The Census of the Burrow

Three gulls south, one north, and the first Sherman trap of the morning is heavier than it ought to be.

I kneel on coirón grass stiffened by frost, my breath unspooling in a slow white rope, and ease the trap door open. The colilargo inside blinks once. Forty-two grams on the scale. I swab his cheek, write the number, set him down. He vanishes into a tussock before I can count to two.

The next trap is heavy. The next, heavy. The next.

Oligoryzomys longicaudatus. Oligoryzomys longicaudatus, longicaudatus, longicaudatus. The Latin runs along the floor of my mind the way a rosary turns in a tired hand. I have been keeping count without meaning to — eleven animals out of seventeen traps, when last March it was four. Last March it was four and Dr. Solís was alive and the world was a place where you could wait one more season.

Above me, gulls drift in the silver air over Golfo Nuevo. I count them again — five, seven — and I write the numbers down because writing things down is the only language I trust. The wind smells of kelp and gravel and that other smell the steppe gets at this hour, like a stone you have just turned over. I weigh, I swab, I release. My hands shake a little. They have been shaking for eight months and I keep pretending not to notice.

By the last trap, the math is in my fingers. The colilargo population at Punta Loma has tripled past the warning threshold I set with Dr. Solís two springs ago. Tripled. I sit back on my heels in front of the abandoned tourism kiosko, with its peeling sign about sea lions and its splintered door no one ever bothered to close, and I say his binomial out loud, the way you might say the name of someone you miss.

My phone buzzes against the gravel.

"M'hijita." Abuela Esmeralda. Calm in the way that means she isn't. "When you have a moment, mi amor, can you come down to the comedor."

In the background: the soft clatter of the kettle. She is making mate. She is always making mate.

"Abuela. What's wrong."

"There are two señores from Salud Pública here." The provincial health office. "Asking about the empanadas I sent up to the cruise crew on the thirteenth." A pause, the small sound of her sliding the bombilla into the gourd. "And a woman called twenty minutes ago. Una tal Sandra Cáceres — some Sandra Cáceres I have never heard of, mi amor — and she told me not to open today."

The cold of the steppe moves down through my collar and into my chest.

"I'm coming."

"Tomate tu tiempo. They are drinking mate." Take your time. Of course she has offered them mate. "M'hijita." Her voice goes proverb-soft, the voice she uses for the things she wants me to remember after she is gone. "La verdad pesa, mi amor. Pero también flota."

Truth is heavy. But it floats too.

"Sí, abuela."

She hangs up.

I break down the trap line with hands that are no longer pretending. Eleven traps. I count them as I fold each one — one, two, three — and the ritual will not hold this morning. Halfway through, my cracked screen lights up with a news alert and I read it standing in the wind.

MS ATLANTIDA, EN RUTA A LISBOA, DESVÍA A TENERIFE. TRES MUERTOS A BORDO — DOS CASOS CONFIRMADOS DE HANTAVIRUS ANDES.

I sit down hard on a tussock of coirón. The pampero is beginning to come up off the gulf, the way it does on these pale silver days, and I can feel it pushing my hair against my cheek as if something were trying to get my attention.

I have been waiting for this morning in my data for two years. I never wanted to be right.

I think of Tobías. Last Tuesday he hiked up to the kiosko on his lunch break with two milanesa sandwiches and a thermos, his too-big steel-toed boots flopping on the gravel, and when he hugged me he wrinkled his nose and grinned. Che, hueles a ratón de campo, prima. You smell like field mice, cousin. I shoved him. He laughed. He has a half-grown moustache he is very proud of.

He loads cruise provisions at Muelle Storni.

He helped load the Atlantida.

I put the rest of the traps into the back of abuela's old Fiat Duna with the careful attention of a person who is trying not to throw up.

The Duna's heater hasn't worked since 2019 and the radio only catches one station — AM static and a cumbia and another cumbia — and I drive the dirt track down toward Ruta 1 with the windows up and the cold inside the cabin and my phone on the passenger seat. I dial the provincial Zoonosis line.

