The Bottom of the Drain

The storm had passed before dawn, but the road out of the hills still belonged to the water. Every drain ran brown and loud. We were driving it slowly, checking culverts, when my partner braked beside a stretch of open drainage ditch and pointed down into it without a word.

The ditch was deep, with walls of slick earth and concrete the rain had polished to a shine. At the bottom, in the shallow run of water, something dark was huddled against the downstream wall. At first it looked like a bundle of wet sticks. Then the bundle shifted, slightly, and settled again, and we understood that we were looking at a baby porcupine.

He was very young, small enough that his quills were still short and soft-looking. He must have tumbled in during the storm, and the wet walls had refused him every way out. Lines of claw marks ran up the concrete at a dozen places, each one ending where the surface turned too smooth, and slid him back down. He had tried that wall all night and by morning he was finished trying. He sat hunched in the shallows with his quills pressed flat along his back, which in a porcupine is not defence but surrender; a porcupine with anything left holds its quills up to the world. His head hung low. His eyes were half-closed. Every so often a shiver ran through him and the quills stirred and lay flat again, and the water moved around his feet.

A porcupine cannot climb wet concrete, cannot swim a ditch current for long, and cannot call loudly enough to be heard over running water. He could only sit in the cold at the bottom of a hole beside a road, while everything he needed was three metres above him and traffic passed it by.

We did not climb straight down; the ditch walls were a slide waiting for a boot, and a rescuer at the bottom would only have made it two rescues. We set the cones out on the bend first, and my partner stood watch on the traffic while I tested the bank from the top edge with a pole until I found a place that would hold a ladder.

The ladder went down at the gentlest angle the ditch allowed, and with it, on ropes, went our padded crate, lined deep with folded sacking. I followed it down in thick gloves and boots and set the crate in the shallows beside him, open side toward him. Then I did the hardest part of the whole rescue: I sat down in the cold water, at his level, and I waited.

He watched me through those half-closed eyes and did not move at all. That stillness told me the truth: this was not trust, it was the bottom of his strength. After a while I shuffled the crate nearer and laid a trail of sweet potato pieces toward its mouth, and waited again. He lifted his head, once, at the smell, and let it sink again, and I understood that waiting was not going to be enough; he no longer had the strength to choose rescue for himself.

The complication came when I moved to lift him. I had got the thick-gloved hands under the sacking beneath him and begun to raise him when a fresh pulse of water came down the ditch from a culvert upstream. It was not deep, but it was fast, and it caught the open crate and swung it against the wall, and the wet concrete under my boots gave up its grip. I went down to one knee with the porcupine in my arms, and felt his whole body go rigid and his quills rise at last, too late and too weak to mean anything. I did not grab tighter. I held exactly the level I had, braced my back against the ladder, and let the water push past my legs until the pulse thinned and died, while my partner hauled the crate back into reach on its rope. Only when the ditch ran quiet again did I settle him, sacking and all, into the crate, and fold the padded lid over him, and signal for the lift.

He came up out of that ditch without a sound, and lay flat in the sacking, trembling in long waves, while we wrapped the crate in a dry blanket out of the wind.

At the wildlife post the vet checked him over with practised hands, working between the quills. No broken bones. Quills intact, paws scraped from the concrete, cold to the core — nothing that warmth, food and quiet would not mend. They kept him three days in a straw-lined pen, and by the second morning he had eaten a whole sweet potato and stamped a small foot at a keeper. On the fourth evening we released him well back from the road, on the wooded bank above the ditch line. He came out of the crate slowly, read the air with his nose, and then walked, unhurried and entirely himself, into the undergrowth, quills up.

We named him Ven — the Vietnamese word for roadside. It seemed honest: the drainage ditch tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that roadside sometimes, when storms have passed and the drains run loud. I think about how a wild life can be ended by three metres of wet concrete, in plain sight of a road the whole world drives, too quiet to be noticed by any of it. And someone happened to be driving that bend slowly that morning. And someone happened to look down into a ditch at a bundle of wet sticks that turned out to be alive.