Sy Montgomery - How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals

Copyright 2018 by Sy Montgomery

Illustrations copyright 2018 by Rebecca Green

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhco.com

The Library of Congress Cataloging-on-Publication data is in file.

ISBN: 978-0-544-93832-8 hardcover

ISBN: 978-1-328-62903-6 special markets

Cover illustration 2018 by Rebecca Green

Cover design by Cara Llewellyn

eISBN 978-1-328-52823-0
v1.0918

All photos courtesy of the author except for: Jacqueline Anderson, (top right).

Always and forever, for Dr. Millmoss

I travel around the world to research my books. I joined a team of researchers radio-collaring tree kangaroos in the cloud forest of Papua New Guinea; searched for signs of snow leopards in the Altai Mountains of Mongolias Gobi; swam with piranhas and electric eels for a book about pink dolphins in the Amazon. During all of these trips, Ive thought of a saying that to me has served as a promise: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Though Ive been blessed with some splendid classroom teachersMr. Clarkson, my high school journalism teacher, foremost among themmost of my teachers have been animals.

What have animals taught me about life? How to be a good creature.

All the animals Ive knownfrom the first bug I must have spied as an infant, to the moon bears I met in Southeast Asia, to the spotted hyenas I got to know in Kenyahave been good creatures. Each individual is a marvel and perfect in his or her own way. Just being with any animal is edifying, for each has a knowing that surpasses human understanding. A spider can taste the world with her feet. Birds can see colors we cant begin to describe. A cricket can sing with his legs and listen with his knees. A dog can hear sounds above the level of human hearing, and can tell if youre upset even before youre aware of it yourself.

Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways. In these pages youll meet animals who changed my life by the briefest of meetings. Youll meet others who became members of my family. Some are dogs who shared our home. Ones a pig who lived in our barn. Three are huge flightless birds, two are tree kangaroos, and theres also a spider, a weasel, and an octopus.

I am still learning how to be a good creature. Though I try earnestly, I often fail. But I am having a great life tryinga life exploring this sweet green worldand returning to a home where I am blessed with a multispecies family offering me comfort and joy beyond my wildest dreams. I often wish I could go back in time and tell my young, anxious self that my dreams werent in vain and my sorrows werent permanent. I cant do that, but I can do something better. I can tell you that teachers are all around to help you: with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.

As usual, when I was not in class at elementary school, we were together. Mollyour Scottish terrierand I were doing sentinel duty on the spacious, crewcut lawn of the generals house, Quarters 225, Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, New York. Rather, Molly was keeping watch, and I was watching her.

Unfortunately for a Scottie, bred to hunt down foxes and badgers, far too little prey was to be found on the orderly and efficient army base. Every inch was strictly manicured, and wild animals were not tolerated. Still, because Molly did find the occasional squirrel to chaseand because, though we lived there, the home was not ours but the U.S. Armys, we couldnt put up a fenceshe was chained to a sturdy, corkscrewing stake driven deep into the ground. I watched her scan the area with her wet black nose and her pricked, swiveling earslonging, longing, as I did daily, to smell and hear as she did the invisible comings and goings of distant animals.

And then she was off like a furry cannonball.

In an instant, she had ripped the foot-and-a-half-long stake from the ground and was dragging it and her chain behind her as she charged, snarling with gleeful fury, through the yew bushes in front of the single-story brick house. Quickly I glimpsed what she was chasing: a rabbit!

I leapt to my feet. I had never seen a wild rabbit before. Nobody had ever heard of a wild rabbit on Fort Hamilton! I wanted a closer look. But Molly had chased the rabbit around to the front of the house, and my two, weak, second-graders feet, imprisoned in their patent leather Mary Janes, couldnt carry me nearly as fast as her four, clawed, fully mature paws.

A Scottish terriers fierce, deep voice is too commanding to be ignored. Soon, out from our quarters came my mother and one of the enlisted men who had been assigned to help keep the generals house tidy. A forest of legs exploded around me as the adults zigzagged after our furious terrier. But of course they couldnt catch her. By this time Molly had broken free of the chain and left the stake behind. There was no stopping her. Whether she caught the rabbit or not, shed be out for hours, perhaps till after dark. Shed come back, signaling at the door to be let in with a single, summoning woof, only when she was good and ready.

Though I wished I could have run after her, it wouldnt have been to stop her. I wanted to go with her. I wanted to see the rabbit again. I wanted to learn the smells around the post at night. I wanted to meet other dogs and wrestle and chase them, to poke my nose into holes and smell who lived there, to discover treasures hidden in the dirt.

Many young girls worship their older sisters. I was no exception. But my older sister was a dog, and Istanding there helplessly in the frilly dress and lacy socks in which my mother had dressed mewanted to be just like her: Fierce. Feral. Unstoppable.

I was never, my mother told me, a normal child.

As evidence, she cited the day she and my father first took me to the zoo. I had just begun to walk, and, breaking free of my parents hands, toddled to my chosen destination: inside the pen housing some of the largest and most dangerous animals in the institution. The hippos must have gazed upon me benignly rather than biting me in half, as these three-thousand-pound animals are prone to do, or stepping on me. Because somehow my parents got me out of there unscathed. My mother, however, never completely recovered from the incident.