The Joey on the Open Grass

I spotted him because the grass was moving wrong. Out on the open grassland, late in the afternoon, the wind was combing everything in one direction, except for one small patch near a fallen log where something was twitching against the flow. A farmer had called us about a kangaroo mob that had scattered when a fence line came down, and we were sweeping the paddock edge in case anything had been left behind. I expected a rabbit or a bird. I did not expect a joey, alone, in a place where no joey should ever be alone.

He was curled tight on his side in the short grass, knees drawn up, tail tucked, in almost exactly the shape he would have held inside the pouch. His fur was still the fine, soft kind that is not made for weather, and the wind was going straight through it. He was cold to the touch when I knelt, properly cold, and his eyes were half-closed, the lids fluttering without ever quite opening. Every few seconds a shiver ran through him and stopped, as if even shivering cost more than he had. Sometime during the panic of the scattered mob he had fallen or been jolted from his mother’s pouch, and she, frightened and running with the others, had not been able to turn back for him. On the open grassland he had nothing: no warmth, no milk, no cover from the hawks that circle those paddocks all day, and no way at all to move himself to safety.

I took off my fleece and folded it into a nest in the grass before I touched him again, because lifting a joey that cold straight against a human chest can shock his system. We slid him onto the fleece and wrapped him loosely, keeping his limbs in that curled position he chose for himself, and I held the bundle low and steady while my partner checked him over with gentle fingers. No breaks that we could feel, no wounds, just a small body running out of heat and hours past a feed. He made one sound, barely a sound at all, a soft exhale when the fleece closed around him and the wind finally stopped reaching his skin.

The complication found us on the walk back to the vehicle. Halfway across the paddock the mob, which we thought had moved on, came bounding back along the far fence line, spooked by a dog barking from the farmhouse, and for a moment the ground itself seemed to shake. The joey in my arms went rigid and then limp, his breathing turning fast and shallow, and I turned my back to the mob and crouched, making myself a wall, while my partner waved the mob wide with slow, calm arm movements. We stayed crouched in the grass until the last of them had passed and the paddock was quiet again, and only then did I feel his breathing ease back down under my hands, slow degree by slow degree.

At the wildlife shelter, the vet and the carers took over with the ease of people who have held a hundred joeys just like him. They warmed him gradually in a humidicrib lined with a cloth pouch, monitored his temperature until the shivering stopped and real sleep replaced that fluttering half-sleep, and fed him specialist milk a few drops at a time. By midnight his colour had improved and his tiny hands had begun to open and close in his sleep, reaching, even in dreams, for the walls of the only home he had ever known. Through the night, rangers and the farmer kept watch on the paddock, and near dawn a single female kangaroo was seen grazing alone at the fence line, returning again and again to the log where I had found him. The carers made the call to attempt a reunion while he was strong enough, wrapped and warm in a portable pouch sling.

I carried him back out at first light. We set the sling low near the log and stepped away, and the female approached in that careful, halting way, nose working, ears rotating. She bent to the sling, sniffed him deeply, and then, with a movement so practised it looked like breathing, she lowered herself and guided him home. He disappeared into the pouch in seconds, and her whole posture changed, settled, complete. She gave us one long look and bounded away at an easy pace, and the small bulge in the pouch rode safe against her as the grass closed behind her. We stood there until she was only a rhythm in the distance, and then not even that.

We named him Tui — the Vietnamese word for pouch. It seemed honest: the open grassland tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that grassland sometimes, at the hour when the wind combs everything one way and the light goes long and gold. I think about how a joey is built for exactly one place in the whole world, and how lost he is the moment that place is taken from him, curled in the grass in the shape of a home he no longer had. And someone happened to be sweeping that paddock edge before dark, close enough to notice the grass moving wrong. And someone happened to be crouching there as a wall while a mob thundered past, holding one small, warming bundle steady until the quiet came back.