Something about my mother attracts ornithologists. It all started years ago when a couple of them discovered she had a rare species of woodpecker* coming to her bird feeder. They came in the house and sat around the window, exclaiming and taking pictures with big cameras.

There always seemed to be three or four of them wandering around our place, discussing the body fat of hummingbirds**.

In those days, wild turkey were rare, and the pure-strain wild turkeys had begun to interbreed with farmers’ domestic stock. It was extinction by dilution.

One ornithologist had devised a method to compute the ratio of domestic to pure-strain wild turkey in an individual bird by comparing the angle of flight at takeoff and the rate of acceleration. By then, the turkeys were flying low and slow.

It was during that time, when I was six years old, that I caught the measles. I had a high fever, and my mother was worried about me.

Even the ornithologists stayed away — but not out of fear of the measles or respect for a household with sickness.

The fact was, they had discovered a wild turkey nest.

According to the formula, the hen was pure-strain wild — not a little bit of the sluggish domestic bird in her blood — and the ornithologists were camping in the woods, protecting her nest from predators and taking pictures.

One night our phone rang. It was one of the ornithologists. “Does your little girl still have measles?” he asked.

“Yes”, said my mother. “She’s very sick. Her temperature is 39 ºC.”

“I’ll be right over”, said the man.

In five minutes a whole carload of them arrived.

“thirty-nine, did you say? Where is she?” they asked my mother. They went into my room and set a box down on the bed. I was barely conscious, and when I opened my eyes, their worried faces seemed to float out of the darkness like giant, glowing eggs. They removed the cover off me and felt me all over. They consulted in whispers.

“Feels just right, I’d say.”

“Thirty-nine — can’t miss if we tuck them up close and she lies still.”

I closed my eyes then, and after a while the ornithologists disappeared.

The next morning I was better. For the first time in days I could think. The memory of the scientists with their whispered voices and their cool hands was like a dream from another life. But when I pulled down the covers, there staring up at me with wide mouths,were sixteen baby turkeys and the broken pieces of sixteen brown eggs.

Turkeys. In: Internet: <www.tacoma.k12.us> (adapted).

Glossary

* woodpecker = pica-pau

** hummingbirds = beija-flor

Based on the text above, judge the following item.

In “tuck them up close”, “them” refers to “sixteen brown eggs”.