The Baby at the Top of the Pole

The children found him first. For two days, the woman who ran the noodle stall at the corner told us, the baby monkey had been at the top of the electricity pole at the end of the street, and for two days the whole neighbourhood had been taking turns looking up.

He was very young, a baby monkey with a thin grey-brown coat and a tail longer than his body, and he had climbed the pole the way frightened young animals climb anything: up, because up is what fear knows. Two days at the top had undone him. He sat hunched on the cross-arm beside the insulators, both arms wrapped around the pole, his small body pressed flat against the wood. His head hung low. Every few minutes a trembling ran through him, visible even from the street, and once or twice an hour he made a thin, hoarse crying sound that set every dog on the street barking. He had not eaten in two days. There was nothing to drink up there but weather. His eyes, when the light caught them, were half-closed and dull.

He could not climb down. Whatever had driven him up had long gone, but the way down had become the frightening thing: forty feet of smooth pole, slick with two nights of damp, and his strength spent on holding on. He knew, in the way animals know, that his arms would not last the descent, so he stayed, and starved, and shook, in plain sight of a hundred windows.

Nothing could be done until the power was off. The utility crew confirmed the line dead and earthed it in front of us, twice, before anyone touched wood. Only then did the bucket lift rise, with me in it, a carrier lined with a soft blanket on the floor beside my boots, and pieces of banana in my pocket, because hunger had been his jailer for two days and might now be our ally.

I had the operator take me up slowly, on the far side of the pole, and stop the bucket a little below the cross-arm so I would not come at him from underneath like something hunting him. He watched me rise with those half-closed eyes and did not move. That stillness was not trust. I set a piece of banana on the cross-arm, within reach, and waited. His nose moved. He did not let go of the pole, but he leaned, an inch, and took it, and ate the way the starved eat, fast and joyless, both hands shaking.

We did it piece by piece, banana by banana, while I talked in the low, boring voice that tells a frightened animal nothing is about to happen quickly. On the fourth piece he shifted one hand off the pole to reach. On the sixth, he stepped, trembling violently, from the cross-arm onto the rim of the open carrier, and stopped there, swaying.

The complication came as he finally committed. A gust of wind moved through the wires and the pole hummed, and somewhere below a motorcycle backfired like a shot. He panicked all at once and lunged, not into the carrier but sideways, scrambling back toward the pole with one hand, and for one terrible second he hung by a single arm over the street, his body swinging, his other hand scrabbling at the wood and finding nothing. I did not grab at him. A grabbed limb is a broken hold. I set my forearm flat along his swing, braced it hard against the carrier rim, and let his scrabbling hand find my sleeve and close on it. We stayed exactly like that, his whole weight on one small grip on my arm, until the swinging slowed. Then, an inch at a time, I drew him against my chest, folded the blanket over him, and settled him into the carrier and closed the door with hands that were not steady.

The ride down took less than a minute. He did not fight the carrier. At the ground he sat in the blanket and drank water from a shallow dish in long, careful laps, and then slept where he sat, in the middle of the crowd’s soft applause.

At the wildlife station the vet checked him over: thin and dehydrated, paws rubbed sore from two days of gripping the pole, his coat full of grime, but no injury and his heart and lungs sound. They fed him small meals and let him sleep in a quiet cage with branches low to the ground. On the third day, word came that a troop had been ranging the orchards beyond the last houses. We carried him there at dawn and opened the carrier under the trees. He went up the first trunk slowly, stopping to look back once, and then the leaves took him, and from above there came a chatter that sounded, to all of us, like an answer.

We named him Cot — the Vietnamese word for pole. It seemed honest: the high pole tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that street sometimes, in the evening, when the wires hum and the whole neighbourhood is out under them. I think about how a small life can be stranded in the most public place in the world, above everyone’s heads, starving in sight of a hundred kitchens, because the way down is the one thing fear will not allow. And someone happened to be selling noodles on that corner for two days, watching. And someone happened to call, at last, instead of assuming someone else already had. He sleeps in green leaves now, off the wire and out of the wind.