The Loris in the Coffee Garden

The coffee farmer called it in himself — a shy, embarrassed voice on the station line. “There’s an animal in my trees. It’s stuck in plastic. I think it’s one of those… cu li.”

A slow loris. In his coffee garden. Tangled in plastic.

I drove out at first light, when the highlands are at their most beautiful — mist lying in the valleys, the red soil dark with dew, rows of coffee bushes marching up the hills like green corduroy. The farmer met me at the gate of his plantation, a small man with big hands, wringing those hands like he was trying to wring an apology out of them.

He led me to the tree, and there it was: a slow loris — round body, enormous amber eyes, teddy-bear face — clinging to a branch with plastic sheeting wrapped tight around its middle and one arm. It must have climbed through a scrap of mulch plastic or a discarded bag in the night, and every struggle had pulled the knot tighter.

Slow lorises are nocturnal. Finding one in daylight, frozen on a branch, means it’s exhausted — they shut down when they’re out of options, going still and silent, which is exactly the wrong strategy when you’re wrapped in plastic in the sun.

And there’s one more thing about slow lorises, the thing that makes every rescuer’s hands extra careful: they’re venomous. The only venomous primate on earth. A bite can put a grown man in the hospital. So the gloves stayed on, the movements stayed slow, and my respect stayed absolute.

Slow lorises are strange, wonderful contradictions: primates that move in slow motion, with venom they lick onto their elbows, and enormous eyes for a nightlife we never see. They’re also victims of the pet trade — those viral videos of “cute” lorises being tickled show animals in mortal terror, teeth clipped out with pliers. This one, at least, was wild-born and wild-living. I wanted to keep it that way.

I talked to it the whole time — soft, low, ridiculous. “I know, I know. The plastic is the enemy here, not me. We’re on the same team.” Its huge eyes tracked my hands without blinking. It didn’t struggle. It had learned that struggling makes it worse.

Cutting plastic off a small, venomous, terrified primate is delicate work. I used the blunt-tipped scissors, working a fold at a time, keeping my fingers between the blade and its fur. Twice it shifted and I froze — waiting, breathing — until it settled. Ten minutes. Fifteen. The farmer stood below holding a towel like an altar boy, and the coffee cherries nodded red and green around us like a curious audience.

Halfway through, the loris shifted suddenly — a quick, fluid movement that belied the whole “slow” reputation — and my scissors slipped. Not toward fur, thank god, just into empty air, but my heart stopped for a full second. The loris froze too, its eyes wider than ever, and we stayed like that, two statues in a coffee tree, until it decided I was still trustworthy. I exhaled for about a year.

When the last strip came away, the loris just sat there on the branch, free, blinking in the daylight it hates. Then — slowly, deliberately — it climbed three branches up, turned, and looked back at me for one long second. I choose to believe it was saying thank you. The biologists would say it was assessing a threat. We can both be right.

We named her Li — from cu li, the Vietnamese name for her kind. The vet checked her at the station: no wounds, just stress and dehydration. That night, we released her at the forest edge behind the farm, where the trees are thick and the plastic doesn’t reach. She melted into the dark like she was made of it — which, of course, she is.

The release was at dusk, the way it should be for a nocturnal animal. We carried her in a dark box to the forest edge, opened the lid, and waited. For a long minute, nothing. Then a small round face peered out, those amber eyes catching the last light — and she was gone, up the nearest trunk, into the leaves, into her own hours. The farmer stood beside me, and I swear he was holding his breath the whole time.

The farmer walked his whole plantation the next day and pulled every scrap of plastic out of the trees. “For Li,” he said, a little sheepish, a little proud.

I think about that branch sometimes — the coffee cherries, the sun, and those enormous eyes watching my hands. She couldn’t chew through. She couldn’t wait it out. All she could do was cling there and go still.

And someone happened to look up.

People walk past suffering every day without seeing it — it’s up a tree, it’s small, it’s silent. The work is mostly about looking: up, down, behind the shed, into the dark corners. The farmer looked up. Then he called. Then we came.