A man answers, asks me to hold, transfers me. A second man. A third number. On the third call a woman picks up — tired the way only public-sector women at eight in the morning can be tired — and I say my name twice.

"Quintero," she repeats back.

"Quintana. Q-U-I-N-T-A-N-A. I have two years of surveillance data on Oligoryzomys longicaudatus along the Chubut coast, and I sent a warning report to your office in November —"

"Señorita." The way she says it is like setting down a plate. "We are aware of the situation. We are handling it. Thank you for your concern."

"My report —"

"Have a good day."

The line goes dead.

I laugh once. It comes out ugly, a sound I do not recognize as belonging to me.

The turnoff to Punta Cantor passes on my right and I do not look. I do not look at the gravel road that goes out to the cliffs. Wait one more season, Paloma. Let's be sure. That is what he told me at the end of June, the two of us on the bench outside his office with a thermos between us, the only conversation I have left of him. He died in the middle of July, on the rocks below Punta Cantor, three days after he sent his own warning emails to three different offices, on a clear afternoon with no wind.

I do not look at the turnoff. Oligoryzomys longicaudatus, longicaudatus, longicaudatus.

I stop at the mirador above the harbor because my hands need the steering wheel to stop trembling. Below me the town opens out — the blue tile roofs, the long grey curve of the boulevard, the old whale skeleton outside the museum. And to the east, Muelle Storni, where the cargo and the cruise ships dock. The empty berth where the Atlantida had been is the color of dishwater.

Beside it is Warehouse 4. Long, corrugated, freshly repainted white. So white it looks wet in the morning light.

I unzip my pack and take out my 2024 field notebook, the Rite-in-the-Rain cover gone soft at the corners, and I turn to the page I dog-eared in November. The warning report. The one I emailed to three offices and never heard back about. A list of nine sites where colilargo activity exceeded threshold. Each one with a coordinate. Each one with the name underlined in my own slow careful handwriting.

The third entry, underlined twice:

Muelle Storni, depósito 4 — proximidad a punto de carga de provisiones.

Warehouse 4. Provisioning dock.

The exact place where the Atlantida took on its food.

I read the line out loud to no one. The wind takes it. From the mirador I can just see, down the long slope of Avenida Roca, the corner where the comedor stands.

I turn the key. The Duna grinds, hesitates, doesn't catch. I sit with my forehead against the wheel and I count — one, two, three — and on three I turn the key again and this time the engine wakes.

Down at the comedor my abuela is making mate for two health inspectors who have come to find a culprit. A woman I have never met has told her not to open. And whatever lives in the walls of Warehouse 4 — whatever I have been counting for two years — has already gone to sea on a ship that is now diverting to Tenerife with three bodies on it.

I drive toward the harbor with the slow cold horror of arithmetic settling under my ribs. The answer I am about to find at that warehouse is going to arrive at my abuela's door before I do.

The road comes down off the bluff and turns into Avenida Roca and Puerto Madryn opens around me — fish stalls, a man selling alfajores from a cooler, the bakery on the corner with the radio always on and the door always open. The wind off the gulf is doing what it always does at mid-morning on a pampero day, lifting plastic bags and napkins off the sidewalk in slow reluctant pirouettes.

I crest the small hill above abuela's block.

Two doors down from the comedor I can already see the faded blue lettering — LA BRISA, COMIDAS CASERAS, DESDE 1995 — shivering a little on the hand-painted board that has hung there since before I was born. The pots of geraniums she set out in February are still on the windowsill. Through the kitchen vent above the side door, the smell I have known my whole life is leaking into the street: dough and beef fat and cumin and onion. Empanadas. Empanadas at nine in the morning, abuela. Why so early.

The radio is silent.

The radio is always on. From six in the morning until ten at night, always, even when the comedor is closed — the little red Philco on the shelf above the register tuned to LU17 or a Mercedes Sosa cassette or the Boca match. Always on. I can hear from half a block away that it is not on now.

And parked at the curb, directly outside her door, is a white Suburban with tinted windows. I have never seen it before. I do not know whose it is.

It is the only warm thing on the block.

Its engine is running.