Since Binti Jua was born in captivity, she was content with the life of a zoo gorilla, climbing the trees in her enclosure and playing happily with the other gorillas.
There was an old male gorilla living at the zoo, a large silverback, who had never shown any interest in fathering any offspring. Something about Binti Jua appealed to the elder ape and when Binti was six, she became pregnant.
The zoo keepers were concerned that because the young gorilla hadn’t had any maternal role models, she might not be fully prepared to mother her own young. So they gave her lessons. They used a stuffed animal as a baby substitute and taught her to put the “baby” to her breast and to hold the “baby” constantly, the way gorillas do in the wild.
She was a good student and when her daughter, Koola, was born, Binti Jua was the perfect mom. This combination of natural motherliness and her comfort with humans would later make her an internationally celebrated heroine.
One day, when Koola was about a year-and-a-half old, Binti Jua was in her outdoor enclosure, holding and grooming her baby as usual. The zoo visitors were all enjoying the sight of the gorillas, when suddenly a little three-year-old boy who had been playing along the barrier of the enclosure toppled over the edge and fell over twenty feet to the concrete floor below.
There was a sickening thud, and the little boy’s hysterical mother began screaming for help.
Immediately, Binti Jua, still holding Koola, made her way over to the unconscious child. The watching crowd gasped in horror. Unconsciously, people tend to associate gorillas with the movie monster King Kong. What would the huge ape do to the little boy?
First the mother gorilla lifted the boy’s arm, as if checking for signs of life. Then, gently, she picked him up and held him tenderly to her chest. Rocking him softly as she walked, she carried him over to the door the zoo keepers always used to enter and exit the enclosure. When another larger female gorilla approached her, Binti Jua made a guttural sound, warning the other gorilla to stay away. By this time, the door was open and the keepers were there with the paramedics, who had been called to rescue the injured boy. The gorilla carefully placed the boy on the floor in front of the door, and the paramedics whisked the child away. When the door closed again, Binti Jua calmly walked back to her tree and began grooming her own baby once more.
The people watching were stunned. The event would have been dramatic enough without the role of the heroine being filled by a gorilla. And Binti Jua was the best type of heroine, not caring for either fame or reward.
The boy recovered without any lasting harm resulting from his adventure. And the world was moved by Binti Jua’s good deed; letters and gifts came pouring in for her from all over the world. She even received a medal from the American Legion and an honorary membership in a California PTA.
Acting from her heart, Binti Jua did what any mother would do: She protected and helped a child. But this gorilla didn’t care that the child was of another species. She showed the qualities we humans hold most dear— love and compassion for all.
Carol Kline
The Eyes of Tex
Eric Seal thought the scrawny puppy at his feet was perhaps five weeks old. Sometime during the night, the little mixed-breed female had been dumped at the Seals’ front gate.
“Before you ask,” he told Jeffrey, his wife, “the answer is an absolute no! We are not going to keep it. We don’t need another dog. When and if we do, we’ll get a purebred.”
As though she hadn’t heard him, his wife sweetly asked, “What kind do you think it is?”
Eric shook his head. “It’s hard to tell. From her color markings and the way she holds her ears in a half-lop, I’d say she’s part German shepherd.”
“We can’t just turn her away,” Jeffrey pleaded. “I’ll feed her and get her cleaned up. Then we’ll find a home for her.”
Standing between them, the puppy seemed to sense that her fate was being decided. Her tail wagged tentatively as she looked from one to the other. Eric noticed that although her ribs showed through a dull coat, her eyes were bright and animated.
Finally, he shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, if you want to fool with her, go ahead. But let’s get one thing straight: We don’t need a Heinz-57 mongrel.”
The puppy nestled comfortably in Jeffrey’s arms as they walked toward the house. “One other thing,” Eric continued. “Let’s wait a few days to put her in the pen with Tex. We don’t want Tex exposed to anything. He has all the troubles he can handle.”
