Every day for the past week the thermometer has risen above the forty-degree mark. Bella Sanders in the flat down the corridor tells me of her concern for the frogs along the old creek bed. Will they not be baked alive in their little earthern chambers? she asks anxiously. Can we not do something to help them? What do you suggest? I say. Can we not dig them out and bring them indoors until the heatwave is over? she says. I caution her against trying. You won’t know where to dig, I say.
Towards sunset I observe her carry a plastic bowl of water across the street, which he leaves in the creek. In case the little ones get thirsty, she explains.
It is easy to make fun of people like Bella, to point out that heatwaves are part of a larger ecological process with which human beings ought not to interfere. But does this criticism not miss something? Are we human beings not part of that ecology too, and is our compassion for the wee beasties not as much an element of it as is the cruelty of the crow?