animal
Mother-love, in beasts and birds, can’t always be observed carefully, because of innate animal secrecy, but—to revisit an old Ohio highway for a moment—I once encountered a mother quail leading her young across the road in a single file. She diverted my attention from them by pretending to have a broken wing, and flopped around almost at my feet, in an exhibition of bravura acting something like that of the late Lionel Barrymore as Rasputin. When the small birds had disappeared into the deep grass, she flew calmly away and joined them.
“And So to Medve,” in Old Dogs Remembered, ed. by Bud Johns (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1993), 27–28.
Willem de Kooning one day was shown some drawings, did not know who had done them, looked at them quite carefully, and said, “Well, they’re very interesting. They remind me a little bit of Japanese calligraphy, quite sophisticated. I don’t think they were done by a child.” And the person who gave them to him to look at said, “No, they were done by an elephant, sir.” Nothing has delighted me more for a long time. Siri was an elephant in a zoo who was seen making drawings with her trunk in the dust, and her keeper said, “Well, we must give her a chance to draw.” But the head of the zoo thought he was crazy and would not do anything about it, so the keeper on his own bought charcoal and large sheets of paper and laid them at Siri’s feet. Lo and behold, she went at it at once with her long sensitive trunk and would concentrate for as much as an hour in perfect bliss.
May Sarton, entry dated Tuesday, November 5, 1991, in Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), 156–57.
Looking directly into my eyes he very gently squeezed my fingers: which is how chimpanzees reassure each other.
“Jane Goodall, Illustrated,” The New York Times, May 13, 2011.
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.
“The Two-headed Calf,” in The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1977), 59.
“Skunks,” the squirrel said, “are sent to try us.”
“Flying Scrolls,” in The Skylark: and Other Poems (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959), 71.
The lambs had nursed and the ewe was lying quiet. One lamb had settled itself on the mother’s back and was a perfect miniature of the old one—they reminded me of a teapot we have, whose knob is a tiny replica of the pot itself.
“Spring,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1944), 233.
The possession of a dog today is a different thing from the possession of a dog at the turn of the century, when one’s dog was fed on mashed potato and brown gravy and lived in a doghouse with an arched portal. Today a dog is fed on scraped beef and Vitamin B1 and lives in bed with you.
“Dog Training,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1944), 199.
I’ve always tried out my material on my dogs first. You know, with Angel, he sits there and listens and I get the feeling he understands everything. But with Charley, I always felt he was just waiting to get a word in edgewise. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of Of Mice and Men, I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.
“The Art of Fiction No. 45,” The Paris Review, No. 63, Fall 1975
“It is hard to be brave,” said Piglet, sniffling slightly, “when you’re only a Very Small Animal.”
“In Which Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest, and Piglet Has a Bath,” in The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh (New York: Dutton, 1994), 92.
Owing to my boat’s shape, she could not wear a tall mast without turning over and so her pocket-handkerchief-sized sail could only garner and harvest the tiniest cupfuls of wind; thus, for the most part, she was propelled from point to point with oars, and when we had a full crew on board—three dogs, an owl, and sometimes a pigeon—and were carrying a full cargo—some two dozen containers full of seawater and specimens—she was a back-aching load to push through the water.
Fauna and Family (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 21.
If it can’t get away, it ain’t free-range.
Kill It and Grill It (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2002), 2.