How to Be a Good Creature

by Sy Montgomery

  Then there would be only six more hours of hiking to go—that day.

  Lisa’s field site, in the 10,000-foot-tall mountains of Papua New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula, was so remote that to her knowledge, no white people other than those on her research teams had ever seen it. It would take us—eight researchers, plus forty-four men, women, and children from the village of Yawan carrying our camping and scientific gear and food—three days of strenuous hiking to reach it.

  Exhausted, I sat down with the others on top of a ridge. It was here, Lisa told me encouragingly, that a member of a previous team, a thirty-year-old bodybuilder, threw up and confessed he thought he could go no farther. (He made it, though.) At last I could look at more than my feet slipping on the muddy ground. I raised my eyes to unspeakable beauty. Far below us, in the distance, were the tidy villages of Yawan and Towet, with their grass roofs and neat gardens of vegetables and flowers. Around us, massive trees hung heavy with moss like velvet drapes; wild rhododendrons and ginger punctuated the green with their red and orange flowers. Tree ferns’ orange fiddleheads swelled larger than cabbages, recalling the dawn of the world. The air twinkled with the chatter of parakeets. Two members of our team—one a veterinarian from Seattle, the other a zookeeper from Minneapolis—started singing. Our Papuan friends joined in. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. I was focused entirely on finishing the hike. If I had dropped dead, it would have been fine with me, but I didn’t want to wreck the expedition for everyone else.

  ✧

  Six hours later, as everyone was hurrying to pitch tents in the rain, I wandered off into the trackless cloud forest to throw up.

  This wasn’t a very good idea. A person can disappear in the cloud forest in seconds. The rain was pouring down hard enough to wash away my tracks and drown out calling voices. But I wasn’t calling for help. I didn’t realize it, but I had both altitude sickness and hypothermia and had taken leave of my senses. My lips and fingertips were blue when my friend Nic, the book’s photographer, found me and led me, still dazed, back to a tent.

  Quickly Lisa and the vet stripped off my soaked clothes, swaddled me in a sleeping bag, and brought me a hot drink. “Is there anything else you want?” Lisa asked kindly.

  By now my mind had started functioning again. “Yes,” I said, “if someone can find my backpack . . .” What I wanted was in my zippered toiletry kit. Along with my silver wedding ring, I had stored another treasure there, so they wouldn’t slip off during the hike. It was a hollow silver bracelet a friend had given me after Tess died. It contained some of Tess’s ashes.

  ✧

  The next morning, after another grueling three- hour hike, we set up camp at the place called Wasaunon, our home base for the next two weeks as the team sought to find, radio-collar, release, and track the endangered Matschie’s tree kangaroos. Lisa’s work was essential: discovering the ’roos’ range and their needs would yield a blueprint for protecting the cloud forest.

  At our campsite, ancient tall trees stood guard over our tents like benign wizards bearded in moss. The moss was studded with ferns. The ferns were dotted with lichens and liverworts, fungi and orchids. But it was the moss that most enchanted me. The world seemed cloaked in its velvet, as if the clouds in these tall mountains had congealed into green and come alive. John Ruskin, a nineteenth-century British art critic, called moss—humble, soft, and ancient—“the first mercy of the Earth.” Mercy, then, was everywhere around me: it covered tree trunks, vines, the ground, forgiving every clumsy step and cushioning every fall.

  Moss hung in great orange clumps from the branches. It was exactly the color of the tree kangaroos. “For years, that’s all we saw,” Lisa told me. And those elusive tree kangaroos were surely up there sitting on those soft cushions of moss right now. The Matschie’s tree kangaroo, the species Lisa studies, is about the size of a big cat. With mostly brownish-orange fur (except on the belly, which is lemon yellow), it has a moist pink nose, and a long furry tail. Dr. Seuss could not have come up with a creature more adorable, nor Gund a plushie that you’d more want to hug. Our job, among the ferns and the orchids, the mist and the moss, was to find, radio-collar, and then follow animals that looked like they belonged in a children’s storybook.

