How to Be a Good Creature Read online

  I developed a checklist of behaviors: walk, run, sit, graze, browse, groom, and so on. I took inventory of what each emu was doing at thirty-second intervals for half an hour. Then I’d switch to a narrative description for the next half-hour. Back and forth I’d go, between methods, from the moment I found them each day till the moment they outpaced me and left, which they invariably did. I never tried to run after them—it would have been pointless—but I always hated to see them go.

  Even the most mundane of their activities held me riveted. Watching them sit was a major discovery. First they dropped to their “knees”—what looks like a bird’s knee is more analogous to a person’s ankle—then, to my surprise, to their chests! I hadn’t realized they had two different sitting positions. Watching them rise was equally surprising. To stand, they jerked forward, using neck and chest to propel them to a kneeling position, and then made a squatting leap to their feet.

  Seeing them drink was also unexpected—so much so that I hadn’t included it as a behavior on the checklist. It was weeks before I saw them kneel to scoop up beak-fulls from a puddle in the road after a rare Outback rain. Many desert animals get all their moisture from their food and don’t drink, and I hadn’t expected to see it.

  Watching them preen was also revelatory, and deeply satisfying. I loved seeing them groom their stringy brown feathers. As their beaks combed roughly through the barbules of their feathers, it recalled for me sunny, sofa-bound afternoons with my grandmother brushing my hair. I imagined how good it felt for them. I found myself sharing their pleasure in this calming, intimate act.

  On gusty days when the wind would toss their feathers, they would dance, throwing their neck to the sky, splashing the air with their strong feet. I had the feeling that they did this for pure joy. They also had a sense of humor. One day I watched them approach the ranger’s dog, tied on a chain outside his house. The dog barked hysterically, but bold Black Head, head and shoulders raised high, continued approaching the straining animal head-on. Once Black Head was within twenty feet, he raised his wing stumps forward, hurled his neck upward, and leapt into the air with both feet kicking, repeating the behavior for perhaps forty seconds. Soon the other two joined him, and the dog went absolutely wild. The emus then raced off across the dog’s line of vision for about three hundred yards, before sitting down abruptly to preen—as if to congratulate themselves on the success of their prank. I admired shy Bald Throat and injured Knackered Leg for their bravery, and realized that their leader, Black Head, must have given them great confidence to be able to tease a predator.

  The three were quite aware of themselves as a group. Whenever one would stray too far from the others, he would look up, assess the situation, and run or trot to close the distance between them to twenty-five yards or so. After a month, I could sometimes get within five feet of Black Head and within ten feet of the others.

  I, too, looked to Black Head for guidance. If I could catch his eye, with a glance I’d try to assess whether he was happy with me following everyone or not. In a sense, I was asking his permission to follow. And yet in another way, by acknowledging him as the leader of the group, I made him my leader too.

  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.

  ✧

  At dusk, they always seemed more nervous. Any quick movement—the sight of a car in the distance, a hopping kangaroo, or a tent blowing away (once it was mine)—would send them running. Knackered Leg, after all, had an injury, and an injured animal, even a strong one like an emu, must always be on guard. But it was Bald Throat who was always first to run, and once the other two took off after him, I could never hope to catch up.

  Each night as I huddled in my sleeping bag, I wondered where the emus slept. Or did they merely rest? Did one stay awake as a sentry? Did they kneel or sit, or stand—perhaps on one leg, like cold chickadees at home? Did they tuck their black heads beneath their wing stumps?

  Some mornings, I got up at four a.m. to see if I could find them sleeping. I never did. But one evening, I followed them and they did not run. It was nearly dark when they sat down, all facing the same direction beneath four stunted eucalypt that formed a canopy under the orange and purple sky. I sat also, so happy to be with them. But as dark gathered around us, I realized I was taking no data. I turned on my flashlight to note the time, and they leapt to their feet and ran away.

  ✧

  Day after blissful day I followed them. I accumulated thousands of pages of data. I felt I was doing something useful for science. Eventually, I would crunch these numbers and figure out what percentage of time they spent strolling, grazing, browsing, grooming—something no one had ever done before.

