The Joey in the Sandstorm

The sandstorm had passed by the time we found him, but the air still tasted of it, and the dry grassland lay under a thin skin of red dust. We had driven out after a farmer called about a kangaroo mob scattered by the storm in the night, a fence down, animals missing. We were walking the paddock edge in the gritty wind, looking for tracks, when I saw the grass moving wrong.

In a shallow hollow by a fallen log, something small twitched against the wind. I went down on one knee and found him there, curled on his side in the dust. A joey, old enough to have fur, far too young to be alone. His coat was full of sand, matted into his ears and the folds of his neck, crusted around eyes that were half-closed and barely flickering. He had curled himself into the shape he would have held inside the pouch, knees up, tail tucked, head down, because that shape was the only safety he knew, and out on the open grass it had bought him almost nothing.

A joey belongs in exactly one place. In the pouch he is warm, fed, carried, hidden. Out of it, in a sandstorm, he is none of those things. The wind had driven sand against him for hours, stealing his heat a little at a time, drying his mouth, filling his ears. His mother had run with the mob when the fence came down, and in that panic he had fallen or been jolted from the pouch, and she had not been able to turn back into the wind for him. He had lain in the hollow all night, too weak to move to shelter, too small to call over the weather.

When I touched him he was colder than the morning explained. His breathing came quick and shallow, and a fine trembling ran through him and stopped, and ran again, as if even shivering cost more than he had. He made no sound at all. I folded my fleece into a nest in the lee of the log before I lifted him, because a joey that cold should not be pressed straight against a human chest. We slid him onto it and wrapped him loosely, keeping his limbs curled the way he had chosen them, and I held the bundle low, out of the wind, while my partner checked him gently. There was nothing broken. There was only a small body running out of heat, hours past a feed, with sand in every fold of him.

We sheltered there behind the log and brushed the worst of the sand from his face with a damp cloth, a little at a time. He opened his eyes once, fully, and looked at nothing, and they closed again. That was the whole of his protest, and it frightened me more than crying would have.

The walk back should have been simple. The vehicle was perhaps three hundred metres away across open ground. Halfway there the complication arrived: the wind gathered itself without warning into a hard gust front, the tail of the storm turning back on us, and the air filled again with driving sand. It hit us sideways. The joey in my arms went rigid, then limp, his breathing turning fast and thin. I turned my back to it and crouched in the grass, making myself a wall, my partner beside me with her jacket held wide, and we stayed there while the gust tore over us and the grass bent flat. We did not move until the air cleared enough to see the vehicle. By then his breathing had eased back down under my hands, and we walked the rest of the way bent low.

At the wildlife shelter the carers took him with the ease of people who have held a hundred joeys just like him. They warmed him gradually in a humidicrib lined with a cloth pouch, cleaned the sand from his ears and eyes, and fed him specialist milk a few drops at a time. Through the afternoon his colour improved. By evening his small hands had begun to open and close in his sleep, reaching, even in dreams, for the walls of the only home he had ever known.

Through that night and the next day, rangers and the farmer watched the paddock for his mother. On the second evening a single female was seen grazing alone near the fallen log, returning to it again and again, and the carers made the call while he was strong enough. I carried him out at first light in a portable pouch sling, warm and fed, and we set the sling low by the log and stepped far back. She came in that careful, halting way, nose working, ears turning. She bent to the sling, sniffed him deeply, lowered herself, and guided him home into the pouch in one practised movement. Her whole posture changed, settled, complete. Then she bounded away at an easy pace, and the grass closed behind them.

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

I think about that dry grassland sometimes, when a hot wind gets up and the dust starts to move. I think about how a joey is built for one warm, dark, moving place, and how lost he is the moment that place is taken from him, curled in a hollow in the shape of a home he no longer had. And someone happened to be walking that paddock edge after the storm. And someone happened to notice the grass moving wrong, in a country where the wind moves everything. He rides safe now.