Surviving Wrong

"They don't tell you that the hardest cases aren't the ones who die. It's the ones who survive into something they were never meant to be—still breathing, still present, but shaped by circumstances into a life their instincts can't recognise."

The headlights carved pale tunnels through the darkness as I turned off Tenafeate Creek Road, the familiar crunch of gravel replacing the hum of sealed bitumen. Half past six in the morning, and the world existed only in fragments—the white-painted rocks marking the Haven's entrance, the silhouette of the main building against a sky that hadn't yet decided whether to lighten, the single motion-sensor light that flickered on as I pulled into the volunteer car park.

I killed the engine and sat for a moment in the sudden silence.

This was my favourite part. The threshold between night and day, when the Haven belonged to the animals and whoever was foolish enough to arrive before the sun. No phones ringing, no school groups chattering, no well-meaning visitors asking if they could pat the kangaroos. Just the work, and the creatures who needed it, and the particular peace that came from being exactly where I was supposed to be.

The cold hit me as I stepped out of the car—proper Adelaide Hills cold, the kind that slipped under your jacket and found the gaps between your scarf and collar. July mornings up here carried a sharpness that the suburbs never quite managed, the elevation adding bite to the winter air. My breath fogged in front of me as I grabbed my bag from the back seat and headed for the staff entrance.

The security code was the same as it had been for two years: Margaret's birthday, reversed. I'd suggested once that they might want something less guessable, and she'd fixed me with that look of hers—half amused, half challenging—and asked who exactly I thought was going to break into a wildlife rescue facility. Fair point.

The corridor lights were on their overnight setting, dim enough to preserve the animals' circadian rhythms whilst still allowing navigation. I signed in at the volunteer book—J. Smith, 6:47 AM, early checks—and hung my jacket in the staff room before collecting the morning clipboard from its hook by the door.

The overnight notes were brief. Dennis had done the last round at eleven: all stable, no concerns flagged, the new admission in ISO-3 still refusing food. I scanned the familiar shorthand, translating abbreviations that had become second nature. KJ-12 had passed urine, good sign. The ringtail in the small mammal ward was unchanged—I felt the small knot in my stomach that accompanied that particular case, pushed it aside for now. The tawny frogmouth had been active around 10 PM, which was at least something.

I started in the intensive care unit, working through the cages with methodical attention. Temperature checks, water levels, visual assessments of each patient. A brushtail possum recovering from a dog attack watched me with one suspicious eye, her bandaged flank rising and falling in steady rhythm. She'd come in ten days ago, more dead than alive, and the fact that she was now alert enough to resent my presence felt like victory.

"Morning," I said quietly, not expecting or needing a response. "Looking better."

The small mammal ward took longer—twelve occupied enclosures at present, ranging from a pair of orphaned sugar gliders to an elderly echidna who'd been found wandering disoriented near Williamstown. Each animal had its own requirements, its own history, its own trajectory toward release or permanent care or the third option nobody liked to discuss. I moved between them with the unhurried patience that the work demanded, checking food consumption, noting behavioural observations, refreshing water where needed.

The sugar gliders were awake, their enormous eyes tracking my movements with the particular intensity of creatures who hadn't yet learned whether humans meant safety or danger. They'd been found in a felled tree near Lobethal, their mother dead beside them, and at six weeks old they were still too young to thermoregulate properly. The heat pad beneath their pouch was maintaining temperature; I made a note to check it again in an hour.

By the time I reached the raptor complex, the sky had begun its slow transformation from black to charcoal to the deep blue that preceded actual dawn. The flight aviaries stretched along the property's northern boundary, their mesh walls catching the first suggestion of light. Inside, shapes shifted on perches—a barn owl recovering from a vehicle strike, a brown goshawk with a healed wing fracture working its way through the final stages of flight reconditioning, and at the far end, in the smallest of the rehabilitation enclosures, the tawny frogmouth.

I saved him for last. Partly because his enclosure was furthest from the main building, partly because I needed the walk to settle into the particular mindset his case required. Mostly because I'd been thinking about him since yesterday, turning the problem over in my mind like a stone I couldn't quite get smooth.

His name—unofficial, unrecorded in any file—was Ghost. I'd started calling him that in my head during his second week, when I'd noticed the way he'd freeze into perfect stillness at unexpected moments, becoming so motionless that he seemed to disappear against the branch he was perching on. It was textbook tawny frogmouth behaviour, the camouflage strategy that made them nearly invisible in the wild. The fact that he could still do it felt important. The fact that he only did it sometimes felt like the problem.

