When someone observed that animals are frequent in my fiction, I realized it’s true.

Asked why, I couldn’t give a reason. The animals in my work are no more planned than a fawn stepping from the trees or a hawk soaring across the sky with a snake in its talons. Welcome but uninvited, animals show up in my stories, as they do in the works of many writers.

I am reluctant to call them symbols, though sometimes they are. Kierkegaard reminds us that one lives forward and knows backward. Writing and reading are like that. I realize an animal’s symbolism later, even if I felt it sooner. In my story “Broken Eggs” (click to read), the girl finds the frightening miracle of life in a dropped egg. In my story “Raccoon” (click to read), a couple falling in love acquire a rabbit, feed it, delight in it, offer it love. The rabbit accepts the love—to a point—like the woman in the relationship. Soon after the couple splits up, the rabbit is savagely killed by a raccoon, and the nothing is left for the bereft man but to bury the body. I nod in agreement when readers point out the symbolism, but it was not self-consciously intended.

I’ve always liked Melville’s idea about characters serving as Drummond lights, characters whose function is to illuminate others. Animals do that, in literature as in life. They shine light on our care, our indifference, or on our cruelty. They rumble like storm clouds on the horizon. In my story “Hetrick’s Army” (click to hear on Youtube) the leader orders his troops to shoot a stray dog, and we see the cruelty in Bob Hetrick. When Charles Bovary approaches Emma’s farm for the first time, his horse shies. The warning is lost on Charles, but it stays with the reader like a small pebble in the shoe. In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the Bundrens’ wagon upsets in the swollen river, and the eyes of the drowning mules say that the horror is not just the event, but the family itself. The family has been seen.
Descartes believed in two realms of being—body and spirit. A human being was a ghost in a machine. Lacking souls, animals were nothing but machines. His logic was perfect, his understanding blind. Every animal in literature, like those in the field or the forest, undermines Cartesian dualism. Though philosophy might have moved on, our civilization is still Cartesian. We treat animals as raw material for our food factories, wind-up zoo toys for our amusement.

In the myths of various cultures, human life represents a fall from a long-forgotten paradise. Humans lived in fellowship with animals, or were married to them, or embodied their spirits. Now we inhabit a fallen world. If animals remind us or our fall, they also provide a glimpse, like a barely remembered childhood, of a life without boundaries.

All literature addresses the question, what does it mean to be human? Animals in literature pose the same question. The value of animals is that they live without costumes, titles, or roles. Their aggression is not disguised as moralism. They feel no shame for their feelings. Past and future matter little. Those that are wild need to be left alone, and those that are not need us to be their stewards. They need our care.
Even if we cannot name it, we sense the power of animals. We have an intimation that they have meaning. This explains the impulse of the national park tourist who approaches a bear, the apartment owner who puts out peanuts for squirrels. We hunger for them like a lost love. Once in Hawaii I was sitting on the black rock lava flow that dropped off into very deep water. No more than twenty feet away, a great whale breached the water and I felt it look at me with one great eye. The impulse to jump in and swim to it was overwhelming. Had it not dropped beneath the surface and disappeared, I think I might have answered some wild call.

In literature as in life, as both a reader and a writer, my heart quickens at the appearance of an animal. I want to jump in and swim in its direction.