I ground them off at the dock. The moment I saw what the man had hidden aboard that boat before he disappeared, I set the grinder down, because the box was packed edge to edge with notebooks, and the top one had a date on it from before I was born.
Sixty-one of them. Spiral, the drugstore kind, wrapped in freezer bags and packed so tight they had gone square.
They are nest counts.
Wood storks, mostly. Roseate spoonbills, ibis, one long run on snail kites in the eighties. Rookery by rookery, date, water level, number of nests, number of chicks fledged, in a hand that gets shakier by about 2009 and never gets less careful.
Elwood Pruitt ran a frog and gator hide operation out of that boat in the sixties. That is what the county remembers about him. There is a man at the fish camp who will still tell you Elwood Pruitt was the biggest poacher in three counties, and he is not lying.
Then something happened in 1971 that the notebooks do not explain and one letter in the bottom of that box mostly does.
He worked a season for a biologist out of the university, as a guide, because the man needed somebody who could actually find a rookery. She died in 1974, and after that he kept doing it, alone, every week, for forty-eight years, on his own gas, for nobody.
He mailed a summary to that university once a year and it went into a file cabinet and nobody wrote back after about 1990. He kept mailing it.
The letter, folded in the last notebook, is one page.
If somebody finds these and does not know what they are, they are a count. Nobody else was counting this long. I took a great deal out of this water before I learned any better and this is what I have got to put back. I am eighty-one and I would rather go out there than in a bed. Do not send anybody looking. The boat will come back on its own or it will not.
The boat came back. It was found against a bank two days later with the fuel run out and nothing aboard but his hat, and they searched for six weeks and never found him, which I believe is exactly what he arranged.
I took the notebooks to the university in a milk crate. The woman who met me is a wetlands ecologist and she was polite about it in the way people are polite about a crate of old paper, and then she opened three of them and stopped talking and sat down on the floor of her own hallway.
Forty-eight years of continuous single-observer nesting data does not exist. That is what she told me. It does not exist anywhere.
They are digitizing it now. There is a paper coming out with his name on it, first author, which is a thing I did not know they could do for a dead poacher with a sixth-grade education, and they can.
The airboat is restored. The steel box is still bolted under the seat with new bolts, and there is a notebook in it, and I have started a count of my own.