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

by Sy Montgomery

Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways.

I can tell you that teachers are all around to help you: with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.

Sometimes, he would look me directly in the eye and hold my gaze. 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.

But in my last hours with the emus, I realized something that would prove, to me as a writer, very important. To 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.

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.

With dazzlingly white fur, a hammering pulse, and a bottomless appetite, the ermine was ablaze with life. Like a struck match

chases away darkness, this creature’s incandescent presence left no room for anger in my heart—for it had been stretched wide with awe, and flooded with the balm of forgiveness.

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.

Early one morning, we felt the ground tremble. It was an earthquake, which here would do us no harm. In fact, the tremors felt reassuring to me. “The Earth feels so new here,” I wrote in my field journal. “No wonder we can sometimes feel its molten, beating heart.”

“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.”

It’s true that it’s easy to project one’s own feelings onto another. We do this with our fellow humans all the time. Who hasn’t carefully selected a gift for a friend that failed to delight, or asked someone for a date only to be coldly refused? But emotions aren’t confined to humans. A far worse mistake than misreading an animal’s emotions is to assume the animal hasn’t any emotions at all.

Among the many truths that Thurber has taught me is this: You never know, even when life looks hopeless, what might happen next. It could be that something wonderful is right around the corner.