How to Be a Good Creature Read online

  Evelyn was silent for several seconds, and then replied, as if stunned:

  “Well, I’ve got a girl right here.”

  ✧

  She was perhaps five years old. Evelyn wasn’t sure. The dog had lived in two different homes before arriving at Evelyn’s rescue, and neither owner appeared to care very much for her. Her name was Zooey, but she didn’t come when called—Evelyn thought it sounded too much like “no-o-o”—so Evelyn had renamed her Zack.

  The dog’s story was pathetic. That winter, from an ill-timed coupling with the border collie next door, which Evelyn thought might have been forced, Zack had borne her owners a litter of eight valuable, purebred border collie pups. But because her people had made her breed in the winter, and then whelp on the concrete floor of the cold basement, the babies were freezing to death. Five of the eight had died before the man called Evelyn for help.

  When Evelyn arrived, she found the new mother desperate, running in and out of the whelping box, aware that her pups were dying but helpless to save them. “I was sick about it,” Evelyn told me. “She was practically bald and loaded with fleas. I even treated her for mange. It was all I could do not to curse those people.”

  Evelyn saved the three remaining pups, whom the man planned to sell for good money. But he had no use for the mother. So Evelyn took Zack and nursed her back to health. She had a full coat now, Evelyn told us. “She’s a beautiful dog,” she said. “But she’s not very well socialized.”

  Howard and I went over to meet her.

  ✧

  “Zack! Calm down, now!” Evelyn admonished as the dog pulled against the leash. At first sight, Zack looked shockingly like Tess: a classic border collie, with the typical white socks, white stripe down the nose, and white ruff and chest against a black background. But of course she was different, and soon the differences were obvious.

  Zack was larger than Tess, about eight pounds heavier, furrier, with taller ears. Her temperament was utterly different. Tess had been incredibly tuned to us from the moment we met. Howard had fallen in love with Tess after his first toss of a Frisbee. But this dog, Howard noted with disappointment, ignored the flying disk. She wouldn’t fetch a ball. Zack didn’t seem interested in playing with toys of any kind.

  She didn’t respond to her old name, Zooey, or her new name, Zack. In fact, she didn’t appear to know any English at all. Unlike with Tess, who had laser focus on us and what we were doing, everything captured Zack’s attention for a moment until something new tore it away.

  Howard didn’t like her coat. Though it had grown back lushly after her mange treatments, and she was super furry, with some distinctive curls on her back toward her hindquarters, it wasn’t ebony like Tess’s but had a brown tinge to it. He didn’t like her tail, which curled to the right—possibly because of some injury. He didn’t like her age—five, he thought, was too old. Tess’s death had broken his heart, and if we were to adopt a new dog, he wanted one we would have at least as long as we had Tess. Even though she leaned against him appealingly when they met, he didn’t want her.

  But I had noticed something important when I saw Zack from the side. Though she had an extravagant white ruff, it didn’t go all the way around her neck. On her right side, her neck was solid black. She looked like she had no white ruff at all. This was the dog from the dream.

  We visited Zack again, and still Howard couldn’t bear to take her home. Beside myself, I drove off to my friend Liz Thomas’s house and sobbed at her kitchen table. When I returned, Howard was in bed, the light out. In the darkness came his voice: “Let’s get the dog.” The next day, we drove to Evelyn’s to take her home.

  “Good luck!” Evelyn called as the three of us drove away. “She’s a lot of dog.”

  ✧

  Evelyn was right. She was a lot of dog. Her first day with us, she pooped in almost every room of the house, including (though we, unfortunately, did not discover this for several days) the basement. She was also a counter surfer. No food she could reach was safe. She dug holes in the lawn, which Tess never did, and she enjoyed rolling in, as well as eating, other animals’ excrement. She seemed completely innocent of any English at all.

  But she was also a good learner. We renamed her Sally, which she understood from her first day with us. And after that first day, she never soiled in our house again—except for the basement, which, perhaps because she had been confined in a basement to whelp her pups, she considered an appropriate latrine.

