The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (21 page)

When Amelia came to us she was wild, but within twenty-four hours it seemed to me she’d consented to tameness. I had no way of knowing that this was untrue. I didn’t understand that when Amelia followed me everywhere she was acting out of instinct, not fondness. Years later I would read the work of ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who made famous the fact that orphaned wild ducklings would cathect to the first person they saw when they struggled free from their shells, that person’s face indelibly imprinted on the infant animal’s most malleable brain. I’d see in Lorenz’s book photos of him walking like the Pied Piper, a long line of geese waddling behind him. Lorenz also discovered that if, upon birth, the wild geese first saw a boot in motion or a spoon in motion, they would imprint upon it with the same ferocious loyalty, longing only to be near the inanimate object, somehow sucking from it succor and safety, reflexively, without thought or plan.

Amelia, in other words, was not following me because she was tame and almost certainly not because she loved me; she followed me because some dumb inner drive urged her to do so, the drive itself as wild as wings or water. I didn’t feel in the least let down by this later-in-life discovery. What counted was not how I was loved. People often cite their pets as sources of “unconditional love,” but surely they must know, at some level, that Fido likely sees in them a food source, first and foremost. Does this diminish the encounter? Not at all. We adore our pets not because they love us, but because they prove to us, day after day after day, that we love them with a purity not possible in human-to-human encounters. Our animals prove to us how capacious the human heart can be, and in doing so they give us, over and over, a great gift.

Amelia, not a human, not by a long shot, began to grow, and with a wild alacrity. Her baby teeth disappeared, sliding from their slots, and in their place came fangs of polished white. Her claws, previously clear, grew cloudy and dark and so sharp she left pits in the pine of the Trevors’ antique floors when she walked over them. Her fur changed too, not in color but in hue, the bristles tipped with gold and blue. Yes, Amelia grew. She grew and she grew and she grew and then August came and with it a series of changes that seemed sudden and severe. My raccoon expanded so swiftly in August that one day, and all of a sudden it seemed, she was too wide to perch on my shoulder. Soon after that her behaviors became odd and unpredictable. At times she would snarl at something I could not see: a scent, perhaps, her wet nose raised and quivering, catching imperceptible currents, her world loaded with lavender, hot tar, wet leaf, rotted loam, bone. She started to tear apart our trash, clawing open the big bellies of bags, raiding the compost, dragging dead things over the stoop, once a rabbit no bigger than my fist, its ears ripped. Neighbors began complaining of trashcans tipped, their garbage ransacked, their cats, they claimed, attacked. I tried to keep Amelia in at night but she paced the house, up and down, around and around, stopping to stare longingly out the window and then, cued by something we could never see, she’d go berserk, clawing at glass, cocking her head and then clawing again, and again, her cries so high and hard that eventually I’d let her go. I’d open the door and watch her romp off into the darkness, heading diagonally across the lawn, through the shrubs, up over the Raymonds’ chain-link fence, dropping down soundlessly onto the ground, going each and every time towards that old abandoned house, just four doors down, drawn there, over and over again, passing her nocturnal hours beneath its broken roof, or around its grounds; I wasn’t sure. Perhaps she had a beau there, or a group, or a gang, or maybe, there, she could fight with all the feral cats she wanted and no one cared. Deep in the middle of the night we sometimes heard the fights, shrieks and snarls and shatters. Every morning, the streets were strewn with trash and neighbors started leaving us protest notes.

I’d go there, come morning. I’d go to the abandoned house. I’d stand at the edge of the busted steps and whistle two highs and one low, our special signal, and every time, within seconds it seemed, Amelia would climb through a hole in the wrecked outer wall, slide down the siding, and amble towards me, blood on her whiskers, dried drops here and there. I don’t know why I never recoiled. Despite her outbursts, her pacing and scratching at glass, her ripping apart our trash, she never hurt us, never came close. Towards the whole Trevor family, she was nothing but unendingly affectionate, and I wonder if her sweetness seemed all the more so when set against her sometimes savage displays. Back home, I’d pour her milk in a yellow saucer and she’d delicately lap it up, chortle for more, and then climb into my lap, turning twice before wrapping into a coil and settling down to sleep.

