Only the Animals Summary

Only the Animals consists of 10 short stories, each narrated by an animal who died in the course of a human conflict. “The Bones” follows a camel is out in the Australian bush in 1892. The camel’s owner, Mister Mitchell, is asleep, while a giant goanna stalks the travelers from a distance. The camel listens to the poet Henry Lawson ramble about his and Mitchell’s childhoods spent together on the goldfields, and how Mitchell’s father struck it rich—but only after participating in the Hospital Creek Massacre. Now, Mister Mitchell has dug up an Aboriginal woman’s bones, believing they’ll protect him from the ghosts that haunted his father. The camel thinks back to his original handler, a man named Zeriph, and vows to run away. But Mister Mitchell leaps up and shouts at the goanna that it’s the goanna, not ghosts, that is haunting him. He shoots the goanna but accidentally kills the camel, too.

In “Pigeons, a Pony, the Tomcat and I,” it’s 1915 and a cat named Kiki has been stranded in the trenches of World War I. She used to live in Paris with the famous writer Colette, and the two shared a close bond—but Colette accidentally left her at the front when she came to visit her sergeant husband, Henri. In the trenches, Kiki avoids the tomcat who lives in the next trench and pines for Colette, all befriending a young soldier. She also tries to avoid Henri, who hates her. As Kiki spends more time with the tom and the other animals working at the front, she resolves to make it back to Paris and to Colette. She and the tomcat plan to travel together, but the tom gets stuck in barbed wire in no man’s land on the morning they plan to leave, and German snipers shoot Kiki.

“Red Peter’s Little Lady” is told through letters that Red Peter, a chimp, writes to a woman named Evelyn and the female chimp Evelyn is training, Hazel. Evelyn’s husband, Herr Oberndorff, trained Peter to essentially be human, and Hazel is undergoing the same training so she can be Peter’s wife. But the letters reveal that Peter and Evelyn were once lovers, and Peter has no interest in marrying Hazel. Peter, Evelyn, and Hazel all write about the difficulties of surviving World War I in their German city, where people are starving. Over the course of the war, people begin to strip Peter of the trappings of his human life, like his clothes and hotel room, and Peter essentially becomes an animal again. When Evelyn learns her husband died, Peter insists that they’re free now to be together. But Evelyn instead traps Peter in a cage and intends to eat him, as she ate Hazel.

In “Hundstage,” a dog tells readers about the development of the German Shepherd dog breed in Nazi Germany. The dog’s master is Heinrich Himmler; the dog’s sister is Blondi, Hitler’s dog. One day, when the dog is ill, a strange man enters Himmler’s office. The dog attacks the man, but calms down when the man strokes him. It’s only when Himmler returns to his office that the man introduces himself as the veterinarian who has come to treat the dog. But Himmler interprets the dog’s willingness to accept affection from the vet as disloyalty and banishes the dog to the woods. Ashamed, the dog runs through the woods and converses with several animals’ ghosts. A pig ghost insists that humans aren’t as kind as the dog thinks they are—indeed, they use their kindness to disguise cruelty. The dog ends up falling in with the Allies and becomes an anti-tank dog: a dog strapped with bombs and trained to look for food under German tanks. The dog dies of starvation before he can reach the Germans.

“Somewhere Along the Line the Pearl Would Be Handed to Me” tells the story of Sel, a mussel, and his mussel friends Muss and Gallos. Muss arrives in Hudson Bay after hitchhiking across the U.S. and convinces Gallos and Sel to join him in hitchhiking to San Francisco. The mussels cross the country, partying and having sex where they can. They reach the West Coast in Washington, visit the mussel farm where Muss grew up, and pick up a fourth friend, Bluey. They hitch a ride on a U.S. Navy battleship that eventually docks in Pearl Harbor. The warm water causes the mussels to spawn prolifically, Sel is distraught when he realizes he and his friends have fathered a generation of mussels who think life should have meaning. As Sel and Muss do drugs with a lobster, bombs destroy the battleships in the harbor. Muss survives, but Sel boils to death.

