BREAST CANCER IS ONE WAY TO LOOK AT THE WHITE-NOSED COATI

As I walk a familiar trail near my home in southern New Mexico, a white-nosed coati crosses the path about fifty feet ahead, angling through a field of grama grass. Common in the tropics, these animals have been traveling up through Mexico for the last hundred years and are now considered native to the American Southwest. An omnivore the size and weight of a large housecat, coatis (Nasua narica) have long white noses in a masked face, long banded tails and coats in varying shades of brown, blonde, and auburn.

You might accuse me of exaggeration when I say that for a nanosecond I believe this animal might stop in its travels, turn around, and speak to me. In a way, that statement is not at all true. I’m a longtime nature writer and do not anthropomorphize animals, whose lives are often short and violent. Yet there is a world inside me—an entire other world—where this statement feels completely true. Whenever I see a coati in the wild, the possibility presents itself: suddenly I am in the middle of a children’s story in which animals talk and advise the main character.

Since I am seventy-one years old, you would think I had long ago relinquished any belief in children’s literature—but no. I haven’t and won’t. Still, my feelings about this animal have changed a bit since I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The connection has deepened—or shifted—into something more akin to that symbolic way we have long thought about animals, something we have done forever, painting mammoths and horses and rhinoceros in the caves where we lived.

Sometimes we painted them deep in caves where there was hardly any light but the torches we brought. We took these animals deep inside the bone caves of our minds even as we hunted them in the grassland and forest, hunted and were hunted, weaving our psyche into theirs.

For years now, I’ve been weaving my psyche into the life of the coati, drawn to an animal that lives in matriarchal troops or bands of adult females and their young. A healthy group can range from ten to more than fifty. Sometimes visitors to the American Southwest mistake them for monkeys as a troop scatters through the dry oak woodlands and riparian forests, talking loudly, chittering, huffing, running up trees, their long tails waving.

The lone coati I have just seen is likely an adult bachelor male who has left his group on reaching sexual maturity. He will return briefly every spring for courtship and mating. This March, along the road and rippling up hillsides, the desert poppies are even now blooming.

I have the most common of breast cancers, invasive ductal carcinoma, which begins in the milk ducts. For adult women, milk ducts grow and divide every month in preparation for a possible pregnancy, which means a lot of cell division and potential cell mutation. Breasts, as a whole, go through many changes, from puberty to menopause. This also makes them more susceptible to cancer. I am grateful for my milk ducts. I breastfed two babies, and that was a privilege and a bliss. I am grateful for my breasts and sorry to see one of them go in the mastectomy scheduled next week.

I am not alone in thinking about this. Somewhere in the world, a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer every fourteen seconds.

As with many animal species, maternal love dominates a female coati’s life. Her dedication begins with being pregnant and nursing during the dry season, the time of least food, so that her kits will be weaned in the monsoon or wet season, the time of abundant food. Pregnant coatis can also carry a high burden of four kits or 11-17 percent of their body weight. They drag. They droop. They move slowly. In one study, mountain lions killed three radio-collared coatis a few weeks before they were about to give birth. Another three were killed soon after they gave birth, two by mountain lions and one by a black bear. Perhaps this happened when the coati tried to lure these predators away from her nest of kits. Babies are such delicious prey.

Although females also go off alone to give birth, they return to their troop when the kits are restless, playful, bright-eyed—a new category of delight. For another few months, the juveniles will continue to nurse from their mother, as well as from other females. They will grow up protected and indulged by their extended family until they are fully grown adults. The females, especially, will develop many friendships with other coatis, often grooming each other with their teeth, murmuring, churring, draping tails.

Communication is everything. A loud sustained squeal from a kit—I am in terrible trouble—evokes an immediate response from any nearby adult. Other squeals between two juveniles fighting—I want it! Give it to me! That’s mine!—are usually ignored. Adults often give soft, absent-minded grunts—All is well—while foraging. A snarling grunt—Challenge!—is quite a different noise. A trilling bird-like chirp seems to indicate affection and contentment. Researchers have also identified ultrasonic and infrasonic sounds that humans cannot hear, as well as a syntax in coati language—a chirp, say, added to an alarm bark.

Juveniles rank high in the social hierarchy. Coatis under nine months of age become adept at stealing food from their elders and get their way in almost any conflict with the older subadults, who are one or two years old. Then, suddenly, when the juveniles are subadults themselves, they must learn a new set of skills—placation and patience until they can breed as an adult female or leave the troop as an adult male.

Of course, I identify with the maternal female. But part of me is also a bachelor male, huffing away, far away from all these aunties, the constant chatter and control. I want the freedom of wandering alone through the woods and crackling leaf litter, exploring the darkness of a new cave, sleeping in the high limbs of a hackberry.

Sometimes, instead, an adult male stays with the troop and is tolerated. Sometimes two females, fast friends, go off together to birth their kits. Sometimes male coatis fight viciously.

Sometimes the monsoons don’t come, and the kits all die because there aren’t enough grubs or insects in the crackling leaf litter. Sometimes entire troops are suddenly gone—because of drought, predation, disease.

A few months before seeing the lone coati, I came across a troop foraging along the Gila River. Perhaps forty animals scattered around me. Many of them ran up trees tumbled and angled from a former flood. On the other side of a humped rise, eight tails rose high—a line of tails in a row moving comically as if in a cartoon. Coatis were everywhere, chaotic, noisy, fleeing.

Every encounter with a coati makes me feel the same way—as if I had just won a prize. As if I had just done something important.

And, yes, I thought for a nanosecond that one of those coatis might stop, turn, look back at me. She doesn’t tell me not to worry. She doesn’t say that everything will be fine. There are mountains lions and black bears. Starvation. Rabies. Distemper. There is breast cancer traveling over to the lymph nodes and slipping into the bloodstream. She chitter-chirps “Sister” or “Daughter” or “Friend.” She holds me in those glowing black eyes, the two of us together in the dark and in the light.