How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals

By Sy Montgomery and Rebecca Green

A New York Times bestseller!

National Book Award finalist Sy Montgomery reflects on the personalities and quirks of 13 animals—her friends—who have profoundly affected her in this stunning, poetic, and life-affirming memoir featuring illustrations by Rebecca Green.

Understanding someone who belongs to another species can be transformative. No one knows this better than author, naturalist, and adventurer Sy Montgomery. To research her books, Sy has traveled the world and encountered some of the planet’s rarest and most beautiful animals. From tarantulas to tigers, Sy’s life continually intersects with and is informed by the creatures she meets.

This restorative memoir reflects on the personalities and quirks of thirteen animals—Sy’s friends—and the truths revealed by their grace. It also explores vast themes: the otherness and sameness of people and animals; the various ways we learn to love and become empathetic; how we find our passion; how we create our families; coping with loss and despair; gratitude; forgiveness; and most of all, how to be a good creature in the world.

• Perfect gift for the holiday season.
• Engaging back matter showcases personal black-and-white photos of Sy and the animals she so lovingly depicts.
• Don't miss Sy Montgomery's other books including Of Time and Turtles, The Soul of an Octopus, and The Hawk's Way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Sep 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781328528230

Sy Montgomery

Sy Montgomery is a naturalist, adventurer, and author of more than thirty acclaimed books of nonfiction for adults and children, including The Hummingbirds’ Gift, The Hawk’s Way, the National Book Award finalist The Soul of an Octopus, and most recently, Of Time and Turtles, which was a New York Times bestseller. The recipient of numerous honors, including lifetime achievement awards from the Humane Society and the New England Booksellers Association, she lives in New Hampshire with her husband, writer Howard Mansfield, and a border collie.

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Copyright © 2018 by Sy Montgomery

Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Rebecca Green

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

marinerbooks.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

v5.0821

All photos courtesy of the author except for: Jacqueline Anderson, 185 (top); Nic Bishop, 180 (top), 182 (top); Nic Bishop, with permission of CCF, 183; Ben Kilham, 187 (bottom); Phebe Lewan, 187 (top); Christine MacDonald, 178 (bottom); Howard Mansfield, 181 (bottom), 188 (top); Pincus Mansfield, 188 (bottom left); Sam Marshall, 188 (bottom right); Evelyn Naglie, 189; Kate O’Sullivan, 186 (top left); Jody Simpson, 181 (top), 185 (bottom); Tianne Strombeck, 179 (bottom), 184; Barb Sylvestre, 182 (bottom); Stephanie Thomas, 186 (top right).

Always and forever, for Dr. Millmoss

Introduction

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 Mongolia’s Gobi; swam with piranhas and electric eels for a book about pink dolphins in the Amazon. During all of these trips, I’ve thought of a saying that to me has served as a promise: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Though I’ve been blessed with some splendid classroom teachers—Mr. Clarkson, my high school journalism teacher, foremost among them—most of my teachers have been animals.

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

All the animals I’ve known—from 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 Kenya—have 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 can’t 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 you’re upset even before you’re aware of it yourself.

Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways. In these pages you’ll meet animals who changed my life by the briefest of meetings. You’ll meet others who became members of my family. Some are dogs who shared our home. One’s a pig who lived in our barn. Three are huge flightless birds, two are tree kangaroos, and there’s 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 trying—a life exploring this sweet green world—and 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 weren’t in vain and my sorrows weren’t permanent. I can’t 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.

Chapter 1: Molly

As usual, when I was not in class at elementary school, we were together. Molly—our Scottish terrier—and I were doing sentinel duty on the spacious, crewcut lawn of the general’s 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 chase—and because, though we lived there, the home was not ours but the U.S. Army’s, we couldn’t put up a fence—she 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 ears—longing, 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-grader’s feet, imprisoned in their patent leather Mary Janes, couldn’t carry me nearly as fast as her four, clawed, fully mature paws.

A Scottish terrier’s 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 general’s house tidy. A forest of legs exploded around me as the adults zigzagged after our furious terrier. But of course they couldn’t 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, she’d be out for hours, perhaps till after dark. She’d 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 wouldn’t 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 I—standing there helplessly in the frilly dress and lacy socks in which my mother had dressed me—wanted 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.

I was always drawn to animals—far more than I was ever attracted to other children, or adult humans, or dolls. I preferred watching my two goldfish, Goldie and Blackie, and playing with my beloved but ill-fated turtle, Ms. Yellow Eyes. (My mother was from the South, and long before feminism, I learned from her the southern habit of bestowing on all females the honorific Ms.) Like most pet turtles in the 1950s, Ms. Yellow Eyes suffered from improper diet and died when her shell got soft. To console me, my mother gave me a baby doll, but I ignored it. When my father returned from a trip to South America and brought me back a stuffed baby caiman, a type of crocodile, I dressed it in the baby doll’s clothing and pushed it around in the doll’s pram.

An only child, I never yearned for siblings. I didn’t need other kids around. Most children were loud and wiggly. They wouldn’t stay still long enough to watch a bumblebee. They ran and scattered the pigeons strutting on the sidewalk.

