Valerie woke before dawn, because sleep had become a country she visited only briefly and with difficulty, and she sat up on her blanket and looked at the ridge, and the ridge was there, and the water was there, and the dark was there, and she was there, and she took her notebook from her jacket pocket, where she had placed it the night before, and she opened it to the page where she had written the list, and she smoothed the wet paper with her palm, and she began to walk.
The perimeter was the limit of the flood as it stood now, a ragged line that followed the contour of the valley floor up to the point where the water met the slope. Valerie walked it slowly, her boots sinking in the mud, her rifle across her shoulder, her eyes scanning the ground, the trees, the rooftops, anything that might hold a body, anything that might hold a sign. She found three in the first hour, all of them on the north side, all of them carried there by the current, all of them wearing the clothes of people she knew. She knelt beside each one and she turned them gently, because turning a body in the mud is a kind of violence, and she was not violent, not by nature, and she checked for identification, and she wrote the names in her notebook, and she marked the locations with a stick driven into the mud, and she moved on.
Heather found her at midday, on the slope above the old Henderson place, where the sheep had been pastured and where the water now stood deep and brown and still. Heather had been working with the search-and-rescue team from Missoula, coordinating the helicopter drops, directing the volunteers, making lists of supplies and lists of tasks and lists of people who needed to be found, and she saw Valerie sitting on a rock with her notebook, and she saw the way Valerie's hands were shaking, and she sat down beside her, and she did not speak, because speaking was not what Valerie needed, because Valerie needed the quiet, and Heather was good at quiet.
"Seventeen," Valerie said, after a long time. "Seventeen confirmed. I have thirty-two more to find."
Heather took the notebook and turned the pages, and she saw the names, written in Valerie's careful hand, and the locations, marked with coordinates, and the conditions, noted briefly: in tree, in debris, in mud. She closed the notebook and handed it back. "You don't have to do this alone."
"I know." Valerie took the notebook. "But I'm the one who started it. I'm the one who wrote the names. I'm the one who knows where they are."
Heather stood and brushed mud from her pants. She looked at the water, which was still, which was calm, which was lying, because the water was never calm, not really, not when it held the things it had taken, and she said, "I'll get you more people. More hands. More eyes."
Valerie nodded. She did not thank her. Gratitude was a feeling for later, for when the counting was done, for when the list was complete, for when she could close the notebook and put it away and not have to look at it again for a long time.
The counting took three days. Valerie walked the perimeter every morning, and the rescue team walked the interior, and they found more bodies, and they marked them, and they waited for the coroner, and the coroner came in the helicopter, and he looked at them, and he wrote the time of death, and he flew away, and the bodies were left, because there was nowhere to put them, because the cemetery was flooded, because the church was a ruin, because the valley was a place that did not have the infrastructure for this kind of death, this kind of number, this kind of silence. The final count was forty-seven. Forty-seven people who had lived in Bramble Hollow, who had known the creek and the bridge and the community hall, who had eaten pancakes on Saturday mornings and complained about the coffee and walked the boundary and gardened in the summer and forked hay in the winter, who were now in the mud, in the trees, in the water, in the ground, and Valerie wrote the number at the bottom of the last page, and she closed the notebook, and she put it in her pocket, and she sat on the rock, and she did not cry, because she had promised herself she would not cry, and she kept her promise, because she was Valerie Whiteclaw, and she was the one who counted, and the counting was done.