How to Be a Good Creature Read online

  Christopher’s timing was perfect, because Howard and I were now landowners in town. Miraculously, we were able to buy the house we lived in. The price came down when the owners discovered the land was just short of eight acres, which made the property one lot and not two. So, anchored to our beloved home by a growing pig, like most young married couples who begin settling down, we decided it was time to enlarge our family.

  ✧

  First came the Ladies. One of my dearest friends gave us eight hand-raised black sex-link hens as a housewarming present. They looked like a small congregation of nuns—if nuns had cheerful red combs, orange eyes, and scaly yellow feet. They ranged freely around the property, scratching for bugs, murmuring in their lilting chicken voices, racing to greet us when we’d appear, hoping for a treat or squatting before us to be stroked or picked up and petted.

  Next came Tess—a classically beautiful black-and-white longhaired border collie with a turbulent past. Bred for herding, the breed is famously independent, emotional, willful, and smart. Howard had always wanted one. But these dogs have a downside: In the absence of sheep and cows, they’ve been known to resort to herding insects—or school buses. They need constant stimulation. After Tess, when still a pup, had leapt onto a dining room table during a formal dinner, her original owners gave her to an animal rescue near us, run by a locally celebrated “animal lady,” Evelyn Naglie. One winter day, Tess was playing with a child who threw a ball into the street in front of an oncoming snowplow. Tess spent nearly a year recovering from multiple surgeries. She was adopted out to yet another family, but had to be returned a year later when the couple lost their house in a recession. She was only two years old when we took her home from Evelyn’s, but Tess had already seen a lifetime of pain, loss, and rejection.

  Tess was a great athlete who despite her injured leg soared into the air to catch balls and Frisbees. She knew a great deal of English and was relentlessly obedient. But, except for when we were playing her favorite sports (which worked out to be about once an hour), Tess was as wary of people as Chris was outgoing. She didn’t pee, poop, or eat without our specifically asking her to do so. She consented to petting, but seemed confused about the point. She didn’t bark for weeks, as if she were afraid to use her voice in the house. The first time we invited her up on our bed she looked at us in shocked disbelief. When we patted the covers, obediently she jumped up, but leapt back down again a second later, as if this couldn’t possibly be what we wanted.

  Tess seemed to be guarding her emotions. But we knew we could change that. Though love could not heal my father’s cancer, I’d seen that it could save a sick little pig—at one year old, Christopher was now a robust 250 pounds and growing. Surely our love could also redeem the cruelty and sorrow that had haunted our lovely Tess’s past.

  ✧

  After the dog, just like in the storybooks, came the children. But not in the usual way.

  I’d never wanted kids of my own, even when I was one. When I discovered, as a child, that I would forever be unable to conceive or bear puppies, I crossed having babies off the list. The Earth was grossly overburdened with humans already.

  As Howard and I grew older, most of our friends were child-free, or they were older and their children were grown up. I didn’t regret not having kids in our lives. By the time I turned thirty, I was blessed with a great career, a husband, a home, a cat, a dog, hens, parrots, and a pig who, heading into his second year, topped out at several hundred pounds. In terms of sheer biomass, our family was, in fact, much larger than those of our peers.

  By Christopher’s second autumn, we had established a new routine. Now he was so large and strong that it was impossible to lead him on a leash. But I could lure him with a bucket of slops—to which the entire neighborhood was now contributing—out to his spacious “Pig Plateau” in the backyard. Tess trotted behind, holding the Frisbee in her mouth. A parade of black hens followed. Once at the Plateau, I’d decant the slops and hook up a long tether to Christopher’s specially made harness. I’d talk to him and toss the Frisbee to Tess while he ate. That’s what we were doing on an October day when Chris paused in his meal, raised his head, flexed his nose disk, and uttered a grunt. I looked up to see two little blond girls racing toward us as if drawn by a tractor beam.

  “It’s even cooler than a horse. It’s a pig!” the ten-year-old shouted to her younger sister. And then, to me: “Can we pet him?”

