as expected. Fewer caddis than last year, though this is two data points and not yet a sentence. Station 3: Plecoptera 14, Ephemeroptera 6, Trichoptera 3, Diptera common.
Len wades ahead. He is better at spotting than I am — always has been — and it is not flattery to say so. Good field observation is a learnable skill with a hard ceiling, and Len is at his ceiling. I am merely competent. He sees the dark slash of a cutthroat in the tailout before I have even registered the tailout as a tailout, and he says only "there," with his chin, and I look and see it too, a fish holding steady in maybe six inches of water, feeding on whatever is drifting to it in the seam. Not the target species. But the river is not only its target species. I write it down.
The first live coho smolt of the season comes at station five, in the scour pool beneath the undercut on the left bank. It is perhaps nine centimetres, bright as a wet coin, and it flashes out of the shadow and back into it in the time it takes me to exhale. We do not catch it. We are not here to catch anything today. I make a tick on the data sheet, in the column labelled smolt observed, juvenile coho, and move on. This is a count. It is the first of the year.
I did not expect, when I started this work, that the accumulation of such ticks would come to feel like a form of devotion. A scientist is supposed to be instrumented against devotion. Devotion contaminates the sample. And yet eight Marches in, the first coho of the season arrives with something that is not relief and not quite joy but is more than instrumental. It is the recognition of a returning fact. The river has held. The fish is here. The count, whatever it will total in October, is open.
We finish the reach at ten past eleven. Len's knee is telling him
🤖 The author declared this story as written with the help of AI.