Count Day

by Zerzanian Primitivism, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Hal Teague handed out the sectors at five-fifteen in the morning from the tailgate of his truck, under the yellow light of the Grange hall porch, and he did it the way he had done it for thirty-one years: a clipboard for each team, a photocopied map with the circle drawn on it in red marker, a tally sheet with every species the circle had ever produced printed down the left margin in taxonomic order, and a chrome hand counter on a loop of shoelace.

"Seven," he said, and gave Ruth Abernethy the clipboard. "The Long Tom bottoms, levee to the county road. You've got Dacey."

"I know I've got Dacey."

"He's got the app."

"I know he's got the app."

Hal held on to the counter a moment longer than he needed to before he let it drop into her palm. It was cold and it was heavier than it looked. Ruth had owned one of her own once, a cheaper one with a plastic case, and had clicked it through so many winters that the numerals in its little window had stuck at 0418 and would not go further, and she had kept it in a kitchen drawer for years afterward with the batteries and the twist ties, as if it might recover.

Dacey Pruitt was waiting by her car with two coffees and a headlamp on his forehead that he had not turned off, so that when he looked at her she had to look past a white disc of light to find his face. He was twenty-six. He had a degree in something with systems in the name and worked remotely for a company in Denver that did water rights, and he had come to the count three years ago because, he said, he wanted to be outside once a year without a reason. Ruth had liked him for saying it. He had then spent the whole day entering birds into his phone with his thumbs.

"Owls first," he said.

"Owls first."

---

They drove out the county road in her car with the heater on high and the windows fogging, and parked where the gravel ended at a steel gate with a sign about the drainage district. It was not light. It would not be light for another hour and a half. The cold had the wet weight that the valley's cold always had in December, a cold that came up out of the ground rather than down out of the sky, and it got into the joints of Ruth's hands immediately, into the old break in her left wrist.

They walked the levee in the dark without the headlamp. That was the rule for owls, and it was a rule she liked. Below them on the left the river moved without showing itself, a sound and a smell, mud and rot and something sweet that might have been cottonwood. On the right the fields went out flat to a line of oaks that she could not see but knew were there, and past the oaks the grass-seed farms began, mile after mile of perennial ryegrass laid down in rows as straight as the lines on the tally sheet, the stuff of other people's lawns in other states. The valley sold more grass seed than anywhere in the world. Hal said so every year, at the potluck, as if it were a thing to be proud of. Ruth had heard him say it thirty-some times. She had never once seen a bird she wanted to see in a ryegrass field.

Dacey stopped. She heard him stop. Then she heard what he had heard, off toward the oaks, the five soft hoots of a great horned owl, the second and third run together, and after a gap an answer, higher and shorter, the female.

He had the phone out. The screen lit the underside of his chin.

"Put it away a second."

"I'm just logging the pair."

"Put it away a second, they're talking."

He put it in his pocket, but she could feel him holding it in there, his thumb on the edge of the case. The owls went on. They were not saying anything for the two people on the levee. They were not saying two. They were saying whatever it was they said to each other in the last of the dark, over and over, on a night that for them had no number on it and was not the third Saturday of anything.

"Okay," Dacey said, when they stopped. "Great horned, two."

---

The light came the way it comes in the valley in winter, without a sunrise, the dark simply thinning to a grey that had the oaks in it, and then the fields, and then the river, brown and high and fast, carrying a whole fir tree down past them with its roots in the air.

Dacey counted. He was good at it, she had to give him that, quicker than she had been at his age. He walked with the phone in one hand and the binoculars in the other and did not seem to need to choose between them. Mallard, eleven. American wigeon, forty. Northern pintail, six. Song sparrow, song sparrow, song sparrow, he said, and his thumb moved, and the number on the screen went up, and somewhere a server in a building Ruth would never see took the number and set it beside every number that had ever been taken for this circle on this day, back to before either of them had been born.

She clicked for him when he ran out of hands. That was the arrangement. A flock of American robins came over in a loose ragged stream, thirty, forty, sixty, more, and she counted them the way Hal had taught her when she was not much older than Dacey: not one by one, but in tens, a block of ten held in the eye and laid over the stream, again and again, ten and ten and ten, the birds becoming blocks, the blocks becoming a figure.

"How many?"

"Two-twenty."

"I had two-ten."

"Two-twenty," she said, and he entered two-twenty, because he always deferred to her on flocks, which she knew was a courtesy and not a judgment.