  I showed how, by rubbing his belly, we could get Chris to flop onto his side. As he grunted with porcine bliss, little hands reached for the softest fur, in back of his ears, as I pointed out the four toes of each of his hooves, his budding tusks, his many nipples. The girls were enthralled.

  Christopher, of course, loved the company. Tess enjoyed another set of hands to toss the Frisbee. As the Ladies pecked for slops scraps around us, I learned that the girls would soon be renting the empty house next door. They’d lost their family home in a nasty divorce, and they hadn’t been happy about their new house—until now.

  From the moment they moved in, Kate, ten, and Jane, seven, were over at our place just about every day. They often brought Christopher sandwiches and apples—which I soon discovered they’d been saving since they left their house in the morning. (“I don’t even know why I pack their school lunch,” their mom, Lila, later confessed. “I might as well put it directly in Christopher’s mouth.”) Periodically they decreed that their ice cream was too freezer burned for human consumption and insisted on feeding it to Chris with a spoon. He rose to his back feet, leaning his front trotters on his gate, and held open his now cavernous mouth patiently for each spoonful. Christopher soon greeted the girls with distinctive soft grunts he used for no other visitors.

  Kate and Jane also instituted Pig Spa. One spring day, Kate decided that the long ringlet of hair at the tip of Christopher’s tail needed to be combed. Then, of course, it needed to be braided. Inevitably for two preteen girls whose house was littered with hair scrunchies and smelled like bubble bath, the effort expanded to an entire beauty regimen for our pig.

  We fetched warm buckets of soapy water from the kitchen, and more warm water for the rinse. We added products created for horses to apply to his hooves to make them shine. Grunting his contentment as he lay in his pool of soapy water, Christopher made clear he adored his spa—unless the water was chilly. Then he’d scream like he was being butchered—and we’d race back to the kitchen to fetch a more comfortable bath. He forgave us the instant the warm water touched his skin.

  Soon other kids were joining in. Several became regulars. Some favorite neighbors always brought their grandkids when they visited from Iowa. That state has no shortage of pigs, but the kids had never seen one enjoy a spa treatment. A wonderfully cheerful teen, Kelly, would come over after sessions of chemotherapy she needed to fight her cancer. Even though by then Chris was huge and powerful, capable of knocking over a woodpile with a nudge of his nose, he was always absolutely tender with her. Two boys and their family, who also had a home in Massachusetts, refrigerated their leftovers for days and carted them up to Hancock to give to Chris; one day they brought fresh chocolate donuts, which were shared among the kids and the pig. For the first time in my life, I learned how much fun it is to play with children, and looked forward to it every day.

  When Kate and Jane’s mom began graduate studies for a new career as a therapist, the girls came over right after school and stayed till she came home. Howard went with Jane to her soccer games. I helped Kate with her homework. In the winter, Howard would build a fire in the woodstove next door so Lila wouldn’t be cold when she got home. They had us over for dinner. We took the girls on field trips. We went to Christopher’s original farm. We visited a nature reserve to release a skunk we’d live-trapped in the henhouse. We overnighted in a tent at an astronomy convention in Vermont. We baked cookies, read books, spent holidays together.

  The Ladies realized what had happened before we did. Previously our hens had stuck to the boundar
ies of our property. Now they started hopping over the stone wall that separated the two backyards and began ranging all over both, as if they owned the place. Somehow, they knew: though we weren’t all related, thanks to Christopher Hogwood, our two multispecies households had become one unit.

  ✧

  Christopher’s fame grew along with his girth. By the time he reached his fifth year, his weight topped seven hundred pounds. This was no wonder, because now he was getting food from all corners. Our postmaster saved vegetable scraps for him, and she would put a yellow card in our PO box letting us know we should pick it up. The owner of the cheese shop in the next town would deliver buckets of leftovers—bread crusts, failed soups, the first and last slices of the tomato—right to his pen, usually while singing opera to him. Neighbors brought apples, overgrown zucchini, whey from cheesemaking operations.

