Tre in the Crevice

I heard him before I saw him, and that has stayed with me longer than anything else about that morning in the reserve. It was a thin cry, hoarse at the edges, coming from somewhere below the path where the bamboo thinned out and the ground fell away into rock. We were walking the lower loop at first light, checking fences after a night of hard rain, when it stopped me mid-step. It was the kind of sound an animal makes when it has been calling for a long time and is running out of strength to keep calling.

I got down on my stomach at the edge and looked over. The crevice was shallow by a climber’s standards, maybe three metres deep, a narrow gully worn between slabs of wet stone. To the small body curled at the bottom of it, it might as well have been the bottom of the world. A baby panda lay on his side on the cold rock, his black-and-white fur soaked through and plastered with mud and wet leaves. He could not have been more than a few months old. His eyes were half-closed, and when he tried to lift his head toward my voice, it rose a little and then sank back down, as if the effort cost him everything he had left.

The rangers told me later he had most likely wandered from the den slope while his mother fed higher up, lost his footing on the rain-slick grass, and rolled. The bank above the crevice was steep and greasy with wet clay, and his small claws had scored long pale lines down the stone where he had tried, again and again, to climb back the way he had come. Near the top the marks were deep and close together. Lower down they grew fainter and further apart. You could read the whole night in those marks — the strong desperate attempts, then the weaker ones, then the point where he had stopped trying and simply curled up on the wet rock and called for a mother who could not reach him either.

I went down first on a rope, boots finding the notches the water had cut, while two rangers fed out line from above. The bottom of the gully held a shallow skin of cold rainwater that soaked through my knees the moment I knelt. Up close his breathing was quick and shallow, and his whole body trembled in waves — the fine, constant shaking of an animal that has spent itself completely. When I spoke to him he made that thin cry again, and this time it broke in the middle, and no second cry followed it.

The plan was simple: work the sling under him a little at a time, the way you slide a sheet under someone sleeping, keeping his body supported and his legs tucked safe. He did not fight me. That frightened me more than struggling would have. A wild baby should protest strange hands. He only lay there and let me move him, his head heavy against the sling, his eyes closing each time I shifted him and opening again, slower every time.

The complication came halfway up. I was braced on the rope with the sling secured and the rangers hauling steady from above when a section of the crevice wall, softened by the rain, gave way under my boot. Wet clay and loose stone sloughed down and my foot dropped into nothing for one long second. The sling swung. He cried out, sharp with fear, and I got one arm around the whole bundle of him and pressed us both flat against the sound wall until the rope took our weight again and the loose earth stopped sliding. The rope went still and solid, and we hung there in the dripping quiet until my heart slowed enough for me to climb again, one notch at a time.

At the top they took him from me gently. We laid him in the transport crate on a warmed blanket, and for a moment he did not move at all, and I had the sudden fear that we had been too slow. Then his sides rose in one deep, uneven breath, and one small paw flexed against the blanket.

The vet at the reserve station checked him over on a heated table. No breaks, she said. Cold, dehydrated, his pads scraped from the stone, and exhausted down to the last of himself, but whole. They warmed him slowly and gave him fluids, and by evening he was holding his head up on his own and making small, indignant sounds at the bottle they offered him. His mother was located on the upper slope before dark, and the reunite was done carefully, at distance, all of us pulled far back. She came down out of the bamboo without a sound and gathered him in as if the crevice had never happened.

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

I think about that reserve sometimes, usually when rain moves in at night. I think about how small he was against that wet stone, and how the marks of his trying faded down the wall, and how close the whole thing came to ending in silence simply because the one ledge he needed was a little too high. And someone happened to be walking the lower loop at first light. And someone happened to look over the edge. That is the entire difference, most days, between a cry that fades into a hillside and one that gets carried back up into the bamboo where it belongs.