How to Be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery

Author:Sy Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Playing with Tess meant multitasking love. Whenever Tess went out, the person with her always interacted with the other animals too. Christopher would sense our presence and call, “Unh. Unh! UNH!” He demanded that we pet him, feed him a scoop of grain, an apple, or some slops, or let him out to be hooked up on his tether. The Ladies would mob us, squatting to be petted, picked up, and kissed.

Happily, if we worked quickly, there was time to do all this between tosses, because Tess liked you to throw the ball or fling the Frisbee a L-O-N-G way. Howard could send the disk flying hundreds of feet. I couldn’t. Plus I had bad aim. But still, Tess caught anything that was tossed without fail, no matter who threw it. Howard called her “a real Golden Glover.” She never played favorites. If we were out together, or with visitors, she would always alternate between people, handing the toy back to first one person, then the next. She loved the game so much, I think, that she assumed we must too, so she kept track out of a sense of fairness. Nobody should be left out. If she had summoned Howard to play earlier, while we were working, she would pick me an hour later.

The sight of our spirited young dog racing over our field, leaping up to catch the toy, always lifted me, like singing the first notes of “Amazing Grace.” Her movements matched the song’s first words, too. She was not only powerful, but refined and elegant—the very definition of grace. And particularly considering the injuries Tess had sustained from the terrible snowplow accident, and before that, the sorrow of her early life as an unwanted puppy, her grace and her happiness with us was nothing short of amazing.

The joy Tess brought continued into the night. The last thing we’d do before going to bed was play one more round of Frisbee. Her black-and-white form was gorgeous gilded in moonlight. But I think Tess was even more beautiful on inky black moonless nights, when I couldn’t see her at all.

On our country road, no streetlights pollute the night skies. Some nights are almost cave dark, and we humans can see nothing on these moonless nights. But Tess could see perfectly in the dark.

Dogs possess a tapedum lucedum, a light-gathering reflector in the eye—the reason dogs’ and cats’ eyes glow in the headlights of a car. So, on those darkest of nights, I would follow her into the blackness, listening for the jingle of her dog tags. She would lead me down the gentle slope of the backyard to where the lawn leveled out at the edge of the field. Then I would whisper to her. “Tess . . . Go!”

I’d wait some seconds and then toss the Frisbee into the blackness. Where it went, I had no idea. But a second or two later, I’d hear the beautiful click of her teeth on the plastic—and know that she had leapt into the air and caught it.

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