  When I went on a fossil dig elsewhere that I’d committed to help with, I made sure I trained a volunteer to follow the emus and take data in my absence. She seemed competent and determined. But would she miss things? The dig was fascinating, but I was consumed with worry about the study, and I left a day early.

  I returned to find my volunteer had filled more than a hundred sheets of data and was following the emus just fine. I just glanced at the sheets before I left to find the emus myself. It was dusk, windy and raining, and the birds were jittery, jogging, then running, as they often were in this weather. I broke my own rule and tried to run after them, but they disappeared into the darkening storm. As the rain turned to hail, I threw myself into a Gigera bush and wept.

  It wasn’t the data on these emus I wanted, I realized. I simply wanted to be with them.

  ✧

  Six months is a long time to work without pay. I had always planned after half a year to return to the States. I’d soon pack up my tent and move to a carriage house that Howard had rented for us in a small New Hampshire town. Five days before I was to leave the park, I found the emus sitting near a favored patch of wild mustard. Knackered Leg looked up at my approach, and then the two other heads rose and turned to look at me. I think they were sitting because the wind was strong enough to knock them over. I lay on my belly to minimize its force as they snatched mouthfuls of wild mustard and groomed themselves. The wind died down, and by noon, we were moving again, strolling together toward the spot where I had first seen them. We crossed the sea of spiky plants. We crossed the reserve’s main track. A truck passed, but they didn’t startle. I got within three feet of Black Head and held his gaze. Then I looked to Bald Throat and Knackered Leg. Never before had I seen the three so calm. I thought, Tonight?

  The night would be moonless. Would I finally get to see them sleep?

  Even at dusk, no one jogged. No one ran. We entered an area of thick bush I’d not visited before. In the darkening brush I could see only Knackered Leg, five feet away. His injury had healed impressively over the months we had known each other, but I always felt a special tenderness toward him, and his trust in letting me get so close in the dark meant a great deal to me. I could hear Bald Throat and Black Head’s footsteps, pacing steadily.

  I couldn’t see my data sheet or my watch. Even the stars were obscured by clouds. I heard the birds sit down. Thump—to their knees. Thump—to their chests. I could hear, but not see, what they were doing: the scuffle of shifting their great armored feet beneath them, the purr of feathers being combed through their bills. And then, silence. I no longer even cared about the data. What mattered was it was dark and safe, and we were together as they slept.

  ✧

  The day before I left, I followed them from dawn to dark. As eager as I was to return to Howard, as much as I looked forward to seeing my ferrets and lovebirds and friends again, I was heartbroken at the thought of leaving the emus. I wished I could convey to them what they had given me: Peace as soothing as the calm they feel when they groom their feathers. Joy as spirited as their dance in the wind. Satisfaction as fulfilling as a bellyful of mistl
etoe.

  I learned a great deal in the Outback, from how to conduct a behavioral study to how to urinate outdoors without peeing on my shoe. After living in the bush for six months, I knew I could never return to scrambling into pantyhose to work in an office or answering to a boss. Now I knew I would spend the rest of my life writing about animals, going wherever their stories would take me. Molly, who had saved my life, had shown me my destiny. The emus, on their tall, impossibly backwards-bending legs, had let me stroll with them for the first steps along the path.

  The data I’d amassed on the emus was new, but not particularly surprising. I didn’t discover the birds using tools or waging war against other emu groups, the way Jane Goodall found with her chimps. 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.

  Howard and I thrived in New Hampshire. We loved its woods and wetlands, its short, intense summers, flaming fall foliage, and winters blanketed with sparkly snow. We both found freelance work: magazine articles on giant insects and possums took me to New Zealand, I researched animal language studies in Hawaii and California, and I wrote a nature column for the Boston Globe. Howard wrote regularly for Yankee, Historic Preservation, American Heritage, and various newspapers. We became fast friends with the older couple from whom we rented our little carriage house just off Main Street in the small town of New Ipswich. When our library and files outgrew that small space, we moved to half of a two-family farmhouse on eight acres in Hancock, a smaller town nearby. The place had a brook, a barn, a fenced field. After a military childhood of frequent moves, I felt like I had finally found a home.

