Year's Best SF 17

With a rush of relief she sees Jane make up her mind. “Well—we do have dog food. Very expensive, low-fat dog food. No paper towels, but toilet paper and tissues. We can manage. But Kaylee, listen to me now: even experienced rehabbers commonly lose about half the baby birds they try to rear, more than half when the babies are so young. You can see why, when they’ve been stressed and banged around, and gotten chilled—I don’t want you to set your heart on this without understanding how hard it is to be successful.”

Kaylee nods as hard as she can. “I understand! Really, I really do, I won’t go to pieces if it doesn’t work. Oh, thanks, Jane, thank you, I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d said no.”

“But if we’re going to do this we need to act fast. We’ll take the whole nest,” she says. “Back to the house. It takes a little while for kibble to soften up, so we’ll start with canned; these babies need to get warmed up and fed ASAP.”

“How come you’ve got all this stuff stashed under the stairs?” Kaylee asks Jane, when the little swallows are safely tucked into their artificial nest (Roscoe’s bowl, lined with Kleenex).

First she and Jane had to hold the hatchlings in their hands, three apiece, to warm them up enough so they could eat; Jane said little birds can’t warm up by themselves when they first hatch out, which is why the mother has to brood them. “Normally we do this with a heating pad or a microwaved towel or something.” Then she opened a can of Mill’s Wet/Dry Veterinary Diet, under the intense scrutiny of Roscoe and Fleece. “Watch this time, then next time you can help. Their gape response isn’t working, but it should come back once we can get a bite or two down the hatch,” Jane said. And sure enough, when Jane carefully pried a tiny beak open and pushed a bit of canned food as far back as she could with her little finger, and closed the beak to help the baby swallow, the beak opened again by itself.

Now they had all been fed. (They hadn’t pooped, which probably just meant they hadn’t eaten since before the tornado.) And Kaylee, yearning over their bowl, thought to ask Jane about the supplies.

Jane sits back in her chair, then stiffens. “Oh!” she says, “That’s what I cut myself on, that bracket on the shelf there. Wedged between paint cans. Can you push it back out of the way?” Kaylee gets up, holding the bowl carefully, and tucks the bracket out of sight; she is helpfulness itself. “Last summer,” Jane says when Kaylee sits back down on the mat, “after I’d been down here with the dogs three times in about three weeks, I started thinking, What if this was the real deal? All I’ve got in the way of emergency supplies is six jugs of water!” So I took a weekend and made a list and went shopping. Good thing I did.”

“Are we getting more tornadoes than we used to? My mom keeps saying that, but my dad thinks she just doesn’t remember.”

“I don’t think anybody knows for sure. But a lot of information about climate change passes through this house,” Jane says, and pauses, and Kaylee can tell she’s thinking, used to pass, so she hitches forward and looks very interested, and Jane catches herself and goes on: “… and I’ve seen several articles about the effect of climate change on weather lately, and quite a few climate scientists seem to be leaning that way. The argument goes that warmer ocean temperatures mean more storms. Heat is just energy, and heat affects how much moisture there is in the atmosphere.”

“So more heat and more moisture in the atmosphere means more tornadoes?”

“It means more frequent and more violent storms in general, apparently. There are computer models that say so, not that that proves anything necessarily. Tornadoes are complex, lots of things affect their formation—but it is true that they’ve been occurring earlier and farther north than they used to. Unusually high temperatures, unusually frequent tornadoes, so the thinking goes, and it does make sense. Though actually,” she adds, “there’ve always been more tornadoes in Kentucky than people think.”

“We had something last year in science about Hoosier Alley,” Kaylee chimes in. “It was something about a new definition of Tornado Alley—if my SmartBerry was working I could look it up! But anyway, there’s still Tornado Alley but now they’re talking about Dixie Alley and Hoosier Alley and something else.”

“I hadn’t heard that.” Jane winces and shifts in her chair.

Pleased to think there was anything she knew that Jane didn’t, Kaylee says, “Hoosier Alley, that’s Indiana and the western two-thirds of Kentucky, and pieces of a couple other states too. So what all do you have here?”