The Calf in the Deep Mud

The call came from a forester walking the boundary track at first light. Something big was down in the old hollow at the forest edge, he said, and the herd was standing around it, and none of them could do a thing about it.

The hollow had been a wallow once. The rains had turned it into something else: a deep pit of grey mud, wide as a small room, its surface shining except where it had been churned to ruin. In the middle of it, sunk to his belly and beyond, stood a wild buffalo calf.

He was perhaps six months old, already heavy, already strong in the way buffalo are strong, and none of it was any use to him. Every time he heaved, the mud took him a fraction deeper. I could read his night in the churned ring around him, the marks growing weaker and closer together until near his body they were barely marks at all. He had been sinking by inches for hours, spending himself against ground that gave nothing back. Now he stood with his head low over the surface, his dark coat coated grey to the shoulders, his eyes half-closed and glazed. His breathing came in short, tired pulls. When he tried once more, while we watched, the mud sighed and settled him a finger’s width deeper, and he let his head sink and did not try again.

The herd stood on the firm ground above the hollow, a loose half-circle of adults, his mother among them, turning in a tight, helpless circle. She could not go down to him; the slope would have taken her too. She called to him in low sounds he answered, at first, and then stopped answering.

The suction alone would defeat you, and force could injure legs that had already spent the night fighting. So we dug him a way out. From the least steep side, the team cut the pit wall back into a long, shallow slope, and packed the slope with cut branches and dry earth so it would hold feet instead of swallowing them. It was slow, heavy work, done in turns.

When the slope was ready I went down to him on a rope, boots sinking at every step. Up close his coat was cold under the coating of mud, and his whole body trembled in long waves. I slid wide padded straps under his chest and behind his hips, working them through the mud by hand, and talked to him the whole time in a low, steady voice. He did not fight the straps. A wild calf that lets strange hands work under him without a struggle is a calf at the end of himself.

The straps ran up the slope to the winch on the vehicle. On a count, the winch took the strain, slow and steady, never jerking, and I stayed beside him as he found the slope with his front legs. He heaved. The straps held his weight at the edge of movement, and he climbed a step, and rested, and climbed another, his legs trembling at every effort.

The complication came halfway up, and it did not come from the mud. His mother decided the strangers were the danger. She came down off the firm ground toward the pit edge at a heavy trot, head low, bellowing, and every person on that slope froze. A buffalo mother does not bluff twice. Nobody ran. The ranger eased his vehicle slowly across between her and the pit, engine low, and stood his ground in it, and she stopped at the last moment, stamping and blowing. We held the calf exactly where he was, straps taut, nobody pulling, while the ranger talked and the vehicle stood, until her head came up and the charge went out of her, and she backed, step by step, to the herd. Only then did the winch turn again.

He climbed the rest of the way slowly. Step, rest. Step, rest. Near the top his hind legs found real grip on the packed branches and something changed in him: his head came up, his ears turned, and he pushed, and the winch hauled, and he came over the lip of the pit and stood on firm grass, swaying, coated grey from chin to tail.

He lay down almost at once, because standing had cost him everything he had borrowed. 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 checked him again and found a strong heart under a body that had simply run out. He rested an hour in the shade at the pit’s edge, drank, and got to his feet on his own. His mother closed the last distance herself, and ran her muzzle along him from shoulder to hip while he leaned into her side with his whole weight. Then the herd moved off into the trees, with him in the middle of it, walking stiffly.

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

I think about that forest edge sometimes, after heavy rain, when every hollow fills and the ground turns to something that keeps what it catches. I think about a calf sinking by inches through a whole night, and a mother circling above him on hard ground she dared not leave, calling to a son she could not reach. And someone happened to be walking that boundary track at first light. And someone happened to stop at a sound under the dripping trees, and to look down. He walks in the middle of the herd now.