Tex, the six-year-old cattle dog the Seals had raised from a puppy, was unusually amiable for a blue-heeler, a breed established by ranchers in Australia. So, although he already shared his doghouse with a yellow cat, soon Tex happily moved over and made room for the new puppy the Seals called Heinz.
Not long before Heinz showed up, the Seals had noticed that Tex appeared to be losing his eyesight. Their veterinarian said he thought the dog had cataracts that might be surgically removed.
But when they brought Tex to a specialist in Dallas, he determined that the dog’s poor eyesight was only partially due to cataracts. He made an appointment for Tex at the local college’s veterinary laboratory.
Doctors there determined that Tex was already blind. They explained that no medical or surgical procedure could have halted or delayed Tex’s progressive loss of vision.
As they talked on their way home, the Seals realized that over the last few months, they had watched Tex cope with his blindness. Now they understood why Tex sometimes missed a gate opening or bumped his nose on the chain-link fence. And why he usually stayed on the gravel walkways traveling to and from the house. If he wandered off, he quartered back and forth until he was on the gravel again.
While the couple had been preoccupied with Tex’s troubles, Heinz had grown plump and frisky, and her dark brown-and-black coat glowed with health.
It was soon obvious that the little German shepherd crossbreed would be a large dog—too large to continue sharing a doghouse with Tex and the yellow cat. One weekend, the Seals built another doghouse next to the one the dogs had shared.
It was then they recognized that what they had assumed was puppy playfulness—Heinz’s pushing and tugging at Tex while romping with him—actually had a purpose. Without any training or coaching, Heinz had become Tex’s “seeing eye” dog.
Each evening when the dogs settled in for the night, Heinz gently took Tex’s nose in her mouth and led him into his house. In the morning, she got him up and guided him out of the house again.
When the two dogs approached a gate, Heinz used her shoulder to guide Tex through. When they ran along the fence surrounding their pen, Heinz placed herself between Tex and the wire.
“On sunny days, Tex sleeps stretched out on the driveway asphalt,” says Jeffrey. “If a car approaches, Heinz will nudge him awake and guide him out of danger.
“Any number of times we’ve seen Heinz push Tex aside to get him out of the horses’ way. What we didn’t understand at first was how the two could run side by side, dashing full speed across the pasture. Then one day, the dogs accompanied me while I exercised my horse, and I heard Heinz ‘talking’—she was making a series of soft grunts to keep Tex on course beside her.”
The Seals were awed. Without any training, the young dog had devised whatever means were necessary to help, guide and protect her blind companion. It was clear that Heinz shared more than her eyes with Tex; she shared her heart.
Honzie L. Rodgers
The Christmas Mouse
By having reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world.
Albert Schweitzer
Once upon a time, we lived in part of a massive, hundred-plus-year-old stone building with an interesting past. Located at a fork in the road at the top of a ridge in rural Lockport, New York, it had once been a blacksmith shop; before that, we heard, it had served as a stagecoach stop. Though it resembled a fortress, it was a grand old place and we loved it. It had character and charm—and leak
s, drafts and holes. Pipes froze. So did we. Our cats regularly left us tiny, gory gifts, remnants of the house mice that entered as they pleased after we were asleep.
It was the Christmas of 1981. We had emerged from some difficult times, and I, after the summer’s cancer surgery, had a new awareness of the worth of each day, as well as a deeper appreciation of love and family. It was an especially excellent Christmas because all six of our children were with us. Although we didn’t know it then, my husband, David, and I would move to Florida the following summer, and never once since that Christmas have we all managed to be gathered in the same place at the same time.
At one end of the big area that served as living room, dining room and kitchen, I was putting dinner together. Things were noisy, what with the Christmas music on the stereo, the clatter in the kitchen corner, and nine young adults horsing around (a few had brought friends). The cats, in typical cat fashion, had absented themselves upstairs, away from the hullabaloo.
Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a small, unexpected movement and turned to focus on an astonishing sight. There in the midst of all this uproar, smack in the middle of a kitty bowl on the floor, sat a tiny, exquisite deer mouse eating dry cat food. Incredulous, I stared, but didn’t say a word. For one thing, I wanted to make sure he wasn’t a figment of my imagination; for another, I’ll admit, I wanted to keep him to myself for a few minutes. He was very charming.
Up on his haunches he sat, chubby rear firmly planted, little front paws holding a piece of cat food. The pieces were round, with holes in the middle; our mouse firmly clutched his morsel with a hand on each side, looking for all the world like a little fat guy munching a doughnut. When he finished one, he’d help himself to another, turning it about and adjusting it in his small fingers till it was perfectly situated, then he’d start nibbling again.
I squatted down and looked at him, catching his shiny dark eye. We gazed at each other, then he looked away and nonchalantly went on eating. It was time to call in the witnesses.
“Hey!” I softly called to the assembled multitude. “Come and look at this.” When eventually I got their attention, I thought it would be all over—he’d run and hide from the mob advancing on him. Not so! He sat right there while eleven bent-over people stood in a circle, gawking (not silently, either) at him. He glanced confidently at the crowd, gave his doughnut a quarter-turn, and kept munching.
We were amazed. Hewasn’t in the least afraid of us. What made the little guy so brave? Some of us brought cameras into the circle, and while the flashes popped, the mouse proceeded serenely onward with his Christmas feast. From time to time, he paused to regard us with that sparkly, confiding glance, as the pile of food in the bowl grew smaller.
For some time we watched in delight while he, apparently bottomless, stuffed himself with goodies. However, enchanted as I was to entertain him, I was uneasily aware that it was also dinnertime for the resident Predators Two. When the cats appeared on the scene, as they were bound to any minute, our Christmas mouse could be seriously hurt or killed in the ensuing pandemonium, even if we were able to prevent the cats from transforming the diner into dinner (a perfectly appropriate denouement from their point of view).
I leaned closer. “Listen,” I murmured, “we have been honored. But now you have to go back outside with the other mice. Good company though you are, your life is in jeopardy here. If you will permit, I will escort you.”
With that, I reached into the dish and picked him up. He neither attempted to bite nor gave way to panic, but sat in my hand, calm and comfortable, awaiting developments, front paws resting on my thumb. I had not expected this; I thought there would be fear, protest, a struggle. Instead, he looked at me, a veritable paradigm of the intelligent, friendly fairy-tale mouse, exactly like something out of a Disney movie.
“What are you, really?” I silently inquired. “Are you really a mouse?” The cool, rational part of me jeered at the question, yet there was something undeniably uncanny about this Christmas visitor.
I carried him outdoors, followed by the family. It had grown dark—one of those blue-and-white Northern winter nights with snow on the ground, the air crisp and sharp.
Squatting down near the cover of bushes in back of the house, I released him. He sat on my palm and looked about, taking his time. Then he jumped to my shoulder and for a long moment we sat there, I in the snow and he on my shoulder, woman and mouse together looking out into the night. Finally, with a mighty leap for one so small, he flew through the air, landed in the shadow of the bushes out of sight and was gone. We humans stayed outside for a while,wishing him well and feeling a little lonely.
His visit left us with astonishment that has never diminished, the more so because, as country people, we knew perfectly well that wild mice are terrified of humans. Furthermore, deer mice are particularly timid; unlike common house mice, they avoid inhabited homes. Engaging and winsome they may be (in the wild, they are known to sing), but not with our kind.
These rare, luminous occasions when wild things in their right minds cross the line that separates us leave us full of wonder. We resonate with remembrance of something ancient and beautiful. As all together we surrounded him, his little wild presence silently conveyed joy, peace, trust and wonder. He was a delightful mystery and a tiny miracle.
