Where the Forest Meets the Stars(13)

When Ursa put away the butter, she surveyed the beer cooling in the refrigerator. “Are the ornithologists alcoholics?”
“Why would you think that?” Jo said.
“That’s a lot of beer.”
“It’s for four people.”
“You won’t drink any?”
“I might have one.”
“You don’t like to get drunk?”
“I don’t.” Jo saw mistrust in the alien’s eyes. “Have you had bad experiences with people who drink a lot?”
“How could I have? I just got here.”


5

After they ate sandwiches and the pies were set out to cool, Jo sent Ursa to change back into her own clean clothes. When Ursa came out of the bedroom and saw Jo working on her laptop, she sat on the couch and read more of the Ornithology text.
Jo turned her screen so Ursa couldn’t see her use her phone to get on the internet. When she got a connection, she googled Ursa missing girl but found nothing. Though the sheriff’s deputy knew of no missing children in the area, she tried missing child Illinois , which brought her to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website and a depressingly long list of missing Illinois children. Many of them were probably dead, their bones concealed in graves that would never be found. Some of the photographs were of kids who had been missing since as far back as 1960, and a few were computer reconstructions of dead children who’d never been identified. One nearly made Jo cry. It was a photograph of a pair of shoes—all that was recovered of a teenager’s remains.
Jo used the same website to look at photographs of children in nearby Kentucky, and also in the bordering states of Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Ursa Major wasn’t on the lists, though she’d been away from home for at least two nights. Jo set down the phone. “How’s Ornithology going?”
“I don’t like systematics that much,” Ursa said.
“It’s not my thing either.” She took her car keys off the desk. “The rain has stopped. I’m going to drive down the road to monitor a few nests. Want to come with me?”
“Yes!” She sprang off the couch and slipped on Jo’s oversize flip-flops. “How do you monitor a nest?”
“I look at it and see how it’s doing.”
“That’s how you get a PhD?”
“There’s a lot more to it than that. I record the fate of every nest I find, and from that data I can calculate the nesting success of indigo buntings in each of my study sites.”
“What do you mean by fate ?”
“Fate is what happens after the nest is built. I monitor how many eggs are laid, how many hatch, and how many baby birds fledge from the nest. Fledge means they fly away from the nest. But sometimes the parents abandon the nest before the female lays eggs, or the eggs are eaten by a predator. And sometimes the eggs hatch, but the babies are eaten by a predator before they fledge.”
“Why don’t you stop the predator from eating the babies?”
“I can’t stop it from happening, and even if I could, saving individual baby birds isn’t the purpose of my study. The research is meant to help us understand how to conserve bird populations on a bigger scale.”
“What is the predator?”
“Snakes, crows, blue jays, and raccoons are the main ones in my study sites.” Jo slung her field bag over her shoulder. “Let’s go before the weather turns again. I don’t like to scare birds off their nests when it’s raining.”
“Because the eggs can’t get wet?”
“I don’t want eggs or babies to get wet and cold. Research should have as little impact on nesting success as possible.”
When they left the cottage, Little Bear trotted over from the shed. He was much tamer, letting Ursa pet his head. “Stay here,” she told the dog. “Do you understand? I’ll be back soon.”
Ursa didn’t like that she had to sit in the back seat and use the seat belt. Someone had been letting her sit up front unbuckled. Jo explained why the seat belt was necessary and how the front airbag could kill children if it opened.
“If the airbag kills kids, why do they put it in the car?” Ursa asked.
“Because people who make cars expect kids to ride in the back seat where it’s safest.”
“What if a truck hits the back of the car where the kid is sitting?”
“Are you going to follow my rules or not?”
She clambered into the back seat and put on a seat belt.
The dog ran after the car as they left the Kinney driveway. “Jo, stop! Stop!” Ursa pleaded. “He’s following us!”
“How will stopping help?”
Ursa leaned out the back-seat window and watched the dog vanish with a bend in the road. “He can’t keep up!”
“I don’t want him to. He can’t come to my study site. Bringing a predator would freak out my birds.”
“Jo! He’s still coming!”
“Stop hanging out the window. This road is narrow, and you’re going to get whacked by a tree branch.”
Ursa stared miserably at the passenger-side mirror.
“He knows this road. This is where he was born,” Jo said.
“Maybe he wasn’t. He could have jumped out of a car.”
“More like he was dumped out of a car by someone who didn’t want him.”
“Will you go back for him?”
“No.”
“You’re mean.”
“Yep.”
“Is that where Gabriel Nash lives?” Ursa asked, pointing at the rutted dirt lane and NO TRESPASSING  sign.