The Panda Behind the Fallen Earth

I heard him before the slope gave him back to sight. We had come up the mountain track at first light with the reserve rangers, checking paths after a night of rain so heavy it had sounded like gravel on the roof. Water still ran in brown threads down the hillside. Halfway up, where the bamboo thinned and the track bent around a shoulder of rock, the lead ranger stopped and lifted a hand, and through the dripping I heard it: a thin cry, hoarse at the edges, stopping and starting as if each one cost more than the last.

The landslide had come down in the dark. A tongue of wet earth, stones and torn roots had slid from above the track and buried the lower mouth of a narrow rock crevice that ran back into the slope. Behind that fallen earth, in the dark slot of stone, something small was trapped. I got down on my belly in the mud and put my face near the one gap the slide had left, a crack no wider than my hand, and in the gloom behind it I saw an eye, and then the round, mud-smeared face of a baby panda.

He could not have been more than a few months old. In the night, when the rain was at its worst, he must have sheltered in the crevice while his mother fed somewhere above. Then the slope had given way and sealed his door. Every attempt he had made to dig toward the light had only brought wet soil down against his face. His black-and-white fur was plastered grey with mud. His breathing was quick and shallow, and his whole body trembled in waves. When he cried toward the crack, the sound broke in the middle. His eyes were half-closed, and each time he lifted his head it sank again, as if the effort used everything he had saved.

We did not start digging at the mouth. That was the first decision, and it mattered. Earth that has slid once is waiting to slide again, and a spade in the wrong place could have sent the whole wet tongue down into the crevice. The rangers drove anchors into firm ground above, roped us to them, and read the slope slowly and with respect. Only then did we begin, on our knees, with our hands.

We took the fallen earth away a little at a time, from the top down, so its weight never shifted toward him. I worked the left side while a ranger worked the right, passing handfuls and small stones back down the line, while a third lay at the crack and talked into the dark in a low, steady voice. The mud was cold and heavy. Twice we stopped while the slope settled above us. An hour of that work opened the crack to the width of my shoulders, and his crying, which had thinned to almost nothing, found a little strength again at the sound of open air.

The complication came when we reached the last of it. A flat stone, half buried, was holding back a pocket of loose earth directly above the crevice mouth. Moving it would free him. Moving it badly would drop that pocket onto him. We stopped. We packed sacks against the earth above, worked a sling of webbing under the stone, and lifted it by rope from the anchored line, a centimetre at a time, while I lay in the opening with my arms around a folded blanket, ready to be a roof if anything fell. The stone came up groaning through the mud and settled where we lowered it. Nothing fell. Behind it, the crevice lay open, and in it, curled on wet rock, was the smallest, muddiest panda in the world, blinking at the daylight.

I worked the padded sling under him a little at a time, keeping his legs tucked safe. He did not fight me. A wild baby should protest strange hands; he only lay there and let me move him, his head heavy against the webbing, his eyes closing each time I shifted him. The rangers took our weight on the ropes and we came up backward out of that slot of stone, me on my knees in the mud, the sling against my chest, until we were clear of the loose face and could lay him on a warmed blanket in the crate.

At the reserve station the vet checked him on a heated table: no broken bones, only cold, dehydration, scraped pads, bruising, and exhaustion down to the last of himself. They warmed him slowly, gave him fluids, and by evening he was holding his head up and making small, indignant sounds at the bottle. His mother was found on the upper slope before dark, and the reunion was done carefully, at a distance, all of us pulled far back. She came down through the wet bamboo without a sound and gathered him in as if the mountain had never touched him.

We named him Truc — the Vietnamese word for bamboo. It seemed honest: the rock crevice tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that mountain slope sometimes, usually when rain moves in at night. I think about a door of earth closing in the dark on something too small to dig through it, and a cry getting thinner behind stone, in a place where almost nobody passes at dawn. And someone happened to be walking that track at first light. And someone happened to stop at a sound most people would have taken for the wind in wet bamboo. That is the whole difference, most days.