Bach on the Broken Branch

The call came in the middle of a windless afternoon, and the quiet in that eucalyptus forest was its own kind of warning. A walker had heard a koala crying somewhere in the trees along the creek track and had known the sound was wrong. I found the tree by following the cries, which came at long intervals, weak and rasping. At the base of the gum, my stomach dropped, because I could see exactly what had happened and how little time the branch was giving us.

He was stranded perhaps eight metres up, clinging to a dead limb that had half-snapped in some earlier storm and now hung at a steep, failing angle, held to the trunk by a splintered hinge of wood that creaked each time he shifted his weight. He was a young male, grey fur wind-ruffled and dusty, with the worn look of an animal holding on for a very long time. His claws were dug deep into bark that was itself peeling away from the dead wood. Every small movement sent a shiver through the limb, and flakes of bark sifted down through the still air. His eyes were half-closed. He would grip, and sway, and rest his forehead against the branch, and then startle and grip again. The living branches were now a long, impossible reach below him, and he knew it.

The detail I could not stop looking at was the hinge. A strip of fibrous wood along the top edge still held, stringy and pale, and it was bending. Slowly, visibly, it was bending. Dead gum wood does not warn you twice. If the hinge tore while he was on it, he would fall with the limb into the creek rocks below. So the rescue had to be a persuasion, not a capture, and it had to happen on a perch neither of us could trust.

We brought the elevated platform in along the creek track and set it up slow and steady, and I went up with a carrier lined with a towel and a fork of fresh leaf. The platform put me just below his level and a body’s length away. Up close I could hear his breathing, fast and shallow in a way that had nothing to do with exertion, and he was trembling through his shoulders. He had been spending what little he had left for hours, clutching dead wood in the heat.

I talked to him the whole time, low and unhurried, and worked the carrier into place beneath the limb so the open door faced him like an invitation. He watched me with one half-closed eye. The trick with koalas is to offer them something that looks more like a tree than the thing they are on. I braced a stout, barked pole from the carrier’s frame up to rest just beside his forepaws — a better branch than his branch, solid and still. Then I waited — the hardest skill in this work.

The complication arrived when he finally committed. He reached for my pole with one paw, then the other, and as his weight came off the dead limb, the hinge behind him tore partway with a crack I felt in my teeth. The limb dropped a hand’s breadth and hung there, and he froze mid-reach, splayed between the failing wood and my pole, crying out in a rough bark of terror. If he scrambled, he would fall. If he retreated, the limb would take the jolt and go. I leaned out further than the safety officer in my head allowed, got one gloved hand under his chest, and simply held his weight myself while I told him that I had him. He was heavier than he looked and rigid as timber. For three long seconds we stayed like that, and then he let go of the dead wood entirely and hauled himself, paw over paw, up my pole and straight into the carrier, where he folded himself around the leaf fork.

The dead limb fell twenty minutes later, while the vet was examining him in the shade of our vehicle. We all heard it go. Nobody said anything for a moment.

The vet found him dehydrated, overheated, his paws sore and his claws worn from gripping, but with nothing broken and his lungs clear. He spent two days at the wildlife hospital on fluids and rest, sleeping the deep, boneless sleep of the utterly spent. His release was at dawn on the third day, into a strong, living gum well away from the creek rocks, and he climbed the way koalas climb when everything is right — unhurried, certain, one deliberate reach after another — up into the leaves.

We named him Bach — the Vietnamese word for eucalyptus. It seemed honest: the broken branch tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that eucalyptus forest sometimes, on still afternoons when the heat sits in the trees and nothing moves. I think about a hinge of pale wood bending by millimetres over cold creek rocks, and about how the rescue came down to an animal deciding to let go of the thing that was killing him and trust the thing that was not. And someone happened to be walking the creek track that day. And someone happened to stop, and listen, and understand that the sound was wrong. He is up in the canopy now, asleep in the leaves he is named for, and the track below him is quiet.