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other way to obtain a book about an animal. Reading
Shege
wasn’t as good as reading something by another author, but I had no choice. A disaster occurred that would have left me with nothing.
    The scene is as fresh in my mind today as on the day it happened. On that black day, the school librarian told me I couldn’t read any more books about animals. I’d read too many already, and there were more important subjects. She said I should read about people.
    I was aghast. I already knew about people. I begged her. I said I’d just read a little and promised to read other things too. She said no. She would not let me take any more animal books from the library. The only books I would be allowed to read henceforth would be about people.
    Her decree was like a death. With those terrible words, she cut me off from what I cared about the most. I stood speechless in front of her, suddenly aware of her power, knowing I couldn’t change her mind, realizing how bleak my future would be.
    For the rest of the day I was despondent. I had to do something. When I came home from school, I assembled some paper, a pencil, some crayons, and two pieces of cardboard that the laundry put inside Dad’s clean shirts. Then I sat on the floor of my parents’ bedroom and wrote
Shege
. The name, I think, derives from Shere Khan in Kipling’s
Jungle Book
, and she’s a Siberian tiger because, thanks to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, I knew these were the biggest kind of tiger. Therefore she lives in the “Siberian jungles,” because from the
Jungle Book
I learned that tigers are jungle animals. If there was such a thing as a Siberian tiger, it followed that there was a Siberian jungle.
    I couldn’t spell, but I didn’t know it—among other mistakes I wrote
nois
for noise,
frunt
for front, and
prytty
for pretty—but when a hydrophobic jackal enters the scene, I must have known I was out of my depth and got help in spelling
hydrophobia
.
    Nor did I have much sense of drama. Here’s the entire last chapter:
Chapler four. One day Shege told her children to stay in the den and they did. After a while they saw it was raining (cats do not like rain) harder and harder. Prytty soon it started to pour. rain. The End
.
    My writing has improved since then, my accuracy too, but my spelling has remained uncertain, so much so that my first agent, Marie Rodell, said I was like a ship’s captain venturing out on uncharted seas, trying my best to deal with each new difficulty that came at me. Maybe I was dyslexic or something, or school eluded me. I have yet to master spelling.
    I kept
Shege
for a while, and when I got tired of it—after all, it wasn’t particularly compelling—my mother kept it. When she was in her nineties and came to New Hampshire to live with me, I found it among her papers and realized that my career began on a Tuesday. Although practice doesn’t always make perfect, practice certainly helps.

4
Kalahari
    W HAT I LEARNED from the woods, from dogs and cats, and from visits with Gran to the museum was enthralling. It set me on a lifelong journey. But it was something like reading the first page of a book without reading the rest, or even knowing that the rest existed. From the farm I knew about farm animals, and I was often taken to the zoo as well as to the museum, so I knew what wild animals looked like. I’d also seen how dogs and cats managed their lives, and had glimpses of how wild animals managed. But our human world was overwhelming. People had all the power and made all the decisions. With their indifference to anything nonhuman, the world was at their mercy. So as I saw it, there were two spheres of existence—the one I lived in, which was the sphere of people, and the one I barely knew, which was the sphere of everything else, from amoebas to blue whales, from duckweed to giant sequoias, from the floor of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Everest.