The Calf in the Hot Sand

The sandstorm had blown itself out by midday, but the dune country kept its heat long after the wind dropped. We were driving the track back toward the herders camp, windows cracked against the grit still hanging in the air, when my partner pointed out across the pale slope of a dune. Something lay in the lee of it that was not stone and was not shadow, and it had not moved as we watched it come closer.

It was a baby alpaca, no more than a few months old, lying flat on his side in the hot sand. His fleece, which should have stood soft and pale, was matted with driven sand, crusted grey around his mouth and folded legs. Grit filled his small ears. His eyes were half-closed, lashes gummed with dust, and a fine trembling ran through him in waves. He did not lift his head as the vehicle stopped. He did not try to rise. A baby alpaca who cannot be bothered to fear a strange vehicle has very little left in him.

The herd had scattered ahead of the storm in the night, the herders told us later by radio. In that noise and blindness this little one had lost the shapes he followed, and wandered downwind until his strength ran out in the hollow behind the dune. Heat does its work quietly out there, slowing the small machinery of a body hour by hour. By the time we found him his mouth was dry as cloth, his breathing thin and quick, and his fleece held the heat of the whole morning like a stored fire.

We did not lift him straight away. Moving an overheated body does more harm than the sun has done, so we built our first rescue for stopping, not carrying. We turned the vehicle across the hollow to cut the wind, stretched a tarp from its roof to poles driven in the sand, and made a pocket of shade over him where he lay. We laid folded cloths, dampened from our bottles, along his neck, chest and the bare skin inside his legs, changing them as they warmed. Not cold water, and never a flood of it. When his lips moved at last, we gave him water a few mouthfuls at a time, then rest, then a few mouthfuls more.

For a while it seemed enough. The trembling eased. His eyes opened a little wider and found us, and stayed. I slid the padded sling beneath him an inch at a time while my partner kept the cloths coming, and we had just taken his weight between us, ready for the short carry to the vehicle, when he changed. Halfway through that first lift, inside the sling, he went completely limp. His head fell slack against my forearm, and his breathing, which had been thin, turned fast and shallow, little pulls of air that did not seem to fill anything. Heat exhaustion had hold of him deeper than his lying still had admitted.

We stopped everything. We laid him back down in the shade of the tarp exactly where he had been, and from then on there was only one job: shade, and damp cloths, and waiting. I knelt in the sand and kept a cloth cool against his neck with one hand and counted his breaths with the other, and for a long while the count stayed frightening, each breath shorter than my patience wanted. Slowly, so slowly that I distrusted it, the breaths lengthened. The shallowness left them. A shiver that was not trembling ran through him once, and his ear flicked at a fly, and that felt like the best news in the world. Only when his breathing had steadied and stayed steady did we lift him again, sling and all, and carry him the few steps to the vehicle without a single jolt.

The herders station was an hour of careful driving away. Their vet met us in the shade of the pens. No lasting damage, she found, once fluids had gone in and his temperature settled through the evening: dehydration, heat exhaustion, sand in every crevice of him, and nothing worse. He slept his first night in a pen lined with clean straw, and woke before dawn drinking like a creature making up an account.

On the third day we drove him back out to where the herd had regrouped along the fence line. We set him down on his own legs in the dust. He stood a moment, unsteady, ears turning. Then an adult female broke from the herd at a run, calling, and he answered with a thin bleat that strengthened as he went to her, and the herd closed around them both and moved off as if the storm were already an old story.

We named him Mac — the Vietnamese word for desert. It seemed honest: the sandstorm tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about those dunes sometimes, when a hot wind gets up and the horizon turns the colour of dust. I think about how the desert does not need to chase anything; it only needs to wait, and let the heat do slow work on whatever the wind has separated from its own kind. And someone happened to be driving that track at midday, on the slow road home, looking out at country most people cross with their eyes on the road ahead. He walks with the herd now, in the middle of it, where the small ones belong.