When She Flew Read Online Free Page A

when they were safely out to sea.
    Last year, for my twelfth birthday, Pater found a book at the Joseph Woods Wildlife Sanctuary about our forest and its flora and fauna. He doesn’t usually buy books, because we can borrow them for free from the library, and we sometimes find good ones in the free box at Goodwill. But he said I was getting older and needed some books of my own, so he bought me The Wilds of Joseph Woods State Park , by Carol Frischmann. I can’t believe someone would write about where we live, and I would like to find Miss Frischmann one day and thank her, because in her book she says that the great blue heron has been sighted here, in my forest, on very rare occasions. That gave me hope.
    I often walked along our creek looking for morels, stopping every once in a while to sketch a kestrel posing on a limb, or a clump of Johnny-jump-ups. The day everything changed, I was thinking about herons, so I almost wasn’t surprised when I saw the tall swoop of gray-blue farther down the creek. I knew it could be a trick of my eyes, but my heart began to beat as rapidly as a hummingbird’s. Could it really be a heron? Or was it just me wanting it that made it look like one? It could have been a piece of newspaper caught in a tree, a scrap of a hiker’s coat or a camper’s tarp. They leave behind the oddest things, like one shoe, or a camera bag. Things you’d think they would need and be more careful about. If I lost one shoe, or my coat, I’d hate even to tell Pater. He says the VA’s four hundred dollars a month doesn’t go very far, even without rent and paying for the energy that Nature makes for free. You still have to eat some store-bought food (even though we grow most of our own vegetables, and forage berries, herbs, and mushrooms). You still need basic necessities (his polite way of saying menstrual supplies and toilet paper, as I just can’t make myself use leaves like he does). You still have to have presentable clothes for church, he says, and to save for the future.
    The tall gray shape moved, and I crept slowly toward it, dropping the paper and pencil on top of the mushrooms in my pocket. I worried I would startle whatever it was because I wore my sparkly silver foraging dress over my jeans and T-shirt. The dress was Crystal’s. I took it from her closet the night we left to remember her by. I wear it to collect mushrooms because it has a big pocket on the right side so I don’t need to carry a bag. I took soft, quiet steps in the underbrush, slipping behind a hemlock when I was as close as I dared go. I leaned my head to the left of the tree, ignoring the tiny ants marching up a woody ridge, and slowly, slowly, I could see the creek, then in the middle of it, a bird: a big, beautiful blue heron. My breath came as fast as if I’d been running, and it was almost like I could cry. I was so overwhelmed by what I’d been allowed by Nature to see.
    The heron didn’t seem to notice me as I watched it dip its head down into the water, neck snaking in a long, graceful S curve. I was almost sure it was a male, even though there are no discernible differences between male and female great blue herons. I just felt that I knew this, and Pater says when you think you know something, you ought to listen to your instincts. The heron made a quick stabbing motion and lifted his head back up, pointing his beak toward the treetops, and gulped down the fish he had caught. One thing I can tell you: the great blue heron is the most elegant fisher of any waterfowl I’ve seen.
    He kept wading downstream, looking for more fish, stopping here and there to poke his beak between rocks, then moving on. I crept behind him from hemlock to fir. I don’t know how long I followed my heron. I’ve never been in a trance, but it felt as if I were in one that day, the rest of the forest and chattering birds fading away into the green afternoon light, and I could only focus on the heron’s shaggy back feathers and the black