  His admirers spanned the globe. I carried photos of our mighty pig to impress new friends I would meet on expeditions to study cheetahs and snow leopards and great white sharks. At home, everyone so admired him that he garnered write-in votes at every election.

  What was it about Christopher Hogwood that seemed to draw everyone to him? Lila later summed it up this way: “He was a great big Buddha master. He taught us how to love. How to love what life gives you. Even when life gives you slops.”

  It’s true. Chris loved his food. He loved the feel of the warm, soapy water of Pig Spa, the caress of little hands on the soft skin behind his ears. He loved company. No matter who you were—a child or an adult, sick or well, bold or shy, or whether you held out a watermelon rind or a chocolate donut or an empty hand to rub behind his ear—Christopher welcomed you with grunts of good cheer. No wonder everyone adored him.

  Studying at the cloven feet of this porcine Buddha every day, I could not help but learn from a master how to revel in and savor this world’s abundance: the glow of warm sun on skin, the joy of playing with children. Also, his big heart, and huge body, made my sorrows seem smaller. After a lifetime of moving, Christopher Hogwood helped give me a home. And after my parents had disowned me, out of an assortment of unrelated, unmarried people and animals of many different species, Christopher helped create for me a real family—a family made not from genes, not from blood, but from love.

  Crouching in the jungle, sweat streaming from my face, I was waiting for a wild animal to rush at me from its hole.

  Just hours before, I had landed in French Guiana in northern South America with photographer Nic Bishop. We’d flown over great mosaics of mangrove swamps, then huge climax forest. When you arrive here at night, we’d been told, what strikes you is the darkness. Only 150,000 people live in this country, a land the size of Indiana, and most of it is virgin tropical rainforest. But we had landed in the daytime, and immediately, with Sam Marshall, a biologist from Hiram, Ohio, we had set out to Trésor Réserve after our quarry.

  I’d been to jungles on three continents before this to research my books, where I’d become acquainted with lions, tigers, and bears. But this trip was different. Again, the subjects of our expedition were top predators in their ecosystem, and among the largest and most imposing of their biological family group. But this time, we were looking for spiders.

  “Queen of the Jungle” is how Sam described the species we sought: the largest tarantula on Earth, the Goliath birdeater. A big female can weigh a quarter pound. Her head might grow as big around as an apricot, her leg span stretch long enough to cover your face. And if the one Sam had located, in a silk-lined burrow that could stretch for twenty feet, did come rushing out, she might, in fact, cover my face.

  The thought was disturbing. For although no tarantula’s venom is deadly to a healthy adult human, a bite from a Goliath birdeater’s half-inch black fangs will certainly break the skin. And if the spider chooses to inject its venom, which paralyzes its prey, the resulting nausea, sweating, and pain is enough to ruin your day.

  Yet, lying on his belly in the dirt, his face inches from the hole, our red-haired host was calling to the spider imploringly. “Come out!” Sam cried. “I want to meet you!” Imitating the scuttling of an insect—because bugs, not birds, are the Goliath’s preferred prey—Sam wiggled a twig until he felt the spider grab it with the pedipalps, the food-handling feet at the front of the head. “She’s pretty strong!” he commented. In the light of his headlamp, he could see the spider was female. Female tarantulas are bigger than males and in some species can live for thirty years. He wiggled the stick some more. A hissing sound issued from the burrow. Goliath birdeaters create this menacing sound by rubbing together pale bristles on the inside of the front legs. That did it. Sam gave us perhaps one second’s notice before announcing, “Here she comes!”

  The huge spider thundered out of the hole. Tipped with hooflike tarsi, each of her eight, seven-jointed legs thrummed loudly against the brittle leaf litter on the forest floor. Her head was the size of a small kiwi and her abdomen was as big as a clementine. This spider, Sam told us, wasn’t even full grown, and perhaps two years old. Yet the youngster rushed fearlessly forward, shooting forward four or five inches as suddenly as a shiver—only to face three monsters who together weighed more than four thousand times as much as she did.

