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

by Sy Montgomery

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.