  Sally and I worked with a private trainer and took group obedience classes at two different locations. Soon her recall was perfect—she always came when called—and she would reliably obey all the other standard commands, even shaking hands on cue. At the end of a month of training, she earned her Certificate of Good Manners from the local Humane Society, which we proudly displayed on the refrigerator. But the very evening she earned it, before I served Howard his dinner, she ate his crabcakes off the plate from the kitchen counter. She ate the birthday cake I made for a friend. She opened a cabinet door in order to eat an entire box of oatmeal—with explosive results.

  I liked to say “Sally does everything I ask—and so much more!” It was things we did not ask her to do that caused problems. Her recall was so good that she could reliably hike through the woods with us off-leash—some of my greatest daily pleasures were our morning walks alone, and our afternoon walks with my friend Jody Simpson and her standard poodles, Pearl and May. But while doing so, Sally would often eat and/or roll in something awful. Once I had to ride back from a hike hunched with Sally in the cargo hold of Jody’s dark blue SUV because Sally was too smelly and sticky to ride in the back seat with the other dogs.

  Another time, we were walking up a dirt road where a family of German shorthaired pointers lived. The pointers’ yard had an invisible fence, keeping the resident dogs from straying. But it did nothing to prevent Sally from rushing inside the house through the dog door, disturbing a mother dog who had recently whelped puppies and somehow instigating a fight between two of the resident pointers that the owner had to break up—in so doing, acquiring a bite on her hand that required a trip to the hospital emergency room. Especially because the homeowner was a lawyer who could have easily sued, I was very grateful that she forgave Sally for causing the melee.

  Sally loved to steal. She stole lunches from backpacks. She would grab a sandwich right out of your hand on its way to your mouth. One morning she seized the steel wool from the kitchen and left a trail of rusty orange splinters across the dining room rug. She opened the cabinet beneath the sink to fish items from the garbage. She always looked so proud of these accomplishments. I couldn’t help but laugh. Howard called her Little Sally Rap Sheet. But when he’d drive with just the two of them in his truck, he’d sing to her the Bruce Springsteen song “Little Girl, I Want to Marry You.”

  Despite being the same breed, Sally and Tess were almost complete opposites. Tess was a graceful athlete. Sally knocked things over. Tess loved her Frisbee and tennis ball but disdained other toys. Sally, as it turned out, became crazy for toys—except for the Frisbee, which she would catch only grudgingly to please Howard. Tess loved us, but felt that more than a few minutes of petting was excessive, and she disliked being brushed. But Sally was extravagantly affectionate. She leaned into strangers; she pressed her snout against their faces, begging for kisses. She loved the brush and would luxuriate for over an hour while I lovingly groomed her lush fur each night. We switched her dog food and her coat lost the brown tinge Howard had disliked. Now it glowed ebony.

  I felt whole again. Sally made me unspeakably happy. I loved the softness of her fur, the cornmeal-like scent of her paws, the rolling cadence of her gait, the gusto with which she ate (even the stick of butter softening for the dinner table and the bowl of cereal abandoned for a moment to take a phone call). I loved the way she’d eviscerate the stuffed toys I would always bring her from my travels—delighting in the destruction of a blue shark, a red rhino, and one stuffed hedgehog a
fter another. I loved her tall ears. Shortly after Howard and I had graduated college, the rock group the Police came out with the hit “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” and that’s how I felt about Sally.

  The three of us slept snuggled together, all our limbs—arms, legs, tail—entwined. Unfortunately, Sally often leapt up and barked replies to distant dogs and foxes during the night. Soon after, she’d be snoring again beside us while we lay, hearts pounding, staring at the crack in the plaster ceiling for hours afterward. And if Howard got up at night, Sally would immediately and deliberately rearrange herself to take up his sleeping lane, with her head on his pillow. When he got back, she’d give him a puffy smile. She thought this was a hilarious joke. And so did we.

  People often speak of a lifetime dog, a phrase that may have been coined by the author and fellow border collie owner Jon Katz. “They’re dogs we love in especially powerful, sometimes inexplicable ways,” he’s said. Tess was our lifetime dog.

  But so was Sally.

