The Baby in the Smoke Tree

The call came from a ranger watching the fire line from the ridge road, in the hour when the wildfire had settled into the lower forest and the smoke lay over the canopy like a low sky. Through his glasses he had seen something small on a bare branch at the edge of the burn, a shape that coughed. He went down the slope and heard it clearly: a thin, soft coughing, over and over, from a lone tree.

He was a baby capuchin monkey, no more than a year old, stranded on a high branch of that tree. His troop had fled the smoke hours before, and somewhere in the grey confusion he had lost them, or been left at the one tree whose branches met nothing. He sat hunched on the branch with his tail curled tight around it, his small dark body pressed flat to the wood.

There were no flames anywhere near him. The fire itself was a long way off, down in the gullies. What held him was the smoke: thick, drifting banks of it that closed around the tree and thinned and closed again. His breathing was quick and shallow, broken by the soft coughing the ranger had heard. His eyes were half-closed and streaming. Every muscle in him trembled in long waves. Twice he tried to climb down, got one handhold lower, and climbed back up, coughing harder, because the smoke lay thicker below him than above.

He could not come down. A baby monkey descends by strength and by sight, and he had neither left: his strength was spent on holding the branch and breathing, and the smoke had taken the sight of every handhold below. He stayed, and shook, and coughed into the grey.

We came in with masks and goggles, two of us, carrying an extension ladder, a light working platform, and a padded carrier with a blanket inside it and pieces of banana and mango in a cloth bag. We set the ladder against the trunk where the smoke was thinnest and built the platform out beside his branch, level with it and close, so that when he moved it would be a step across, not a leap. I went up first, an arm’s length below him, and stopped there, and let him look at me until the looking stopped frightening him.

Then I worked the way you work with anything young and afraid: by inches and by appetite. I set a piece of banana on the platform edge and took my hand away. He did not move. I waited, saying nothing, because stillness was worth more than comfort. On the second piece his nose moved. On the third he leaned, trembling violently, one hand still locked around the branch, and ate fast and joyless, coughing between mouthfuls. Piece by piece I laid a trail of fruit to the open carrier, and piece by piece he followed it, until he stood swaying at the carrier mouth.

The complication came as he was halfway in. The wind shifted above the canopy and the smoke closed in far thicker than before, a grey wall that took the platform, the ladder, and the ground out of the world entirely. He froze half in and half out of the carrier, coughing hard, ready to bolt back to the branch he could no longer see. I did not reach for him. I crouched on the platform, folded myself small and absolutely motionless beside the carrier, one hand resting on its half-closed door, and held that stillness while the smoke pressed in and the minutes went by and his coughing, slowly, eased. When the bank thinned at last, he looked at me once, and stepped the rest of the way in, and I closed the door with hands that were not steady.

The ride down took care and time, the carrier held level against my chest. At the ground he drank a little water and slept in the blanket, in air that was almost clean.

At the wildlife station the vet checked him slowly: smoke deep in his small lungs, eyes sore and streaming, his coat grey with ash, no burns anywhere, and exhaustion all the way through him. They kept him in a quiet room with clean air, fed him small meals, and let him sleep in a cage with low branches. He coughed for two days and then less, and by the end of the week he was climbing and scolding the keepers at feeding time, which the vet called the surest sign there is. When the fire was out and the rains had washed the ash away, we carried him to a green part of the forest where a capuchin troop ranged, and opened the carrier under the trees. Two of the troop came down to the lower branches at the sound of the carrier door, and he went to them hand over hand, straight up into the green, scolding all the way.

We named him Chay — the Vietnamese word for burning. It seemed honest: the smoke tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that forest sometimes, when smoke from a distant burn drifts over the ridge and the light goes the colour of old tea. I think about how a young life can be stranded in the middle of his own home, on a branch he has climbed a hundred times, because the air itself has become a thing he cannot cross. And someone happened to be watching that fire line from the ridge road. And someone happened to look through the smoke a moment longer than the smoke wanted, and to see a small shape coughing on a bare branch.