  ✧

  “At about 11, a miracle,” I wrote in my field diary. “The trackers came back bearing a long-beaked echidna! Native only to New Guinea, it is another Seuss character come to life—a fat, furry, pillow of a body with only a few spines, dear, tiny black eyes, back feet that seem to be on backwards and a six-inch tubular snout that is so long he literally trips on it as he trundles along.”

  Our guest seemed remarkably unperturbed at his capture, and immediately upon his release from the tracker’s coffee bag began to explore, using his strong hands to tear a hole through the lashed-together saplings we were using as a table. He stabbed his nose into the earth as if it were water, and then walked though the sapling wall of our makeshift cookhouse as easily as smoke. He did not recoil when I gently touched his back, finding his charcoal-colored fur surprisingly soft—though his few ivory spines were quite sharp. Perhaps that is what gave him confidence. Still, we didn’t want to stress him. Though we could have watched him forever, rapt, after photographing and videotaping him for ten minutes, we returned him to his coffee bag and took him back home.

  “It seems only minutes have elapsed since his visit when another team of trackers brings us a mountain cuscus!” continues my field diary. “He is a plump, plush fellow, with huge brown eyes, his woolly fur dark brown except for his moon-white belly, pink hands, feet, and underside of his naked, grasping tail.”

  At every turn, it seemed, we encountered evidence of rare, unlikely animals with incredible bodies, fantastic abilities, and delightful names. Echidnas are egg-laying mammals, one of only two kinds on Earth (the platypus is the other). Mountain cuscus are the largest possums in the world, weighing up to thirteen pounds, nocturnal and secretive. Other animals we didn’t actually see, but we found their nests, hides, and holes. We encountered a mound where a chicken-size brush fowl had dug a nest as big as a Volkswagen in the dirt, using the heat generated by compost to incubate his eggs. (Yes, the male tends them, adjusting the temperature as needed, cooling by digging ventilation holes.) We found holes in the grassy areas near camp that had been dug by pademelons—fat, furry kangaroo-like characters with alert, swiveling ears and stubby tails. The trackers reported they spotted a dorcopsis, a tiny wallaby with the face of a gazelle, near camp.

  This cloud forest world was vividly alive in a way I had not observed in any other habitat. Unlike in the Amazon and other rainforests I had visited, there were no mosquitoes (too cold), no biting ants, no poisonous snakes, spiders, or scorpions. Though Wasaunon was teeming with lives, all of them seemed not only benign but benevolent.

  Each day revealed a new, delightful surprise: Wild strawberries along a path. Micro-orchids smaller than a dress-maker’s pin. Nights shot through with falling stars. The humans around me were wonderful too: from the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Papua New Guinea. Three of us were friends before the trip; by the end of the first week, we all were. Trackers and scientists, natives and foreigners, whether zookeeper, artist, or researcher, we were united in the challenging task of exploring this primeval cloud forest in the effort to protect it.

  Life in camp was not always easy. The tree ’roos were elusive. Our clothes were always wet. Nights and mornings, we could see our breath. Curled as tight as a fist in my sleeping bag, I slept in all my clothes but still woke up cold every day. But the work was essential, the camaraderie warm, and the setting magical.

  Early one morning, we felt the ground tremble. It was an earthquake, which here would do us no harm. In fact, the tremors felt reassuring to me. “The Earth feels so new here,” I wrote in my field journal. “No wonder we can sometimes feel its molten, beating heart.”

  ✧

  From the moment she woke on April 1, Lisa told me, she felt it
would be a good day. We both liked to get up early to see the trackers leave on their search for tree kangaroos. I was deeply impressed by the men’s kindness, not only toward the Westerners (whose heads New Guinea tribes had once famously hunted) but also toward the animals, whose skins adorned their ceremonial clothes and whose flesh they used to eat less than a generation ago.

