SMALL WONDERS

Of all the hummingbirds in my life, the loudest appeared to me in the Chiricahua Mountains.

She came in the moments before dawn, when the sky was the color of waiting. A storm would build later, filling Pinery Canyon with a rain so cold it made the bones in my fingers burn. But she beat it, buzzing against the mesh of my tent.

I heard her first — those revving engine wings. We faced each other for a second (less than, maybe), and she was gone. A flash of glitter, the silhouette of her body disappearing into morning. She was bigger in my startled half-sleep than she was in real life, real time.

It is little wonder to me that there are 13 hummingbird varieties in the segment of Southeastern Arizona where Cochise and Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apache people once defended their homeland.

Weight in the woods.

And still so much air — the wing beats of long-ago warriors. In one Apache legend, a boy was born deaf, but sang wordless songs that healed his people and promised good weather. His name was Wind Dancer, and he became one of those warriors. Once, he rescued a woman, Bright Rain, from a wolf. She married him not long afterward.

But Wind Dancer was killed, and a bitter winter followed. It lasted until his widow began taking long walks alone.

Wind Dancer visited Bright Rain as a hummingbird, wearing the same colors he wore as a warrior. Spring flowers bloomed as Wind Dancer whispered secrets in Bright Rain's ear.

The world was right again — as it so often is when we open ourselves to messages from nature. There are other stories about hummingbirds, of course. A Cherokee tale praises hummingbird for retrieving stolen tobacco from a gaggle of wicked geese. Others tell heroic feats of speed and strength and stealth.

Most of my own stories about hummingbirds involve my grandmother.

SHE DIED ON A WEEKDAY.

It was 1997, and I don't remember the details as much as I would had I not been a girl trying to figure out what it meant to be a woman in grief.

Sometimes it's easier to fold sad things into small packages and tuck them away somewhere.

It was summer, though, and I lay on my back in the pool not long after the news came.

I closed my eyes for a minute, an hour, a lifetime maybe, and opened them again to a buzz. A hummingbird. There, then gone. It took with it the smell of gardenia, my grandmother's fragrance. What it meant, I wasn't sure, but it hovered so close to me, I felt it in my rib cage.

Sometimes I still feel it there.

I started noticing the birds more often after that on special occasions and ordinary ones little reminders of beauty. I wondered if it was because, when I was young, I'd visit my grandparents and watch with them the frenzy of hummingbirds at their feeder.

Long minutes would pass as I'd trace the veins in her hands with my fingertips, laugh at the way his reading glasses slid down his nose, wonder how such tiny birds could be so vicious in their fight for a place at the feeder.

I loved the "little hummers," as my grandmother called them, just a fraction as much as I loved her. So when she was gone, the hummingbirds seemed a natural extension of her life on Earth.

My mother and my sister see them, too.

Cancer is a manipulative thing. Base and vile. It's the thing that took both of my grandparents.

Now, other people live in the house with the hummingbirds. They have for a long time.

WILDFIRE IS LIKE CANCER in some ways, maybe — the way it starts somewhere and spreads everywhere. In 2011, the Horseshoe 2 Fire threatened Chiricahua National Monument and could be seen from space. I know, because there's an image from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, online. In it, the smoke from the fire forms two wings reaching eastward. From space, it looked like something delicate and slow.

But that photograph was made on June 14, 2011, when the fire had burned 171,333 acres. Ultimately, it moved quickly, burning more than 220,000 acres before it was contained. That included portions of Pinery Canyon.

So, even though I had skirted the broad back of the Chiricahuahuas before the fire, I've found myself more often north than south in the years since. North seems cooler, but the hummingbirds seem fewer, too.

And it's the disappearance of hummingbirds I've learned to pay closest attention to.

In seasons of joy, the birds feel nearer.

The love and birth and growing seasons.

Their hum is louder. Their warrior wings beat a heavier tempo. Their small bodies carry the perfume of a thousand gardens.

In colder seasons, though, the birds are off to visit other people.

The heartbreak and sick and lonely seasons.

Then, the sphinx moths mimic the birds and sniff at flowers and buzz about. Often, they're called hummingbird moths or hawk moths in size and weight, they are similar. In speed and chatter and meaning, they are not.

I've read accounts from people who say they, too, have had close encounters of the insect kind.

They should know that the birds will come when the season is right.

For years and so many journeys north, my own seasons did not match the hummingbirds'.

It was my fault, having fallen into the sort of self-pity and loathing and confusion that happens when things change. The static sound of a record moving from one track to the next has a way of drowning out the sound of beating wings. Still, I thought of my grandmother most days.

I still do.

But pain eventually stops dictating destinations.

SO I RETURNED TO PINERY CANYON.

I went with someone who, months before, had called me "little hummingbird."

It felt like a shift in seasons.

Along the road, we found a dead gophersnake. Its skin sort of twinkled in the sun, and when we examined it, we could see it hadn't been run over. The body more than 3 feet from head to tail was perfect. Save for the slice that likely killed the beast.

I guessed a raptor had plucked it from the Earth, that the snake fought, that the bird dropped it. I wondered what it would be like to fall from such a height. Not in a morbid way, but rather in the sense that it might have looked like art.

Later, we'd set camp. And although the sun set as it always does, we couldn't see the pinks and oranges, only the gray that followed. The canyon walls too well protected our nest.

Before I opened my eyes to that waiting light the next morning, the woods came to life. I can't name all the birds that called out before the storm, but I could imagine them. The fire hadn't gutted the place after all.

Within hours, the storm had shaken the canyon. Passed.

Rattled through again. We took to a trail within the monument anyway, watching the sky the way sailors do.

Hail. Thunder. The aching creep of cold back into my bones.

Another storm, a child of the same, moved into Echo Canyon like a train.

We were drenched, but the sky cleared. And, from the shelter of Massai Point, we watched the clouds move as a hummingbird hovered, then landed.

Then took for the shadows of Cochise Stronghold.