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

by Sy Montgomery

Tess still enjoyed going outside, even at night. I used to love how she could run so far away from me to catch the toy; now I rejoiced that we stayed so close together. Tess could follow my heat and my scent at first. Later, we remained touching at all times. And I was honored, after our years together, to receive the gift of her graceful, trusting reliance on me, as I had once relied on her, to navigate through the dark. Never before had anyone relied on me so completely. Never before had anyone loved me more deeply. And never before had I experienced grace so profound.

Tess never lost her superpowers. She had simply brought them back and handed them to me, like the Frisbee at night. Until the end of our days together, I would enjoy the humbling privilege of doing for her what she had done for me. Now it was I who would lead her through the darkness.

But it was the moss that most enchanted me. The world seemed cloaked in its velvet, as if the clouds in these tall mountains had congealed into green and come alive. John Ruskin, a nineteenth-century British art critic, called moss—humble, soft, and ancient—“the first mercy of the Earth.” Mercy, then, was everywhere around me: it covered tree trunks, vines, the ground, forgiving every clumsy step and cushioning every fall.

Here in the cloud forest, I found again the wildness that keeps us sane and whole, the wild, delicious hunger for life.

I had never been a person gifted with visions or dreams or contact with spirits. In high school Bible study, to my disappointment, I never got tongues. I believe in the survival of the soul. It is an important tenet of my faith. But to my immense frustration, I could never feel the presence of loved ones who had passed on. I only missed them. I spoke of this to a friend whom I had met in the Amazon, a martial artist and former U.S. Marine. “Oh, but you do feel them,” he said gently. “What you are feeling when you miss them is not their absence. It’s their presence.”

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

What might I discover about the interior lives of these animals if I were to use, as a tool of inquiry, not only my intellect, but also my heart?

“Let’s try again later. She might change her mind,” Wilson Menashi, a longtime aquarium volunteer who had worked extensively with octopuses, suggested. Though Athena had seized me right away, Octavia showed no interest in meeting me—or anyone else, for that matter. “They’re all individuals,” Wilson explained. “Even the lobsters have personalities.”

Reading an octopus’s intentions is not like reading, for instance, a dog’s. I could read Sally’s feelings in a glance, even if the only part of her I could see was her tail, or one ear. But Sally was family, and in more than one sense. Dogs, like all placental mammals, share 90 percent of our genetic material. Dogs evolved with humans. Octavia and I were separated by half a billion years of evolution. We were as different as land from sea. Was it even possible for a human to understand the emotions of a creature as different from us as an octopus?

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.

Multitasking for an octopus is easy, because three-fifths of their neurons are not even in their brains, but in their arms. It’s almost as if each arm has its own separate brain—a brain that craves, and enjoys, stimulation.

But eggs fertile or no, Octavia’s devotion to them was profoundly beautiful. In each caress, each cleaning, each hour of steadfast protection of this mother’s eggs, I could see the ancient shape of life’s first love. Thousands of billions of mothers—from the gelatinous ancestors of Octavia, to my own mother—have taught their kind to love, and to know that love is the highest and best use of a life. Love alone matters, and makes its object worthy. And love is a living thing, even if Octavia’s eggs were not. Molly. Christopher. Tess . . . all were no longer living, yet I loved them no less. And, I realized, too soon, Octavia herself would be no more. But love never dies, and love always matters. And so it still fills me with gratitude that Octavia tended her eggs with such diligence and grace. For I could face the inevitable fact of her dying with the knowledge that she would do so in the act of loving, as only a mature female octopus at the end of her short, strange life can love.

Wilson and I unscrewed the lid to her barrel and peered in. We held a squid for her in case she wanted to eat. She floated to the top and took the squid from our hands. But she dropped it. Hunger was not what brought her to the top of the tank. She was old. She was sick. She was weak and near death. She hadn’t had any contact with us for ten months—given an octopus’s life span, that’s like not seeing someone for twenty-five years. But she not only remembered us, but made the effort to greet us one last time.

Could she know how much I cared about her? Did it matter to her? I wish I knew, but I don’t. But now, thanks to Octavia, I know something perhaps deeper and more important, perhaps best expressed by Thales of Miletus, a Greek philosopher who lived more than 2,600 years ago. “The universe,” he’s reported to have said, “is alive, and has fire in it, and is full of gods.” Being friends with an octopus—whatever that friendship meant to her—has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom—and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.

His enormously long tail (when he was a puppy I could carry in one hand, his tail was already fourteen inches long!) nearly touches the ground when he stands. But his tail is seldom down. Usually it’s held high, like his tall ears, waving its white tip like a flag as he bounds ahead of us in the woods. Howard calls him a trail rocket. But he always turns and waits for us to catch up. He invariably comes or waits when we call. He trusts that something good is always about to happen—because it’s true.

When the student is ready, the adage goes, the teacher will appear. This time, the student wasn’t ready. The teacher came anyway. I was fifty-eight when Thurber appeared in my life, and I soon saw that I still had more lessons to learn on my journey of trying to be a good creature.

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.

The Outermost House by Henry Beston. A quote from these pages helped me to define what I set out to do in chronicling the natural world: We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. . . . For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas. In these pages I found brilliant science writing by a scientist who remains dazzled by the workings of biology. Thomas, a specialist in the human immune system, musters vivid, lyrical language to convey his wonder and excitement. His theme in these twenty-nine essays is the interconnectedness of each human with all of life.

The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson. This title introduced me to an author whose work helped found the modern environmental movement. I bought this, her third book, as a discard at a library sale the first year I began work as a newspaper reporter. I wasn’t yet an environmental reporter, but I wanted to learn about seaweeds and snails. I became a devotee of Carson’s sharp eye and lyrical voice and sought out her later works, including Silent Spring, her sweeping exposé of the chemical poisoning of the natural world.

Life on a Little-Known Planet by Howard Ensign Evans. The author, a Harvard entomologist, dedicated this riveting book on insect life to the book lice and silverfish that inhabited his study with him. Even though many new discoveries about insects have been reported since this book was published in 1968 (my copy, purchased as a used paperback, cost $2.45 when it was printed!), when I re-read it today, the book seems more prescient than outdated in its appreciation for the complexity of these tiny beings.

FOR ADULTS: Walking with the Great Apes Spell of the Tiger The Curious Naturalist The Wild Out Your Window Journey of the Pink Dolphins Search for the Golden Moon Bear The Good Good Pig Birdology The Soul of an Octopus Tamed and Untamed (coauthored with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas) FOR CHILDREN: The Snake Scientist The Man-Eating Tigers of Sundarbans Encantado Search for the Golden Moon Bear: Science and Adventure in the Asian Tropics The Tarantula Scientist Quest for the Tree Kangaroo Saving the Ghost of the Mountain Kakapo Rescue Temple Grandin The Tapir Scientist Chasing Cheetahs Snowball the Dancing Cockatoo The Octopus Scientists The Great White Shark Scientist Amazon Adventure The Hyena Scientist