How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals

by Sy Montgomery

am still learning how to be a good creature. Though I try earnestly, I often fail. But I am having a great life trying—a life exploring this sweet green world—and returning to a home where I am blessed with a multispecies family offering me comfort and joy beyond my wildest dreams.

Many young girls worship their older sisters. I was no exception. But my older sister was a dog, and I—standing there helplessly in the frilly dress and lacy socks in which my mother had dressed me—wanted to be just like her: Fierce. Feral. Unstoppable.

When my father returned from a trip to South America and brought me back a stuffed baby caiman, a type of crocodile, I dressed it in the baby doll’s clothing and pushed it around in the doll’s pram.

I love this detail. I can imagine the young child who wouldn’t play with the dolls her parents got her, but who would easily reappropriate them for her stuffed caiman.

A Scottie puppy is like a terrible two-year-old tot on steroids and gifted with an almost unnatural indestructibility.

Heh heh heh

Eventually my parents figured out we could blink the front porch lights on and off to signal that we would like her to come home. It was merely a suggestion—the way my father felt about traffic lights (he called a red light “just a suggestion”). Molly would come home when she felt like it. This bothered me not at all. I certainly didn’t expect her to obey me. Why should she? By the time I was five, she was only two—but she, by then, was a full adult. I considered her not only my superior, but my role model. I did not even realize that my view of our relationship wasn’t endorsed by other humans—until my mother set out to tame us both.

After they left, I felt a shift in my psyche. But I had no idea that I had just caught the first glimpse of a life farther off the beaten path than I had ever imagined. I could not have known it then, but these strange giant birds would grant me the destiny Molly had inspired, and they would repay me a millionfold for my first act of true bravery: leaving all that I loved behind.

I spent my days roaming the Outback in search of “emu pies.” For me, they were as precious, and potentially informative, as the discarded fuel tanks from an alien’s space ship.

Though in dirty clothes, my uncombed hair matting like the fur on a stray dog, when bathed in the sight of this giant, alien flightless bird, I felt beautiful for the first time in my life.

begin to understand the life of any animal demands not only curiosity, not only skill, and not only intellect. I saw that I would also need to summon the bond I had forged with Molly. I would need to open not only my mind, but also my heart.

on a dreary March day, the kind when your spinning tires kick frozen mud all over your car, and the remaining snow looks as appealing as sodden Kleenex, we nonetheless found ourselves driving back over dirt roads to our precariously temporary home with a shoebox on my lap containing a very sickly black-and-white spotted piglet.

That metaphor, yall! Sodden Kleenex? Doesn’t get better

What were we going to “do” with him? people would ask. “I’m a vegetarian and my husband is Jewish,” I’d explain. “We’re certainly not going to eat him. But we might send him abroad for university studies . . .” Then

Ha!

After a lifetime of moving, Christopher Hogwood helped give me a home. And after my parents had disowned me, out of an assortment of unrelated, unmarried people and animals of many different species, Christopher helped create for me a real family—a family made not from genes, not from blood, but from love.

great mosaics of mangrove swamps, then

Again, love this metaphor

I wondered: Did Clarabelle know us? “Spiders are individuals like everyone else,” Sam assured us. He’s had pet tarantulas since he was thirteen, and in his lab in Ohio, he had about five hundred of them. Through the years of interacting with them, Sam learned that within the same species, some individuals seemed calm and others nervous. Some changed their behavior over time and appeared to grow calmer in his presence. Later, with Nic, I’d visit his tarantula lab. One of his students noted that something unusual happened when Sam walked in. Even though many of his tarantulas were naturally blind, when Sam—and only Sam—entered the room, five hundred tarantulas invariably turned in their terrariums and oriented toward him.

That’s crazy!

at a time when girls were discouraged from education and adventure, she had learned to fly a plane, had gone to college, made valedictorian of her class, landed a job at the FBI, and married an army officer. She’d grown up in a house where she could see chickens scratching in the dirt beneath the floorboards of the kitchen. Sometimes she had hunted squirrels to eat; her old shotgun still rested in the corner of a bedroom closet in each house where my family had lived. But through the force of her will and her intellect, she had transformed it all: the military gave her servants to clean the house, mow the lawn; a chef cooked at her parties. Her husband had a staff car, a yacht, and a plane at his disposal. As a child, I had always looked to my father, a survivor of the Bataan Death March and a decorated war hero, as my model of courage and persistence, but my mother’s example, too, had helped me to grow up believing that if anything could be done by a human, it could be done by me. Her achievement was a feat as staggering as an ermine taking down a hen. My mother had died of pancreatic cancer earlier that year. In the hospital in Virginia, I held her hand as she fearlessly breathed her last. Since the doctors at Fort Belvoir had diagnosed her with this painful terminal disease, she had not once whined or wept. As I looked into the piercing black eyes of that white weasel, I realized how much I had admired my mother, and how much I missed her.

To me, one of the most heartbreaking conditions of life on Earth is that most of the animals we love, with the exception of some parrots and tortoises, die so long before we do. I used to joke with friends as I left for trips to lands with poisonous snakes, man-eating carnivores, and active landmines that I was trying to make sure I predeceased Chris and Tess. I never feared dying. Death was just one more new place to go. We’d all go there eventually. I believed if there was a heaven, and if I went there, I would be reunited with all the animals I had loved. But I deeply dreaded being left behind when Chris and Tess passed on.

Hers was the grace to which we appeal when we need strength or compassion of greater-than-human origin. Grace is not merely athletic prowess or elegance of movement. It is also, theologians tell us, the divine ability to regenerate and sanctify, inspire and strengthen: “I once was lost but now am found / was blind but now I see.”

Here in the cloud forest, I found again the wildness that keeps us sane and whole, the wild, delicious hunger for life. The day we released Christopher and Tess back into the forest, it set me free, too.

“Love is not changed by death,” read the quote by British poet Edith Sitwell, “and nothing is lost, and in the end, all is harvest.”

People often speak of a lifetime dog, a phrase that may have been coined by the author and fellow border collie owner Jon Katz. “They’re dogs we love in especially powerful, sometimes inexplicable ways,” he’s said. Tess was our lifetime dog. But so was Sally.

Mojo

This is the gift great souls leave us when they die. They enlarge our hearts. They leave us a greater capacity for love.

They use their eyes in another way, too. They can move animals with the force of their stare alone. It’s called “the Strong Eye,” but you really need two.

I know this!