When I stumble upon ducks swimming in Lower Crow Creek, they fly away before I get very close. So it was unusual that this odd “duck” stayed. It was a big gray “duck” with an odd quack. My hound, a blood and red-bone cross, jumped in the water and swam up to it. The bird swam to me and I reached over the big gray bird with my fishing pole and poked my dog, to keep him from munching on the bird. 

I called my hound out of the water, and held him by the collar. We sat and watched the bird from a little distance. I heard gun blasts and the loud music in the distance. Crow Dam is just a little upstream, and that’s where red-neck kids go to party.

The big gray bird stepped out of the water. It was a great blue heron, but a small one. It spread its wings out, in a stretching motion. There was a two inch hole in its chest. It walked under a juniper bush, laid down, and tucked its head under a wing. Maybe I should have left it alone, but I didn't.

I crawled into the brush of the juniper bush and eased my hand up to it. I was thinking, it’s gonna stab me right through the arm with that bayonet of a beak it has. I slipped my fingers around its slender neck and eased the bird out of its hiding place. I felt a sickening sense of revulsion when my fingers slid into the hole in the bird's chest.

My hound bounced all around me as I carried the large bird, as if to say, “I’ll carry it for you, chicken is yummy.” The two mile walk home, out of the steep gorge the creek runs through, was arduous.

My mom was intrigued by the heron. She called the game warden, and he came out to look at it.

“I don’t know what to tell you. They aren’t endangered. We don’t have a place for it. I guess you’ve got yourself a bird.” He shrugged and left.

We put the bird in a closet. I went fishing and caught a bunch of small perch to feed it. I held the bird and mom massaged a little fish down its throat. The heron threw it up later.

Mom called and told all her friends about our visitor. A few days later she found a good home for it at a bird refuge. The bird refuge had been a fish hatchery, but the spring water that came out of the ground there was too cold. It left the fish smelted at about five inches long at maturity, so the hatchery failed. A couple from California bought it and had hundreds of ducks, swans, geese and other birds on the cold pools full of small fish. 

The Heron ate a lot. In a week on one pond, all the little fishes, and frogs were gone from what had been a life saturated pool.

He lived about six months in this place, but got an infection and died.