How to Be a Good Creature Read online

  This bothered me not at all. I certainly didn’t expect her to obey me. Why should she? By the time I was five, she was only two—but she, by then, was a full adult. I considered her not only my superior, but my role model. I did not even realize that my view of our relationship wasn’t endorsed by other humans—until my mother set out to tame us both.

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  The very characteristics that makes Scotties special—independence and tenacity—also make them difficult to train. One trainer’s website noted that Scotties’ famous stubbornness and self-reliance “tend to make them think obedience is optional.”

  Yet, incredibly, while our Molly was running loose and destroying toys and clothing, my glamorous Aunt Grace managed to train her Scotties to say their prayers and play the piano.

  Aunt Grace had purchased a squat black child’s toy piano, like the kind Schroeder plays in the Peanuts cartoon. She would call Mac, Molly’s brother, into the living room. “Play the piano!” she would urge with great verve. The dog, sitting in front of the plastic keyboard, would mash first one set of keys, then another, alternating paws. I was also learning piano at the time and was impressed that Mac could play with both hands before I could.

  Next Aunt Grace would wow her guests with her Scotties’ piety. A large pale blue upholstered footstool would serve as their dinner table, set with two matching blue placemats ready to receive two dog dishes. While Aunt Grace held their shiny aluminum bowls brimming with food, Mac and his mother, Ginny, would sit up, side by side. Aunt Grace set the bowls down. “Say your prayers!” she’d urge, and the Scotties would place their paws at the edge of the “dining table” in front of them, bow their heads, and tuck their snouts beneath their paws. They’d hold this position until Aunt Grace signaled it was time to eat.

  This was impressive, and impressing one’s peers was very important in army high society. My mother was no dog trainer—though as a child in Arkansas, she’d had a beloved little beagle mix named Flip, who was tragically run over by a car—but she was a skilled seamstress. So she set out to best her glamorous rival. Our dog might not be able to perform like a person, but she could dress like one.

  Though the Scottie’s hard, wiry coat was bred for weather resistance, my mother began to sew little coats for Molly. She had coats for both summer and winter wear. A tartan plaid would have been nice, but my mother went for pastels—Molly was female, after all, and my mother felt she should dress the part. Then she turned her attention to Molly’s furniture. Mac had a piano in Aunt Grace’s living room. Molly would not be outdone. My mother bought a canopy bed for Molly, which was headquartered between the kitchen and the living room, for which she created covers, a pillow, and of course a canopy in royal red satin, with ruffles all around.

  My own dresses began to sprout more ruffles too as my mother tried, with increasing fervor, to make me at least look like the dainty little girl she’d always wanted. At the private school in Brooklyn, girls did not wear slacks, and in fact I didn’t own any jeans until we moved and I entered public school in fifth grade. I was strictly admonished not to get my clothes dirty, to the point that in kindergarten I’d refused to finger-paint even with a smock on—a tale my mother recounted many years later with great pride.

  At her featherweight black-and-gold Singer sewing machine, my mother created dress after pretty dress for me, often in fabric that would match one of her own. Her most dazzling achievement was the outfit she made for me for an elementary school play, in which I, because I was always shorter than all the other kids in my class, played Little Bo Peep. The costume, all pink and white, with eyelet lace and an embroidered bonnet, was so spectacular that the audience gasped when I stepped on stage.

  But as my mother valued girly-ness, I revered doggy-ness. I was entranced by Molly’s otherworldly powers. She could hear my father’s approaching staff car long before it arrived in the driveway. She could smell an opened can of Ken-L Ration from the moment my mother took it out of the refrigerator. She could see in the dark.

  Could I acquire such superpowers, I wondered? On TV, cartoon characters could walk through walls like Casper the Friendly Ghost and fly in rocket ships like on Space Angel. But here was a being who really did have more-than-human genius, and as a small child I pledged myself her acolyte.

