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Elizabeth Marshall Thomas turns out to be a remarkably good-humored sort of heretic. She possesses a rich, inviting laugh that burbles up frequently during a cross-country phone conversation about her new book, Certain Poor Shepherds: A Christmas Tale. Despite a recent, near-epic deluge that's soaked large swaths of New Hampshire, she pronounces autumn at her home in Peterborough "glorious, heavenly." Not even a sudden onslaught of obligations that has her working seven days a week seems to dampen her spirits: "I'm trying to follow a cat with a radio collar; I'm trying to make a video of interactions between animals; I have another book to write; and, suddenly, I have a lot of family obligations that I never had before. I feel like the woman in that commercial," she says, laughing, " 'I've fallen behind and I just can't catch up.' "
Of course, Marshall Thomas has much to pleased about. Her 1993 book The Hidden Life of Dogs, became a surprise nonfiction bestseller, and hard on the heels of that success came her investigation of cats and their culture, The Tribe of Tiger -- also a bestseller. Now Marshall Thomas returns to fiction -- but doesn't stray from her interest in the inner lives of animals -- with the publication of Certain Poor Shepherds, a Christmas tale which is already receiving very favorable advance notices.
And why not? Certain Poor Shepherds is a charming, exceptionally well-written tale that offers a surprisingly original version of the Nativity story. The shepherds here are two animals, a huge sheepdog named Lila and a goat named Ima. Tending their small flock of sheep by night, they are surprised by the appearance of a new star, wonderfully described by Marshall Thomas, as carrying "a strange new odor, a pure, clear scent halfway between honey and water, halfway between rock and cedar." Awed and curious, the shepherds and their flock journey to Bethlehem, encountering along the way angels and Magi, camels and cheetahs, wild dogs and falcons, all of which affords Marshall Thomas an opportunity to make a point about the natural grace of the animal world. Marshall Thomas, who describes herself as a bad, lapsed Quaker and tells a story about a visit to a Buddhist temple in Japan last year that began with irreverent good humor and ended with something close to enlightenment, is uncomfortable with words like "spiritual" and "divinity." Still, she insists that Certain Poor Shepherds "in very, very oblique ways deals with the question of the divinity of animals."
Can animals sense the divine? "I think animals have a sense of a larger picture," Marshall Thomas says. "The thing that gave me the clue was observing two wolves waiting to see the sun rise. They would crowd together in the window and in an excited way would await the sun, and when the sun itself appeared, they would sing, together. Why did the wolves do that? There are people who are not as spiritual as that."
This conviction about the responsiveness of animals to the divine leads Marshall Thomas to suggest in the epilogue of Certain Poor Shepherds that "perhaps our hope of redemption lies in the fact that we are animals, not that we are people."
"I believe that very strongly," Marshall Thomas says when asked. "The feeling of awe we get when we see the galaxies or see the sun rising or experience a storm or an earthquake is not intellectual. It is instinctive. It's not something that we're taught to do, we just do it. Our reactions are primal. My interpretation of that is that we are part of nature, part of it all, even though we don't act it. We acknowledge that in these intuitive feelings we have, and so do other animals."
Still, Marshall Thomas is not one to over sentimentalize animal nature. Over the years, she has trained herself to avoid "filtering out the stuff that isn't perfect, like a cat killing a mouse and eating half of it," and instead to see it all. "If you observe and report on animals," she says, "then you've got to do it all. And if you do report on everything, including the things that are less than totally happy to us, then that gives much more credibility to the things that are totally happy to us. Realism is a very good vehicle. Animals can express themselves. You're not creating them on the page; they're already created, and you just write it down. You'll never get into trouble if you do that."
Well, maybe. But staying true to her animals' points of view leads to one of the biggest surprises of Certain Poor Shepherds -- the relative unimportance of the Christ child to the narrative. "Usually," says Marshall Thomas, "when people write a story about animals and the Christ child you can expect one tremendous dollop of sentimentality when the animals go in and see the Christ child and display a kind of reverence, bringing the child a present and so forth. In my book, when the Magi make this wonderful journey to see the Christ child, they block off the view of two dogs. One dog assumes, because he no longer sees the eyes of the other dog, that the first dog has had a failure of courage. To the dogs the entrance of the Magi into the stable has dog meaning. Dog life is very important to dogs, and human life is very important to humans, and sometimes the two conflict in some seemingly trivial way. But the point is that there are many different worlds going on here, and each is important."
To gently drive that point home, Marshall Thomas has her sheepdog Lila sense that the child in the manger is not a human being, an assertion that would have gotten Marshall Thomas burned at the stake in an earlier century. "I stuck that in there on purpose," she says, "because to call someone non-human is thought to be a pretty gross insult. It shouldn't be. Humans are no more nor less divine than anything else, so if Christ is more divine than humans, then he certainly isn't human -- and neither are cats and dogs and other animals. Certain Poor Shepherds acknowledges Christ's divinity more than anything I've read in a long, long time. It also expresses what I feel most deeply, which is that human beings have no corner on the divinity of things. What I want to do is engender respect for animals. In everything I write, I try to do that."
Alden Mudge is a freelance writer in Oakland, California.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.