It was a little after nine when the starlings came. They came up off the ryegrass to the east, where somebody's sprinkler line had left the ground soft, and they rose in a sheet that bent over on itself and became a funnel and then a hinge and then a long breaking wave, thousands of them, the light going dark and bright through the gaps as they turned. Dacey said a word she did not hear him say often. She lifted her hands. She laid the first block over them, ten, and then she did not lay the second.

She did not decide not to. It was more that the second block would not go down on them. They would not stay still to be laid over. They were not ten and ten and ten. They were one thing, a breathing thing the size of a field, turning on a single impulse that no bird in it was giving and every bird in it was taking; and the noise of them came over the levee, the papery roar of all those wings, and went through her, and she stood with her hands half raised and her mouth open as if she were about to say something to somebody.

They went down into the oaks. The oaks went black with them, and then quiet.

"Ruth. How many?"

She looked at the counter in her hand. It said 0011. She did not remember clicking it.

"A lot," she said.

He laughed. Then he looked at her, and stopped laughing, and said, "Like, four thousand?"

"Put four thousand."

He put four thousand. She could see from his face that he did not think it was four thousand, and that he did not think it mattered very much whether it was, because they were starlings, and nobody had wanted starlings on this continent except the man who had let the first ones go in a park in New York because they were in Shakespeare. Hal told that story at the potluck too.

---

At the bend where the levee turned south there was a strip along the drainage ditch that nobody had ever plowed, because it flooded every year and because the drainage district owned it and the drainage district did not farm. It was perhaps forty yards wide and a half mile long. In summer it was camas and tufted hairgrass and a kind of buttercup and bare patches of grey mud cracking in hexagons, and wild rose along the ditch, and it was the last piece of the old wet prairie in sector seven, and it was where the meadowlarks were, when there were meadowlarks.

They stood at the top of the levee and glassed it. Nothing. Wet grass the color of a lion. A northern harrier came low along the far edge, rocking on its wings, its white rump flashing, and Dacey said "harrier, one," and the harrier dropped its legs and went down into the grass and did not come up.

They waited for it. Ruth found that she was holding her breath, and let it go, and the breath stood in front of her face in the cold.

The harrier came up with something small and dark and went a little way and landed on a fence post at the field edge, and stood on the thing, and began to pull at it. Ruth put her binoculars on it. It was a vole. The harrier's face was a disc, like an owl's, and it pulled with its whole body, the way you would pull a stake out of hard ground, bracing, and then it swallowed something and looked around, straight at her it seemed, with its yellow eyes, and then it put its head down again.

She watched the whole thing. It took eleven minutes, Dacey told her afterward, as if she would want to know. She did not write it down. Somewhere in the eleven minutes she was aware that Dacey had moved off a little along the levee and was counting a pair of hooded mergansers in the ditch, and that he had looked back at her twice, and that the clicker was hanging off her wrist on its shoelace, swinging very slightly.

When the harrier lifted off the post and went away low over the ryegrass she found she was crying a little, which was ridiculous, and she wiped her face with the back of her glove and the wool was rough on her cheek.

"You all right?"

"I'm cold."

"You want to sit in the car a bit? I can do the bend."

"No."

He stood beside her. He did not take out the phone. She was grateful, and then she was angry at herself for being grateful, because he was a nice young man and he did not need to stand on a levee in the cold waiting for an old woman to finish looking at a hawk.

"Can I show you something?" he said.

---

It was a graph. He had made it himself, the night before, from the count's own records, which went online back to the 1950s; he had pulled sector seven out of the circle, because the sectors had been the same since 1974, and he had set the western meadowlark down a line of fifty-two winters. He held the phone so that she could see it and shaded the screen with his other hand.

The first dots were high. They were scattered, up and down, forty one year and sixty the next and twenty-eight and fifty-five; and then they came down, not all at once, but steadily, the way water goes down in a ditch in July. There was a long stretch in the teens. Then a stretch of fives and sixes. The last nine dots sat almost on the bottom of the screen, two, three, zero, one, zero, zero, two, one, zero.

"Those are yours," Dacey said. "Most of those. Hal says you've done seven since nineteen-eighty-something."

"Eighty-one."

"So those are yours."