  Lisa was washing clothes and I was doing the dinner dishes down by the stream when we got the word at 8:35a.m.: Tree ’roos! Two of them! We assumed it must be a mother and a baby. We raced after the tracker, who told us in Tok Pisin, the national trade language, that they were both in a tree “clostu”—nearby. You would think it would be impossible to get the animals out of the trees, but the trackers know exactly how. First, you build a little fence around the tree. Then one tracker climbs an adjacent tree, and the kangaroo jumps off its branch to the ground, where other trackers grab it by the strong tail and quickly stuff it into a coffee bag.

  When we got the animals back to camp, we saw the “baby” was an adult male. The trackers had found two tree kangaroos on a date! For the first time in Lisa’s study, she would be able to radio-collar an adult male. “This is a miracle!” she cried. “The first ever collared male Matschie’s!” said her New Guinean student. “History!”

  The vet lightly anesthetized the tree kangaroos to examine them and put on their radio collars without further scaring them. The female was first. She was the color of a rainforest orchid, her long tail golden, her back a deep chestnut-topaz. Her curved claws, perfect for climbing, gleamed ocher. I couldn’t help but reach out and stroke her fur, as I had once stroked Tess’s. It was softer than a cloud.

  As the tree ’roos, their collars on, awaited the morning’s release in a large, leafy pen, we all wondered what to name them. But Lisa had already decided: Christopher and Tess.

  ✧

  On the trail to the release site, my boots weighed extra pounds with caked mud from the increasingly slippery trail. Their names jangled and jounced in my mind, in the rhythm of each heavy step. Tess. Chris. Tess. Chris. How many times in the fourteen years I’d shared with my pig and my dog had I uttered those sweet words? Since their death, just the sound of their names had been as an arrow to my heart. But now it was different. Tess. Chris. Tess. Chris: repeating their names became a chant, a mantra, a prayer—a call to remember my beloved ones with gratitude, and to be in the right frame of mind for this momentous release.

  These beautiful wild animals were not my Chris and my Tess, of course. Nor were they inhabited by their spirits. They were their own complex, individual selves, who loved their unique lives. But also, they were, to me, wildness itself. These two animals carried within them the wild heart that beats inside all creatures—the wildness we honor in our breath and our blood, that wildness that keeps us on this spinning planet. Here in the cloud forest, I found again the wildness that keeps us sane and whole, the wild, delicious hunger for life.

  The day we released Christopher and Tess back into the forest, it set me free, too.

  The card sat on my desk as a reminder. “Love is not changed by death,” read the quote by British poet Edith Sitwell, “and nothing is lost, and in the end, all is harvest.”

  My friends assured me that Christopher and Tess were still with me. Gretchen Vogel, who had given us our first flock of hens as a housewarming present, is a spiritual medium, and she told me she could see both Chris and Tess when she came to visit our house. The spirit of our 750-pound pig was even bigger than he was in life. He floated around after me like a blimp, she said. And she could see Tess plain as day, sitting beside me on the black and white linoleum tiles in the kitchen.

  But why couldn’t I see them?

  I had never been a person gifted with visions or dreams or contact with spirits. In high school Bible study, to my disappointment, I never got tongues. I believe in the survival of the soul. It is an important tenet of my faith. But to my immense frustration, I could never feel the presence of loved ones who had passed on. I only missed them. I spoke of this to a friend whom I had met in the Amazon, a martial artist and former U.S. Marine. “Oh, but you do feel them,” he said gently. “What you are feeling when you miss them is not their absence. It’s their presence.”

  His wise words soothed me. But I couldn’t help but long for some sign, some feeling, some communication.

  Then one night in January—after I had returned from Papua New Guinea, after I had written the memoir of my life with Christopher Hogwood, after completing the tree kangaroo book, after another research trip to the Amazon and yet another one to Italy, a year and a half after she had died—Tess came to me in a dream and showed me the promise of joy that lay ahead.

  ✧

  I dream of animals often, and usually they are rapturous. But this dream was different. It began with a crisis. A friend had given us a border collie puppy. What could be better? But I was beset with anxiety. In the dream, the baby was only about the size of a newborn mouse, and I was terrified it would die. I had no idea how to keep the puppy alive. I felt utterly helpless.

