The Voice at the Bottom of the Pit

We were three hours into the old forest when the guide stopped walking, and in that country a guide who stops has heard something the rest of us have not. Under the drip of the canopy there was another sound, low and worn, coming up out of the ground itself: a cry, repeated at long intervals, each one thinner than the last. We followed it off the trail until the ground simply ended.

The pit was old, a sinkhole where rain had hollowed the soft earth under the roots and the floor had fallen in. It dropped perhaps four metres, straight down, into a bowl of packed clay. The walls were smooth as the inside of a pot, polished by water, dry earth crumbling down them at any movement above. And at the bottom, in the thin light that reached that far, sat a baby monkey.

He was a red-faced macaque, young enough that his ears still looked too large for his head, his pink face dusty and streaked. The pit had kept him. Around the walls the clay was scratched in frantic arcs, each set a little lower than the last. He had climbed at those walls for hours. Smooth clay gives nothing back. Every hold he clawed had crumbled and slid him down again, and the effort had cost him everything he owned.

When our shadows crossed the opening he looked up, and the hope in that small face was a hard thing to see. He cried once, then sagged back against the wall, spent by it. His eyes were half-closed. His whole body trembled in long waves. He tried to rise and reach toward us, but his arms shook too badly to hold his weight, and he sat down again in the dust, breathing hard, his head hanging.

A macaque that age belongs against his mother’s chest, in the troop. Alone in that hole he belonged to nobody, and the forest, which is not cruel, only indifferent, had already forgotten him.

We worked from the rim, and carefully, because the lip of that pit was as ready to crumble as the walls. My partner anchored our ropes to a sound tree back from the edge, and we laid a mat at the rim so our weight would not break the lip down onto him. No one would climb down after him; a man in that bowl would fill it and frighten him half to death. Instead we built him a way up that he could choose himself.

We lowered our rescue platform on two ropes: a broad pad of split bamboo and canvas, padded deep, with a low rim, more raft than cage. On it we set pieces of soft fruit, because hunger speaks louder than fear. We lowered it to the pit floor near where he sat, then went still and waited, talking now and then in low voices so the silence had something ordinary in it.

He stared at the platform. He crawled to it once, sniffed the fruit, and retreated to the wall. Waiting, done right, is rescue work, and we let the minutes go by until hunger did what hands could not. He came again, took a piece of fruit in both hands, and sat on the pad to eat it, too tired even to be suspicious.

The complication came a metre into the lift. As the platform rose it swung toward the wall, and one corner caught on a root knuckle jutting from the clay, and tipped. He panicked then, all at once, scrambling to the high side with a scream that echoed off the pit walls, and for one terrible moment he was sliding toward the edge with four metres of empty air beneath his hands. Nobody pulled. My partner held his rope dead still and I hauled only on mine, walking the swing back toward the centre of the shaft a hand’s width at a time, talking down into that hole, until the platform levelled and he crouched flat in its middle, shaking so hard the ropes hummed.

We lifted him the rest of the way at a pace with no name, it was so slow. At the rim we set the platform on the mat and stepped back, and he sat among his fruit for a minute, blinking in the green light, before he climbed stiffly out and drank, in long laps, from a broad leaf of water.

The wildlife vet met us at the trailhead and checked him over. No broken bones from the fall. Scraped palms, bruising, dehydration, and exhaustion down to the last of himself. They kept him at the forest station two days, until the trembling was gone. His troop had been sighted along the ridge, and on the third morning we carried the open crate to the trees below their feeding ground and stepped far back. He went up the first trunk in a rush, stopped once to look down at us, and then the branches took him, and a chatter from above answered him.

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

I think about that forest sometimes, when I walk old trails under the green light. I think about how many holes the earth holds open in the dark, and how a small life can fall into one and cry at walls that slide him home again every time. And someone happened to be walking that trail with a guide who listened. And someone happened to stop at a sound most walkers would have taken for a bird, and follow it off the trail.