She looked at it. There they were. Every flock she had laid her blocks of ten over. Every January morning with the fields white with frost. The year her husband had come with her and complained the whole day and then seen a short-eared owl and gone silent. The year she had had the cast on her wrist. The year she had walked the whole sector alone because nobody else would come out in the ice. All of it had gone into the dots, and the dots had gone into a line, and the line went down, and there was nothing in the line of the frost or the owl or the cast, and still the line was true.

"There's a guy at the state," Dacey said. "He uses the CBC numbers. Ours, all of them. It's part of how they got the meadowlark listed. If nobody counted, nobody would know they were going."

"I know."

"I'm not saying." He stopped, and put the phone away, and took his hand off it in his pocket. "I'm just saying the counting does something."

"I know it does."

She did know it. That was the trouble. The count had been begun, a hundred and twenty-six years ago, by people who were sick of what the count replaced. Hal told that at the potluck too, every year, standing up with his paper plate in one hand, his voice going high the way it did when he was moved: how on Christmas Day the men in the towns had gone out in teams, in the old days, and shot everything that flew or ran, and piled it up, and counted it, and the team with the bigger pile won; and how a man in New York had written that instead they should go out on Christmas Day and only count. And everybody at the potluck clapped. Ruth had clapped. They clapped for the change from the pile to the list, from the gun to the clicker, and it was a good change. Then everybody went back to the casseroles, and nobody said that the hunters and the counters had come in out of the cold with the same thing in their hands, a figure for somebody to write down.

She thought of the dots going down and the man at the state looking at them and writing a plan. She thought of the plan. Signage, probably. A conservation easement. Somebody paid not to mow a strip forty yards wide.

"Hal will want the meadowlarks," she said.

"There aren't any."

"There might be."

---

She gave Dacey the clipboard and the map and the tally sheet, and she held out the clicker on its shoelace, and after a second he took that too and put the loop over his own wrist.

"Where are you going?"

"Down there."

"You can't, it's the drainage district's."

"Then the drainage district can come and get me."

She went down the inside of the levee sideways, the way you go down a steep place when your knees are seventy-three years old, digging the sides of her boots into the wet slope, and at the bottom she stepped over the ditch where it narrowed and into the grass.

It was taller than it had looked from above. It came up to her hips. It was soaked, and in ten steps her trousers were black with water to the thigh, and the cold of it went straight through, a clean cold, nothing like the cold of the car or the Grange hall porch. The ground under the grass was not flat. It went in little hummocks and hollows, the hollows full of standing water with skins of ice on them that broke under her boots with a sound like somebody stepping on a cracker. The smell came up. Wet earth, and something sour and old, and a green smell that she would not have believed there was in December.

She walked out into the middle of the strip and stopped and stood there.

Nothing moved. She could hear the river. She could hear, far off, a truck on the county road, downshifting. She could hear behind her and above her the faint click, click, click of Dacey on the levee counting something, she did not turn to see what.

She stood. Her feet went numb and then stopped being anything. The grass around her moved a little in air she could not feel. A Bewick's wren came along the rose canes at the ditch, scolding, its tail cocked, and looked at her, and went on. A pair of crows went over. She did not name them to herself. She found that she did not want to, that the names came up in her the way the blocks of ten had come up, ready, from forty-five years of being ready, and that she could, if she was patient, let them go back down without saying them.

It was a long time. She did not know how long. The light did not change, because it never changed on days like this; there was no sun to move. She would have said twenty minutes, or an hour. Dacey would know.

Then, out at the far end of the strip, low, something flew up out of the grass and went a little way and dropped. Brown. Chunky. It flew the way they fly, on short stiff wings, a flutter and a glide, a flutter and a glide, with the white flashing at the edges of the tail. It dropped into the grass. Another went up. And another, closer, so close she could see the yellow of its breast and the black V across it, before it went down again out of sight thirty feet from her and was gone, and was there, she knew it was there, in the grass, under the grass, walking, feeding, being, a thing that did not know what it was called or that it was the state bird of anything or that it was the last of something.

She did not count them. She thought there were some. And then, as she stood with the wet coming up into her and her hands hanging at her sides in her gloves, she thought there were more, because one called, out of nowhere, out of the middle of winter, that liquid tumbling phrase that is not supposed to come until March, the sound of water going down over stones, and another answered it, and she let them be more.

On the levee, high over her head, small and steady, like a clock in another room, the clicker went on.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Zerzaniānō Prīmitīvismī Simulācrō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Zerzanian Primitivism Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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