John.

His father, Gene, still tells the thing about the empty years offhand: there was a time when almost no one was born, whole springs when not a single new chick arrived on the entire lake. So few families were left that they all fit on one dock. And then, little by little, the people came back. John was born already on the way up, of the first new batch. "You were one of the first ones again," Gene told him one day, without ceremony, and it took John years to understand the weight of what he was being handed.

That's where the habit that defines him comes from: he throws nothing away. He fixes what others discard, keeps old screws and strings, finds an owner for whatever's left over. He doesn't call it a principle or a virtue; it's just that he knows, in some quiet place, that being here was never guaranteed. Wearing this bald eagle t-shirt means carrying a man like that with you: one who looks like stone and, inside, is out to rescue things. I sign it, Yago Partal, for my Animal Kinhood series, and there's more of John in his biography.