"Beautifully written essays" on animals, "the real and mythological, the ordinary and the exotic, the wild and the domesticated" (Publishers Weekly). Humans were surrounded by other animals from the beginning of time: they were food, clothes, adversaries, companions, jokes, and gods. And yet, our companions in evolution are leaving the world-both as physical beings and spiritual symbols-and not returning. In this collection of linked essays, Alison Hawthorne Deming examines what the disappearance of animals means for human imagination and existence. Moving from mammoth hunts to dying house cats, she explores profound questions about what it means to be animal. What is inherent in animals that both leads us to destroy and leads us toward peace? As human animals, how does art both define us as a species and how does it emerge primarily from our relationship with other species? The reader emerges with a transformed sense of how the living world around us has defined and continues to define us in a powerful way. "Beautifully written essays on animal and human behavior and biology... highly recommended for lovers of words and nature." -Publishers Weekly "Human beings live in an age in which industrialization and mass extinction are facts of life. But as Deming suggests in this collection, the more people denude the planet of animals, the more diminished they become in spirit... Eloquent, sensitive and astute." -Kirkus Reviews "Serpentine intellect and wry humor." -Booklist