The Civet Beside the Dry Tree

The drought had been going on for weeks when we walked the forest edge at midday, checking the places where animals come down looking for water that is no longer there. The ground was cracked in pale plates. The grass had gone the colour of straw. Beside a dead tree, in the thin shade of its bare branches, something small lay so flat and so still that I took it for a fallen branch until I saw one ear move, weakly, against the flies.

He was a baby civet, a striped civet, no more than a few months old, and he was lying flat on his side in the dust at the roots of the dry tree. His coat was dusty and dull, the dark stripes along his back faded under a film of pale dirt. His mouth hung slightly open, dry at the edges, and his tongue was dry too. His eyes were half-closed and barely flickered when our shadows fell across him. Every breath was a small, tired effort that lifted his ribs a little and let them fall again. Once he tried to lift his head toward us, and it sank back into the dust before it had properly risen.

He had become separated from his mother somewhere in the dry forest edge, in the long search for water that drought forces on everything. Somehow he had fallen behind, and had made his way to the one landmark he could reach, the dry tree, and there his strength had run out. He was too young to find water on his own, too weak to travel to it if he had known where it was, and too exposed to survive another afternoon of that sun. His small paws twitched once in the dust, as if he were still walking in his sleep, and then lay still.

We did not pick him up straight away. An animal that far gone can be harmed by kindness done too fast. My partner rigged the tarp between two branches above him, so the first thing that changed for him was the sun leaving his body. I knelt beside him and laid a folded cloth under his head, and he did not resist. His breathing sounded dry and faint, and his ears felt hot. I put a few drops of water on my fingertip and touched them to his mouth, and waited, and did it again. His tongue moved, slowly, once. That small movement decided everything. He was still fighting, in the only way he had left.

We gave him water the slow way, a few drops at a time, with long pauses, the way the vet on the phone directed. Too much too fast would have been dangerous for a body that empty. Between pauses we laid a damp cloth along his back to bring his temperature down gently. He lay through all of it without lifting his head, his breathing gradually deepening. When his swallowing was steady, we slid a towel under him and lifted him, towel and all, into the shaded carrier.

The complication came on the walk back to the vehicle. Halfway along the forest edge the wind shifted and dropped, the heat thickened, and his breathing, which had been easing, turned fast and shallow again inside the carrier. His small body began to tremble and then went worrying still. We stopped at once in the shade of a standing tree, set the carrier down flat, lifted the damp cloth away and fanned air gently across him with the tarp edge while we dripped two more drops of water onto his mouth. Nobody spoke. For a long minute the only sound was his breathing, thin as thread. Then it slowed, deepened, and steadied again, and one striped paw flexed against the towel. Only then did we walk on, slower, stopping at every patch of shade.

At the wildlife clinic the vet examined him on a cooled mat. No wounds, no broken bones. Severe dehydration, heat exhaustion, and a body that had used nearly everything it had. They gave him fluids a little at a time, kept him in a dark, quiet pen, and fed him small amounts only when he was fully awake. By evening he had lifted his head and looked around with clear, annoyed eyes. By the second day he was eating eagerly and trying to climb the pen, which the vet called the best possible sign.

We kept him five days, until he was strong and restless. On the fifth evening, near dusk, we carried the carrier back to the forest edge, well away from the dry tree, to dense low cover near a watercourse that still held damp earth. I opened the door and stepped back. He came out slowly, nose working, ears turning, and then slipped low and quick into the undergrowth, stripes merging into shadow, exactly as a civet should go.

We named him Van — the Vietnamese word for stripes. It seemed honest: the drought tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that dry tree sometimes, whenever a long hot season cracks the ground and empties the waterholes and the forest edge goes quiet at midday. I think about how a small life can come down to a patch of thin shade and a mouth too dry to cry with, in a place where almost nothing passes in the heat of the day. And someone happened to be walking that forest edge at midday, checking the dry places. And someone happened to look twice at what seemed to be a fallen branch, and to kneel down in the dust beside it instead of walking on.