If you punch links we provide, we may receive compensation.
Excerpted from Heron, Betsy, PhD.
Animal Hierarchies On the Savannah.
Credit: Michael Gibson
The Journal of Wilderness Behaviors,
Vol.
IV, 2001, pp.
*
*(Complaints or reports may be made anonymously.)
Or hummingbirds, buzzing so fast they might explode from the effort.
Which would be messy, among other things.
This is your lunch in here, okay?
Dad was saying in his dont-frighten-the-newborn-cubs tone.
He held out a brown paper bag.
And I put a dollar in there for you to buy some milk.
One of the older kids can show you where to do that.
Do you remember your phone number?
What about your address?
I wrote it on this piece of paper for you, just in case.
Put it in your pocket.
I dont want you to lose it.
She pushed a stray frizz of mom-hair out of her eyes and handed me the folded piece of paper.
Just like we practiced!
Mom forced a wavery smile.
It wasnt very convincing.
Her eyes welled up.
She squeezed me hard enough to crack a rib as Dad whipped out his camera.
Its Cadys big day!
Right on cue, Mom burst into tears.
I patted her on the back of that wash-faded shirt.
I wasnt sure what else to do.
I mean, I guess its natural for parents to cry on their kids first day of school.
But that usually happens when the kid is five.
And the thing is, Im not five, Im sixteen.
I know what youre thinking:Homeschooled kids are freaks.But my familys totally normal!
Its a good thing lion cubs are adorable.)
I had a great life.
But then my mom got offered a full professorship at Northwestern University.
There went my lion-cub math lessons and my lab-coated monkey.
In Evanston, the only wild animals you saw racing were the frenzied morning commuters.
(Although, in their white-button-down-black-pants business-casual uniforms, they did kind of remind me of the zebras.)
Id never set foot in an American high school.
I had no idea what to expect.
Then again, Id survived theAfrican wilderness.The savannah.
I mean, high school couldnt be much worse than that, could it?