I approached the enclosure slowly, keeping my movements predictable. The mesh was fine enough to prevent escape whilst still allowing clear observation, and I could see him on his usual perch—a section of dead branch positioned at roughly forty-five degrees, mimicking the angle they preferred in eucalyptus trees. His mottled grey-brown plumage blended with the bark almost perfectly. His eyes, those enormous yellow-orange discs that could spot a moth at twenty metres, were fixed on me with an attention that made my chest tight.

He wasn't afraid.

That was the problem, distilled to its essence. A healthy tawny frogmouth, confronted with a human at this distance, should be cycling through its defensive repertoire. The freeze response, first—becoming a branch, becoming invisible, trusting stillness to protect it. If that failed, the threat display: mouth gaping wide to reveal the vivid yellow-green interior, feathers fluffing to increase apparent size, the whole body transforming from cryptic branch-dweller to something startling and strange. And if threat failed, flight—the silent explosion of wings that carried them to safety.

Ghost watched me approach with something that looked almost like recognition. His feathers stayed smooth. His beak stayed closed. When I stopped at the mesh, less than two metres away, he tilted his head in a gesture I'd seen a hundred times from birds comfortable with human presence.

He'd been in care for six weeks. Orphaned at perhaps three weeks old, found beneath a felled tree in Cudlee Creek, his sibling dead beside him. The woman who'd brought him in had done everything wrong with the best intentions—kept him in her laundry for two days, fed him mince from her fingers, handled him constantly in an attempt to provide comfort. By the time he'd reached the Haven, the critical early window for wild-appropriate development had already begun to close.

I'd been his primary carer since week two, when the initial intensive phase had ended and he'd moved from the ICU to the raptor complex. Six weeks of four feeds a day, of careful handling designed to minimise bonding, of all the protocols we used to maintain appropriate human-animal boundaries. And still he watched me with those enormous eyes, and still he didn't flinch, and still I couldn't figure out how to undo what had already been done.

"Hey, mate," I said, keeping my voice low. Talking to the animals was technically discouraged during rehabilitation—another opportunity for inappropriate bonding—but I'd found that my presence alone was enough to trigger whatever responses they were going to have. The voice didn't make it worse. And in the pre-dawn quiet, with nobody around to hear, the words helped me think.

"Big day today. School group coming through. Emily's going to want to show you off."

Ghost blinked slowly, the nictitating membranes sliding across his eyes in that distinctly avian gesture. His head tilted further, tracking my voice.

"You're supposed to be scared of me, you know. I'm a predator. I'm dangerous. I could eat you."

The words felt absurd even as I said them. Tawny frogmouths were ambush predators themselves—sit-and-wait hunters who dropped from branches onto insects, small mammals, the occasional frog or lizard. They understood predation at an instinctive level. Ghost should have been reading my forward-facing eyes, my size, my movement patterns, and concluding that I was something to avoid.

Instead, he stretched one wing in a leisurely motion that was almost a greeting.

I pulled out my notebook—the small one I kept in my back pocket, separate from the official observation logs—and recorded the time, the behaviour, my own position relative to the enclosure. The data was building into a pattern I didn't want to see. Approach tolerance increasing. Threat response absent for the past four observations. Appetite unaffected by human presence. Everything pointed toward the same conclusion, the one that sat like a weight in my stomach.

He wasn't going to make it. Not back to the wild.

The thought crystallised in the grey pre-dawn light, solid and cold and unavoidable. I'd been dancing around it for a week, finding reasons for optimism that didn't quite hold up to scrutiny. Maybe he was just calm by temperament. Maybe he'd develop wariness as he matured. Maybe the protocols would work given more time. But I'd read the studies. I knew the statistics on hand-raised raptors and their release outcomes. And I knew, watching him watch me with those trusting yellow eyes, that I was looking at an animal whose future had been decided in a stranger's laundry six weeks ago.

The Haven had ambassador animals—permanent residents who couldn't survive in the wild but served educational purposes, allowing close observation that would be impossible with their wild counterparts. The barn owl in aviary three was one of them, blind in one eye from a collision with a car. She'd been here for eight years, had featured in thousands of school presentations, had probably done more for public understanding of nocturnal raptors than any number of pamphlets or documentaries.

Ghost could have that life. It wasn't the worst outcome. It wasn't even a bad outcome, necessarily—regular food, safety from predators, the particular contentment that captive-raised animals often displayed in familiar environments. He wouldn't know what he was missing. Wouldn't feel the loss of a wild existence he'd never really had.

