How to Be a Good Creature Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Molly

  Chapter 2: Bald Throat, Black Head, and Knackered Leg

  Chapter 3: Christopher Hogwood

  Chapter 4: Clarabelle

  Chapter 5: The Christmas Weasel

  Chapter 6: Tess

  Chapter 7: Chris and Tess II

  Chapter 8: Sally

  Chapter 9: Octavia

  Chapter 10: Thurber

  Photographs

  For Futher Reading

  Other Books by Sy Montgomery

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2018 by Sy Montgomery

  Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Rebecca Green

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-on-Publication data is in file.

  ISBN: 978-0-544-93832-8 hardcover

  ISBN: 978-1-328-62903-6 special markets

  Cover illustration © 2018 by Rebecca Green

  Cover design by Cara Llewellyn

  eISBN 978-1-328-52823-0

  v1.0918

  All photos courtesy of the author except for: Jacqueline Anderson, 185 (top); Nic Bishop, 180 (top), 182 (top); Nic Bishop, with permission of CCF, 183; Ben Kilham, 187 (bottom); Phebe Lewan, 187 (top); Christine MacDonald, 178 (bottom); Howard Mansfield, 181 (bottom), 188 (top); Pincus Mansfield, 188 (bottom left); Sam Marshall, 188 (bottom right); Evelyn Naglie, 189; Kate O’Sullivan, 186 (top left); Jody Simpson, 181 (top), 185 (bottom); Tianne Strombeck, 179 (bottom), 184; Barb Sylvestre, 182 (bottom); Stephanie Thomas, 186 (top right).

  Always and forever, for Dr. Millmoss

  I travel around the world to research my books. I joined a team of researchers radio-collaring tree kangaroos in the cloud forest of Papua New Guinea; searched for signs of snow leopards in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia’s Gobi; swam with piranhas and electric eels for a book about pink dolphins in the Amazon. During all of these trips, I’ve thought of a saying that to me has served as a promise: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Though I’ve been blessed with some splendid classroom teachers—Mr. Clarkson, my high school journalism teacher, foremost among them—most of my teachers have been animals.

  What have animals taught me about life? How to be a good creature.

  All the animals I’ve known—from the first bug I must have spied as an infant, to the moon bears I met in Southeast Asia, to the spotted hyenas I got to know in Kenya—have been good creatures. Each individual is a marvel and perfect in his or her own way. Just being with any animal is edifying, for each has a knowing that surpasses human understanding. A spider can taste the world with her feet. Birds can see colors we can’t begin to describe. A cricket can sing with his legs and listen with his knees. A dog can hear sounds above the level of human hearing, and can tell if you’re upset even before you’re aware of it yourself.

  Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways. In these pages you’ll meet animals who changed my life by the briefest of meetings. You’ll meet others who became members of my family. Some are dogs who shared our home. One’s a pig who lived in our barn. Three are huge flightless birds, two are tree kangaroos, and there’s also a spider, a weasel, and an octopus.

  I 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. I often wish I could go back in time and tell my young, anxious self that my dreams weren’t in vain and my sorrows weren’t permanent. I can’t do that, but I can do something better. 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.

  As usual, when I was not in class at elementary school, we were together. Molly—our Scottish terrier—and I were doing sentinel duty on the spacious, crewcut lawn of the general’s house, Quarters 225, Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, New York. Rather, Molly was keeping watch, and I was watching her.

  Unfortunately for a Scottie, bred to hunt down foxes and badgers, far too little prey was to be found on the orderly and efficient army base. Every inch was strictly manicured, and wild animals were not tolerated. Still, because Molly did find the occasional squirrel to chase—and because, though we lived there, the home was not ours but the U.S. Army’s, we couldn’t put up a fence—she was chained to a sturdy, corkscrewing stake driven deep into the ground. I watched her scan the area with her wet black nose and her pricked, swiveling ears—longing, longing, as I did daily, to smell and hear as she did the invisible comings and goings of distant animals.

  And then she was off like a furry cannonball.

  In an instant, she had ripped the foot-and-a-half-long stake from the ground and was dragging it and her chain behind her as she charged, snarling with gleeful fury, through the yew bushes in front of the single-story brick house. Quickly I glimpsed what she was chasing: a rabbit!

  I leapt to my feet. I had never seen a wild rabbit before. Nobody had ever heard of a wild rabbit on Fort Hamilton! I wanted a closer look. But Molly had chased the rabbit around to the front of the house, and my two, weak, second-grader’s feet, imprisoned in their patent leather Mary Janes, couldn’t carry me nearly as fast as her four, clawed, fully mature paws.

  A Scottish terrier’s fierce, deep voice is too commanding to be ignored. Soon, out from our quarters came my mother and one of the enlisted men who had been assigned to help keep the general’s house tidy. A forest of legs exploded around me as the adults zigzagged after our furious terrier. But of course they couldn’t catch her. By this time Molly had broken free of the chain and left the stake behind. There was no stopping her. Whether she caught the rabbit or not, she’d be out for hours, perhaps till after dark. She’d come back, signaling at the door to be let in with a single, summoning woof, only when she was good and ready.

