There’s an old Yiddish tale that tells of a sickly man who bought a dairy goat because his doctor said goat milk would cure his ills. After weeks of drinking the goat’s milk, the man was healthy again.

One morning his goat disappeared. The man and his son searched everywhere but the doe couldn’t be found. A day later she appeared in the doorway, her udder so full it touched the ground. When the son milked her he found the milk extraordinarily sweet and rich. It tasted like milk and honey.

Soon the doe disappeared again, and again returned with a gravid udder; and this went on for days-the goat leaving home and coming back and the milk always tasting “of paradise”. The son grew curious about where she went. So one evening he tied a long tether to her tail and when the tether slipped out the door he followed her into the dusk. 

The goat walked through the night. In the morning she came to a cave and went inside. The boy followed the tug of the tether through the dark, and the sound of the doe’s hoofs led him on. At last they emerged into daylight, and a lush green land spread before them; fat grapes hung from vines, honey dripped from trees. The boy understood at once: he’d arrived in the land of milk and honey. Through the dark cave the goat led him to paradise.

The folktale doesn’t end well; what Yiddish ones do? Yet what interests me is how a goat led a boy to paradise. How careful attention to one animal took him though a rabbit hole and revealed a hidden world. “Every species of animal” writes E O Wilson “opens the gates to the paradisiacal world.” If you follow living beings assiduously in the field, or through the lens of a microscope, they lead you to an understanding of their lives, and all life. They usher you in to a kind of Eden.