But I would know. I would look at him and see the flight paths he'd never trace, the territories he'd never claim, the mate he'd never find in the darkness of some Adelaide Hills gully. I would know that every correct instinct, every perfect piece of evolutionary engineering that had shaped his species over millions of years, had been undone by a woman who'd only wanted to help.

That was the part they didn't tell you about wildlife rescue. Not the death—everyone expected the death, prepared for it, developed their own ways of processing the animals who couldn't be saved. It was the ones who survived wrong that got under your skin. The successes that weren't quite. The creatures who lived but couldn't live the lives they were built for.

I stood at the mesh for a long time, watching Ghost watch me, the sky lightening around us in imperceptible increments. A magpie started its warbling song somewhere beyond the treeline—that distinctive Australian sound, half melody and half proclamation. Ghost's head swivelled toward it, tracking the noise with predatory attention, and for a moment I saw the wild bird he might have been. Alert. Engaged. Ready.

Then the magpie fell silent, and Ghost turned back to me, and the moment passed.

"We're going to figure this out," I told him, not believing it. "There's still time."

The lie hung in the cold air between us. Ghost blinked once, slowly, and settled deeper onto his perch.

I completed the raptor rounds on autopilot, my mind still circling the problem without finding purchase. The goshawk was doing well—another week, maybe two, and she'd be ready for release assessment. The barn owl was her usual self, drowsing through the early morning hours, one good eye opening occasionally to confirm that the world hadn't changed since her last inspection. A pair of tawny frogmouth chicks in the adjacent enclosure, younger than Ghost and still in the intensive feeding stage, huddled together on their branch and displayed perfect defensive postures when I approached. They'd been raised with minimal handling, had come in soon enough that the critical period was still intact. They'd be fine.

The contrast felt pointed. Cruel, even, though I knew that was anthropomorphism of the worst kind. The universe wasn't trying to teach me a lesson. It was just doing what it did—presenting variations, testing outcomes, proceeding without regard for fairness or narrative satisfaction. Some animals made it. Some didn't. The reasons were often arbitrary, often came down to timing and circumstance rather than anything within anyone's control.

I finished the rounds and headed back toward the main building as the first real light began to seep across the property. The Haven looked different at dawn—softer somehow, the harsh edges of functional architecture blurred by mist that was already beginning to lift. Smoke rose from the chimney of the old farmhouse that served as accommodation for overnight volunteers, thin and pale against the lightening sky. Someone was awake in there, probably making tea, probably watching the same transformation from darkness to day.

The treatment centre was quiet when I entered, the overnight cases stable in their heated enclosures. I updated the observation logs with my findings, transferred the relevant notes from my personal notebook to the official records, and stood for a moment in the stillness, letting the familiar smells of antiseptic and animal settle around me.

This was the work. Not glamorous, not exciting, not the stuff of television documentaries with their dramatic rescues and heartwarming releases. Just the slow accumulation of observations, the careful administration of medications, the endless repetition of feeding schedules and cleaning routines. The animals didn't care about narrative arcs or satisfying conclusions. They cared about food and safety and the absence of pain. Everything else was human projection, human need, human inability to let nature be nature.

I thought about the day ahead—Taryn arriving for her morning shift, the school group Emily had mentioned, the thousand small tasks that would fill the hours until darkness fell again. I thought about the ringtail possum in the small mammal ward, the one whose condition wasn't improving, the consultation with Dr. Groves that I knew was coming. I thought about Ghost on his perch, watching the world with eyes that should have been afraid.

And beneath all of it, in the place where I kept the things I didn't want to examine too closely, I thought about Nate Baker's face in that bathroom. The terror in Ryan's eyes. The sound of a body hitting porcelain. The way some damage happened so fast you couldn't see it coming, and some happened so slowly you didn't notice until it was already done.

The kettle in the staff room clicked off, startling me from thoughts I hadn't meant to have. I made myself a hot chocolate from the tin someone had left in the cupboard—not the good stuff, just the cheap powder that dissolved into something vaguely comforting—and carried the mug to the window that looked out over the eastern paddocks.

The sun was coming up, painting the macropod enclosures in shades of gold and amber. A group of kangaroos were already moving, their silhouettes dark against the brightening grass. One of the joeys—a red kangaroo who'd been hand-raised after his mother was killed on the highway—was practicing his hopping, covering ground in those exaggerated bounds that always looked more like celebration than locomotion.

He'd be released next month, if everything went according to plan. Relocated to a property near Murray Bridge where a mob had been slowly rebuilding after the last drought. He'd find his place among them, or he wouldn't. He'd survive, or he wouldn't. We'd done everything we could to prepare him for a world that didn't owe him anything, and now it was up to the world to decide.