  Finding no prey, the tarantula sensibly returned to the mouth of her tunnel, all her spider senses on alert. Her eight eyes were vestigial, but no matter. She could smell with her feet. She could taste with special hairs on her feet and legs. And when she stood on the mat of silk she had spun from her own body at the mouth of her burrow, she could pick up the vibrations of the footfalls of the tiniest insect.

  She knew we were there, Sam assured us. But she was unafraid.

  It was as impressive as meeting a tiger. Yet I knew far more about tigers than spiders. I had of course seen plenty of spiders, but never really met one. This was about to change.

  ✧

  “Strike! Strike! Strike!” As Nic and I squatted beside him, Sam narrated the scene he was able watch with his flashlight, looking down another Goliath birdeater hole. The spider was attacking his stick. “Backing up . . . strike . . .

  “She’s not going to come out and play,” Sam finally said with disappointment. “She’s reared up and not very pleased with me.” When threatened, tarantulas stand tall on their hind legs and raise their front ones like black belts ready to execute a karate chop. They display their long black fangs; sometimes a drop of venom exudes from one tip.

  Sam didn’t fear a bite—in twenty years of studying tarantulas, he’d never been bitten—but he withdrew his face from the entrance of the hole. “She might start kicking hairs,” he explained. Rather than bite, an irritated Goliath birdeater is apt to use the back legs to kick hairs off the abdomen, which, floating on air currents, will lodge in an assailant’s eyes, nose, and skin, and cause pain and itching that can persist for hours.

  This Sam didn’t need, because, like us after our second day surveying birdeater burrows, he was itchy enough from the bites of other invertebrates, mainly ticks and chiggers. Though Sam assured us this rainforest was “more benign than the forest in Ohio,” where he had his spider lab, we were all consuming Benadryl and Exedrin each night to cope with the itching, swelling, and sore muscles.

  Nic and I were finding our days as exhausting as they were exciting. “I ache all over,” I wrote in my field journal on our third day in French Guiana. “Drenched in sweat, covered with dirt, and we’ve found so many ticks on our bodies we don’t even bother to look for them anymore.” The birdeater dens were usually found on slopes forty-five degrees or steeper, on ground covered with giant slippery wet leaves and rotting logs that gave way beneath our feet. Though there were only two common plants with skin-piercing spines—one a palm, the other a vine—we often encountered them, and in the 90-degree heat and 90 percent humidity, even small wounds could get seriously infected fast. Every brown leaf threatened to contain a stinging wasps’ nest (Sam was stung on our second day), and in the litter and fallen trees, somewhere deadly
fer-de-lance snakes were lurking.

  So at the end of each day, it was a delight to retreat to Emerald Jungle Village, the nature center where we were staying. Run by the Dutch naturalist Joep Moonen and his wife, Marijke, it had whitewashed, tin-roofed guest quarters that featured fans, warm showers, and comfy mosquito-netted beds. Its extensive grounds were veined with paths through impressive gardens of native rainforest plants. Best of all, even amid such comfort, animals were all around us—even in our rooms. Gecko lizards slid like raindrops up and down exterior as well as interior walls. A toad inhabited our shower. One morning, before I got up, I watched from my bed as a small snake uncoiled and crawled across the floor from its hiding place in one of my shoes.

  Naturally, Sam was eager to check every nook and cranny of our living quarters for possible tarantulas. He found one in the potted bromeliad on the tiled veranda just outside his room.

  “Look! An avicularia!” Sam called to Nic and me one afternoon.

  “Can I borrow your pen?” he asked me. He wasn’t going to make a note. He inserted the pen between the succulent’s serrated, pineapple-like leaves and gently prodded a tarantula the size of a child’s fist to step forward—into his waiting hand.

  “Sy,” he said, “would you like to hold her?”