There was no grant funding available for my father's lifelong project. It was a labor of love financed by his and my mother's meager savings, the frequent fate of creative artists. (My mother was Elizabeth Bartlett, well-known for her many published books of poetry.) During each hacienda visit, my father made sketches he later turned into finished pen-and-ink illustrations, of which he completed 350. The collection of hacienda illustrations was exhibited in more than 40 one-man shows in leading galleries, museums, and libraries in the U.S. and Mexico. In addition, he took more than a thousand photographs of the haciendas. Before his death in 1990, the University Press of Colorado published his non-fiction book, _The Haciendas of Mexico: An Artist's Record_, which contains selections of his many illustrations and photographs, accompanied by a text that describes hacienda life and the history of the haciendas. In 1959, thanks to my parents' friendship with Cuca Cámara, of the long-established Cámara family of Mérida, Yucatán, my father was offered the opportunity live on one of the family's haciendas, located outside of Mérida between the small towns of Motul and Suma. My father and I lived at the Hacienda Kambul while he completed _When the Owl Cries_. The Hacienda Kambul provided a very spartan existence: We slept in hammocks in a large bare room of what had been the _casa principal_, the main residence of the hacienda. The 20-foot-high ceilings and the thick adobe walls helped cool the hot and dry Yucatecan weather; in the mornings, swallows would fly through the opened ten-foot-high doors into the room, chitterling and swooping above our heads. [Illustration: The author on horseback at the Hacienda Kambul] The time there was not limited to serious writing. We went horseback riding across the fields of _henequén_, whose fiber, like that of sisal, was traditionally used for rope and twine. Sometimes, we would relax in hammocks on the wide terrace of the _casa principal_. Often, we would travel out into the _campo_ on the hacienda's narrow-gauge railway, on a flat-topped rail car pulled by a mule, called a _plataforma_. [Illustration: Riding an hacienda _plataforma_. The author's son on the right, the hacienda driver on the left, the mule in front.] We had no electricity, so evenings were short and mornings early. We had a _huipíl_-clad Maya maid, Bicha, who, along with a thin, old, lame Maya gentleman, Lázaro, helped us to provision ourselves on a close to starvation diet. We were sometimes very sick from the polluted water of the well, which had unwisely been dug right next to the horse corral. We boiled the water conscientiously, but Moctezuma exacted considerable revenge despite our efforts. [Illustration: Stressful life at the Hacienda Kambul! The author's son on the hacienda terrace; in the foreground their pet dog, a Mexican Maltese, named Mona, whose namesake appears in _When the Owl Cries_.]