Between Two Rocks

The stream gorge was loud with water when we reached it, white water pushing between boulders, spray hanging in the cold air, and over the noise I could hear a sound that did not belong there. It was a hoarse, broken bleating, weaker each time it came. A fisherman downstream had reported it at dawn and stayed to wave us in, because the sound had been fading for hours and he feared it would stop before help arrived.

We found the young serow a hundred metres upstream, where the gorge narrowed and two enormous rocks leaned together over the water. A serow is a wild goat-antelope, stocky and sure-footed, built for cliffs that would break other animals. This youngster had tried to squeeze through the gap between the rocks, perhaps taking the short way to the grazing above, and the gap had taken him and kept him.

He was wedged at the chest and hips, front half through, back half not, suspended almost clear of the ground with his hooves scrabbling at wet stone and finding nothing. He could not go forward because the rocks narrowed. He could not back out because his ribs had swollen with hours of straining and his legs had no purchase. Every struggle only settled him deeper, like a cork in a bottle. By the time we reached him, he had mostly stopped struggling.

His head hung low between the stones, ears drooping, eyes half-closed and glazed with exhaustion. His dark coat was soaked and streaked with pale rock dust, worn and filthy from hours against the stone. His breathing came in short, tired grunts. When I spoke to him he did not even startle, and a wild animal that does not fear a human voice at close range is at the very end of its strength.

We worked from both sides. My partner waded into the cold stream and braced herself where she could reach his hindquarters, while I climbed onto the downstream rock and worked from the front. The danger was plain. If we simply pulled, we could crack a rib. If we levered carelessly, a shift of a few centimetres the wrong way could crush him. The rocks could not be moved by any strength we had. So we would have to move him, slowly, along the exact path he had entered, while padding every surface his body touched.

First we slid flattened foam matting and folded blankets into the gap, working them down along his ribs and hips with flat hands, until stone no longer touched him directly. Then, with a long pry bar padded at the end, I eased the smallest pressure against the upper rock, not to move it but to take its bite off his chest by a fraction, while my partner kept steady backward pressure on his hips, rocking him gently, a centimetre at a time.

He helped once, near the start, a weak scrabbling push with his front hooves that moved him perhaps two centimetres, and after that he simply hung in our hands and let us do it, his head resting against the foam, eyes closing and opening slowly.

The complication came when we were nearly there. His left hind hoof slipped off the wet ledge and his whole weight dropped suddenly, jamming him tighter at an angle, and a strangled cry tore out of him that echoed off the gorge walls. For a moment nobody moved. I held the bar steady with my shoulder shaking, terrified that easing off would let the rock settle back onto him. My partner got her forearm under his belly in the cold water and took his weight herself while I reset the padding and changed the angle of the pull. Her arm was numb and blue by the time his hoof found the ledge again.

After that we went slower than slow. Rock, rest. Rock, rest. Letting him breathe, until at last his hips cleared the narrowest point with a soft sigh of cloth on stone and he slid backwards into my partner’s arms and the shallows at the edge of the stream.

He lay in the shallows trembling all over, too spent to stand, and we stayed crouched around him so the current would not take him. I poured stream water over the rock dust in his coat and checked him limb by limb while my partner held his head clear. Nothing broken. He was bruised, chilled, and utterly empty, but whole.

The vet met us at the trailhead with the transport crate. She checked his ribs, his heart, and his temperature, then kept him at the wildlife station for six days on rest and good feed while the swelling went down. On the seventh morning we carried the crate back to the grazing slope above the gorge and opened the door. He walked out carefully, tested each leg, then climbed, steady and certain, up ground so steep it made me dizzy to watch.

We named him Khe — the Vietnamese word for gorge. It seemed honest: the two rocks tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that stream gorge sometimes, the white water and the leaning rocks and how a gap that had stood open for a thousand years became a trap for exactly one animal on exactly one night. Nobody passes that way. Nobody would have heard him by morning. And someone happened to be fishing downstream at dawn. And someone happened to stay, and listen, and refuse to leave until help came up the trail.