How to Be a Good Creature Page 10

  Sally was enjoying life, still stealing food, still loving our hikes in the woods, still favoring us with her puffy smile. But she seemed suddenly much older. Was it arthritis? We had her x-rayed. We tried glucosamine, the same supplement that had helped Christopher. Our vet suspected it was something else.

  He was right. It was a brain tumor.

  ✧

  We’d have done anything to help her. We consulted with a veterinary neurologist in Maine. We were told that treatment seldom helps. We prayed that it was a slow-growing tumor. But it was not.

  Over the course of a weekend, when both Howard and Jody were away, Sally lost the ability to walk, to stand, and to eat. I didn’t leave her side. As long as I was touching her, she seemed calm and peaceful. Otherwise she was agitated. I carried her outside to enjoy the warm spring sunshine. My friends Liz and Gretchen came over to support us and didn’t leave till Howard came home. Chuck made an emergency house call to see us. He felt it was possible she had an infection, and gave her a shot of antibiotics, hoping if she recovered we might still have some months of happiness together. But the next day, it was clear what we had to do. Chuck came to our bedroom, where Sally lay on a sheepskin. She died in my arms.

  Friends phoned and visited, trying to cheer me up. Jody returned from her trip, and I walked in the leafy shade of summer with her and her dogs. My octopus book, just published, became a bestseller. But I felt no joy in the book’s success, in my friends’ kindness, in the beauty of New Hampshire’s woods. I felt no joy at anything anymore. I felt myself spiraling into another depression. And this time, no exotic research trip was waiting to rescue me. For the first time in twenty years, it would be a full twelve months before I set out on another scheduled expedition.

  And then, one morning about a month after Sally’s death, Chuck called.

  “We were just checking out a new litter of Dave Kennard’s pups,” he said.

  “Bet they’re cute,” I replied.

  I knew Dave and his talented, purebred border collies, who lived in the next town over. The dogs were famous for performing at sheep herding demonstrations all over the Northeast. Dave sold his pups for thousands of dollars, and all of them went to working farms where they would pursue careers as professional herders. Dave never sold his dogs as pets—they would be hopelessly bored in the average home—which was one reason why I hadn’t called him after the dream in which Tess had shown me Sally. The other was that, with so many dogs homeless and unloved, we would never consider buying a border collie from a breeder when we were among the relative few who could provide an appropriate home for such a high-energy animal. I still felt the same way.

  So why was Chuck even telling me this?

  “They’re cute, all right,” Chuck continued. “And they’re all super healthy. But there’s one, a little male, with a blind eye . . .”

  Working border collies depend on excellent eyesight to herd. If they can’t see all the animals they’re working, they can be literally blindsided by a sheep or pig or cow, and since the animals they herd are often bigger than themselves, they can be seriously injured or even killed. 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. It was unlikely a serious shepherd would pay thousands, no matter how smart or otherwise healthy, for this little pup.

  I hung up with my heart pounding. Then I called Jody, and got Rick.

  ✧

  At lunch, Howard and I discussed all the reasons we weren’t ready for a puppy. It was too soon. We were consumed with our grief for Sally. Maybe the next spring, we might consider adopting a rescue. A female. Classic black and white, with a white stripe right down the middle of the nose, like Sally and Tess. We’d want a young dog, on the small side, as Tess had been—because Sally, at forty pounds, had been difficult for me to carry up and down the stairs in the middle of the night in her old age.

  We went to see the puppy anyway. Just to take a look.

  ✧

  We named him Thurber. The cartoonist and essayist James Thurber is one of our favorites, and he, too, had only one good eye. (The other eye was blinded by an arrow shot by his younger brother during a game of William Tell.) Since the moment we brought him home, Thurber has been the most eager, outgoing, happy creature we’ve ever known.

  Just looking at him makes people smile. A bolt-of-lightning white stripe zigzags from the top of his head, around his good left eye, and then down the side of his black nose. He’s a tricolor, with handsome brown eyebrows and one brown sock extending from his dominant left front leg down to a white foot. 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.

