Build Me An Ark:
A Life with Animals
By Brenda Peterson
W.W. Norton, $25.95
ISBN 0393050149

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Anyone who shares his or her life with an animal will appreciate Brenda Peterson's book about her experiences with whales, seals, wolves, horses and other beasts. Peterson, who grew up in the High Sierras on a national forest lookout station, has spent her life in the company of animals. She studied dolphins and whales for two decades and has worked to restore wild wolves to the West.

Peterson has often subjugated her needs to those of creatures who required her help and Build Me An Ark tells the story of those times, as well as the moments when the tables were turned and animals became her saviors.

From an early age, Peterson drew inspiration from nature, yet her narrative also includes moments of disillusionment. When she sees the way Smokey Bear, whom she revered as a symbol of strength, is kept at the National Zoo -- alone and pacing a small cage -- the young Peterson is dismayed. But the experience serves as a catalyst. As the author remembers, "seeing Smokey Bear in the zoo would mark the making of a conscience and a search to understand my own responsibility and right relationship to the animals."

Peterson's various experiences with animals almost always include adventure. She swims with dolphins, gets to know seals and is "mothered" by a whale who has lost her own baby. The author encounters wolves and watches as a wolf wins over a ranch woman in a scene Peterson compares to the lion lying down with the lamb. She also includes tales of her more domestic animal friends -- lively felines and a newborn foal.

In the end, Build Me an Ark leaves readers with a lesson of kinship, of the ways in which humans can put aside the hierarchies of nature and replace them with bonds of sympathy and sensitivity. As Peterson writes of her feelings after one seal's death, "Every time I see a harbor seal on my backyard beach, I remember that first seal's burial at sea, and all I buried with her. Some grace is given back to me, some sweet and enduring embrace, like a second skin."

Eliza R. L. McGraw lives and writes in Cabin John, Maryland.