The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals Read Online Free Page A

at least it seemed I did. I didn’t know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core. I stayed up on top. I saw holes in the ground, ragged circles that went down, dark. I knelt and smelled something rank and alive in there. I planted the nuts from my parent’s liquor bar all the way around the entrance to those holes and then sat back, waiting in the shade. At last foxes appeared, their pointy faces popping up, their scrappy paws swiping the nuts down into their dens. I did this for days, and then stopped. Instead, now, I put the nuts on the forest floor, in a small pile, and then sat back against a tree, the food just a few feet from me. How close, I wanted to know, could we come? The foxes saw me and smelled the treats and knew what I was up to. In the earth below me I listened to their language, a panoply of chirps and gurgles and quick, high barks. They debated and decided, their heads poking up, dropping down, overtaken by ambivalence, until at last what looked like a large male made his way towards the pile, nose to the ground, his eyes all amber.
Click click
, with my tongue. The fox stopped, cocked his head, then started again. I got quiet in a way I’d never been before. I entered into stillness. The fox kept coming, his movements both slinky and slow, five curled cashews, crystalled with the grit of sparkling salt, midway between us. As he approached I could see his whiskers, the slope of his snout, the dark dots of his nostrils. It took some time, a long, long time, but at last he crept so close I could hear his breath and see him take the nuts with his teeth, his jaw working as he chewed, fast, then bent his head for more. He eyed me the whole time and then, when he was done, he turned away and trotted back into the forest.
    It wasn’t until August that I found the egg. It lay in the forest on a little patch of grass, entirely alone, no bird near here. I scanned the sky between the branches but saw just chinks of blue and the faintest fingernail of an afternoon moon. I looked straight up the trunk of the nearest tree and then the tree after that and the tree after that, but there was no nest in sight. It appeared that this egg had been dropped straight from some solar system, perhaps carried down to the ground by a winged thing that had borne it but could not bear it, and so wanted to pass it on.
    I picked up the egg. It was more delicate and perfect than anything I’d ever held and I knew, immediately, that I would keep it, that I would bring it back with me, into the Golden Ghetto. I pressed the orb to my ear and thought I heard, from within, a small slosh, and I pictured a thimble-sized being turning round and round, flexing its fleecy wings, opening and shutting its ruby beak as it readied itself for its enormous task, based entirely on faith, cracking the caul of your gorgeous surround in search of something still finer.
    That day I filled my bike basket with leaves and grasses to cushion the egg on the long way home, and, for the first time, I brought a piece of the forest back with me, into the Golden Ghetto. Right from the start the egg made it seem like anything here could happen, and I believed this all the more when I showed it to my mother, carrying it into the kitchen, which was growing dark as the evening arrived, her silhouette, I remember, and my words:
Look, look
, my voice strangely soft, my hands cupped closed, my very being emanating a mystery she could not resist. “At what?” my mother asked, turning from the window towards me now, her own voice suddenly soft, too, mirroring mine, as if we were, indeed, under some spell, entirely transformed, I no longer with stink, she coming quietly across the kitchen floor to
look
,
look
, and when she was close I opened the hub of my hands and she saw resting down deep in my joined palms the tiny perfect orb of the egg and she said,
Oh. Oh.
    And we two stood there for a second and I swear I saw