  We celebrated the publication of Howard’s first book, Cosmopolis, about future cities. I landed a contract for my first book—a tribute to my childhood heroines, the primatologists Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas—which led to research trips to East Africa and Borneo. We got married on a friend’s farm, with thirty humans, four horses, three cats, a dog, and a new foal in attendance.

  But then, everything went wrong.

  The house we lived in went up for sale. The publisher for my book pulled out of the contract. I went to Africa anyway, where at the end of a two-month, three-nation research expedition, Jane Goodall failed to meet me at her remote camp as she had promised, leaving me stranded and, worse, without the scene I needed for my first chapter. Worst of all, my father, my hero, was dying of lung cancer. I felt I was about to lose almost everything—our home, my book, my dad.

  It did not seem a good time to be adopting a baby animal of a species we knew almost nothing about. But on a dreary March day, the kind when your spinning tires kick frozen mud all over your car, and the remaining snow looks as appealing as sodden Kleenex, we nonetheless found ourselves driving back over dirt roads to our precariously temporary home with a shoebox on my lap containing a very sickly black-and-white spotted piglet.

  ✧

  Howard had been the one who’d agreed to take the pig. I’d been in Virginia, caring for my father, when the call came from farmer friends in a nearby town. Their kindly sows produced a record number of piglets that spring, including many runts. The smallest of all was less than half the size of the others. He was sick with every disease in the barn, with runny eyes and worms and diarrhea. They called him “the spotted thing.” This runt needed far more TLC than the farmers had time to give. Besides, even if he recovered, nobody would want such a small pig for the freezer, which was the fate of all his littermates. Could we take him?

  Normally, Howard wouldn’t have even told me about the call. He wouldn’t even let me enter the local animal shelter for fear I’d come home with half its population. We no longer had our ferrets, but since we’d moved to Hancock, our lovebirds had been joined by a cockatiel whose owners no longer wanted him, a homeless crimson rosella parrot, and our landlord’s affectionate and playful white-and-gray cat. But now Howard was desperate to cheer me up. The best thing he could think of to do the trick was adopt a baby pig.

  We named him Christopher Hogwood, after the conductor who founded the Academy of Ancient Music, whose recordings we often enjoyed on New Hampshire Public Radio. We hoped that all the little guy needed was some warmth, some love, and a reprieve from hungry brothers and sisters who pushed him away from the food.

  But we had never raised a pig before. In fact, other than the offspring of our ferrets, whose own mothers took care of them, we’d never raised a baby of any kind. We didn’t know for sure that Chris would even survive. If he did, we had no idea how large he’d grow. And because most pigs are killed and eaten at the tender age of six months, we had no idea how long he might live.

  But the biggest surprise in store was that from the moment the sick piglet came home with us, Christopher Hogwood would begin to heal me.

  ✧

  “Unh. Unh! Unh!” Christopher Hogwood would call when his oversize furry ears picked up the sound of my footsteps approaching the barn. He sounded like he couldn’t wait to see me. We would both squeal with delight upon contact. I’d push open the temporary gate to his pen we’d made from pallets and string, and sit down in the hay and wood shavings to hand-feed him his breakfast.

  Then he’d investigate the lawn with his wondrous nose disk, thoughtfully grunting a running commentary, and when he tired of that we’d go back in the pen and he’d push his surprisingly strong, wet snout into the crook of my arm and we’d snuggle.

