The Serow in the Mud Pit

The rain had stopped the night before, but the mountain slope had not finished moving. Water still ran down the path, and somewhere below the trail a sound kept repeating, hoarse and broken, until our guide stopped and pointed down through the trees.

The pit was an old hollow in the slope below the cliff path, where runoff gathered and the clay held it. After the rain it had become a deep bowl of mud, its sides polished smooth, too steep and too slick for anything to climb. At the bottom stood a young serow, sunk to his belly in grey mud, his legs invisible, his coat coated and heavy, his body sagging as if the mud were the only thing holding him up. In a sense it was. It was also the thing killing his strength by degrees.

A serow is a wild goat-antelope, stocky and sure-footed, built for ground that would defeat most animals. This youngster had come down the wet slope in the rain, and the softened edge had given way under him and slid him into the hollow. Every attempt to climb had polished the sides smoother. I could read his night in the walls: long slide marks rising a body length and failing, and lower down, marks that grew shorter, until near the bottom they stopped altogether. He had not stopped because he was safe. He had stopped because there was nothing left to climb with.

His head hung low over the mud, ears drooping, eyes half-closed and glazed. His breathing came in short, tired grunts. When our guide called down softly, he did not startle, and a wild animal that does not fear voices at close range is at the end of itself. His legs trembled under the surface in small, constant efforts.

We worked from the top first, because going down carelessly would only have made a second rescue. My partner anchored ropes to two sound trees above the pit and checked them twice. I went down the rope on the least steep side, boots sinking at every step, and worked around the edge of the deep mud until I could reach him without standing in it. Up close his coat was cold under the coating, and his whole body shook in waves. I talked to him the whole time, low and steady, and slid a mat under his chest so the straps would not press bare against him.

The plan was patient. We would not haul him straight up a wall of grease. We would dig him a road. From above, the others cut steps into the least steep side, a rough ramp of notches packed with branches and matting for grip, while I stayed below keeping his head up. It took the better part of an hour. Then we passed the padded straps under his chest and hips, took the slack out slowly, and asked him to climb.

The complication came on his first real effort. He found the lowest step with one front hoof, gathered himself, and pushed. For one hopeful second the ramp held him. Then the step, cut into earth softer than we had judged, sheared away under his weight and he slid back down in a slow rush of mud, the straps catching him before the deep part took him again. He made a strangled sound that echoed off the pit walls, and then he hung in the straps, spent, mud to his chin. We did not pull. We lowered him gently back onto the mat and let him breathe, while the others rebuilt the ramp lower and wider, packing it with twice the branches and testing every step with their own full weight before we asked him for anything again.

The second climb took twenty minutes, and I counted it by his breathing. Step, rest. Step, rest. The straps took some of his weight and his own legs, freed one at a time from the sucking mud, did the rest, trembling at every notch. Halfway up his hind legs found real grip and something changed in him. His head came up. His ears turned. He pushed, and we hauled, and he came up over the lip of the pit in a final, staggering effort and stood on the wet grass, swaying, coated grey from chin to tail.

He lay down almost at once, because standing had cost him everything he had borrowed, and we let him lie while we poured clean water over the worst of the mud and checked him limb by limb. Nothing broken. Bruised, chilled, emptied out, but whole. The vet met us at the trailhead and kept him at the wildlife station for five days, on rest and good feed, while the stiffness left his legs. On the sixth morning we carried the crate back to the slope above the pit and opened the door. He walked out carefully, tested each leg, then climbed, steady and certain, up ground steep enough to make me dizzy, and did not look back.

We named him Vuc — the Vietnamese word for deep pit. It seemed honest: the mud pit tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that mountain slope sometimes, after heavy rain, when every hollow fills and every path runs with water. I think about how a creature built for cliffs can be undone by a bowl of mud no wider than a room, simply because the walls shine smooth and the night is long. And someone happened to be walking that trail at first light. And someone happened to hear a sound under the dripping trees, and stop, and look down. He climbs above it now.