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his saber-like beak.
    When he hops on a rock, then wades in, I fetch my Roger Tory Peterson, the classic bird guide I keep handy on the kitchen windowsill.
    I flip through the color plates and learn that he is a green heron, a secretive, carnivorous, and solitary relative of the more common great blue heron. The book says that green herons are native to the Midwest, and I know my birds, but I still don’tremember ever seeing one like him before, at least not up close. I read on and learn that’s because his status is “threatened” due to “human disturbance.”
    I feel you, Edgar.
The Big Valley
specialized in human disturbance. The boys and their mother got along fine every week, loading the wagons and riding fence and breaking the broncos and having sing-alongs by the campfire. It was other people who messed everything up. And it is not lost on me that there was no Mr. Barkley.
    Outside, Edgar is enjoying the pond, and I take this as an unintended compliment. I designed, dug, built, plumbed, and landscaped that pond myself, shoehorning it into a narrow twelve-foot space between a brick walkway and an ivy-covered fence. I filled it with koi and added a waterfall, planning for the sound of moving water and the reflection of light to give off a welcoming mood next to the porch steps and my front door. This rare bird totally gets it. And I’m happy to see my efforts have actually faked out nature.
    Edgar stands very still then, one yellow-rimmed eye staring down at the water. A quick lunge and there is a speckled koi struggling on the end of his beak. In two hunched gulps the young fish is gone. I watch from the porch as the other fish speed to the bottom and school together. Crap.
    I didn’t fake out nature at all—it faked out me. And nature, unfortunately, kills stuff. As a rural person, I should know this. I
do
know this, and usually take the appropriate precautions.
    I protect the corn seeds from the crows, the dogs from ticks, and my horses from roundworms and the strangles. I hope I’ll be able to protect my sons from the flaws of their mother, but in theirabsence I’ll protect my imported pet-store fish from a threatened native bird. This is the Big Valley and, endangered or not, this trespasser is not going to eat any more of my koi.
    I shoo Edgar away from the pond, across the yard, and down into my woods, where foxes, feral cats, and coyotes are known to prowl.
    My bird book says that in another month Edgar should be migrating south. With that injured wing and no food source, his chances of making it aren’t good. Despite his outward bravado, he’s a fragile creature, all alone, and at the mercy of human disturbance. Mine.
    Late that night, or maybe early, early morning, a thick sound wakes me up. It has the feel of an impact, like someone falling out of bed or down the stairs. Someone heavy. Too heavy for the black vampire bird of my bad dream, returned in my sleep from the woods, bloody and rotting, to peck down our farmhouse’s door.
    Half-asleep, I call out, “Boys?”
    The house is quiet.
    “Boys?” I call again, climbing out of bed, climbing out of sleep, climbing out of that half-remembered dream. And then I’m down my unfinished stairway, hopping over the central landing, up the boys’ stairway and almost to the other side of the second floor and their bedrooms, when I remember. They are still across the road at their father’s. I am in the house alone, and there’s no one here but the dogs and me.
    Super, our Akita, has a guard dog’s suspicious nature and would bite an intruder without so much as snarling at him first, but Friday, our corgi, is a herding dog, and he would run circles around a trespasser and bark and bark. I haven’t heard so muchas a whine, though, and check the mudroom. The dogs are both asleep on their rugs, and so I know for drowsy certain that the house is unbreached.
    With the remodel only half done, the kitchen ceiling is still stripped to its lathing, there are