“Soon,” said Cranston, “she’ll be too big to handle.”

“She’s already,” said Annie, “too big to handle.”

“She shouldn’t live here,” said Cranston. “It’s not right.”

“She doesn’t live here,” I said. “She sleeps at the haunted house.”

“She’s here every day,” Annie said.

“All day,” Cranston said.

“Inside,” Annie said.

“It’s inappropriate,” Cranston said.

“Dangerous,” Annie said.

If not now, they said. Then soon.

I went on a mission then. I needed to prove to people that it was possible to make a wild animal safe. I pedaled to the library in town where I found half a shelf dedicated to the topic of taming and training beasts. In 1852, I read, Sir Walter Rothschild, a British nobleman, had had a fleet of zebras shipped to him from Africa. Convinced he could tame them, he built a beautiful state-of-the-art barn and then hitched several of the equines to an impressive carriage whereupon, after cracking his long crop, he was taken for a ride through the cobblestoned streets of London, people stopping to stare as the carriage ricocheted past them. Dusting dirt off his trousers, Rothschild worked with his zebras day in and day out, surviving, I’m sure, grievous bites and backside bruises. Although Rothschild did eventually convince his zebras to haul some heavy loads, all in all the breed resisted his efforts, too severely stubborn for the whip or the bit. Still, many others tried after him, the zebra, because of its close connection to the horse, being an obvious beast-of-burden candidate.

The dog was the first domesticated animal, and the hamster probably the last, but in between, rodent and canine people, since the earliest civilizations, have been trying to domesticate dozens and dozens of animals: the cheetah, the kangaroo, the brown bear, the hyena, to name just a few.

As Jared Diamond tells us, of all 148 large mammalian species who inhabit this earth, only fifteen—sheep, goat, cow, pig, horse, Arabian camel, Bactrian camel, llama, alpaca, donkey, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, Bali cattle, and mithan—have proven amenable to domestication or the taming that precedes it. Zebras have that nasty temper and have probably sunk their teeth into more male hindquarters than we would care to count. Elephants, those gentle giants, mature too slowly, while deer and antelope panic in a pen. In general, only a handful of mammals are really fit for the farm or the human household; as for the rest, their encrypted temperaments render them perennially dangerous or just plain unsuitable, beyond the grasp of human hands.

I was just fifteen when I imbibed this sobering information, old enough to understand it but young enough to decide to discard it. Inside the library I made my way down the alphabet, riffling through the collection of books until I finally found what I was looking for. I read about a Portuguese prince who had successfully tamed a tiger and Pygmies who had, with great delight, taken wild pandas as pets.

In the days and weeks that followed I stayed on the lookout for similar stories, sampling libraries in surrounding towns, telling Annie and Cranston my research proved them wrong, while Annie and Cranston, caught between my deep need on the one hand and their common sense on the other, looked with escalating worry from Amelia to me, me to Amelia, day by day her contours coming clearer as her size, and her temper, increased. My aim: to make my raccoon into an animal other than what she was, this despite all the information I’d received. Who, after all, had taken me to meet my neighbors, or called me around corners I might have otherwise just dodged? I had come to understand that adventure and adrenaline were not necessarily the same. Mostly I can credit Amelia, an animal who had no words, with helping me talk to the Trevors, so that first we became friends and then something else, one evening Annie reaching across some space to touch the back of my head, asking, softly, “Where’d you get this cut?” A few days later I went with her to a stylist, all three of us looking at books showing bobs and shags, bangs and layers, Annie sweeping my matted hair back, this way and that, considering me carefully in the mirror, as a mother might, and I woke up to a series of wants. I went down with a throat so swollen breathing became difficult, and Cranston brought me to the hospital in the middle of the night, his hand testing me for a fever, and my wants went wayward, turned into inevitable needs. Soon after that, lying across my bed beneath the eave one afternoon, the window open and autumn in the air, I realized that somehow, somewhere along the line, this room had come to feel like mine, and something in me settled, and then days later spilled when my social worker called and asked me about my placement.
Placement
, rhymes with basement, and I recalled, with a dull thud, a buried, bottom-line fact: everything about this family was fleeting for me. Unlike the zebra and the cheetah, I ached to be domesticated, tied and tethered to a single spot, but in fact I was radically free. Unlike a child by blood or adopted by law, the Trevors could, and eventually would, release me, and that fact seasoned my stay with anger and appreciation both.

