The Koala Above the Water

The water had taken the forest floor by the time we reached it, and it was still rising. Rain had fallen for two days, and the creek through the eucalyptus forest had broken its banks in the night and spread brown and quiet between the trunks. We came in by flat-bottomed boat, moving slowly, because under that smooth surface there were rocks and fallen limbs waiting.

We heard him before we saw him. It came at long intervals, a hoarse, tired bark from somewhere ahead, then silence, then the sound again, weaker. The boatman cut the motor and let us drift, and we listened until the sound fixed itself to one tree standing alone in the flooded ground.

He was perhaps four metres above the surface, which meant the water had climbed faster than anyone expected. He clung to a fork where two branches met the trunk, his grey coat soaked dark and heavy, his ears flattened with rain, his body pressed into the bark as if he were trying to become part of the tree. Below him the water reached steadily up the trunk, carrying leaves past in a slow current. A lower branch already lay submerged beneath his feet.

Koalas are built to hold on, and he was holding on with everything he had, but holding on is work, and he had been doing it through a night of rain and rising water without food or rest. His head rested sideways against the trunk. His eyes were half-closed. Every so often his grip shifted and his whole body trembled in a long shudder, and then he caught himself and went still again, spending a little more of what was left. He did not call when he saw the boat. He only looked down at us, exhausted past sound.

We did not go straight to his tree. The boatman circled wide first, reading the current, and we tied off to a stronger tree nearby and worked the boat in against the trunk from the sheltered side, so the current pressed us toward him instead of pulling us away. I stood in the bow with the carrier open and lined with a dry towel, my partner keeping one hand on the trunk and one on my harness, and we let the boat settle. Only then did I reach toward him, slowly, speaking in the low, unhurried voice that works on animals who have nothing left for surprises.

The plan was simple. I braced a stout barked pole from the boat up to his fork, an easier road than wet bark, and held a fork of fresh leaf where he could smell it, and waited. He looked at the pole. He looked at the water. His grip loosened on the trunk by one paw, and my heart went up into my throat, and then that paw found the pole and held, and he began, paw by deliberate paw, to come down.

The complication came when he was halfway. A surge moved through the flooded forest, a slow push of water from the creek finding a new course, and the boat shifted under me by a hand’s breadth. The pole dropped with it. He froze mid-reach, splayed between the trunk and the pole, and made that hoarse sound again, sharp with fear, and his back paws scrabbled once on the wet bark and slipped. My partner hauled the boat back against the trunk and held it there with her whole weight on the rope, and I leaned out and got one gloved hand under his chest and simply held him, taking his weight myself until the boat steadied and the pole came back under his paws. For long seconds nobody moved except the water. Then his grip found the pole again, and he came down the rest of the way in a rush and folded himself into the carrier around the leaf fork, trembling so hard the whole boat felt it.

We backed the boat out into slower water, and nobody spoke until the tree stood behind us. At the bank, where the ground rose at last out of the flood, the vet examined him in the back of the vehicle with the heater running. Soaked to the skin, cold, dehydrated, his paws sore and his claws worn dull from a night of gripping wet bark, but nothing broken and his breathing clear. They dried him slowly, warmed him, gave him fluids, and he slept in the carrier for six hours without stirring, in the deep sleep of an animal who has finally been allowed to let go.

He stayed at the wildlife hospital for three days while the water fell. On the fourth morning we released him well above the flood line, into a tall living gum with strong forks and fresh leaf, and he climbed unhurried and certain, one reach after another, up into the canopy, where he settled into a fork and went to sleep in the sun.

We named him Vin — the Vietnamese word for holding on. It seemed honest: the rising water tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that eucalyptus forest sometimes, when rain falls for days and the creeks come up and the low ground disappears under brown water. I think about a grey shape in a fork of a tree, holding on through the night while the water climbed toward him in the dark. And someone happened to be out on that water at first light. And someone happened to hear a sound so tired it was almost not a sound at all, and to follow it tree by tree until it had a shape. He sleeps in dry forks now, above dry ground.