No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life

Investigating the Heron Murders

Investigating the Heron Murders Life in the country is almost guaranteed to make one cautious about leaping to conclusions. So I knew better than to make the particular mistake I made about the herons. Even as a child, I’d often overheard my mother tell my father a juicy piece of gossip she’d gleaned at a church gathering or on the party-line telephone. “Remember,” he’d say, “there may be more to that story.” My best excuse for the heron fiasco is that I was so busy learning how to be part of a city community that I was less attentive to my ranch neighborhood. i’d been immersed, that summer, in learning how to live and work with the women who traveled to Windbreak House to work with me on their writing. Slowly I realized we were creating a temporary society within my old community. We watched from the deck, for example, as my neighbors moved cattle through my pastures. If I’d been alone, I’d have gone down to help, but my primary job working with writers meant I couldn’t be neighborly in the old way. The rural ranching life I’d always known was going by my windows while I worked at my job of writing and teaching. Once a resident writer who walked the grasslands around the house encountered one of my neighbors in a pickup. After introductions, he said cheerfully, “Oh! You’re one of Linda’s women! Well, have a nice walk. If you want to ride a horse, my place is just up the road.” I liked to think my new community was fitting into the old. Investigating the Heron Murders Nn 177 That year, during the final week of August, only Emmy was in residence with me. We lived the writer’s fantasy, rising early for breakfast together before turning to writing projects in separate rooms. While we ate lunch, she’d hand me several revised pages from her manuscript. In the afternoon, I’d read and reread the new work, writing comments to help her revise again. Late in the afternoon, we often took a walk together, toward the old stone house or down the willow-choked draw hoping to see deer. She’d ask questions about ranching and grasslands wildlife. Evenings, when she played her violin in practice for an upcoming competition, I’d sit on the deck, wrapping myself in the symphony of her glorious playing, the bass notes of the nighthawks diving in the dark, coyotes howling on the ridge, wind plucking the strings of the grass lute. One afternoon, she reminded me that I’d promised to show her the great blue herons nesting along the creek that ran through some of our alfalfa fields, and asked to see the rookery. We drove north to Hermosa, then east while I explained how we harvested hay from these fields in summer, hauling some to other areas of the ranch and leaving several stacks in a hay yard under the tall cottonwoods near the creek. In late fall, we’d move our pregnant cows to this acreage, leaving them to graze on the grass left between plots of alfalfa, to drink from the creek, and to find shelter in the gullies and among the trees. Before the first snow, my father would make the hazardous highway drive on the old John Deere A with its hydraulic grapple fork, parking it under the trees. Even if the winter was stormy, we could usually get to the fields every few days in a pickup, and then use the tractor to scatter hay. During the drive, I also told Emmy about some of my conversations with local folks who hated the herons, declaring they “ate all the fish in the creek.” Ranchers or farmers who shoot hawks and owls are unaware that all these earn their place on our land by eating mice, pocket gophers, and other pests. I’d countered these arguments on several occasions by reminding them of the upstream neighbor who piles corral waste on the stream bank. The manure washes into the creek with each rain; I suppose that’s what killed the fish, not the herons. When our right to irrigate from the creek was canceled by the state, the same dairy farmer went right on pumping the water without a permit. No one wanted to call the authori- 178 Nn...