The Kit in the Jar

The drought had been on the land for six weeks, and the yard behind the farmhouse was the colour of dust. The call came from the old woman who lived there, and she was apologising before she had finished explaining. Her grandson’s ferret kit, a young thing no bigger than a man’s forearm, had gone missing at midday and been found an hour later — not by sight. By a sound so faint she thought she had imagined it, coming up out of the big earthenware jar that stood in the shade of the wall.

The jar was waist-high, round-bellied, narrow at the mouth, of the kind used for storing water. It stood empty now, its glaze fired smooth as glass inside. The little ferret had climbed the rough outer wall after the cool and the shadow of it, slipped over the rim, and dropped to the bottom — and the bottom was a world with no way back. Inside, the walls curved away from any claw. He had tried. The fine scratches low on the glaze showed how long and how hard he had tried, and then he had stopped trying, because the heat at the bottom of that jar in the middle of a drought afternoon had taken everything out of him.

I lay flat on the ground and put my head to the mouth of the jar, and in the dusk down there I saw him: a small cream shape lying flat against the curved floor, stretched out the way animals lie when they are spending nothing at all. His sides moved in quick, shallow breaths. Now and then a trembling ran through him, small and helpless, and his eyes were half-closed, filmed and dull. He made no sound when I spoke. A ferret that age should have been all curiosity and teeth. This one had been cooked down to stillness, and in that heat, without water, he had very little time left in him.

The first thing we did cost nothing and mattered most: we shaded the jar. A sheet on poles went over it and the mouth, and the fierce work of the sun inside that jar stopped. Then came water, but not poured — a ferret that far gone can be harmed by kindness done clumsily. I lowered a cloth soaked in cool water down to him on a string, again and again, and let him find it. His tongue moved against the cloth, slow at first, then with a weak, steady greed, and a little of the dullness went out of his eyes. Only when he had drunk twice did we begin the harder work.

You do not tip a jar like that casually, and you do not reach down its throat and haul a spent animal up smooth glass. The plan was the ground itself: a bed of sacks and straw laid thick beside the jar, and hands — six of us — taking the weight together, rolling the great jar down onto its side by inches, onto the padding, so slowly it seemed not to move at all. It never dropped. It never jarred. As the mouth came level, the little ferret slid with infinite slowness down the curved floor toward the light, too weak to help, too weak to hinder.

The complication came at the very end, with his head and front paws already in the daylight. The mouth of the jar was narrower than its belly, narrower than his shoulders where they bunched as he slid, and he stopped fast against the rim — wedged, breathing fast, beginning to panic in small, exhausted jerks that could have hurt him against the hard edge. Everything stopped. We held the tilted jar perfectly still, three people on the body of it, not a tremor passing through our arms, while I worked water around his shoulders with my fingers, wetting the fur and the glaze, again and again, until the surfaces gave up their grip on each other. Then I eased him — a fraction, a rest, a fraction again — talking in the low, boring voice the whole while, until his shoulders came through the rim like a cork drawn kindly, and he lay in my hands in the open air.

He weighed almost nothing, and what weight there was felt like warm sand. The vet, who had come up from the town, checked him a long while there in the yard: no injury anywhere, only severe dehydration and exhaustion all the way through him. Water was given a little at a time, and then a little more, through the afternoon, while he slept in a shaded box lined with a damp cloth. By evening he had lifted his head and looked at the yard as if pricing it. By the next day he was exploring the box with intent. The jar got a lid that same day, a good wooden lid with a stone on top, and the old woman said it would stay lidded if she had to sit on it herself.

We named him Sanh — the Vietnamese word for earthenware. It seemed honest: the jar tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that yard sometimes, in the long dry months when the jars stand empty in every farmyard shade and the dust lies white on the paths. I think about how a small animal can go looking for nothing more than coolness and a shadow, and find a trap fired smooth and patient, waiting with its mouth open to the sky. And someone happened to be passing the jar on her way to the well. And someone happened to stop at a sound she almost did not believe she had heard, and to bend, and listen again, and put her ear to the rim of the dark.