My husband, Mike, is retired now, but he served the public for 41 years in the U.S. Forest Service. Being retired, he did not receive the now-famous “fork in the road” email, in which lifelong public servants were asked to give up their jobs or risk being fired, but it hurt him, I know, to think that 41 years could be disregarded so utterly, that many of his still-employed friends were told unilaterally by the richest man in the world that their projects were expendable, that their work — including many scientific studies that would now be abandoned after years of collecting data — had no value at all.
We live in the Rio Grande National Forest, the forest where Mike served. We look up into that forest from every window of our house. Yesterday, while Mike sat at the kitchen table eating his birthday blueberry pancakes, 150 elk came down out of the forest and into our horse pasture. It is my unwavering belief they came, perhaps among other reasons, to remind him that the work he did was valuable, and to wish him a happy birthday.
ON THE DAYS I’M IN DESPAIR about the way our elected officials are positioning BIPOC people for erasure, the way they’re setting up trans kids to be the victims of hate crimes, the way they’re pushing their hypocritical and hateful agenda to the point where they’ll get to achieve their primary goal: the thrill of using lethal force on their own citizenry, I follow my feet out to the corral to hang for a few hours with the horses. More often than not, Raj, the horse I rescued on Election Day 2024, or sometimes Ben, the horse I rescued during high COVID, will place his forehead right against my forehead and keep it there for a while. We will push on each other very lightly. I think of this as a kind of mind meld, a mechanism by which Raj pulls all the distress out of my head and flicks it away with his lush auburn tail, meanwhile transmitting joyful present-based thoughts into the empty spaces those bad thoughts have left behind. Can you feel the sun warming your coat? Isn’t the sky an astounding blue today? How lucky that this alfalfa is of such high quality! If you scratch on my withers, I will wrap my giant neck around you like a shield.
YEARS AGO, I WAS HIKING with a friend in Arizona, and we came upon a rattlesnake, not stretched across the trail but curled lazily 10 feet downslope beside it.
“Hello, beautiful!” I said, stepping higher off the opposite side of the trail to make a wider berth while my friend made noises of distress behind me. The snake watched us pass with not a lot of interest, then lay its diamond head back down on its shimmering brown and gold body. Twenty minutes later, I could no longer ignore the fact that my friend had stopped speaking to me. “You OK?” I asked.
“I can’t believe,” she said, hissing a little herself, “that you gave that thing
a compliment.”
Did I smile? Giggle a little? Even in those days, I thought everyone who knew me knew I talked to animals, though I didn’t in those days tell too many people how often they talked back. I can report, with lingering wonder, that my complimenting the snake brought about the end of that friendship, which had not been long, nor particularly deep.
I have always spoken, aloud, to every animal I encounter, be it hummingbird, Arctic fox, alligator or grizzly bear, sometimes out of delight, sometimes out of fear, but mostly because it would seem rude not to. I speak to humans on deserted streets and dark alleys for some of the same reasons. At least one of us, in any scenario, is likely to be more frightened than the other. Speaking nearly always alleviates that fear. The bear chuffs, the moose snorts, the beaver slaps its tail, the redtail cries, the grasshopper clatters, the human says, Hello, beautiful — one being encountering another, acknowledging the other exists.
I have always spoken, aloud, to every animal I encounter, be it hummingbird, Arctic fox, alligator or grizzly bear, sometimes out of delight, sometimes out of fear, but mostly because it would seem rude not to.
I also believe in my ability to call wild animals to me, not all animals and not at all times, but the number of times I’ve thought hmmm, this looks like excellent moose territory, right before a big bull pops out of the trees, or it’s been a long time since I have seen an eagle over the ranch, only to look up and have one appear, or it would sure brighten my mood on this beach walk to see a harbor seal or a humpback or a reef shark seconds before one emerges, seems too large to be chalked up to coincidence. Since lockdown, when briefly, the skyways and byways were largely, if temporarily, returned to the animals, I have felt the animals calling me back out into the open. I have felt their curiosity as they’ve watched me encounter my post-lockdown life.
Among COVID-19’s many teachings was the way it brought us face to face with our creaturely selves, reminding us that we, too, have animal bodies, bodies that need food and toilet paper and lungs clear enough to breathe. Our loss of movement gave us access to and empathy for wild creatures’ incessant loss of habitat, and our adaptations during the pandemic helped us understand the animals’ continuous imperative to adapt themselves to us. For all of these reasons, COVID-19 could have and should have been an inflection point, a moment we decided clean air and water was better than rich men serving each other exotic animals on platters. I believe the animals were hoping, collectively, for something like that. So I made my own inflection point.
ON THE DAY AFTER ELECTION DAY 2024, I was opening the gate between the corral and the pasture when the reddest red fox I have ever seen found himself trapped between a rock and a hard place in the corner where the corral meets the yard. Our 1-year-old Wheaten terrier, Bodhi, has gotten over-curious about the horses, and our mini-donk, Isaac, would like nothing better than to teach him a lesson in etiquette, so we’ve put up new chicken-wire fencing along the barbed wire fence that separates the pasture and the yard. The red fox’s normal escape route was suddenly not available to him, and so he found himself with me on one side, the dogs on the other, the horses in between and no available holes in the fence to slip through.
“You’re OK,” I said, by way of greeting, though I couldn’t be certain it was true.
Everybody froze for a second to gauge everyone else’s intentions, even, luckily, Bodhi, and then the fox made the best decision possible and scooted right between my legs.
I spent the rest of the afternoon reading stories from many traditions about foxes, trying to interpret the visitation. I am still thinking about all of that, but I believe the main thing he came to remind me about was stealth.
ELK, HORSE, RATTLESNAKE, FOX. The animals know, especially now, how frightened we are, as we face together the destruction of the planet we call our home. They understand, even when we fail to, that we have long been and still are kin, and they are trying to help us, as kin do for one another, I am sure of that all the way down to my bones.
Animals Taught Me Everything
By Pam Houston
210 pages, paperback: $18.95
Torrey House Press, Oct. 13, 2026
The owl calling who cooks for you? The ermine who pokes his head out from behind a hay bale, not once but six times, because each time elicits human laughter. The aging wolfhound who stands in the middle of the kitchen at precisely 4 p.m. (in spite of her fear of linoleum) to remind me it’s time for her afternoon cheese. The osprey turning lazy circles above my pasture. They are, every one of them, as expendable to the current administration as we ourselves are, every one of us. So, we must bear witness to their brief, beautiful lives as they bear witness to ours. We are in this together, all of us creatures. Let us honor one another’s existence, and fight for each other to be free.
This story was excerpted from Pam Houston’s book Animals Taught Me Everything, due out in October 2026 from Torrey House Press. Excerpt used by permission.
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This article appeared in the August 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The animals are standing by.”
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