  Though I wished I could have run after her, it wouldn’t have been to stop her. I wanted to go with her. I wanted to see the rabbit again. I wanted to learn the smells around the post at night. I wanted to meet other dogs and wrestle and chase them, to poke my nose into holes and smell who lived there, to discover treasures hidden in the dirt.

  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.

  ✧

  I was never, my mother told me, a “normal” child.

  As evidence, she cited the day she and my father first took me to the zoo. I had just begun to walk, and, breaking free of my parents’ hands, toddled to my chosen destination: inside the pen housing some of the largest and most dangerous animals in the institution. The hippos must have gazed upon me benignly rather than biting me in half, as these three-thousand-pound animals are prone to do, or stepping on me. Because somehow my parents got me out of there unscathed. My mother, however, never completely recovered from the incident.

  I was always drawn to animals—far more than I was ever attracted to other children, or adul
t humans, or dolls. I preferred watching my two goldfish, Goldie and Blackie, and playing with my beloved but ill-fated turtle, Ms. Yellow Eyes. (My mother was from the South, and long before feminism, I learned from her the southern habit of bestowing on all females the honorific Ms.) Like most pet turtles in the 1950s, Ms. Yellow Eyes suffered from improper diet and died when her shell got soft. To console me, my mother gave me a baby doll, but I ignored it. 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.

  An only child, I never yearned for siblings. I didn’t need other kids around. Most children were loud and wiggly. They wouldn’t stay still long enough to watch a bumblebee. They ran and scattered the pigeons strutting on the sidewalk.

  With rare exceptions, adult humans were not particularly memorable either. I would stare blankly at an adult I had seen many times, unable to place them, unless one of my parents could remind me of their pet. (For example, “They’re the ones with Brandy.” Brandy was a miniature longhaired dachshund with red hair who loved to snuggle with me in my bed while the adults continued to enjoy their party after I was tucked in. I still can’t remember his people’s names or recall their faces.) One of the few petless humans I loved was my “uncle” Jack, not really an uncle, but a colonel, a friend of my father’s, who would draw pictures of pinto ponies for me. I would carefully color in the spots while he and my father played chess.

  When my language skills had grown robust enough to discuss such matters, I announced to my parents that I was really a horse. I galloped around the house neighing and tossing my head. My father agreed to call me “Pony.” But my elegant and socially ambitious mother, wishing that her little girl had the good sense to pretend she was a princess or a fairy, was worried. She feared that I was mentally defective.

  The army pediatrician assured her the pony phase would wear off. It did—but only when I revealed that now I was really a dog.

  From my perspective, this presented only one problem. While my parents and their friends were eager to show me how to be a little girl, there was nobody around who could show me how to be a dog. Until I was three and my short life’s ambition was realized with the arrival of Molly.

  ✧

  A Scottish terrier puppy is “bold and jaunty,” say breed websites, as well as notably “active and willful.” A Scottie’s characteristic traits of toughness and independence are evident even from infancy. An ancient breed concocted by thrifty Scots to keep vermin from bothering their livestock, these small black dogs are Highland warriors. They’re strong and brave enough to subdue foxes and badgers, and smart enough to capably work independent of their owners and outwit wild intruders. Standing a mere ten inches tall and weighing only about twenty pounds, Scotties “have all the compactness of a small dog and all the valor of a big one,” the critic and author Dorothy Parker wrote. “And,” she added, “they are so exceedingly sturdy that it is proverbial that the only fatal thing to them is being run over by an automobile—in which case, the car itself knows it has been in a fight.” A Scottie puppy is like a terrible two-year-old tot on steroids and gifted with an almost unnatural indestructibility.

  But, despite our shared toddlerhood, tough, feisty little Molly was exactly my opposite.

  Something bad happened to me once I turned two, after my family moved back to the States from Germany, where I’d been born. In Germany, we’d had a nanny, but now I was my mother’s responsibility. My mother would later tell me that I contracted a very rare case of early childhood mononucleosis. But my father’s sister thought this was a lie, and indeed, many years later, I found no note of this diagnosis in my army medical records. My aunt was convinced I had been smothered, shaken violently, or both, probably repeatedly. Evidently I cried a lot. Even many years later, when I was a teenager, my mother still complained bitterly to her friends about how my crying often ruined her cocktail hour. Her evening martinis were the best part of her day. They must have eased her loneliness when my father was away, leaving her alone with a howling baby.

  Whatever happened to me, for many months afterward, I wouldn’t play or talk. I refused to eat. I turned three, and still I hadn’t grown.