  Then someone came to the door. I didn’t hear a knock, but I knew someone was there. I opened the back door—and there stood Tess.

  Oh! The joy of seeing her again! But even as I lay dreaming, I understood that Tess was dead. I knew in the dream that Tess was in her spirit form, and that she had come to help me. I raced to get Howard. He came to the door with me. But now Tess was gone. In her place stood a different border collie.

  Like Tess, this border collie had a white stripe down the nose, white legs, and white tail tip. But she was even more luxuriantly furred than Tess. Her ears stood up taller, with no flop to the tips. She lacked Tess’s white ruff. She looked at us expectantly with intense brown eyes.

  Instantly, I understood that Tess had sent this dog to us. From the moment I woke up, I set out to find her.

  ✧

  Howard and, I unbeknownst to each other, had separately been visiting a website for a border collie rescue. Located in rural upstate New York, it’s the largest rescue devoted to the breed in the region, if not the nation. It features appealing photos and detailed stories of dozens of border collies and border collie mixes for adoption. Glen Highland Farm Sweet Border Collie Rescue was the obvious place to start looking for the dog Tess had shown me. I strongly felt she was female. But would I recognize her?

  Adopting a dog from this rescue is not easy. The dogs have great lives on the farm. They run free over acres of fenced grass, ponds, and woods, sleep snug and warm inside at night on dog beds and couches, and have loads of toys, volunteers, and other dogs to play with. No wonder the rescue only lets these dogs go to homes that will be even better than this. To be considered as potential adopters, we had to fill out a lengthy form, include photographs of our house and yard, and procure letters endorsing our fitness for border collie stewardship from our veterinarian and at least one neighbor. Finally, after submitting the paperwork, a date was decided when we could visit. By this time it was February. We awaited a call confirming the time of our appointment.

  The call didn’t come in time for us to make the trip; it was a daylong drive to the farm, and we would need overnight accommodations. Disappointed, we planned for another visit several weeks later, in March. This time we’d stay overnight at Howard’s parents’ house in Long Island and then drive to the rescue. My heart pounded as I packed Tess’s old leash, her bowls, and her blanket into the car. Howard and I had looked so many times at the different dogs profiled on the website. Which was the right one? Would she know us? Would we know her? What if I picked the wrong dog, and failed my stalwart, lionhearted Tess, who had come all the way back from the dead to try to show me the right one?

  We returned from dinner the night before we were to set out from Long Island and found a message on Howard’s parents’ answering machine. Many of the border collies at the farm had an illness; our visit was canceled a second time.

  Clearly, though many wonderful dogs awaited adoptio
n at Glen Highland Farm, our dog was not there.

  But where was she?

  ✧

  I came home and looked at other rescue sites: Animal Rescue League of New Hampshire. Petfinder.com. Humane societies in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine. New England Border Collie Rescue. For some reason, few border collies were available for adoption at the time, and no young females were available. I was starting to feel frantic. Now it was April, three months after Tess had come to me in the dream. It appeared not only possible, but likely, that I would fail her—and meanwhile, the dog who was meant to be ours was languishing out there, somewhere. I didn’t even know where to start.

  A breeder was out of the question. We knew an excellent one in the next town over, but he bred professional working dogs, not pets—and besides, we had always wanted to give a home to a border collie who wouldn’t otherwise have a good one.

  So, without much hope, I cast my dream upon the mercy of the universe. I told some of our friends that we were looking for a young female border collie. One friend was a Yankee columnist and knew, it seemed, half the population of New England. Another was on the board of the local Humane Society. A third friend had worked at the Massachusetts SPCA. Surely they would have some leads.

  On a whim, I also called Evelyn—the woman who runs the private rescue where we had gotten Tess. We’d stayed friends ever since we’d brought Tess home. I had immediately told her about Tess’s death, and of course, I reasoned, she would have called us if, by some fluke, she suddenly acquired another border collie—which was unlikely. Tess had been the only border collie Evelyn had gotten at the rescue in fourteen years. But I phoned her anyway, just to tell her we were looking.