Preface to Book 1

Most of you came to Taeon Kopalo the way I did, through the Fragments of the Keepers. You learned the Kopalo cycle in your first seasons, a few lines at a time, sitting where you were told to sit. You learned what he did before you learned where he was, or why, or what came before it and after. That is the order in which we are taught him. It is the wrong order.

The Fragments are not false. They are a telling, and a telling chooses. It keeps the moment that teaches and lets the rest go, and over many tellings it leans, gently, toward him. Read alone, they give you a man who always knew where to stand. The records give you someone working it out.

The records are his own field notes. I never met him. No one I have studied under met him. What we have is what he wrote down, on the days he wrote anything: lists, names, counts, the questions he meant to come back to, and here and there a line he must have said aloud. Some days are full. Some are a few words. Some are missing altogether, and where they are, I say so, and I do not fill them.

What I have done is set those notes down in order, from his first days on Absalom Station to the last page he wrote. Where the Observances or the Fragments or the Field Canon bear on a day, I give them. Where the Fragments make more of a day than the notes do, I say that too, carefully, the way I was taught a student corrects a teacher: with the records in hand.

Note the track before you name the animal.
Note the second track, and the third.
Note where the ground was soft, and where it held nothing.
Do not begin with the kill. The kill is the end of a long walk.
Walk it.

— the Observances, from the Readings on Tracking

We are given this Reading for the field. I have come to think it serves for a life as well.

Before the records there is a short account of where he began, as the order gives it to everyone who comes to his notes. It is plainer than the Fragments and less certain than it sounds. Then the records, in order. Read them that way first. Go back to the Fragments after. You will find you hear them differently.