I found and killed. Lilac is digging into it. She does have a larger hunger than me. Probably due to being raised in a more flora and fauna filled environment.

“So, liking our little party?”

Lilac turns to me, blood covering her maw. “Yep!”

I stand up next to her and prod her. “Wait. You’re going to love this next part.”

As a nice warm breeze goes over us, dozens of fireflies start flying around lazily. She looks at me. “Yep. Definitely a nice party to celebrate your stupid collection of creepy-crawly bugs.”