After Chris and, too soon afterward, Tess had died, the one thing that kept me going was the comforting thought that I could kill myself.

Tess, sixteen, was already failing when we found that Christopher had died in his sleep in his pen on a morning in early summer. I was in shock. We had no warning. At age fourteen, Chris had a bit of arthritis but otherwise seemed fine. Because he had shown no symptoms of rapid decline, and because we had no idea how long pigs could live, I had hoped he would outlive Tess and help me through her death. But this was not to be.

In her final days, Tess had endured my flushing her body daily with infusions of Ringers solution to aid her failing kidneys. At night, sometimes she woke whimpering, with confusion or nightmares—I never knew which. I knew it was only a matter of time before her life held more pain than pleasure. That time came one short season later, on a sunny September afternoon, when our vet came to our home, and, as Howard and I held Tess in our arms beneath our silver maple, gave her the shot that ended her brilliant, big-hearted life.

How I wanted to go with her! Losing Christopher was horrendous enough. Without Chris, the barn, even with our busy hens, felt empty. Just looking at our yard made me sick with grief. After his loss, I had lived for Tess. I knew she was dying, and I think she did too. But we were together, and for those short months, for both of us, that was enough.

Once she was gone, though I still had my darling hens, my beloved husband, our lovely home, friends who cared, and meaningful work—blessings that had brought joy to every day—it all felt like nothing. It was early autumn, my favorite time of year, and the air smelled like ripening apples. But I didn’t want the precious fruit of our hundred-year-old Roxbury russets. I didn’t want to pick the last of summer’s blueberries. I didn’t look forward to the fall colors or the fluffy snow. I didn’t want food or sleep, music or company. I didn’t want Christmas, or Easter, or next year—or ever. I hated myself for my ingratitude.

Weeks went by, and then months. Still my despair felt bottomless. My hair fell out. My gums bled. Worse, there was something wrong with my brain. When I spoke with people, I would search for a word in my mind but speak its opposite. Once I was at an elderly friend’s house and tried to make a little joke about an eighty-year-old acquaintance who was dating a sixty-year-old. I wanted to say he was “robbing the cradle.” But to my horror it came out “He’s robbing the grave”!

I knew I was dangerously depressed. Alarmed, I fought to quell it. I forced myself to swallow food and water. I took vitamins. As before, I worked out three times a week at the health club. I spent time outside every day to get sunshine. Attempting to revive my ailing brain, I got tapes to play in my car to learn Italian. Nothing helped.

And for the first time in decades, I could not escape into my work. After Christopher died, to honor him, I’d begun writing a memoir of our life together. So every day, my work was to recount, in vivid detail, the fourteen years of comfort and joy that Christopher, and Tess, and the friends who had gathered around them to become family, had brought to me—comfort and joy now forever lost. Even the little girls next door had moved away. Writing the book was not cathartic. It was draining and difficult.

I struggled every day to finish the manuscript. And what then? Chris and Tess would still be dead. Would I still feel like this for the rest of my life?

I thought: I can’t stand this.

And I remembered the injectable Valium left over from my mother’s failed battle with cancer. After her death, I had taken it home with me, meaning to dispose of it safely. But I never had.

✧

I made myself a deal. If I didn’t feel any better by the time the manuscript was finished, I would end my pain, as vets end many animals’, with a simple injection. I’d overdose on Valium. I didn’t know then that this plan wouldn’t work. An overdose of injected Valium wouldn’t kill me; it would only make me sleep longer than usual. And because of the nature of depression, I also didn’t realize what a hideous blow my suicide would deal my survivors. Killing myself would only deflect my pain onto those I loved—the last thing in the world I’d have intended.

But the decision brought me a strange sense of peace. Knowing I would not have to suffer like this forever, I could soldier on until I had fulfilled my obligations. There was at least an end in sight. Either I would feel better and go on with my life, or I wouldn’t, and could end it.

Besides the Hogwood manuscript, I had one more duty to discharge before I could make the decision. I’d signed a contract for a shorter book, for younger readers, about the work of Dr. Lisa Dabek, an extraordinary researcher who had just begun radio tracking a species of kangaroo that lives in trees in Papua New Guinea. Lisa had become a good friend since I’d first met her at a talk on my Amazon pink dolphin book years before, and I owed her the honor of featuring her important work in this book. The expedition to her study site was slated for March—a particularly depressing time in New Hampshire, when the snow is melting into mud and everything looks gray and dirty. It might be, I thought, the last expedition of my life.

✧

The first three hours of the hike to our field site would be the hardest, Lisa promised. Certainly, it had to get easier from here, I thought. With each step up the muddy, sometimes forty-five-degree slope through the cloud forest, my heart banged in my chest like a bongo drummer gone berserk. Holding on to my walking stick, I gasped for breath. An eight-year-old from the village was carrying my backpack because I could not. One of the local women who was working as a porter extended a scabby hand to help me. She clearly had a skin disease. I grabbed her hand gratefully. Sweat, sore muscles, contagious skin ailments—none of it mattered. Neither did the painful swipe of stinging nettles, or the leeches that brush off from the tips of leaves and can end up in your eye. All that mattered was putting one foot in front of the other until the first three hours were over and we could sit down and take a break.

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.