Diane M. Smith
Juneau’s Official Greeter
All those who travel to Juneau, Alaska, by water are welcomed at the dock by a dog named Patsy Ann. She doesn’t bark. She doesn’t wag her tail. She doesn’t even respond when you call her.
That’s because Patsy Ann is a bronze statue that sits imposingly and silently in the middle of Patsy Ann Square, which borders Juneau’s Gastineau Channel.
The real Patsy Ann was a Staffordshire bull terrier who arrived in Juneau as a newborn pup in late 1929 with her human family. Her family didn’t keep her once they realized she was deaf and could not bark.
The dog was taken in by a second family, but for unknown reasons was later abandoned by them as well. Patsy then became an orphan who freely roamed the streets of Juneau.
Patsy Ann limited her daily wanderings to the downtown area, where local merchants and residents grinned at the sight of her happily loping from business to business.
Though Patsy Ann was an orphan, the Longshoremen’s Hall became her nightly home. For her, it was the most logical place for warmth and sleep because she spent so much of her time on the docks. The deaf dog possessed a most remarkable ability. Whenever a ship neared Gastineau Channel, Patsy Ann was somehow able to “hear” its whistle, even if the ship was as much as a half-mile away. At once, the terrier would scamper down to the wharf to await the ship’s arrival.
Juneau’s residents had no idea how Patsy Ann was able to sense the imminent approach of a ship, anymore than they could figure out how the dog knew at exactly which dock she should wait. But they learned to trust her unerring judgment.
One afternoon, townspeople gathered at the appointed dock to await an incoming ship. Patsy Ann joined the expectant crowd and then suddenly ran to a different dock. Everyone was perplexed by her behavior until they realized they had been given misinformation. The ship entered the channel and berthed at the very dock where the terrier was waiting!
Patsy Ann may have loved the local people who fed her and fondly patted her. She may have felt cared for by the longshoremen. But Patsy Ann’s primary happiness came from sitting on the docks as she waited to welcome the ships.
It was appropriate, then, in 1934, for Juneau’s mayor to proclaim Patsy Ann “the official canine greeter of Juneau, Alaska.”
That same year, the city passed an ordinance stating that all dogs must be licensed. After an animal-control worker impounded Patsy Ann, several of the locals chipped in to pay for her license and to buy a bright red collar for her. She was again free to continue her lookout duty.
For thirteen years, nearly all the days of her life, the wagging tail and the happy-go-lucky presence of
the little dog brought a pleasant constancy to the lives of Juneau residents. She could not hear them say “good girl,” but she saw their smiles and felt their affection.
Then, in 1942, Patsy Ann died of natural causes.
Members of the saddened community placed Patsy Ann’s body in a small wooden casket and lowered it into Gastineau Channel. Now she would forever be tied to the hearts of Juneau’s people and to the tranquil waters she loved to watch.
Nearly fifty years after Patsy Ann’s death, a campaign was waged to memorialize the terrier. A small patch of land at the Gastineau wharfside was converted into what is now Patsy Ann Square, and a larger-than-life bronze statue was commissioned—complete with a bronze collar that rests at its base.
Today at the foot of the square, gaily-colored flowers bloom, and people sit on benches and gaze out at the horizon, just as the bronze Patsy Ann does.
Patsy Ann, adopted and loved by all the residents of Juneau, is still the official greeter for her city. The statue of the little dog who could not hear sits forever next to a wooden sign, her bronzed presence echoing the words printed there: Welcome, Juneau, Alaska.
Roberta Sandler
Simon
There are no ordinary cats.
Colette
Only fifty-three animals in the world have ever received the Dickin Medal, an award presented to animals connected with the British armed forces or civil defense who have displayed “conspicuous gallantry or devotion to duty.” The medals, named for the founder of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA), Maria Dickin, were given to the animals for their heroism during World War II or in conflicts directly following the war. The recipients were eighteen dogs, three horses, thirty-one pigeons and one cat. That one cat was Simon, of His Majesty’s Ship Amethyst.