It wasn't enough.
I pulled up to my house to find three little feathered heaps lying under their angled shelter inside the run. They looked lifeless. I jumped out of my car and ran over to them, clucking to them. The black and white Maran perked up her head and looked at me without getting up; the auburn Rhode Island Red and the brown Welsummer with her pretty gold quail-patterned feathers didn't move at all. When I opened their run the Maran got to her feet but didn't run away (a first for her) and let me pick her up docilely. I put her under one arm and scooped up the Welsummer and the Red into the crook of my other arm. I could feel them panting (they cool themselves like dogs do) and their hearts beating, fast as horses, but they didn't struggle or even do more than lay quietly together in my arm.
Before we even thought about buying chicks I had been like a pregnant mother, reading every single scrap of literature on chicken rearing I could get my hands on. The Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, A Chicken in Every Yard, the chapters in Little House in the Suburbs and The Backyard Homestead's Guide to Raising Farm Animals. So as I was hurrying the chickens back to the backyard to care for them I didn't think, I just reacted.
- Cool their feet. I set down all three chickens and sprayed down their feet with cool water from the hose to help them lower their body temperatures. The black and white Maran perked up immediately and struggled and flapped to get down. My redhead, the Rhode Island Red, pepped up a bit and lifted her head so she could sit up in my arms instead of dangling loose. I sprayed her feet for another minute and she clucked indignantly at me. Then I turned to the brown Welsummer. Her feet just dangled lifelessly underneath her, and her mouth was gaping wide and outstretched. I sprayed her feet but they didn't seem to feel any cooler.
- Get them into the shade. I brought them back to their coop where it was not just shady but completely dark and put them inside. The Maran, already feeling the peppiest of the three, started walking around and fluffing her wings to cool herself. The Rhode Island Red and the Welsummer laid down immediately in the doorway of the coop.
- Water. Normally the chicks have a nipple waterer (a big five gallon bucket with a metal nipple system underneath that they can click for a drop at a time without getting soaked themselves) but they seemed uninterested in drinking, and I knew they were dehydrated. I brought them a small tub of ice water and dipped my fingers in to coat the tops of the Red and the Welsummer's beaks. The Red almost immediately gulped down the drops, then the next ones I dripped onto her beak, then when I dunked her beak in the tub she got it and started drinking greedily. The Maran, not the brightest of birds under the best of circumstances, came over to investigate, but of course instead of drinking like an intelligent thirsty creature, tilted her head at me curiously. I sighed and dunked her beak, too, and she was like, OMIGOD you did not tell me that this was WATER why have I been drinking from a spigot like some kind of ANIMAL. She went to town on that tub like water was going out of style.
- Cold fruit. I grabbed some cold peaches from the fridge and cut them up so their cool juicy flesh was exposed and threw them into the coop. Red and Maran immediately went for the fruit and tore open the fleshy center piece peck by peck down to the pit.
By now Red and Maran were feeling good, clucking and drinking and eating freely and jumping down from the coop to peck for bugs under the coop. But beautiful Welsummer was still not moving. She lay there in a fat pile of pretty feathers, her little sides trembling with her panting, drinking the drops that I tapped onto her beak but otherwise not moving. I watched her with a critical eye, and noticed her golden eyes were dilating and contracting and dilating and contracting. This couldn't be good.
I pulled her out of the coop gently and put her on my lap with a bottle of ice for her feet. I laid her talons over the curve of the frozen water bottle with my bare thighs freezing under the painfully icy cold bottle but her feet still feverishly hot. With one of the peach pieces in hand, I was able to squeeze juice into her open beak. She nibbled the first ten or fifteen drops down but then lost interest, turning her head when I tried to tempt her with the sweet juice. I checked her feet. Still insanely hot, burning to the touch, but after a few minutes her golden eyes had stopped dilating. I switched to an ice water dish, dripping cold water into her beak with the ice bottle on her feet. After another few minutes she struggled to sit up and flapped to get down, so I set her on her feet. She made it a few unsteady steps before staggering like a drunk and falling over.
Shit.
Okay. I tried again. I filled a six inch deep tub with water and dunked and held her feet in the cool water, then dripped cool water over the top of her head. I dunked her beak into the water and she came up sputtering but slurped down the drops; I dunked her again and then two more times until she was slurping steadily. She was still unsteady on her feet so I picked her up and flipped her onto her back like I had when she was a baby chick, just two weeks old, and let her feet naturally curl around the ice water bottle as I held her in my lap. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her breathing stilled and she almost immediately fell asleep in my lap. When I touched her feet several minutes later they had finally started to move from oven-hot to her normal humming warmth. She opened her eyes and sat up, then struggled to flip over and sat on my knee.
She looked up at me. I dripped some water onto her beak. She slurped it greedily then pecked my thumb. Hard. And turned a baleful eye on me.
I felt a sudden warmth.
The warmth spread over me like a font.
It was not my heart, in an outpouring of tenderness, but the Welsummer releasing the last of her feverish heat with a truly alarming quantity of hot, watery chicken poo all over my leg. She shook herself and clucked at me, indignantly.
Sigh.
I'll just go inside and change my shoes then.
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