It is a difficult thing to explain tears in your eyes and a smile in your heart.

So many of you who knew Fiona Ward because of my magazine and books and my Web site have met her. She was tragically lost to me and her countless other friends in a recent accident.

The tears are easy to understand, the smile perhaps is not. It comes because Fiona will always be here for those of us who got to know her well. It is there because for the past five years she has been a light in my life, a friend whom I could not have done without, in so many ways.

If you knew Fiona, she put a smile in your heart that will never go away.

I met her because she read my newspaper columns and wanted to get a Labrador from me.

I asked her to help me with my Web site in return for the Lab puppy, and she showed me how to do some things I had been trying to do in getting a fledgling outdoor magazine started.

She knew so much about what I knew so little about, and helped me accomplish things I could not do. She was so smart, so capable. She amazed me. She made insurmountable mountains into little hills.

Fiona had been working for years in her husband’s law office, and when he died of cancer, also too young, she agreed to help me with my publishing company. Between her and Dorothy Loges, there was no problem which came up they couldn’t take care of. I wrote, Fiona and Dorothy did the rest.

In time, I found out how she had been born in Oregon, and loved Mount Hood, where she spent much of her youth hiking and skiing with her father. As a young woman she went to Alaska to work for Alaskan Airlines, and she loved the outdoors wherever she went.

She told me all about salmon fishing, and you could see she had the soul of an outdoorsman.

Quite often, I couldn’t afford to pay her what she was worth to me. There was always Fiona to make something work that I couldn’t understand.

It got to a point where people involved in the technical aspect of printing or selling my books and magazines would quit trying to explain things to me and simply say, “Ask Fiona…”

And so, sometimes I paid her by taking her hunting and fishing when I could. She lived so far away she couldn’t often get here early, so she came late. It didn’t matter.

On her first turkey hunting trip we didn’t get in the woods until late in the morning, but the turkeys gobbled, and came to the call, and she killed her first gobbler close to noon.

I think nature knew Fiona was there, and she deserved it. She killed several more over the years. And then in the summer it was her first big smallmouth, in the middle of the day also. Again there were more to come.