  With his big, appealing ears—one shell pink, one black—his questing pink nose, and a black spot over one eye like Spuds MacKenzie, the dog in a popular beer commercial, Christopher was about the most adorable baby I had ever seen. He was extra cute because he was so little. Each hoof was small enough to stand on a quarter. Imagine an entire pig who could fit in a shoebox! But while his body was tiny, his personality was huge. He was cheerful, inquisitive, and a great communicator. Quickly we learned to decode his desires: “Unh. Unh! UNH!” meant “Come here—now!” “Unh? Unh? Unh?”: What’s for breakfast? “Unh. Unh. Unh,” slow and deep, directed me to rub his belly. (“Unhhhhhh” indicated the spot where it felt best.) A squeal of “Ree!” expressed excitement—though a high pitch indicated distress. He had a special greeting grunt for Howard and a slightly higher one for me. He had me wrapped around his cloven hoof. I loved him so much it scared me.

  ✧

  Unfortunately, the delight with which I beheld my baby was not shared by my parents when they saw theirs. They were mad at me. I wasn’t turning out the way they wanted. They had urged me to train for the army in college. I declined. They had kept a membership for me at both the Army Navy Town Club and Army Navy Country Club in Washington, D.C., hoping I might meet a suitable military man. I never did. The person I chose to spend my life with must have seemed, to them, like the last straw. Howard, with his abundant curly hair and progressive views, could not have possibly seemed less like their vision of a suitable army officer. Plus, he was Jewish; I was raised Methodist. His family was middle class and liberal while mine was wealthy and conservative. In a venomous letter that arrived the week after our wedding, my father had formally disowned me, likening me to the snake in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “the serpent that did sting thy father’s life.” To my parents, I was a different species.

  Nonetheless, nearly two years later, when I had heard through my aunt in California that my father was sick, I had immediately boarded a plane to Washington to be by his side at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as he recovered from his first lung surgery. He and my mother were glad I was there, and glad upon my every return. But my husband was never welcome in their home—not even for my father’s funeral. Though I was with him when he died, my father never told me he forgave me, and my mother could not accept my living a life so different from their own.

/>   But unlike the case with my human family, the differences between Christopher and me (he a quadruped, me a biped; he having hooves, I lacking hooves entirely, and so on) would not trouble our relationship. He was a pig—and I loved him for it, just as I had loved Molly not despite her being a dog but because she was a dog. And as I would soon learn, Christopher would also, with great generosity, accept, and perhaps forgive, that I was only human.

  ✧

  Other than our physical differences, there was another important contrast between me and Christopher. I was shy. He was not. Christopher was an extrovert who loved company—and he sought it by frequently breaking out of his pen. We had secured the makeshift gate to his pen with an elaborate tangle of bungee cords, but Chris, with a pig’s high intelligence and flexible nose and lips, managed to dislodge them. He wanted to visit the neighbors.

  “There’s a pig on our lawn! Is it yours?” I’d get a phone call and rush out the door to retrieve him. Sometimes I’d arrive bed-headed and still in my nightshirt—not optimal for socializing, especially with neighbors I hardly knew. But I was always welcomed, because by the time I arrived, Christopher had already charmed his hosts. I’d show up to find them scratching behind his big ears, rubbing his belly, or feeding him a treat. “He’s so cute! He’s so friendly!” they’d exclaim. They’d want to know all about him.

  Previously, I’d have been at a loss to come up with a subject for conversation. I didn’t know about the things it seemed most people talked about—kids, cars, sports, fashion, movies . . . But now, even at parties, which I used to dread, I had something to contribute: how Christopher brilliantly engineered his breakouts; that pigs not only recognize individuals but remember them for years; how Chris loved watermelon rinds but hated onions, and didn’t Hoover up his food, but chose each bite with care and precision, lifting each morsel from his bowl delicately with his lips. What were we going to “do” with him? people would ask. “I’m a vegetarian and my husband is Jewish,” I’d explain. “We’re certainly not going to eat him. But we might send him abroad for university studies . . .” Then we’d invite folks over for what we called “dinner and a show.” If they brought their leftovers—stale bagels, extra macaroni and cheese, freezer-burned ice cream—they could watch Christopher eat it. It was always a jolly occasion. Yankees hate waste, and watching Christopher’s delight in eating was contagious. Soon, neighbors who had been strangers were friends.