With rare exceptions, adult humans were not particularly memorable either. I would stare blankly at an adult I had seen many times, unable to place them, unless one of my parents could remind me of their pet. (For example, They’re the ones with Brandy. Brandy was a miniature longhaired dachshund with red hair who loved to snuggle with me in my bed while the adults continued to enjoy their party after I was tucked in. I still can’t remember his people’s names or recall their faces.) One of the few petless humans I loved was my uncle Jack, not really an uncle, but a colonel, a friend of my father’s, who would draw pictures of pinto ponies for me. I would carefully color in the spots while he and my father played chess.

When my language skills had grown robust enough to discuss such matters, I announced to my parents that I was really a horse. I galloped around the house neighing and tossing my head. My father agreed to call me Pony. But my elegant and socially ambitious mother, wishing that her little girl had the good sense to pretend she was a princess or a fairy, was worried. She feared that I was mentally defective.

The army pediatrician assured her the pony phase would wear off. It did—but only when I revealed that now I was really a dog.

From my perspective, this presented only one problem. While my parents and their friends were eager to show me how to be a little girl, there was nobody around who could show me how to be a dog. Until I was three and my short life’s ambition was realized with the arrival of Molly.

✧

A Scottish terrier puppy is bold and jaunty, say breed websites, as well

Reviews for How To Be A Good Creature

[sriddell_8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A delightful book!

The author tells autobiographical stories of pets and animals she's researched. Each animal has made an impact in the author's life.

I loved her stories about her pets: dogs, chickens, a pig. But what was unexpected is how she brought tarantulas and octopi to life in such a warm and loving way. Got to admit, I still wouldn't want to handle those creatures, but I appreciate that she appreciates those animals.

There were some stories of her childhood and her family woven into the fabric of the book. She brushes over these incidents, but clearly didn't have a warm and fuzzy mother! And animals seemed to take a place where family might otherwise go.

This was 100% a feel good book and a wonderful read.

[wellreadsoutherner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cute heartwarming stories with a little sadness thrown in about how animals help heal us. Illustrations and especially the cover were what drew me into it as they are wonderful.

[charon07 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sy Montgomery reveals some alarming facts about her mother and her childhood—though I don’t think that she intended them to be alarming or that she herself considers them alarming—that make her empathy and openness toward animals all the more poignant.

[juliestielstra · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Charming, sweet, fun. If you have read Montgomery's "The Good, Good Pig," "Birdology,"or "The Soul of the Octopus," you will have met some of these beings already, and in more depth. I was attracted by the intent of the book to tell these stories of her animal friends and acquaintances and what they have taught her about being a "good creature." It doesn't quite work in that regard. She is a gifted, vivid writer, and the animal characters are brought delightfully to life with a full-hearted respect for who they are in their own selves. She does acknowledge how she came to learn to see them that way (in the chapter on the tropical spider named Clarabelle, she astutely recognizes the moment when she suddenly saw Clarabelle not as a "giant spider!" but as a small animal, which feels completely different). As housemate to half a border collie (she's not saying what the other half is), I enjoyed the portraits of Montgomery's sequence of three border collies and how three dogs of the same breed can still be such different personalities. But that's pretty much what this very readable book amounts to: interesting, enjoyable, well-told animal tales.

[jreynolds1959 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sy Montgomery really makes you think about the personalities of creatures, whether they be dogs, spiders, kangaroos, octopi, etc. This woman has a real feel for trying to get the thoughts and feelings of all kinds of creatures. This book was so interesting and solidifies some of my own thoughts about living things.

[jtsolakos · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A heartwarming, beautifully written memoir. Just what is needed in this chaotic time. Ms. Montgomery will convince you to feel compassion and heart for scary spiders and a huge octopus as well as pigs, chickens, and dogs. Each chapter is dedicated to a different animal the author has met in her life. Through these experiences, we learn interesting facts about the animal and the life of the author at the same time. A lovely, lovely read!

[ar_bookbird · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I LOVE this book!!!!! Sy is such a beautiful writer and captures the “soul” of animals so perfectly in all her books!

[drfuriosa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a lovely memoir about the lessons we can learn from the animals in our lives. This short but memorable book is peppered with gorgeous illustrations that make this book a feast for the eyes, too.

[forsanolim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was given The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness a while ago but don't have it with me right now, so I chose this one of Sy Montgomery's works for my October animals read. As the title suggests, it's a charming memoir about the author's work and experiences with animals over her lifetime, from her childhood dog to the rescue pig who she and her husband adopted, almost like their child, to their rescue border collies and the New England Aquarium octopuses. This book was really lovely, and I did also appreciate Montgomery's candor in describing both her strained relationships with some of her family members and in her own mental-health challenges.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This memoir explores the author's relationship with the animals that have shaped her life. From a huge pet pig, to emus in the wild, from a tarantula to border collies, she loves these animals deeply and they have impacted the way she she's the world.

