“Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been, — who can tell?” A White Heron, Sarah Jewett

To call it a loss seems almost too much; he had barely been lodging with them a while. Her heart had only skipped so few times in the past days. But it had skipped and he had been the reason. 

She had watches, not him, but his hands, his fingers as they wrapped around the barrel of his gun. She follows the almost tarnished glint of the worn metal as his hands lift it from its resting place against the old wood of the door frame and slings it over his shoulder. She does not meet his lovely eyes as he turned to leave. 

A fitful sleep was all that came to her that night. And the nights that followed. With her head under the open window, she listens. To the familiar croaking of toads she knows are ugly to look at and even uglier to touch. To the here and there chirping of raccoons she knows are rummaging in the waste pile outside the house. To the pushing and pulling of distant water she knows is running between and around the lofty legs of the white heron. 

She wishes then, that the heron would speak. Not in its guttural natural voice, but in the voice of the young man that had walked so deftly away. She wished it would stoop its long white neck into her open window and whisper words of reassurance. Give me a word, give me anything. 

Months pass by and she falls again into the routine of milking her old cow and keeping up the farm. No longer does she sleep so fitfully for the noises of the night have become more melodic than the memory of the young man’s voice. She sees the white heron here and there. She does not see it today.

At night she lays beneath her open window, the thought of speaking herons long lost. 

In the morning she wakes and sits up to rub the sleep from her eyes. There, in the open window a small heron sits. Not the stark white plumage she is so used to searching for in the distance. But a small, dark thing that only barely passed in resemblance to its parent bird. And in its tiny beak, there was something, 

Sylvia stops breathing, waiting for the small heron to make a move. Blinking twice, the chick bends its neck down to place the thing down on her window sill. One last look and the chick turns to hop off of the window sill and begins waddling away. 

Sylvia looks closer to find a single silver coin, old and dented but nonetheless of value. She looks up and the small heron has vanished into the brush. 

Finally able to breathe, Sylvia lets her shoulders slump low for what feels like the first time in months. The coin is heavy in her hand.