  No spot on her body eluded my fascinated scrutiny, from the sandy bumps on her long pink tongue to the way her anus seemed to bloom when she hunched to defecate. I followed avidly every swivel and fold of her ears, every twitch and flare of her rubbery nose. Everything about Molly was perfect.

  There were many differences between Molly and me, besides the most obvious ones. Her nostrils were shaped like commas. Mine were simple holes. Her ears were not just mobile, unlike my stationary ones, but inside them, I could see they housed mysterious cartilaginous structures unlike my own. But these differences, I decided, were not insurmountable. Maybe I could still be like her. If only I could learn her doggy secrets! I remember spending hours lying on the floor, my head resting on my arm, inches from her face, watching her sleep, trying to absorb her scent, her breath, her dreams.

  In my fantasies—elaborate daydreams I nurtured for years—Molly and I would run away from home together. We’d live in the woods. We’d lap water from clear streams. We’d find food in the forest, and shelter in a hollow tree. All the other animals would know us, and we would know them. We’d spend our days watching, sniffing, digging, exploring. She would teach me all about the world—the real world, outside the post, away from school, far from asphalt and brick and concrete. With her at my side, I could learn the secrets of wild animals.

  Even though we lived on an army base, and later in the tame suburbs, I knew there was a vivid, green, breathing world out there, bustling with the busy lives of birds and insects, turtles and fish, rabbits and deer. I knew it from books and from TV shows like Wild Kingdom and The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau—but I believed it because Molly could hear it and smell it. The real world, the world I already loved, was just out of my ordinary human sensory range. For now. But one day, I knew, we’d escape and go there, to the wild places, where Molly would at last share with me her animal powers.

  A lone with the wind and the dry, wintering scrub, I was squatting in a sea of thorny ground cover in middle of the Australian Outback. Then, suddenly, I knew somebody was there.

  I was twenty-six, five years out of college, and literally half a world away from home—which most recently had been New Jersey, where I’d worked for five years as a science and environmental reporter for a daily newspaper. But now, I was sampling small plants for a graduate student’s botanical survey. The only sound, other than my knife cutting the stems, was the wind blowing through the low bushes and stunted eucalyptus trees called mallee—until something jerked my mind away from my work. I looked up to see three giant birds, each as tall as a man, strolling casually through the brown grass, not fifteen feet away from me.

  They were emus. Nearly six feet tall, typically seventy-five pounds, these flightless birds stand beside the kangaroo on Australia’s coat of arms as a symbol of this otherworldly continent at the bottom of the globe. Emus seem part bird and part mammal, with a little dinosaur thrown in. Shaggy, twin-shafted brown feathers hang from the rounded torso like hair. A long black neck periscopes up from the body, ending in a gooselike beak. The wings are mere stumps, and stick out from the body like comical afterthoughts. But on their strong, backwards-bending legs, emus can run forty miles an hour—and sever fencing wire, or break a neck, with a single kick.

  At the sight of them, a shock leapt from the top of my head down my spine. I’d never been so close to this large a wild animal before—much less while alone, on a foreign continent. I was not so much afraid as I was dazzled. I froze, caught by their grace and power and strangeness, as they lifted their long, scaly legs and folded their huge dinosaurian toes, then set them down again. Balletically dipping their necks into an S-shape as they picked at the grass, they walked past me, and the
n over the ridge. Finally their haystack-like bodies blended into the brown, rounded forms of the wintering bushes, and were gone.

  After they left, I felt a shift in my psyche. But I had no idea that I had just caught the first glimpse of a life farther off the beaten path than I had ever imagined. I could not have known it then, but these strange giant birds would grant me the destiny Molly had inspired, and they would repay me a millionfold for my first act of true bravery: leaving all that I loved behind.

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  Almost everyone had thought I was crazy when I’d left the United States. My mother had been horrified, though my father assured her the move would get “the travel bug” out of my system. I’d quit my well-paying job, one I had parlayed from a cub reporter covering nine rural towns to the beat I had hoped for while I was a college journalism student. Within a year of graduating from university, having triple majored in journalism, French, and psychology, I was covering science, environment, and medicine in a state with urgent environmental issues to investigate and more scientists and engineers per capita than any other in the nation.

