Always striving to defend democracy, I spent Aug. 11 working the poll during the primary election. As a deputy registrar of voters, I kind of had to be there from 5 a.m. until voting ended, all the ballots — in-person and absentee — were sorted, counted twice, and sealed up, all the paperwork filled out and duly signed, all the ducks in a row, all the booths, tabulators, tables, papers, posters, accoutrement and equipment picked up, folded up, packed up, stacked up, and locked up.

The primary was a long, dull trudge toward a predestined conclusion. It was also a bumpy trudge. Under the pressures of the pandemic, rules were unclear, often flawed and in flux even as the voting was happening.

The tabulator jammed with humid ballots. The sanitation was constant, the masks stifling.

The poll workers were diligent. The voters were great. No arguments. No issues. Workers worked together.

Voters braved the heat, did their duty, and went back into the heat. Once again, democracy prevailed over anarchy.

The process may have been predestined, but it was also a dry run. We hit a few bumps. We had to hit them to know them.

The bumps weren’t roadkill. They were glitches, inevitable under the circumstances and solvable with cooperation and good intentions. We’re gong to do this again on a smoother road in November.

I had coffee for breakfast, a parsimonious grinder for lunch, cold pizza for dinner, lukewarm water all day. I got home around 9:30. I mixed myself a drink and went out to sit on the deck and look at the dark of the woods over the Little River. It was good.

As E.B. White said, the sweetest sound in the world is “the tinkling of ice at twilight.”

I’ll say the same for the tinkling of ice a couple hours after the poll closes, especially with the hushed gurgle of a little river playing harmony.

Then, in the calm, somewhere unseen, I’d say halfway up a tree, but maybe not, something shrieked. It was a screech of simultaneous surprise and pain. And then a second, weaker screech. In two seconds it was over. Done.

That, I thought, is how animals do it. They prey and are preyed upon. They sneak around in the dark or hide under camouflage. They look for something to eat and try not to get eaten. They eat and get eaten raw.

Nothing ruins the tinkling of ice like a cold reminder about life in the jungle.

Within a second, I thought of my cat. She’s a newbie, just off a farm and as yet not definitively named. One name, offered by someone who knows nothing about naming a cat, simply will not work. My tentative moniker, Tiki-Tiki, is really just a clipping of Kitty-Kitty. It doesn’t work, either. Because it’s a cat.

This cat, flat black, invisible in the dark, has not descended far from her feral ancestry. She could live without me. She enjoys the convenience of kibble, but she spends most of her time outdoors enjoying nature.

Had I just heard Tiki-Tiki screech her last? Or had she dispatched some furry little soul to another go-around? Or was it a couple of other forest animals, viscerally instinctive, predestined, anonymous, and, whether prey or preyed upon, doomed to die with a desperate screech?

In any case, the death and the pain of it touched my heart. It’s a sad and terrible way for nature to keep itself going, to transfer energy from one beast to another so that yet another and another can have something to eat.

During that brief struggle in the dark, I, a domesticated deputy registrar of voters so far from feral, sat on a deck, tinkling my ice as I recovered from the democratic process.

I couldn’t think of a better way for nature to sustain itself, but I appreciated the way we’d just transferred power at the poll. We didn’t have to sneak around in the dark. Nobody ate anybody. Nobody screeched with mortal pain. We did what we had to do, and we accept the results. And we’ll do it again in November, by which time I’m sure Tiki-Tiki will be home for some civilized chow.

Glenn Alan Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.