So a couple of months back Chris Clarke tapped me for a meme. I'm usually horrible at follow-through with these things, best intentions notwithstanding, but this one really does seem like an obligation.

See, it's about animals. And my relationship with animals and Chris's have virtually nothing in common. Anyone who reads Chris's stuff at all knows about his bond with the animals he's shared his home with, and about how profoundly wild animals figure into his bond with the natural world.

Me, I'm a city boy. I've never owned a pet in my life. When I go to wild spaces, I bring my city head with me. I interpret everything I encounter through a prism of human experience. When I think about great trips I've taken to national parks, I think about Glacier --- about the strange story of how that land made the leap from quasi-private to quasi-public a century ago, and about how that history is written on the land today. Chris said once that you should have to take a quiz on flora and fauna to gain entrance to the national parks, and that's a quiz that I'd fail every time. Ask me about the Great Northern Railway and the development of Glacier, though, and I'll knock your socks off.

Chris's meme lays out five ways of interacting with animals, and asks you to describe one example of each from your own life. Given what I've written above, how can I not take a crack at that? So here goes...

An interesting animal I had.

I wish this weren't the first question. I've never owned a pet, like I said. And though I've been racking my brains for stories that I could make fit, I can only think of one, and I've told it here already. So in the absence of anything else to offer, I give you The Story of the Peanut Butter Mouse .

An interesting animal I ate.

This one's easier. I spent a good part of the summer of 2001 in Turin, swapping apartments with an Italian historian. A few blocks from his place there was a motovelodromo, a poured-concrete motorcycle racing arena that dated from the Mussolini era. One afternoon there was an open-air bazaar on the grass in the middle of the track --- a giant rummage sale, basically.

It cost a few thousand lira, maybe four bucks, to get into the bazaar, and your admission included dinner. At the end of the day we all lined up for still-warm bread, grilled beef, a sort of steak tartare, and plastic cups of cheap local wine poured out of huge unmarked jugs. The tartare was served in a dollop, with a triangular shard of Parmesan cheese poking out of it like the cookies you get with ice cream in England.

This was at the height of the Mad Cow scare, and I was initially hesitant about diving into a plate of raw beef. There was probably some governmental oversight over most of the food and drink at some point along the line, but EU regs or no, this was Italy, and I didn't feel like I could look to any government to vouch for my plate as prion-free.

I'm used to eating regulated food --- I'm a city boy, like I say --- so this was challenging. But the beef supplier was obviously local, and his logo was plastered all over the motovelodromo. The cooking was being done by old ladies who looked like they'd spent much of their lives in kitchens, and the folks eating and the folks being fed were neighbors. This was a community meal and I was for that month part of the community, and so I ate.

I'd like to say that it was delicious, but I honestly can't remember. It was a wonderful meal all the same, tho.

An interesting animal in the museum.

The Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History flummoxes me every time I visit. It's Casey's second-favorite room in the museum, on the strength of just two of the dioramas.

As you enter from the Roosevelt rotunda, the gorillas are behind you on your left. It's a family scene, and it's familial in a way that few AMNH displays are. There are three generations of gorillas in view, lounging amicably, and for as long as she's been able to talk, Casey and I have speculated each time we visit about which gorilla is which --- who's the mom, who's the dad, whether that's a grandma or a grandpa.

Across from the gorillas, behind you to your right as you enter the room, there's a watering hole. It's got giraffes, and some sort of gazelle type creature, and a family of zebras. And one of juvenile zebras is nursing. We talk about this every time we visit, too.

When I look at the herd of elephants in the middle of that room, or the moose and the bison in the Hall of North American Mammals, I don't usually contemplate how they wound up on the Upper West Side. But looking at these two families, these parents and children displayed as parents and children --- tenderly displayed as parents and children for the edification of parents and children --- I can't not think of the fact of their violent deaths, even as I'm discussing their lives with my own child.

Like I say, it flummoxes me.

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal.

I visited my sister in Michigan once, years ago, when she had a new kitten in the house. I was sleeping on the living room couch, and the kitten was relegated to the bathroom for the evening, but somebody got up to use the can at some point and for the rest of the night I had the cat with me as an unwelcome guest.

It would come clambering up onto the couch, looking to hang out, and I would rouse and gather it up and put it on the floor. And then we'd do it again. And again. At some point I remembered that dropped cats will land on their feet, and so I tried gingerly tossing it to the floor, a little further away than arm's reach. It didn't seem to mind, and it seemed to explore other stuff a bit more before coming to bother me again. After the first couple of tosses I stopped worrying about damaging it, and we settled into a sort of a routine. It'd come to snuggle, and I'd accept its ministrations for a bit, and then the charm would wear off again and I get rid of it again and it'd give me a bit of peace and then we'd start the whole thing over.

By the end of the night I could sort of see the allure of owning a cat. Or at least a kitten. I didn't have any more interest in pet ownership than I'd had the night before, but I could see the allure.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat.

My dad was a college teacher when I was growing up. My mom worked as a nurse for a while, then stayed home with us kids for a while, then went back to school and eventually taught nursing herself. So we as a family had quite a few free summers, and with extended family far away and air travel still exorbitant, we tended to take road trips.

When I was about nine, I guess, we stopped off at the Grand Canyon on one such trip. There's a campground about three-quarters of the way down the trail to the river, and in those days you could get standby space by waiting on line the night before. So we drove into Flagstaff, got a motel room, and my dad went and waited and snagged us a spot. The next day we all hiked down to the campsite, and we set up camp, and then my dad and I hiked down to the river while my mom watched my little sisters.

On the way back up to the campsite, only a few hundred yards from home, my dad heard a rattle he'd heard before, growing up in Idaho. He pulled me back and looked up the trail and saw the snake. In Idaho in the fifties, if you saw a rattlesnake you killed it, and this rattler was right by where we were going to be sleeping. My dad found a rock, and threw it, and missed. He found another, threw again, and missed again. And then we heard my sister coming up the trail to find us.

My dad sent my sister back to camp, and she told my mother, and my mother told the Park Ranger, and he came out with a long pole with pincers on the end and a big burlap bag. He got a hold of the rattler right behind the head and scooped it into the bag and gave the crowd that had gathered an impromptu nature lesson on the spot. In the course of that talk, he told us that this was a Grand Canyon Pink rattlesnake, that it was endangered, and that anyone harming one would be subject to a five thousand dollar fine.

So that's my five animal stories. If you feel like taking up the challenge, go right ahead. And while I'm up, Chris Clarke has set out a Tip Jar for I think the first time ever --- he's juggling blogging and writing a book right now, and he's more committed to the first and less well-paid for the second than I am, so he's in a bit of a bind. If you were inclined to throw a couple of nickels his way, I'm sure it'd be appreciated.