Fable came into the world climbing. After a monthlong gestation, she emerged blind and furless, an embryonic jelly bean endowed with little more than grasping claws and an instinctual map of her mother’s topography. She clambered from cloaca to pouch, found a teat in the warm dark, and latched on. Milk flowed into her. After a month she weighed as much as a quarter; after three, as much as a deck of cards. Her ears unfurled like spring leaves. Her eyes opened. She grew to the size of a human heart. She sprouted a layer of silver velvet.
Then, in December 2017, on a rural road in Tasmania’s Central Highlands, Fable’s mother met a fate that befalls thousands of other wombats every year: she was killed by a car.
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