Monkey in the Undergrowth

We almost walked past him, and I have thought about that more than anything else we did that day. We were walking a transect line in the rainforest after a night of wind, checking the troop’s range with a ranger, when he stopped and held up one hand. Under the dripping and distant calls there was a nearer sound, small and uneven. A whimper that started, failed, started again lower.

It came from a thicket where a fallen limb had crushed the bushes flat and the undergrowth had closed over the wreckage. I got down on my knees in the wet leaf litter and parted the stems with both hands, and there he was, deep in the green tangle, at the bottom of everything. A baby squirrel monkey, no bigger than my forearm, lying on his side on a mat of broken stems. His golden-grey fur was soaked and dark with rain and mud. One small hand still gripped a twig, the way a falling baby grips whatever the air offers. His eyes were half-closed. His breathing was quick and shallow, and every few breaths his whole body trembled in a wave that spent him further.

Squirrel monkeys live in the branches the way fish live in water. The low undergrowth is not their country. He had fallen, the ranger thought, when wind took the dead limb his troop was crossing in the night — fallen through leaves that slowed him just enough to save his bones, into a green well he could not climb out of. He had lain there through the coldest part of the night, wet through, calling into a forest full of louder sounds, and by morning the strength for climbing had gone out of his limbs entirely. When I spoke, his eyes opened a fraction and his fingers tightened once on the twig. That was all he had left to answer with.

We did not reach straight in. A frightened baby primate, even a spent one, can bite from reflex, and a flinch could have driven him deeper into the stems. The ranger cut an opening from the side, stem by stem, letting the cut pieces fall outward. I cleared a hollow around him with my fingers until I could see all of him — no limb pinned, nothing broken that showed, only a small body curled around its own fading warmth. I warmed my gloved hands against my neck first. Then I slid them under him and lifted him out the way you lift something sleeping that you must not wake badly.

He weighed almost nothing, and he did not fight. He turned his face into my forearm, hid it against the fabric, and held on with one hand in a grip so weak I could feel it fading and returning like a pulse. We carried him out to the path wrapped in a dry cloth inside my jacket, where the warmth of my own body could do slowly what the forest floor had been undoing all night.

The complication came when we tried to check him on the ranger’s groundsheet. In the open air his trembling worsened all at once — from cold, shock, or the sudden space, I could not tell — and his breathing thinned until his eyes slipped fully shut and his grip on my sleeve let go. For perhaps twenty seconds he was simply limp in my hands, and the forest sounds went on around us, indifferent, dripping. The ranger got warm fluid into him drop by drop from a syringe while I held him upright against my chest, wrapped, his head supported, and we waited. Warmth and patience. There is no faster version that works. Then his fingers moved on my sleeve. Then his eyes opened — half, then fully — and fixed on my face with complete, exhausted offence that made the ranger laugh out loud in relief.

The vet at the field station examined him on a warmed pad: bruised along one side, dehydrated, cold to his core, his blood sugar low from a night without feeding — and no fractures, nothing the fall had taken that rest and warmth and food could not give back. He fed from a syringe that afternoon, slept in a heated nest box, and by morning was gripping the bars with all four hands and complaining, clearly and at length, about the quality of the service.

His mother took longer to find. The troop had moved on after the storm, and for two days rangers tracked their calls while he grew stronger. On the third morning we carried him out in the nest box and set it, open, beneath a low, safe branch on their path, and stepped far back. The calls came nearer. He answered — thin, but his own. A female came down the branch, dropped in beside him, and gathered him against her chest in one motion, his small hands closing in her fur. They were gone up into the green within a minute.

We named him Bui — the Vietnamese word for bush. It seemed honest: the thick undergrowth tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that rainforest sometimes, the dripping after wind, the wall of green that gives nothing back to a passing eye. A baby can fall out of the sky of his whole world and land twenty paces from a path, invisible under leaves, calling in a voice the forest is built to swallow. And someone happened to be walking that line that morning, with a ranger who knew how to listen for the sound that does not belong. He stopped. We knelt. That is where it turned.