  I often worked fourteen-hour days and weekends and was hungry for more. My work was rewarded with awards, raises, and freedom. Surrounded with talented editors, smart colleagues, and good friends, I lived in a little cabin in the woods with five ferrets, two lovebirds, and the man I loved, Howard Mansfield, a brilliant writer whom I’d met in college. I was happy.

  And then came a gift that changed my life. After I had worked five years at the Courier-News, my father, now retired from the army and ever my champion, gave me a plane ticket to Australia. I’d always wanted to visit. Sculpted by isolation, Australia’s animals outpace the imagination. Instead of antelopes or deer trotting on four feet, kangaroos bounce about on two, carrying babies in belly pockets. Echidnas, quill-covered mammals who lay eggs, lick up ants with whiplike ribbons of sticky tongue. Beaver-tailed duck-billed platypuses defend themselves with poison spines at the ankles of their webbed feet.

  I wanted to do more than just see these animals. I wanted to study, and, if possible, help the creatures from whom I was learning. I discovered an organization that paired paying laymen with scientific and conservation projects around the world. Earthwatch, a nonprofit based in Massachusetts, offered “citizen science” expeditions geared to a working persons schedule. Each lasted only a few weeks. I signed up for a project in the state of South Australia, assisting Dr. Pamela Parker, a conservation biologist at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo, with a study of the endangered southern hairy-nosed wombat at Brookfield Conservation Park, a two-hour drive from the city of Adelaide.

  We seldom saw the wombats. Looking rather like koalas but living in holes instead of trees, the wombats were shy and spent much of their time in the extensive tunnels they’d dug in the rock-hard soil. We would see them at a distance, though, basking in the afternoon sunlight on their burrow mounds. Occasionally we caught them and measured them, but mostly we surveyed their habitat, mapped their burrows, and counted their desert-dry, squareish scats in an effort to estimate their numbers. But we did see kangaroos every day, and they never stopped astounding me. Every creature, plant or animal, in the study area opened a new world, from the fist-size lycosid spider who often appeared inside my tent at night, to the twisted acacia trees that somehow survived in the dry red soil. At night, we cooked our food over eucalypt-scented campfires. We slept in tents pitched beneath scrubby Outback trees. In the mornings we watched sunrises streaked with flocks of gray-and-pink parrots. Here was a taste of the dream I had cherished as a child: living in the wild, discovering the animals’ secrets.

  I worked so hard and so earnestly that at the end of the two weeks, as I faced my return to the United States and my job, Dr. Parker made me an offer. She couldn’t hire me as a research assistant. And once I went home, she couldn’t pay my airfare to come back to Australia. But if I wanted to conduct independent research on any of the animals living at Brookfield Conservation Park, she would let me stay at her camp and share her food.

  So I came home—only to quit my job and move to a tent in the Outback.

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  There was one big difference between my dream as a child of living in the wild woods and moving to the mallee scrub of Australia. In my childhood fantasies, I’d had my mentor with me to show me the way. But of course, Molly was long gone. She’d died peacefully as she slept, in her red canopy bed, when I was a junior in high school. Who now would lead me, a mere human, lonely, disoriented, and inexperienced, into the land of unknown animal powers?

  I had no idea what I would study. So I began by assisting other people with their work—for example, taking plant samples for the grad student I was helping the first day I saw the emus. There were usually only six researchers in camp at a time. Sometimes I helped another woman look for evidence of introduced foxes. One day, several of us were tearing down barbed-wire fences left over from when the park had been a ranch. We were cannibalizing the fence posts to mark wombat warrens for Dr. Parker’s study when I saw the three emus again.

