Tears prickled the back of my eyes as I drove back toward Gunnison, because Henson was right, I knew better about Pop. He only saved the birds to indulge me. The minute I left him, he let them go.

SITE FIDELITY IS A beautiful, romantic idea, but it's also dangerous. The Blue Mesa Reservoir filled in 1965, and the following spring a few hundred Gunnison sage grouse descended on the reservoir ice in March, right above where their lek had been, slipping around and falling and failing to mate. The year after, half as many returned. The next year, even fewer, and so on until there were none. They didn't move to other leks, didn't find solid ground on the shore. The entire family just died out, pining for their land.

It's one of the saddest stories I've ever heard, and the first time I heard it, I asked Pop for the same thing I wanted from Henson, to get a conservation easement on the ranch, to give the birds some official, enduring government protection.

“We murdered almost all of these birds before we even knew they existed,” I said. “Building those dams. We have to do something.”

“We are doing something, Norah,” Pop said. He rubbed his head, which has always been his act of frustration, then he tugged my braid and smiled sadly.

“They need us to do more,” I said. “We can do more for them.”

“The government can't protect them better than I can,” Pop said. “Grazing has hurt these birds, no question, but so did those dams, which the government built. Our birds, Norah, we keep for ourselves, keep secret. That's how we keep them safe in the world.”

My pop has always been the North Star of my life. I set my moral compass by his worldview, consider always how my choices will affect his good opinion of me. I see Pop's heart for ranching and his heart for the environment, and I'm grateful for the clear land ethic I learned at his knee. Pop read me Ed Abbey and Aldo Leopold, taught me to use willow like aspirin, kept me outside on a horse for fifteen hours every day. But Pop sprinkled his distrust of government on everything he taught me as a child, like salt on every meal. It felt like critical thinking for most of my life, but I realize now it was just seeing everything that one way.

I PREFER CAMPING WHEN the full moon brightens the midnight world into something warmer, more welcoming. The starlight seems brighter at full moon, even though I know that's not how light works. New-moon light is thin, muted, the distant shrill coyote yipping amplified, every crack of sagebrush an invisible threat. Even the temperature, which can be recorded objectively, felt colder than it should. I wasn't a quarter mile from the campsite Pop and I used every year, but I was on the adjacent BLM land. It's the same runoff stream I was camping next to, the same species of willow along its bank, but the patterns of the limbs, the music they made in the breeze—it was all off, somehow discordant. This landscape should feel familiar, safe, but at new moon it didn't quite.