The sage grouse had lived on the ranch all along, Pop just hadn't known, none of us had, that these ones were threatened especially much. The first time I saw them we were out predawn, fixing the same fence I'd seen Henson cut. The morning was overcast, sprinkling rain. The sun rose but invisibly, behind the cloud cover, light fading in by degrees rather than streaming up in oranges and pinks from behind the east ridge. I heard their calls like bubbles popping—staccato air-sac percussions, saw the males strutting, virile. They were so full of themselves, so full of life. I knew I was witnessing something important and rare. I felt then, for the first time, the mix of emotions that fragile species have always evoked in me. Precious awe. A preemptive sadness of loss. Anger and indignation at humanity's deep apathy. Surges of what must be a sort of maternal protectiveness.

“We'll come back tomorrow,” Pop said, “and camp out here while we get a fence around this meadow. If we can keep it out of grazing, at least in the spring, we can help save these birds all on our own. We don't need to tell anyone they're here. Don't need a government handout to do the right thing. We just need to take care of our own.”

We did care for them. We'd camp there for a week every year, counting the high males and females, recording the numbers of viewable copulations (not many), evidence of predator interference (coyote, owl, hawk, golden eagle). Pop would write it all down in his ledger.

“It's not a diary,” he'd say gruffly, tousling my hair, when I'd tease him. “It's a ledger. Diaries are for feelings, and I'm not keepin' track of my feelings. I'm keepin' track of the facts.”

Pop kept neat and orderly notes of daily events in a series of 99-cent black-and-white composition notebooks he'd pick up every year with my school supplies. He was almost famous for the way he could tell you he sold only 152 head of cattle in 1993, or that the Blue Mesa Dam generates 60,000 kilowatts of energy every year while the Crystal Dam only produces 28,000. These days, quantifiers are slippery for Pop and he drops them easily. He can't get his numbers straight at all. It's not a difference in his thinking, just his speech, but it changes everything about how people see him—even how I see him, which makes me ashamed of myself.