The Pup on the High Rocks

The fisherman who called us was mending nets above the cove when he heard it, a thin crying that came and went with the wind off the water. He walked the point looking for the source and found nothing but gulls, and it was only when he climbed down to check his crab pots that he saw the shape on the rocks, dark against the wet stone, where nothing should have been left behind.

He was a baby sea lion, no more than a few months old, stranded high on the rocks as the tide had rushed out from under him. Somewhere in the falling water he had hauled himself onto the stone to rest, the way his kind does, trusting the sea to come back and collect him. But the tide on that coast falls fast and far, and it had left him on a ledge of rock a long way above the water, with nothing below him but more rock, steep and slick and broken into shelves all the way down to the surf.

His skin, which should have been wet and shining, had dried to a dull grey-brown in the wind. His flippers were scraped pale from dragging himself over stone, and they moved weakly, pushing at the rock and finding no purchase. His whole small body trembled in long waves. His eyes were half-closed, filmed against the glare, and when he lifted his head and cried toward the water the sound was hoarse and spent, the cry of a pup who had been calling for his mother for hours and had nearly finished calling at all.

He could not get down. The drop was too steep for a pup, the rock below too sharp and too dry, and every attempt had only scraped him further and spent what little strength the sun had left him. The sea was right there, close enough to hear and smell, and it might as well have been on the other side of the world.

We came down the cliff path with everything on our backs: towels, buckets, a wide canvas sling, and a shade cloth on poles. Four of us. The first work was not moving him. It was stopping the day from finishing what the tide had started. We soaked the towels in the rock pools and laid them gently over his back and sides, and his whole body shuddered under the wet cloth, and his breathing slowed a fraction. Two of us held the shade cloth above him so the sun came off him. Only when he was wet and shaded, his trembling eased from panic toward plain exhaustion, did we talk about the carry.

The way down was not a path. It was a route we picked shelf by shelf, to a calm inlet around the point where the water stayed deep and quiet even at low tide. We worked the canvas sling beneath him an edge at a time, easing it under his chest and belly over the wet towels, never lifting until the fabric was true. Then four of us took the corners, a vet volunteer at his head counting the steps aloud, and we began the slow descent, resting him on flat stone between moves, wetting the towels again at every stop.

The complication came halfway down. The tide turned early that afternoon, ahead of the tables, and the returning swell began to break over the lower rocks while we were still mid-carry, with two shelves of wet stone between us and the inlet. The surge came up the rock face in white water and broke around our ankles and then our knees, and the shelf turned to glass under our boots. We did not hurry and we did not turn back. We moved him up onto the highest flat rock within reach, set the sling down true, and all four of us braced there with him, backs to the sea, hands on the canvas, while the set broke over the rocks below us again and again. He lay still under his wet towels, eyes half-closed, trusting four strangers on a rock to be his shore. When the water eased we lifted again, slower than before, and carried him down into the shelter of the inlet.

In the shallows we did not let go at once. We lowered the sling until the water took most of his weight, and stood around him while the vet volunteer checked him where he floated: no bones broken, flippers scraped and sore but sound, skin dried by wind and sun, and exhaustion all the way through him. We held the sling loose beneath him and let him feel the sea come back into his body. His breathing deepened. His flippers moved in slow, deliberate strokes. Twice he pushed and tired. The third time he swam a slow circle inside our hands, surfaced once beside us with his eyes open and clear, and slid away toward the deeper water, where the colony hauled out on the far rocks.

We named him Trieu — the Vietnamese word for tide. It seemed honest: the falling tide tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that rocky shore sometimes, at low water, when the ledges stand bare and shining and the pools hold their small, patient worlds. I think about how a young animal can do everything his instincts tell him and still be left behind by the simple turning of the sea, stranded in plain sight of the water he belongs to. And someone happened to be mending his nets above that cove that morning. And someone happened to hear a cry under the wind and the gulls, and to climb down and keep looking until he found where it came from.