BIG PELICAN LAKE — Both juveniles are still here.

I write that first because people ask at Tim’s, at the landing and now at the brewery, which proves there are some questions that will travel wherever the coffee or beer happens to be.

The adult loons left during fair week. We missed the departure. The juveniles did not. They have been alone on Big Pelican for more than a week now and are doing what young loons do when the adults leave: fishing badly, then better; flying every morning; ranging farther; landing with less drama than they did in July.

Sunday the brave one went through the narrows and was out of sight for almost two hours. The careful one stayed on the south bay and worked the drop by the old cedar point. By noon they were together again.

Nobody led either one anywhere.

Greta Solberg, eight, has kept the loon log since the eggs. Her back page titled LEAVING still has one entry beneath the earlier staging notes: “The big ones went.” She has left the rest blank because, she says, “The little ones haven’t.”

Her mother, Kari Solberg, said Greta now checks the lake before breakfast and again after school preparations, although school has not technically begun yet.

“She is not trying to stop them,” Kari said. “She would like advance notice.”

There will probably not be any. Juvenile loons commonly remain for weeks after adults leave, and the two from Big Pelican are unlikely to depart together. The whole point, if there is one, is that each leaves when it is ready, alone, for a route it has never flown.

That is the part people do not like, because we have a strong preference for teaching stories in which somebody older demonstrates the route.

Loons do not provide us one.

The adults go first.

The young leave later.

For now, both are still here.