  My condition must have distressed both my parents. My mother bought a little bowl with animals at the bottom, which I could see only if I finished my cereal. She cut my toast into animal shapes with cookie cutters; my father tried to tempt me with milkshakes (into which he had clandestinely slipped a raw egg). Their desperation over my failing health may have been what prompted them to consider adopting a puppy.

  Today, dog trainers and parenting coaches would have warned against it. Dog trainers agree that Scotties, while wonderful dogs, are not a good match for small children. Toddlers might step on toes or clutch at a tail, and Scotties won’t put up with this. They’re apt to bite, and their jaws and teeth are as big as an Airedale’s. Scotties are exceptionally loyal, but they are also considered the fiercest of the terriers. And today most experts caution against getting even the most docile and patient of dog breeds till a child is six or even seven.

  But of course, nobody knew any of that then—so the glamorous Cuban émigrée whom I knew as Aunt Grace gave us one of her three precious puppies.

  Aunt Grace was not really my aunt, and her husband, whom I grew up calling Uncle Clyde, was not really my uncle. Uncle Clyde was my father’s best friend, but Aunt Grace was my mother’s rival. Aunt Grace wore her waist-length jet-black hair pinned into elaborate twists, custom-tailored dresses that featured plunging necklines and slit skirts, black eyeliner, crimson lipstick, and high heels. My mother considered her a showoff. “What color dress do you think Aunt Grace wore to the vet when she took the puppies in for their vaccinations?” she once asked me.

  “Black?” I guessed. Personally, I would have wanted to look as similar as possible to the rest of the family. “No,” my mother corrected me—“white!” The puppies would show up better that way.

  It must have been soon after that vet visit that Molly came to live with us. And though nothing in my short life could have possibly matched the glory of that day, alas—whether because of my illness or injury, or because I was just too young—any memory of that life-changing moment is lost to me.

  But its effect was soon obvious.

  Not long after she joined us, my parents took a black-and-white photo of Molly and me—one that my mother would later send as the family’s holiday greeting card the Christmas two months before I’d turn four. Though my short, puffy sleeves show the season is summer, Christmas stockings hang by the fireplace and a mechanical Santa doll stands beside me on the brick floor, ready to ring a brass bell. Like all my mother’s Christmas card compositions, it was a set-up shot. But Molly’s and my elated expressions are genuine.

  ✧

  “Molly’s got a Daddy sock!”

  Like most puppies, Molly loved to steal, and she especially loved to seize my father’s black dress socks, the ones he wore to work with his general’s uniform. When Molly would steal them, far from tattling on her, I would eagerly announce to the household the spectacle that would follow. It always amused my dog-loving father. Having routed the sock from its usual lair in the bedroom hamper, or sometimes from where it was hiding in the toe of a shoe, Molly would race into the living room, growling ferociously, and then shake the sock with single-minded, delighted fury. There was no getting the sock back until Molly was certain that she had broken its neck.

  As a puppy, Molly didn’t chew things. She killed them. Sure, she liked rawhides and bones, but she was after something utterly different when she attacked my father’s socks. Though I can’t remember her ever actually slaying any animal, she imagined objects to be alive, and then imagined herself killing them.

  She loved to destroy balls. Small ones didn’t interest her. She didn’t fetch. With explosive intensity, she chased large, air-filled plastic spheres—soccer balls,
kick balls, dodge balls—and she bested them all. I would walk her on leash from our quarters down to the army post’s tennis courts early in the morning, before the adults would occupy the space, to roll one of these balls for her. With her deep-throated growls reverberating in my chest, I’d watch her tear across the clay surface of the court as the ball struggled to stay ahead of her nose. But she would always corner it; once she punctured its lungs with her long white canines, the ball would deflate enough so she could get the entire thing in her strong jaws and shake it into oblivion. When it was dead she let me pick it up and examine it. The thing looked as if it had been punctured by ice picks. A small dog had done this with her face. I was impressed early on that Molly was a powerful being, worthy of deep respect.

  Apparently others on the post recognized this too. When Molly was older, after we gave up on the stake and chain, she would frequently go out at night alone. Folks on the post got to know her. On one of her nightly jaunts, she visited the Womens Auxiliary Army Corps barracks. (Women were not integrated with the male army until 1978.) A number of the women were outside that night, and word got back to us the next day that when they saw Molly trotting by, they stood in line, allowed her to sniff them, and then saluted her as she continued on her way.

  The story could well be apocryphal. Or it could be the WAACs really saluted her only because she was the general’s dog. It could also be that these strong, brave women saw and respected this little female dog’s independence and spunk. An earlier general had recognized this quality too in his Scotties. The commander of the Scottish army, Major General George Douglas, also known as the Earl of Dumbarton, had a pack of distinguished Scottish terriers in the nineteenth century whom he nicknamed “the Diehards.” His Scotties inspired him to name his favorite regiment, the Royal Scots, after them: “Dumbarton’s Diehards.”

  With typical Scottie self-reliance, Molly didn’t need people to tell her what to do. She wouldn’t come when we called her in at night. 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.