In her memoir “Plautus: A Memoir of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space,” the titular tortoise begins with her journey from the hermit Oleg’s hut to the Tolstoy family. Leo Tolstoy died several years earlier, but Plautus spends a year with his daughter, Alexandra, reading feminist theory. Ten years later, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, Alexandra’s husband sends Plautus to Virginia Woolf in England. He carved Tolstoy’s last words into her shell, believing that would help her survive. Virginia cares for Plautus diligently until she loses her home in the London Blitz during World War II. After Virginia commits suicide months later, Plautus spends a few years living with George Orwell. They dislike each other, but Orwell unwittingly introduces Plautus to the intoxicating idea of going to outer space. Plautus runs away and tries to get in with Americans or Soviets, who are engaged in a race to get a man on the moon. After Plautus spends some time with the playwright Tom Stoppard, a friend of his takes Plautus to the Soviet scientist Dr. Yazdovsky. Plautus watches for years as they send dogs into space until finally, it’s her turn. In 1968, Plautus goes to space with two spiders and circles the moon before dying.

An unnamed elephant narrates “I, the Elephant, Wrote This.” The story takes place before and during the Mozambican Civil War, ending in 1987. The elephant and her twin sister grow up hearing stories of elephants who died exciting deaths and whose souls are now in the stars as constellations. This makes the sisters obsessed with dying glorious deaths. But as the elephants grow older, they learn of the violence that elephants in their native Mozambique have experienced, and their perspective on death shifts. When the elephant’s daughter and nephew are two, the nearby humans seem to be at war. It’s a dry summer, and the herd wanders to various bodies of water looking for sustenance. As the elephants head for a lake near the humans, hungry villagers surround the herd. They shoot the elephant’s sister, and the elephant refuses to leave her twin. The elephants die forehead to forehead, dreaming of their happy childhood.

“Telling Fairy Tales” takes place in 1992, in the Sarajevo zoo. A witch takes up residence near the bear enclosure and speaks often with the black bear, a jaded creature who can’t wait for the blind brown bear who shares the enclosure to die. He wants to eat her. The brown bear, seemingly oblivious, tells the fairy tale of a Russian prince who turned into a bear when he was about a year old. A soldier named Karol adopted him during World War II, and the bear eventually became the regiment’s mascot. Karol and the bear traveled Europe and ended up in Scotland, unable to get home. Finally, the brown bear dies and the black bear eats her. The witch informs the bear, who’s memory is failing, that he just ate his wife. The bear stops talking and dies not long after, clutching his wife’s bones.

As the title suggests, “A Letter to Sylvia Plath” takes the form of a letter that the dolphin Sprout writes to the poet Sylvia Plath. Sprout feels a connection to Plath—Plath seemed aware that she’s an animal, unlike most men. Like her mother, Sprout works for the Navy—but her beloved trainer, Officer Bloomington, treats the dolphins like equals. Their unit serves in the Gulf War and then, following the end of the Cold War, the Navy purchases a dolphin from the USSR, Kostya. Kostya’s trainer, Officer Mishin, comes with him. It turns out the Soviet people and dolphins aren’t so different from the American ones. During a special training session on a remote island, Bloomington and Mishin fall in love. Kostya and Sprout are jealous, but happy for their trainers. Everything changes after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The Navy decides to put the dolphins’ special training (learning to tag enemy divers with tracking devices) to use, despite the trainers’ reservations. Sprout is the first dolphin sent out—but she only discovers after tagging an enemy diver that she actually tagged him with a lethal dart, not a tracker. Sprout is distraught that she killed a person and commits suicide.

In “Psittacophile,” a woman referred to as the owner moves to Beirut following her divorce. She wants people to appreciate and worry about her, and living in the Middle East seems like the best way to get people’s attention. Soon after moving, she purchases a parrot whom she names Barnes. The two soon become best friends—the owner even breaks off a relationship with another expat for Barnes’s sake. But then, in 2006, the Israelis bomb Beirut. Distraught, Barnes begins to pull his feathers out and hurt himself. Eventually, with no way to know that the bombing will stop a month later, the owner flees the country. She leaves Barnes’s cage hanging in front of the demolished pet shop where she bought him.