Hanging over the river is a big gray trunk and on it are a half a dozen vultures, one spreads out its wings to take in the morning air, which is brisk and still glistens with last night's dew. At the river's edge two great blue herons make a lift off as I step out of the car to photograph. They seem to float along the river until they come to a branch and poise, perfectly, on the top. After walking for a few hours upstream the herons appear again, as if following me, and began fishing along with the mergansers and black phoebes, tanagers and various sparrows. The Gila Valley is an amazing bird refuge, one of the best in the country.

A large butterfly appears, with thick velvet black wings showing luminescent blue eyes on the edges, and a tiny morning cloak butterfly alights on the edge of a rock and folds and unfolds its colors of night and then day.

The rocks along the riverbed are small replicas of the hillsides surrounding us, with ancient twisted stone and sanded reds on the surfaces. I find a thick piece of what might be the blood of the earth, smooth, dry and twisted into a diamond shape. The earth bleeds and leaves her drops there for me to pick up and hold, feeling her fertility. This rock like so many others will never be again. Never in this particular shape and combination, so I hold the rock and it holds me, as we meet there in mutual respect. We are one of a kind, stopping together for a moment, and then on our ways.

In the distance there is a tree a brighter green than all the rest and behind it is an adobe wall with wood shattered around it. It is part of an old homestead. Five years later, while picking peaches in a farmer's orchard in the valley, I learn of his childhood at this home with his parents. The tree by the homestead has leaves as big as my face and they look like green lakes floating in the sky. It is a Catalpa tree. The house is made of adobe bricks and the windows still nest in the slumped and leaning wall.

My dog wags up to me, covered with sticky weeds and mud. She races across the open field of sand until she hits the river and then pounces up and down in the restless water. Along the side of a bank is a fuzzy tarantula with prison striped legs, it is a female with a huge egg sack under her. I watch her find a less noticeable place to inhabit and carry her eggs to another lip of mud and shale. I can see along the rim of the bank there are several smaller versions of her and I am fascinated with their sizes and homesteads. They too have made tiny adobe worlds. I walk along a highway of stones, up and back along this riverway as the trees, birds and water feed my spirit.