The Baby in the Smoke

The smoke reached us before the forest did, a grey wall between the trees, and the air tasted of ash though it was barely noon. A plantation worker had flagged down the patrol that morning. High in a tree at the forest edge, something small was coughing, and it had not come down, and the coughing was getting slower.

We found the tree by sound. Through the haze came a thin, rasping cough, then a long silence, then the cough again, weaker. I stood under the canopy with my mask tight and my eyes watering, and when the smoke thinned for a moment I saw him, perhaps twelve metres up, clinging to a fork where three branches met.

He was a baby orangutan, no more than a year old, his long red hair darkened with ash, his small body pressed flat against the bark. His mother was nowhere we could see. Somewhere in the confusion of the fire days before, they had been separated, and he had climbed, the way orangutans climb, away from danger on the ground, straight up into the smoke that gathered thickest in the canopy.

That was the cruelty of it. Smoke rises, and the high branches he trusted had become the worst air in the forest. His eyes streamed without stopping, swollen nearly shut. His chest moved in quick, shallow pulls, and every few breaths a cough shook his whole body and loosened his grip for a terrible second before he caught himself. He was too weak to climb down. The way down was long, the branches slick with ash, and his arms trembled so hard I could see it from the ground. He could only hold on, in the bad air, and holding on was spending him.

We did not climb straight to him. A frightened baby, approached fast in a tree, climbs higher, and higher was worse air and thinner branches. Instead we made the way down worth taking. Two climbers went up a neighbouring tree, slow and quiet, and rigged a broad platform of poles and netting in the fork below him, where the smoke ran thinner. On it we set an open carrier lined with a blanket and pieces of ripe fruit, and then everyone came down and we waited, because waiting, done properly, is also rescue work.

It took nearly an hour. He coughed. He looked down at the platform with streaming eyes. He shifted one hand, then took it back. We stayed still below, calling softly now and then, nothing sudden. At last hunger and thinner air did what hands could not. He began to come down, hand over hand, stopping at every branch to rest and cough, his limbs shaking, feeling for each hold. When he reached the platform he did not go to the fruit. He lay flat on the netting, breathing, and that spent pause told me more than the coughing had.

The complication came when he was almost safe. I had climbed to the platform and was easing the carrier toward him when a shift of wind pushed a fresh bank of smoke through the canopy, and the coughing took him again, hard, one fit after another. He scrambled away in panic, back toward the trunk, and one hand missed its hold and he slipped, catching himself by a single wrist at the platform edge, his body swinging over the long drop. I did not lunge. I set my weight, slid one arm along the netting, and got my forearm under his chest. We stayed exactly like that, neither of us moving, until the coughing eased and his free hand found the netting again. Then, together, an inch at a time, we moved him into the carrier, and I closed the door with hands that were not entirely steady.

We carried him down through the grey trees and did not stop until the air ran clean beyond the forest edge, where the vet team waited. Hearing his breathing in that clean air remains one of the better sounds of my life.

At the sanctuary clinic the vet checked him slowly. His eyes were rinsed clean of ash. His chest was listened to again and again: irritated and tired from days of smoke, but clear of anything worse. No burns anywhere, no injury from the slip. Only exhaustion, hunger, and lungs that needed clean air and time. They gave him fluids, soft food in small amounts, and a quiet enclosure with branches low to the ground, so resting did not require climbing.

He stayed until the rains came and the fire season broke, and the forest air cleared tree by tree. On a bright morning with the canopy washed clean, we released him in the care of the resident group the sanctuary supports there, close to where he was found. He climbed slowly at first, stopping often, then higher and steadier, until the leaves took him.

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

I think about that forest sometimes, when the dry season comes and the horizon turns grey. I think about a baby who climbed toward safety and found the danger waiting at the top, and held on anyway, coughing, in air no lungs were made for. And someone happened to be working that plantation edge that morning, and happened to stop at a small sound in the smoke instead of passing it off as the forest settling. He breathes clean air now, high in green leaves.