  Sally was no replacement for Tess, or for Chris. She was not a serious, intense, laser-smart border collie. She was not a great big Buddha master like Christopher Hogwood. She was not a wise mentor like Molly. And yet, from the moment Sally came home, I loved her no less than I loved them.

  This is the gift great souls leave us when they die. They enlarge our hearts. They leave us a greater capacity for love. Thanks to the animals before Sally, I adored her with all the love I had for Molly, all the love I felt for Tess, all the love I had for Chris—and all the love I had for this silly, goofy, sweet, smiley, uniquely wonderful new dog.

  “Tess must be laughing at us,” Howard would sometimes say as I cleaned up the bag of dog kibble Sally had strewn all over the kitchen floor, or hosed the smelly remains of a rolled-in deer carcass from her fur. I never doubted it. I loved thinking of Tess smiling down on us from heaven, knowing that every time I looked at Sally, I thought gratefully and lovingly of Tess, too. For after all, everything had turned out as Tess had intended when she came to me in the dream.

  ✧

  Years later, as I was looking over notes I had taken from talking with Evelyn about Sally long ago, I realized another miraculous aspect to that dream. It had started with a crisis: a puppy whose life was in danger but whom I felt powerless to save. The dream had occurred in January, the same month—and, who knows? possibly the same night!—that Sally, then named Zooey, was imprisoned in a cold basement many miles away from me, desperately trying to save her freezing pups from dying. Had I glimpsed, through the dream, the heartbreaking dilemma that, without my knowing her, Sally was facing?

  I wondered: Did Tess appear to Sally, too? Did she show her me, a promise of a new future? Perhaps, thanks to Tess, Sally and I had seen each other that same night, in our dreams.

  Standing on a short stepstool, I bent over the tank waving a dead squid back and forth in the forty-seven-degree salt water. Finally the muscles of my hand froze. So I switched to my left hand, until it, too, froze and I could move it no longer. But still, despite my efforts with what I had hoped would prove an appealing food item, the New England Aquariums new giant Pacific octopus, a female named Octavia, remained plastered by her suckers to the opposite wall of her 560-gallon tank. She would not come to me—yet. I decided to try again later. I desperately wanted this octopus to be my friend.

  Earlier that spring, I had met Octavias predecessor, Athena. The moment the aquarist opened the heavy lid to her tank, she slid over to inspect me. Her dominant eye swiveled in its socket to meet mine, and four or five of her four-foot-long boneless arms, red with excitement, reached toward me from the water. Without hesitation, I plunged my hands and arms into the tank and soon found my skin covered with dozens, then hundreds, of her strong, white, coin-size suckers. An octopus can taste with all its skin, but this sense is most exquisitely honed in the suckers.

  “Weren’t you afraid?” my friend Jody asked as Sally and I hiked with her and her poodles through the woods the next day. Jody and I spent hours playing with and exercising our dogs every day; like me, she is a huge animal lover. But an octopus—boneless, cold, covered with slime? “Wasn’t it gross?” she asked.

  “If a human had begun tasting me so early in our relationship,” I admitted, “I’d have been alarmed.” But this was an earthbound alien—someone who could change color and shape, who could pour her baggy forty-pound body through an opening smaller than an orange. Someone with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and ink like an old-fashioned pen. Yet clearly, this large, strong, smart marine invertebrate—one more different from a human than any creature I had ever met before—was as interested in me as I was in her. And that was why I was so intrigued.

  I’d come back twice more to get to know Athena better. She even seemed to recognize me. Experiments I had read about, conducted at the Seattle Aquarium, proved that octopuses can and do recognize individual humans, even when the people are identically dressed and even when the octopuses are simply looking up through the water at them. Athena let me pet her head—something she’d never let a visitor do before. She turned white, the color of a relaxed octopus, beneath my touch. I had only started to know this strange and compelling creature, but already she had opened to me a possibility I’d never before explored: getting to know the mind of a marine mollusk, a creature closely related to brainless clams yet reportedly smart and sensitive.

