The Joey in the Marsh Mud

The marsh had not held real water in months. What was left of it was a cracked grey pan ringed with reeds, and in the low places a skin of mud that looked dry and was not. A ranger doing the morning round found the tracks first: a wallaby’s prints coming down to the pan at night, growing deeper and closer together, then ending in a churned hollow. In the middle of that hollow, sunk to his haunches, sat a joey.

He was a wallaby joey, old enough to be out of the pouch and grazing at his mother’s side. His hind legs and tail had gone down into the mud to the hip. Only his forefeet and his front body were clear, braced against the cracked surface broken around him in plates. His coat was coated dark to the waist. His head hung low. His eyes were half-closed, and his sides rose and fell in short, tired pulls.

He had come down in the night, following his mother toward the last damp at the marsh’s heart, and the pan had taken him the way these pans do: one step on crust that held, the next on crust that did not. Every struggle since had worked him deeper. The mud around him was scored with his forefeet’s scrabbling marks, growing shallower as the night used him up, until near dawn they had stopped altogether. He was not resting. He was finished, and sinking the last of himself an inch at a time.

Wallaby legs are the whole of a wallaby. Those long hind limbs are built of leverage and spring, and mud cancels both. With his haunches down and his tail trapped, he had no angle to push from and no hard ground under a single foot. His breathing was quick and shallow, his ears still. A trembling ran through his front legs, which had held his weight all night, and one forefoot slipped on the crust as we watched, and he caught himself with a small, frightened effort that cost him visibly.

We worked from boards. That was the first decision: nobody steps on that crust. We laid planks out from the firm edge and inched forward on our knees, spreading our weight, until we could reach him. I talked to him the whole way in a low, steady voice. He watched me come with half-closed eyes and made no attempt to flee, and a wild young animal that does not fear hands is telling you how much he has left.

Freeing him was slow, wet work. We did not haul. We poured water from our bottles around his buried legs first, a little at a time, working it down along the mud’s grip with our fingers. Then we dug by hand, scooping the softened mud away from his hips and thighs handful by handful, down along his legs to the trapped tail, freeing it last and most gently. The mud sighed and settled and gave, inch by inch. My partner slid a broad padded strap under his chest to take some of his weight off those exhausted forelegs while I dug, and he leaned into it, very slightly.

The complication came when his legs were nearly free. As the last of the mud loosened around his hips, his whole weight shifted on the strap and he panicked — a sudden, violent scrabble of those long hind feet in the softened mud, kicking mud over us both, and for a moment he twisted sideways and began to sink again at one hip. We did not pull against the panic. I set my forearms under his chest and simply held him, lying half across the boards in the mud with him while my partner repacked the hole his kicking had opened. We waited until the trembling eased and his breathing slowed. Then, together, on a count, we lifted him straight up out of the last of it, supporting his whole body, his long legs hanging clean and unhurt, and carried him back along the planks a step at a time to ground that did not move.

On the firm edge the vet checked him in the shade of the vehicle: legs sound, hips sound, no breaks in those long bones, only exhaustion, cold mud packed into his coat, and forelegs trembling with the night’s work. We washed the mud off him with warm water, a leg at a time, and let him rest in a towel while the sun climbed. By midday he was standing, stiff and careful. That evening, at dusk, the ranger saw the female at the reed line, returning the way mothers do. We carried him down and set him on firm ground at the pan’s edge and stepped far back. He stood a moment, ears up at last and turning. Then he bounded — stiffly once, then cleanly — and the reeds took him, and her shape moved with his through the grey light.

We named him Ket — the Vietnamese word for stuck. It seemed honest: the marsh mud tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that dry marsh sometimes, in the long hot season, when the pans crack and shine and look as harmless as floors. I think about how a crust an inch thick can hold a grown man’s boot and swallow a young animal to the hips, and how a whole night can pass over a small shape sinking in plain sight. And someone happened to be walking that pan at first light, reading tracks. And someone happened to notice the footprints simply stopped, and follow them to where they ended instead of turning back. He bounds the reed lines now, beside his mother.