THE FALL

A koala on the ground is something wrong. That’s the first thing they teach you. Koalas belong in the trees — sleeping in the forks, waking at dusk, living their whole slow lives above the forest floor. So when the call came from a woman who’d been walking her dog through the eucalyptus forest at first light, I already knew, before she finished the sentence, that I was going to find something that would stay with me.

“He’s just lying there,” she said. “Under the big gum tree. He hasn’t moved. I think he’s a baby.”

I drove out with a soft blanket folded on the passenger seat, a carrier, and a thermos of water I kept out of habit. The forest was quiet in the way it only is early — cool, grey-green, smelling of eucalyptus oil and damp earth. My boots crunched through dry leaves, and my chest camera swung a little with each step, and I remember thinking: please just be sleeping. Please just be a deep sleeper.

He wasn’t sleeping.

The baby koala was curled at the base of the tallest tree in that stand, half-buried in leaf litter, as if the fall had folded him into the ground. His grey fur was matted with dirt and dust and bits of bark. One round ear twitched, weakly, at nothing. His eyes were half-closed. When I knelt down beside him, he didn’t flinch, didn’t try to crawl away, didn’t do any of the things a healthy wild baby should do when a giant leans over him.

He just lay there, breathing in small, tired sips of air.

“Oh, little mate,” I said, very quietly. “How long have you been down here all alone?”

Sometime in the night, I guessed — a gust of wind, a branch that gave way, a small paw reaching for a hold that wasn’t there. Koala babies fall more often than people think. The lucky ones land soft and get found fast. He had landed in leaves, which was lucky. But he’d been down there for hours, getting colder, getting weaker, waiting in the one place where nothing in his world made sense.

A koala joey spends its first year of life within arm’s reach of its mother — first in the pouch, then riding on her back or her belly, learning which leaves, which branches, which forks are safe. A baby alone on the ground has lost all of that at once: the warmth, the transport, the map of the world. He had nothing left to do down there but wait and get weaker, and hope that the thing that found him first was kind.

I spread the blanket beside him and slid my hands under his small body the way you’d lift something made of glass and feathers — and he weighed almost nothing, and the moment I raised him against my chest, his claws came out and caught, instinctively, at my shirt.

Holding on. Even half-asleep, even exhausted to the bone, that baby knew how to hold on.

I wrapped the blanket around him and cradled him in the crook of one arm, and he made a sound — not a cry, exactly, more like the ghost of one, a tiny creaking sigh — and then he went still, his face pressed into the blanket, his whole body rising and falling with mine.

From the bottle cap I offered him water, a few drops at a time, the way the wildlife carers taught me. His tongue came out, slow and uncertain, and lapped. Once. Twice. A third time, stronger. Somewhere inside that small, dusty body, something had decided to keep going.

“Good boy,” I told him. “Good, brave boy. We’re nearly there. You’re nearly safe.”

I carried him out of the forest in my arms the whole way — I couldn’t bear to put him in the carrier, not yet, not while he was still clinging to my shirt like I was the first branch that had ever held. The woman who’d called was waiting by her car with her dog sitting politely at her heel, and when she saw his little grey face over the edge of the blanket, she put both hands over her mouth.

“He’ll be alright, won’t he?” she asked.

“He’s got people now,” I said. “That’s the biggest part of alright.”

At the wildlife hospital, the carers took him the way you take a newborn — all gentleness and quiet competence. They weighed him, warmed him, and settled him into a soft pouch lined with fleece, with a bundle of fresh eucalyptus leaves within reach of his nose. One of the nurses told me he’d bruised nothing that time and rest wouldn’t mend. He was just a baby who’d had the worst night of his life, and survived it.

Before I left, I stood at the door of the nursery and watched him sleep — truly sleep this time, deep and safe, one small paw curled tight around the fleece, holding on.

Three days later I rang the hospital for news, the way I always do and pretend I don’t. He was awake at dusk like a proper koala, the nurse said. Eating gum leaves with real enthusiasm. He’d climbed — carefully, under supervision — to the lowest fork of the nursery enclosure’s little tree, and sat there looking extremely pleased with himself. When he’s stronger, they’ll take him back to his own forest, and let him choose a tree of his own.

That’s the thing about the smallest rescues. They don’t ask for much. Just a pair of hands at the bottom of the fall, and somebody willing to be held onto.