  For Thurber, pretty much every moment is fun. Indoors, he loves to play with his toys, some of which, including a red ball, belonged to Tess. When he grabs and squeaks his hedgehog or his shark, one of his stuffed lambs or snakes or octopuses, or his elephant or his dragon or his duck or his hippo or his crab, we can seldom resist playing pull and chase. But if we’re busy, he plays by himself, making up games in which one of his toys comes alive and he must either herd or attack it. He rolls several balls at once around the floor and chases them, sometimes herding as many as three at a time. In the woods, he selects enormous, usually forked sticks—downed saplings, sometimes longer than eight feet—and drags or carries them along the trail to impress his companions. He is so happy that he sings. He howls to the radio in the morning, particularly if it’s playing something with strings or trumpets. In the car on the way to our outings, he and I howl together to his favorite CDs. He especially likes Springsteen, and one song by the indie pop group A Great Big World, appropriately titled “Say Something.” Lately our favorite duet is sung to “Gracias a la Vida” (Thanks to Life). I’ve even composed alternative lyrics: Gracias a la vida / for giving me this dog-o / He’s the very best perro / in the whole wide mundo . . .

  Everyone loves Thurber, and Thurber loves everyone. He has tons of friends, both canine and human. He instantly bonded with Gretchen and Liz and Jody. We hike in the woods almost every weekday afternoon with Pearl and May. Mornings and weekends we go with one or more of his other dog friends: an athletic cattle dog named Basil, a water-loving black Lab named Shadow, and a beautiful golden retriever puppy exactly his age named August who lives on our block. Incredibly, she, too, was born with only one good eye.

  We often forget Thurber has a blind eye. There’s almost nothing he can’t do. He flies after the ball when Howard flings it with the Chuck-It. He’s fast and agile and smart, obedient and imaginative. As far as we’re concerned, he is perfect and he is whole.

  Every once in a while I catch sight of his blind eye in a certain light and remember he has one good eye, and one blessed eye—the blessed eye that brought him to us.

  Thurber’s blind eye was a genetic accident. It was also a miracle—one of several that conspired, along with our wonderful vet, to rescue me from a future that I was certain was nothing but bleak. Ever since Molly died, I had longed for a puppy, who instead of raising me I could myself raise—and in this way, I could pay forward the debt I owed my first mentor. But from trolling border collie rescue sites, I knew that border collie puppies for adoption are difficult to find. What were the chances that a pup from one of Dave’s famous litters would end up with us? And the timing, which at first appeared so wrong, was freakishly perfect: Thurber arrived at the one moment of my more than thirty-year career that I had no pressing deadlines, no expeditions pending for months. I was free to devote most of the summer and fall to raising a puppy. I could give to this b
aby all the nurturing, confidence, and security that Tess and Sally had so tragically lacked before they had come into our lives.

  Thurber was not what we were expecting. He was not even what we thought we wanted. We thought wed wanted a dog months or years later than Thurber appeared. We had imagined a petite black-and-white female rescue with a plush double coat; we got a male tricolor with a short coat who’s turning out (at less than two years old at the time of this writing) to be both the tallest and the heaviest dog in our lives. Other than being a border collie, he is unlike both Tess and Sally in so many ways. Neither Sally nor Tess particularly relished meeting new dogs; Thurber greets everyone with enthusiasm. He does things neither Sally nor Tess would do. He wakes us each morning by poking us with the white paw of his brown arm as a person might. (We’ve noticed his mother, whom we’ve gone back to visit with Thurber several times, reaches out with her arm in the same way.) Thurber doesn’t like to sit in our respective offices, as did Tess and Sally, but in one of two favorite spots: in a rocking chair between my office and the kitchen, or halfway up the stairs to Howard’s office, with his snout poking through the spindles of the banister and his front legs hanging down.

  The most important difference, though, is that Thurber is happy no matter where he is or whom he’s with. We hate to leave him, but if we need to go away for a week or a weekend and can’t take him—like the recent weekend we went to Arizona for the wedding of Kate Cabot, one of the two little girls who had lived next door—Thurber can happily stay with any number of friends. That wasn’t the case with Tess (if we left, we always had to leave her with Evelyn) or Sally (whom we really couldn’t leave at all for more than a few hours). Though both of them were happy dogs, they both suffered from separation anxiety, having been neglected or abused when they were younger.

  Thurber again surprises us with a surfeit of blessings. Not only did he heal our sorrow. He allows us to rewrite, in a way, the early sorrows of our previous dogs.

  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.

  Sy and Molly were pups together.

  Meeting a friendly binturong at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Rhode Island.

  Sally offers her irresistible puffy smile.

  Sy strokes her friend Octavia.

