The Lemur Who Held On

The rain in that forest did not fall so much as arrive, all at once, hammering the canopy until the whole world sounded like a drum. We were sheltering under a broad leaf roof at the trail’s edge, waiting out the storm with two local guides, when one of them touched my arm and pointed up into the dripping green. Something small was moving on a low branch over the path, or trying not to move, and even through the rain I could see it was losing.

She was a baby lemur, no bigger than my hand and wrist together, clinging to a low branch with all four limbs wrapped around the wet bark. Her fur was soaked through and dark, plastered flat to a body that seemed far too small underneath it. Lemur babies ride their mothers. They do not sit alone on branches in storms. Somewhere in the panic of the rain, with a troop moving fast for cover, she had been left on that branch, or had climbed there and could climb no further, and now the branch was her whole world. She held it the way a drowning swimmer holds a rope. Her eyes were half-closed against the rain. Every few seconds her grip slipped a fraction on the slick bark, and she caught herself with a small, desperate tightening, and each catch was weaker than the one before.

That was the arithmetic of her trap. She could not climb up to the canopy shelter; she was too young, too cold, too tired. She could not climb down; the ground in a storm is a river of mud and things that hunt. She could only hold on, and holding on is work, and she was running out of it. When a gust shook the branch she made a thin sound, not quite a cry, and pressed her face into the bark, and her whole body trembled with the effort of staying exactly where she was.

We moved slowly, because a startled baby lets go, and letting go was the one thing she could not afford. My partner held our big umbrella over the branch, and the change when the rain stopped hitting her was heartbreaking. Her shoulders dropped a fraction. Her breathing slowed a little, as if her body was spending its first spare strength on simply being dry over one small patch of bark. I climbed onto a sturdy crate beneath the branch, bringing my chest level with her, speaking the whole time in the low, boring voice frightened animals seem to trust. Then I offered her what she needed most: something warm and solid that was not a branch. I laid my forearm, wrapped in a dry fleece sleeve, alongside the bark, and waited.

The complication came just as she decided to trust it. She reached for my arm with one hand, then a second, when a crack of thunder rolled over the canopy and the troop above us exploded into alarm calls. She startled hard. Her remaining grip on the branch slid, and for one terrible second she hung from my forearm by both hands alone, feet scrabbling at empty air, crying in earnest now. I did not grab at her. Grabbing is how small bones get hurt and small animals let go. I locked my arm where it was, braced against the branch, and let her climb me, hand over hand, up the fleece, until she reached my chest and fastened herself into the fold of the carrier sling, burying her wet face against the warmth. Only then did I breathe.

We took her down under the umbrella, where we dried her with absurd gentleness, cloth after cloth, until her trembling began to ease. At the field station the vet checked her on a warmed towel: heart strong, limbs sound, no injury, only cold, hunger and exhaustion. They warmed her slowly, fed her small amounts at careful intervals, and kept her in a cloth-lined box that mimicked, as well as humans can manage, the shape of being held. She slept for hours in a tight curled ball, and woke reaching for something to hold, and the carers gave her fleece and time.

For two days the guides tracked the troop, which had not gone far, held close by their own missing. On the third morning, in clear light after rain, we carried her back to the trees at the trail’s edge where her mother had been seen calling and searching the lower branches. We set her, warm and fed and gripping strongly now, on a dry branch within her mother’s line of travel, and stepped far back. The female came through the branches in that floating, weightless way, stopped, stared, and then gathered the baby against her belly in one motion, and the little hands that had held a branch so desperately fastened instead into their rightful place. They were gone into the green within a minute.

We named her Bam — the Vietnamese word for clinging. It seemed honest: the storm tried to keep her, and lost.

I think about that rainforest sometimes, when rain comes down hard anywhere and the paths turn to mud and everything small goes quiet and holds on. I think about a pair of hands wrapped around wet bark, slipping by fractions, buying time in the only currency a baby has. And someone happened to be sheltering under that leaf roof when the storm passed over. And someone happened to look up, instead of down at the mud, in the one minute when looking up still mattered.