The Squirrel at the Bottom of the Well

The old woman heard her before she saw her, which is how it usually goes with wells. She had crossed her country yard in the morning with a basket for the garden when a sound came up out of the ground itself, thin and worn, from the direction of the old abandoned well that stood capped with rotten boards behind the house. She lifted the boards and called down, and in the shaft of light below, at the very bottom, something small moved once and lay still.

She was a baby squirrel, only weeks old, who had fallen from the yard’s old tree or from the well’s own rim in the night and gone down thirty feet of smooth stone to the rubble at the bottom. The well was dry, long abandoned, and its walls were worked stone, slick and sheer, with no more purchase on them than glass. She lay flat on the broken rubble in the cold dark at the bottom, her grey coat dulled with dust, her tail curled limp beside her, her eyes half-closed. When the old woman called, one ear turned. Nothing else did. She had no strength left to climb, and climbing was impossible anyway, and some deep part of her had finished trying sometime in the night and settled her there to wait for whatever came next.

A dry well is a dangerous place to work, and we treated it as one. First we tested the air at the bottom with the meter, because old wells hold bad air the way they hold cold, and it came back clean. Then we set the tripod over the shaft and rigged the line, and I went down partway on the rope, braced against the stone, to see the last stretch with my own eyes. The shaft narrowed near the bottom, too tight for a rescuer to work in and turn. So the last distance would not be mine. It would belong to a soft cloth pouch on a line, lowered steady and slow, with me talking down the shaft the whole way so the dark would arrive with a voice in it.

We lowered the pouch an inch at a time. From my brace partway down I could watch it turn gently on the line as it passed me and went on into the deeper dark, toward the small still shape on the rubble. The old woman lay at the rim above with the lamp, and the yard was so quiet I could hear the line creak against the stone.

The complication came halfway through the descent. The pouch, swinging almost imperceptibly, brushed the shaft wall and knocked a loose stone out of its bed, and the stone fell past the pouch and struck the rubble below with a crack that echoed up the walls and set dust sifting down through the lamplight. We stopped everything. The pouch hung motionless while we counted the silence and listened for any sound from below, and I called down and waited until I saw, in the lamp’s edge, the small shape shift once, alive and unhurt by fortune alone. Then we re-rigged the line’s path with a redirect so it ran down the opposite wall, clear of the loose bed, and only then lowered again, slower than before, along the clean side. The pouch came to rest on the rubble beside her. Working the line from above, I tipped it gently until it lay open against her, and after a long minute the weakest instinct in the world did its work and she dragged herself, a fraction at a time, into the soft dark of it.

We brought her up the way she had gone down, but in reverse and in safety, the pouch rising slow and steady into the light. She lay in it limp and weightless, eyes still half-closed, dust in every fold of her, breathing in small, tired pulls. In my cupped hands at the rim she weighed less than the fear of losing her had.

The wildlife carer who took her checked her over that afternoon: no broken bones, only dust and bruising, dehydration, and a deep exhaustion in a body too young to have reserves at all. She stayed in care for weeks, in a warm box lined with cloth, taking milk and then soft food from a dropper, growing stronger a gram at a time, until the day she ran up the carer’s arm and onto a branch and made the whole room laugh. When she was strong and quick and properly wild again, we brought her back to the yard and opened the carrier beneath the old tree she had likely fallen from. She went up it without a pause, all the way to the high fork, and sat there washing her face in the sun, bright-eyed, as if the well had only been a rumour.

We named her Hoang — the Vietnamese word for abandoned. It seemed honest: the well tried to keep her, and lost.

I think about that country yard sometimes, when I pass an old capped well behind a farmhouse and wonder what sleeps beneath its boards. I think about thirty feet of smooth stone, and a fall in the dark, and a small life lying on cold rubble spending the last of itself on one thin sound at a time. And someone happened to be crossing that yard in the morning with a basket, on an errand she had done ten thousand times. And someone happened to lift rotten boards over an old shaft on nothing but a hunch, and lean into the dark, and call down.