In the basement were his attempts at art. Masterpieces some thought, but to us merely the evidence of kidnap victims. Posed normal, noble, not struggled entangled. Not in the shed, splayed out and shoved down. Alien abductions. Blood taken. Probed. Vast and choking light smashed into the huge eyes. Talons held tender yet still held unwilling.

Rates of trauma in re-banded birds. Rates of trauma in old biologists whose research was suspect. Rates of trauma in drone harassment. Crunch of birds underfoot. But it’s a species, not an individual.

The loneliness of the musk ox released back into the herd, forever marked and alone. Taking shelter in the snow, alone. The seal with the glue-affixed beacon on the forehead. Maybe it will come off. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Here’s a kingfisher. I had to kill it so I could save it. The bighorn sheep that, the last of its herd, looked at the reflection in car metal to know of another of its kind.

“We need data from you,” I explained to the old biologist.

He, the object, objected, but we pushed past that point, until the binocular necklace was pressed tight against his throat. We took his blood. We weighed him. We shined bright lights upon his lined face. He didn’t understand. How could he? We barely understood ourselves. These rituals, how do they evade scrutiny. How they evade scrutiny. What we tell ourselves is important.

He pissed himself and we took that sample too. Dehydrated, despite the stew. There was too much of the wrong kind of bird in that stew, his nets too poked through with holes, for us to mistake the results of that.

There were monsters in the night. Things that would never be studied. We let the biologist go, out into that darkness, holding his binoculars like a weapon. Swinging them against whatever lay in wait. Watched as he, shrieking, was pulled up into the night, flung and quartered, soon scraps for predators. It wasn’t our fault. We needed our data. We had our data. Still, no excuses. We had no control or controls.

“You don’t mind if we band you, do you?” I asked. “It’s what we do. We band things. It’s nothing personal. It’s about the species.”

We burned down the nets, burned down the house. Spared the shed. I could not take the echo that I knew was coming to me from somewhere in the future or the past—it wasn’t clear.

Our data told us to discontinue that particular experiment, so we did. Instead, we traveled north, our breath fierce in our throats and our eyes encrusted with the white rust of ice.