[boundtogetherforgood · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I didn't really enjoy this book. Probably 10% of the book focused on a spider, and I found that to be a big turnoff for me.She also explained in depth how much she wanted to kill herself when two of her animals died in close succession. That was too much for me. I enjoyed her book, "Soul of an Octopus," much more.

[grandpahobo_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book is very heatfelt and vivid in the descriptions of the animals and experiences in her life.

[gma2lana · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Animals know and feel so much more the we can ever understand.

[patkue · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Welch ein wunderbares Buch. Die Autorin beschreibt ihr Leben mit Tieren, Tiere die sie erforscht, Tiere die sie als Haustiere hält, Tiere denen sie begegnet. Immer ist ihr persönliches Erleben Thema, wie sie die Tiere erlebt, was sie empfindet, was die Tiere ihr bedeuten. Gerade diese persönliche Note hat mir sehr gut gefallen.Dann habe ich anschließend von ihr das Buch "Vom magischen Leuchten des Glühwürmchens bei Mitternacht" gelesen und war sehr enttäuscht. Denn dort fehlt das persönliche fast vollkommen und übrig bleibt ein Sammelsurium an Naturbeobachtungen.

[montzaleew · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How to be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery and also narrated by the author is a book that just makes you feel so good! I am a but animal loved and I could relate to her stories much. It didn't sound like she had the best family life but her love for her dog was a saving grace. Later her love for animals spread to all kinds of creatures and she explains how they helped her and she loved them. I laughed, related, and cried throughout this book! I was a mess! I could do all of these in one chapter! Her love just shines through! I have listened to another of her books so I knew how wonderful, tender, and insightful she is in her books. I can't wait to read more! As a narrator, it was nice to hear her true emotions as she told her adventures. It really brought the story closer to the reader.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a delightful book this is. Not only does Ms Montgomery share her love of all creatures with us but it is beautifully illustrated by Rebecca Green. Even the illustration for each chapter heading is individual. As a person who shared 16 years with a border collie I am, of course, bound to be enchanted by a book that includes stories about not just one or two border collies but three. And I have to bow down in awe to a woman who manages to write twenty-six books while keeping a border collie fully amused and exercised. My Gypsy rode herd on my husband and I, a cat, another dog and still had energy to burn. However, this book doesn't just chronicle the author's experiences with dogs. She also had a pet pig and not one of those cute little pot-bellied pigs; this was a pig that grew to 750 pounds. She raised chickens but since she is a vegetarian they too were pets. And then there were the more exotic animals she formed friendships with: three emus in the outback of Australia, tree kangaroos in Papua New Guinea, a tarantula in South America that she called Clarabelle and on and on. From each animal the author learned important lessons and no doubt will continue to learn more.If you have ever had a pet you loved then this is a book that will speak to you.

[smiler69 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I’m an unabashed animal lover/nutcase with three furkids of my own—of the kind that remains relatively unmoved at the sight of adorable babies, but goes absolutely nutters over dogs, cats, elephants, cows, horses, pigs, frogs, spiders, bears, beetles, bees, marsupials, octopuses, whales, mice, and just about any non-human critter living on this planet (except for roaches and mosquitoes ?). As such, I absolutely love Sy Montgomery’s books, who’s passion for animals is positively infectious. She has dedicated her life to researching them and travelled the world to encounter countless known and rare species to write about them. This, her latest charmingly illustrated book, came about when an interviewer asked her what lessons animals taught Sy about herself, and her almost immediate answer came: “How to be a good creature”. Here she briefly talks about 13 different critters she has encountered in her lifetime who taught her important life lessons: from her first dog, Molly, a Scottish terrier adopted when she was 3 and which she strove to emulate in every way to her mother’s great despair; a threesome of emu siblings which she undertook to study to satisfy her own burning curiosity as to their habits in the Australian outback; Christopher Hogwood, a pig she adopted as a runt so sick and small he had few chances of survival and who grew to become a 750 lbs “Buddha master” and the subject of her bestselling book “The Good Good Pig” when he passed after a very contented life, aged 14; Clarabelle, an Avicularia, or large species of tarantula with distinguishable pink footpads and a friendly personality encountered on a trip in French Guiana; Tess, Sally and Thurber, border collies who became irreplaceable members of the family; an octopus named Octavia who was also the fascinating subject of an excellent standalone book, called “The Soul of an Octopus”, to name a few. If you’ve never read a book by this author, this is a great way to get acquainted with her work. If you’ve already read and enjoyed some of Montgomery’s books, “How To Be a Good Creature” will get you better acquainted with Sy Montgomery and introduce you to several creatures you likely haven’t met before, or you’ll surely find some new anecdotes to smile at or sympathize with. Another part of the book I really liked was the For Further Reading section, where Montgomery lists ten books that inspired her to start studying and writing about the natural world. Highly recommend, naturally.

[nyiper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Perfectly delightful, as usual, it serves as a reminder of some of Sy's other wonderful books as she relates stories of some of the creatures in her books along with the wonderful stories of Molly, Tess, and Thurber.