  They arrived noiselessly at a corner of the park about five hundred yards from us. They appeared to be picking at a low, bird-nest-like clot of mistletoe in a eucalyptus tree. Again, the shock stung the top of my head, like a laser bolt. Pay attention!

  We approached them with cameras and binoculars, ducking behind bushes in an attempt to hide, advancing only when we imagined they weren’t looking. But emus are always looking—the average bird’s eyesight is many times better than a human’s. We were within a hundred yards of them when one pulled himself up to his full height, black neck upstretched, and advanced straight toward us. At about twenty-five yards, the bold bird turned and ran. I noticed he also raised his tail and excreted a sizable watery mass. Thereafter, the three emus ignored us and strolled off over a ridge.

  I searched out the poop and found it was studded with green striated seeds. Mistletoe seeds! There and then, I knew what I would study. Are emus important dispersers of seeds? What species do they eat? Do emu droppings help seeds germinate better?

  I spent my days roaming the Outback in search of “emu pies.” For me, they were as precious, and potentially informative, as the discarded fuel tanks from an alien’s space ship. I’d gather them up, schlep them back to camp in bags, and try to identify the seeds I’d find. I’d then return half the seeds to the excrement from which they came and place the other half on a wet paper towel and see if one group grew better than the other.

  At the close of one particularly sunny day, I paused to sit and rest on a fallen log. I was watching meat ants crawl over my boots, feeling happy and free. Now I had a scientific purpose to my wanderings.

  When I looked up from the ants, I saw the emus again, grazing. I ducked behind a bush, hoping to be able to watch them longer, unseen—but they had already seen me. One began walking straight toward me. He came within twenty-five yards and ran, straight across my line of vision, and then stopped. The other two advanced and did the exact same thing. The three stood, as if waiting.

  Was this a challenge? An invitation? A test? They must have wondered: Was I dangerous? Would I chase them? If I did, how fast could I run?

  Trying to hide, I realized, was futile. I remembered that Jane Goodall, whose famous chimp studies chronicled in National Geographic made her one my childhood heroines, had come to the same conclusion. She didn’t try to steal glimpses of her study animals. Instead, she offered her presence, humbly and openly, until the chimps felt comfortable with her.

  So thereafter, I dressed in exactly the same clothes every day: my father’s old green army jacket, blue jeans, red kerchief. I wanted to reassure the birds: It’s only me; I’m harmless. I reckoned they could see me long before I could see them.

  After that day, I began to encounter them more often. Soon I could find them almost every day. And within a few weeks, I could follow them at fifteen feet—close enough to see their eyes clearly, mahogany irises with pupils black as holes; close enough
to see the shafts of their feathers; close enough to see the veins on the leaves of the plants they ate.

  I could easily tell them apart. One had a long scar on his right leg. I named him Knackered Leg. (Knackered is Australian slang I’d learned from a zookeeper. It means “messed up” and is more impolite than I then realized.) His injury might have been the reason he sat down most often of the three. Black Head seemed to be the most forward emu of the group, and took the lead most often. It was surely he who approached us straight on during my second meeting with them. Bald Throat had a whitish patch on his throat where the black feathers were sparse. He seemed skittish. When the wind would blow or a car would approach, he’d be the first to run.

  I referred to the three as “he” for no anatomical reason. There is no way humans can sex live emus until someone lays an egg. But I couldn’t think of these marvelous individuals as its. I knew, though, that they were not quite adult, because they lacked the turquoise neck patches that adorn the mature birds. And they were surely siblings, having left their father’s care (the male incubates the greenish-black eggs and takes care of the up to twenty chicks who hatch) only weeks or months earlier. Like me, they were just starting to explore their world.

  What do they do all day? I wondered. On one of our rare trips to Adelaide, I’d visited the university library. Nobody had published a scientific paper describing the behavior of a group of wild emus before. So, while I continued the seed germination experiments (and yes, seeds did germinate more quickly after passing through an emu’s gut), chronicling the birds’ daily lives became the new focus of my work.