The Baboon on the Dead Branch

The storm had passed an hour before we drove out onto the savanna, but the grass still lay flat and shining, and every track held water. A ranger had radioed in about a lone tree, and something small in it that had been calling since first light. By the time we reached it, the calling had thinned to a hoarse, tired bark that came at long intervals, as if each one had to be saved up for.

He was perhaps fifteen feet up, in the fork of a dead branch on a lone acacia that the storm had stripped of what little leaf it had left. A baby baboon, no more than a few months old, his dark coat soaked through and plastered flat, both arms and both legs wrapped around the bare wood. His whole body shook in waves that I could see from the ground. Below him the branch dropped to mud and standing water. Above him there was nothing but grey sky.

Somewhere in the worst of the night the troop had moved, the way troops move in a storm, fast and low and together, and he had not kept up. He had done the one thing a baby baboon knows to do. He had climbed, and he had held on. But the branch was dead and smooth and wet, and getting down it was a different problem from getting up it in a panic, and by morning his arms were too spent for either. His eyes were half-closed. His head rested sideways against the bark. When he called, it was a worn, rasping sound that ended before it properly began.

We did not climb the tree. A dead acacia in wet ground will not forgive weight in the wrong place, and a frightened baby, reached for, will climb higher or let go, and either answer could have ended him. Instead we made the ground beneath him safe and waited, because waiting, done properly, is also rescue work.

My partner and two rangers stretched a broad, soft blanket between them under the branch, held low and loose, the way you would hold a sheet to catch something fragile. I stood to one side with a warmed towel inside my jacket and a carrier ready, and talked to him in a low, steady voice. There was nothing to lure him with. A baboon that age wants one thing only, and we did not have her. What we had was patience, and a soft place to land.

It took the better part of an hour. He called twice more, weaker each time. He looked down at us and looked away. Once he loosened one hand and reached a few inches down the branch, and my breath stopped, and then he caught himself and clung harder than before, trembling all over. The blanket crew did not shift or speak. The sun came out at last, and heat began to rise off the wet grass.

The complication came when he finally chose. Perhaps the sun warmed his back a little, or the strength simply ran out of the waiting. He began to come down, hand under hand, an inch at a time, his limbs shaking so hard the dead branch ticked against his chest. Halfway down he stopped, hung by both arms with his feet scrabbling at smooth bark that gave him nothing, and cried out once, and slipped.

He fell perhaps six feet. The blanket took him the way it was meant to, sinking deep and soft between the rangers’ hands, no bounce, no jolt, and he lay in the middle of it blinking up at us, too stunned and too spent to fight, his little hands opening and closing on empty air. I had the warmed towel around him in seconds. He weighed almost nothing. Against my chest he shook and shook, and then, slowly, the shaking eased into shivering, and the shivering into stillness, and he slept the way exhausted young things sleep, all at once and completely.

At the field station the vet checked him over on a warmed mat. No broken bones from the fall, no injury the storm had left that we could find. Only cold, hunger, dehydration, and the deep exhaustion of a small body that had held on through a whole night of weather. They warmed him by degrees, gave him fluids, and fed him small amounts when he woke, and by evening he was sitting up and complaining at the world.

The troop was the real medicine, and the rangers knew where it had gone. On the second morning we carried him in the carrier to the ridge where the troop was feeding, and set it down in the grass and opened the door and stepped well back. He came out slowly, looked around, and called once, loud and clear. An adult female broke from the group at a run, and he went to her and was gathered up against her chest as if the storm had been a rumour.

We named him Ben — the Vietnamese word for enduring. It seemed honest: the storm tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that savanna sometimes, after rain, when the grass lies flat and shining and the lone trees stand over standing water. I think about a dead branch, and two small arms, and a night of holding on that nobody saw. And someone happened to be crossing that grassland at first light. And someone happened to hear a sound that was nearly finished, and to stop, and to look up into a bare tree instead of driving on. He rides his mother’s back now, in the middle of the troop, where the small ones belong.