The seasons changed; summer turned to fall turned to winter. One afternoon in the fading light of a December day, when all the trees in town were strung with tiny teardrop lights, I found on the kitchen counter a check from the state—the monthly payment for keeping me. I studied it for a long while, turned it over and over in my hands, and then, before I could stop myself, I crumpled it up and threw it in the basket by Annie’s desk. “Did you do this?” Annie later asked me, holding up the creased check.

“No” I said, too quickly. And then added, leaning closer, “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Annie said, pulling the paper away and folding it in half. She slipped the check into her pants pocket and walked upstairs.

Raccoons normally hibernate, but that winter Amelia had no need. We were still her steady food source, and every morning, even in the thickest of snows, she’d exit the abandoned house four doors down and show up on our stoop, covered with cobwebs, waiting for her milk and table scraps, which she’d eat and then settle down to sleep before the hearth until late afternoon, when she wakened in an always playful mood. She loved to bat around balls, climb up the curtains, taunt the dog, and bathe in the bathtub, her fur when wet showing its oily sheen. Her antics endeared her to anyone and everyone and must have had something to do with why Annie and Cranston, despite their stated misgivings, continued to allow her in, day after day, all day, despite the threat of injuries large and small. She’d grown now almost to my knees and, at some point that winter, she started to snap her jaw and growl if anyone touched her while she ate. One December morning, thinking she was done, I accidentally stroked her head and she sunk her teeth into my wrist, the blood falling fast on the snow. I tried to hide the wound but anyone could see it; Annie wrapped it up tight muttering “Jesus” under her breath.

That night, Annie and Cranston took me aside. “It’s over,” they said. “She could get rabies,” they said. “We’re sorry,” they said, and I wept tears that snaked down my face and collected in the corners of my mouth. I wondered if she’d starve without us, if somehow, by taking her into the human realm, we’d torn or tainted the basic instincts she’d need to survive in the wild. It turns out the answer is yes, although back then, I’d no way of knowing for sure. But the fact is that when we take the wild out of the wild we often confuse, or corrupt, the animal’s ability to navigate its natural habitat. Had I known that then would I have acted otherwise? I can’t say for sure. I felt the lure that must be as ancient as it is intense, the drive to shed your skin; the need to know the utter other who looks back at us with eyes in which we see what we once were, and still are in corners culture forbids us to investigate. I remembered how we took her from the wall, how the hole looked after she’d emerged, a punched-out place gushing dust and darkness.

The next morning, when I woke, the Trevors told me I could not call her from her nighttime shelter in the old abandoned house. Annie took the yellow saucer that had, for all these months, held her morning milk and set it on a pantry shelf. I figured Amelia would be back begging soon enough, standing on the stoop, high on her hind legs, and what would we do then? I wasn’t sure. I smelled smoke. I smelled it far away, as if coming from another world, a past place, maybe from my mind, because no one else smelled anything. “You can’t smell that?” I asked Kyle, Emma, Annie, Cranston, and they each said no, and it snowed and the night went into a deep, silent freeze, fangs of icicles hanging from the drip edge off the roof.