  Enjoying the company of 18,000 snakes in the Narcisse Snake Dens, Manitoba.

  In early runthood, Christopher Hogwood was small enough to fit in a shoebox . . . but with plenty of slops and love, he grew to 750 pounds.

  From left to right: May, Pearl, and Sally on vacation together in Maine (Their humans came along, too.)

  By her twenties, though Sy no longer thought she was a pony, she still loved every horse she ever met.

  Beautiful Clarabelle rests calmly in her silken hideaway, with just a few of her pink toes peeking out.

  Searching for octopuses, Sy scuba-dives with her friend and instructor Doris Morrissette in Cozumel, Mexico.

  Making a new friend in Namibia—an orphaned cheetah cub turned ambassador for the Cheetah Conservation Fund.

  Thurber on the trail, carrying his prize.

  After her book The Soul of An Octopus was published, the New England Aquarium named an octopus after Sy. Here the two Sys, by then good friends, share a gentle caress, toward the end of Sy the octopus’s short life.

  Sally looks up while we cross-country ski.

  Sy with tree kangaroo Holly at the Roger Williams Park Zoo.

  As a puppy, Thurber reaches out with his brown arm.

  Home sweet home: happy to live in a tent in the Outback.

  Emus Bald Throat, Black Head, and Knackered Leg.

  Playing with a royal Bengal tiger cub.

  These black bear cubs would later be released to the wild and star in a National Geographic documentary that Sy wrote about the work of her friend, wildlife rehabilitator Ben Kilham.

  This sweet cow lived at a farm in Peterborough, NH.

  Despite a leg injury in her youth, Tess leaps balletically to catch her Frisbee.

  Off to the Pig Plateau. Sy with slops bucket; Tess with Frisbee; Christopher Hogwood with appetite.

  Here are ten books that inspired me to embark on a career of studying the lives of animals and writing about the natural world.

  Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat. One of my favorite books as a child was Farley Mowat’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, which is about his adventures with his beloved pet, ignominiously named Mutt. Later I would read the author’s most famous adult title, and it affected me deeply. The book is a portrait of a scientist whose findings turn him into an activist on behalf of the animals he studied. Though Never Cry Wolf was published as a factual account, it was later decried as fiction. Yet even as he departed from the facts on the ground, Farley’s text remains true to matters of the heart. “Never let the facts get in the way of the truth,” he later told me, as he generously welcomed me to his home and helped me while I researched my first book. And while I’ve remained a stickler for facts in my own writing, Farley showed me that a book must have emotional resonance as well if its author is to successfully move others to action.

  My Life with the Chimpanzees by Jane Goodall. I grew up inspired by photos of Jane with the chimpanzees of Gombe in the pages of National Geographic in the 1960s, even before I could read. Finally reading the story of her life, which came out in 1988, was worth the wait.

  Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey. The majestic mountain gorillas in their misty cloud forest home appealed to me even more than Jane’s fascinating chimps. I read Dian’s memoir in its first edition, when the cover—my favorite of any book ever published—featured an intimate, close-up portrait of a silverback male, Uncle Bert, his black face benign and thoughtful, his jet fur bejeweled with raindrops. The back cover showed Uncle Bert from the other side, accentuating the great dome of his skull and the massive power of his shoulders and back.

  Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez. One of my best friends, who later became a veterinarian, left this book on my porch as a gift before I left for the Outback. This classic, careful study of wolves’ true lives and how they have been understood by human cultures through the centuries showed me the value of looking at an animal’s historical and even prehistoric relationships with humans in an effort to understand its powers.

  King Solomon’s Ring by Konrad Lorenz. This is a classic account of animal behavior by the man who founded the field now known as ethology. His careful and detailed observations of graylag geese, crow-like jackdaws, and even cichlid fish are not only scientifically revealing, but also filled with respect and affection for each animal as an individual.

  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 au
thor 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.

  Lilly on Dolphins by John Lilly. The author was one of the first scientists to attempt to formally study communication with another species. Today, his book would be dismissed as too “woo-woo” to be considered science writing; the author became known as a proponent for mind-altering drugs, an enthusiasm I don’t share. But when I read the book just out of college, I was deeply moved by his connection with these intelligent individuals he came to know. Though some of his ideas have been disproved, tools that were not available to Lilly at the time of his work have revealed that dolphins do possess a complex language, including personal names, known as “signature whistles,” for each individual in a given pod.