  I was working on a magazine article on octopus intelligence, which I hoped to expand to a book. Then, just one week after my third meeting with Athena, I received terrible news. Athena had died. She had likely succumbed to old age. Nobody knew for sure, as she had hatched in the wild, but Athena was probably three to five years old, the outer limit of giant Pacific octopus longevity.

  I wept at the news. Only during my lifetime had scientists begun to acknowledge that chimpanzees, humankind’s closest relatives, are conscious beings. But what about creatures so different from us that you’d have to go to outer space, or into science fiction, to find anything so alien? What might I discover about the interior lives of these animals if I were to use, as a tool of inquiry, not only my intellect, but also my heart? Now that Athena was gone, so, it seemed, was the opportunity for that new adventure.

  But days after Athena’s demise came an invitation. “There’s a young pup octopus headed to Boston from the Pacific Northwest,” the aquarist Scott Dowd emailed me. “Come shake hands (8) when you can.”

  This would prove easier said than done.

  ✧

  “Let’s try again later. She might change her mind,” Wilson Menashi, a longtime aquarium volunteer who had worked extensively with octopuses, suggested. Though Athena had seized me right away, Octavia showed no interest in meeting me—or anyone else, for that matter.

  “They’re all individuals,” Wilson explained. “Even the lobsters have personalities.” Among octopuses, personality differences are well known to those who care for them, and are often reflected in the names aquarists give them. At Seattle Aquarium, one of the octopuses was so timid that she never came out from behind the filter. They named her Emily Dickinson after the reclusive poet. Finally, because she never showed herself to the public, they released her back into Puget Sound, where she’d been initially caught. Maybe, like Emily, Octavia was just shy.

  Or there could be another explanation. Usually when the octopus on public display shows signs of aging, the aquarium gets a young octopus who grows up in a large barrel behind the scenes, getting to know people, before the animal takes its place in the big octopus tank. Because Athena had died unexpectedly, the aquarium had to get a new octopus fast, and understandably wanted a big one to impress the public. Octavia wasn’t as big as Athena, but her head was about the size of a cantaloupe, and her arms were about three feet long. It was clear that Octavia was not really a young pup. She was a large, perhaps nearly mature octopus who had been living wild in the ocean just weeks before.

  So, even though I tried to interact with her three sep
arate times that day, it was no wonder I got nowhere with Octavia on my first visit. It seemed I was having no better luck on my second trip. That morning, again I offered her squid to no avail. Then Scott got the idea to present the food to Octavia held in long tongs, which could be held right up to her face. Suddenly, Octavia seized the tongs—and then grabbed me. She began to pull.

  Her red skin signaled her excitement. I was excited too. She had my left arm up to the elbow encased in three of hers, and my right arm held firmly in another. There was no way I could resist. A single one of her largest suckers could lift thirty pounds, and each of her eight arms had two hundred of them. An octopus’s arms, by one calculation, can pull a hundred times the animal’s own weight. If Octavia weighed 40 pounds, as Scott thought, that would pit my 120 pounds against her ability to pull 4,000.

  But I wasn’t even trying to escape. I was aware that like all octopuses Octavia could bite, hard, with her parrot-like beak inside the confluence of her arms. I knew, too, about her venom. A giant Pacific’s is not, like some species, deadly, but it’s toxic to nerves and dissolves flesh. An envenomated wound can take months to heal. But I felt no threat from Octavia. I felt only that she was curious. I was too.

  Scott, however, didn’t want to see me pulled into the octopus tank, so with Octavia tugging on one end of me, he had ahold of the other. “I thought I would end up holding your ankles!” he said once Octavia abruptly released her grip.

  I hoped we had achieved a breakthrough. Now, at least, she seemed interested in me, and her interest had not seemed aggressive or dangerous. But was I reading her correctly? Reading an octopus’s intentions is not like reading, for instance, a dog’s. I could read Sally’s feelings in a glance, even if the only part of her I could see was her tail, or one ear. But Sally was family, and in more than one sense. Dogs, like all placental mammals, share 90 percent of our genetic material. Dogs evolved with humans. Octavia and I were separated by half a billion years of evolution. We were as different as land from sea. Was it even possible for a human to understand the emotions of a creature as different from us as an octopus?