The Fawn on the Rock

The water was already loud when we reached the gorge, and it was getting louder. Rain had fallen somewhere above us in the night, not on us, and the stream had taken it all and turned it into speed. A walker who had crossed at dawn had called it in, his voice thin over the noise behind him: a fawn, out in the middle of it, on a rock, and the water rising.

She stood on a flat outcrop in the middle of the stream, in a gorge where steep banks of wet stone left no shore worth the name. The water ran around her rock in brown ropes, fast enough to carry branches past without pausing. She was perhaps a few weeks old, her spotted coat dark and plastered with spray, her legs gathered tight under her on the one patch of stone the current had not yet taken. She stood the way fawns stand when every choice has been removed: absolutely still, except for a trembling that ran through her whole body without stopping. Her head was low. Her eyes were half-closed against the spray. Every few seconds she shifted one hoof a fraction, felt the wet stone, and froze again.

A flash flood does not negotiate. Somewhere in the early hours it had come down the gorge while the herd was crossing, and in the noise and sudden water she had been cut off on the one high stone. She had done the only thing left to her. She had climbed the rock and waited. But the water was still rising, an inch at a time, up the sides of her refuge, and a fawn that age cannot leap a flooded stream, cannot swim that current, and cannot hold her footing once the water takes her knees. She looked at the bank, and looked at it, and did not jump, and the rock got smaller around her.

We worked from the bank, and we worked roped. In a gorge, a rescuer in the water unroped is simply a second rescue waiting to happen. We set anchors in the trees above the bank, put a line across to the far side with a second team, and clipped ourselves to it before anyone’s boot touched the current. The crossing was only a few metres. In that water, a few metres is a country.

I went first, sideways, letting the current press against my legs while the line took the worst of it, carrying a folded blanket and a soft sling. The noise at the middle was total. When I reached her rock I did not reach for her at once. A frightened fawn on wet stone, grabbed at, will leap, and a leap into that stream would have ended the story in seconds. I got low, made myself small beside her, and talked into the roar in a voice she could not hear but might feel through the stone. Her trembling went through the rock into my knees. Slowly, I laid the blanket over her back, the way you cover something you are not taking, only sheltering. She did not move. That stillness told me how spent she was; a fawn with anything left would have tried the water rather than trust me.

The complication came as I lifted her. I had her gathered against my chest in the sling, her legs tucked, her head against my shoulder, when the stream surged — a fresh push of water from above, carrying a mat of branches and leaves that struck the rock and my legs together. The line above me went bar-taut. My footing went with the mat for one long second, and I sat down hard on the rock rather than be taken, holding her clear of the water with both arms while the surge dragged at everything below my waist. We stayed like that, the two of us on a shrinking stone, until the pulse of water passed and my partner, roped on the same line, could work his way out to us and take half her weight and half my balance, and the three of us crossed the last metres the way drunks cross ice: together, or not at all.

On the bank she lay flat in the blanket, trembling in long waves, too weak to stand, her eyes half-closed now with exhaustion rather than fear. At the care unit the vet checked her over: no broken bones, only cold, bruising from the stone, and the deep tiredness of a small animal who had stood against a flood for hours. They warmed her slowly, gave her fluids, and her first feed in tiny swallows. On the second day she stood on her own, legs splayed wide. Releasing her took a week of watching the gorge at dusk, until the herd came back through the quieter water, and on the evening they lingered we carried her down and set her on the grass. She called once, thin and reedy. A doe stepped out of the shadows and came at a stiff-legged trot, and the fawn went to her.

We named her Run — the Vietnamese word for trembling. It seemed honest: the rising stream tried to keep her, and lost.

I think about that stream gorge sometimes, when rain falls somewhere far off and a quiet creek begins to change its mind. I think about how fast safe ground can become an island, and an island a stone, and a stone nothing at all, and how a small life can be left standing in the middle of that arithmetic. And someone happened to be crossing at dawn, close enough to see her. And someone happened to call before the water finished rising, while there was still a rock to stand on.