The state mammal of Arizona is the miner’s cat, which is actually a fugitive racoon masquerading as a feline. She passes for both species fluidly, the same way that the ambiguousness of your brown confuses strangers. The miner’s cat’s ancestors were domesticated into house pets who lived as copper miners’ pals, but now she is independent and prefers to roam among the saguaros in the Catalina Mountains. She’s smaller than the American housecat and chooses to live in a solitary den where she can decorate her space with perimeter-marking feces and twigs as she pleases, free from the unwanted critiques of a coffee-spilling spouse. In the two-bedroom adobe house that you live in, your mother feels the same way. The miner’s cat has a distinguished palate; she demands diverse dishes of braised rabbit, sautéed frog’s legs, and mice tacos with a side salad of grasshoppers. She isn’t picky about her meat source, but she prefers it local, rare. Your mother serves you raw tofu with steamed broccoli and potatoes. March is the only month of the year when the miner’s cat gets a little lonely, so she prowls the desert clicking and barking coquettishly until she finds a suitable mate with a strong white-ringed tail who invites her back to his den. Your mom meets a man on the internet and picks him up from the Greyhound station; he stays at your house for two weeks before she drops him back off at the bus station and never speaks of him again. After she’s satisfied, the miner’s cat notices a coyote approaching and pushes her spent mate toward the predator before dashing out of his den, her social quota for the year fulfilled.  

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Arkansans call the white-tailed deer their state mammal, but the white-tailed deer wants to make it clear that he is a nomad and didn’t choose the south; he’s happy in the forest, prairie, savanna, and even in the Southwest. In Arizona, everyone assumes that you’re Hispanic; in Arkansas, classmates assume you’re Black. The white-tailed deer is a peaceful ruminant who enjoys sharing his dinners of grasses, acorns, and poison ivy with his family of four. Each morning, he wakes his fawns at the crack of dawn and teaches them to scavenge for acorns and push through fences to munch budding strawberries and lilies in manicured yards. When the white-tailed deer notices the barrel of a rifle pointing at his son through a tree, he starts to blow and breathe heavily, impersonating sounds of nearby bears in the forest, or the moans that leaked from the hunter’s bedroom the previous night. His fawns don’t know why, but they echo their father’s breathy bellows. Indoors, the hunter’s wife sweeps glass shards from the bathroom floor. 

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The state mammals of Kansas remain divided about whether to call themselves “bison” or “buffalo.” You, too, have learned that it’s fun to try out different ethnicities wherever you are- one day you’re Hispanic, then Greek, Black, then Indian. The group that prefers to go by “buffalo” are rowdy supporters of the Buffalo Bills, who would eagerly go to sports bars to eat fried pickles and cheer, if they could. Instead, they watch the football games through television reflections in ranchers’ windows. Unlike the “buffalo” group who drink too much Coors Light and sometimes stumble into nearby barns to harass heifers, the “bison” group discusses astrology over glasses of sherry and contemplates Emerson’s essays in a wallow. Only one of the heifer’s new calves lives.     

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The badger is proud to be the state mammal of Wisconsin, and Wisconsin celebrates him by printing Bucky Badger on University of Wisconsin hoodies, binders, condoms, and sunglasses, all made in China. While UW Badgers eat pizza and drink beer on Saturdays, the sophisticated badger prefers to feast on the unhatched eggs of ground-nesting birds, small mice, the rare lizard, and a dessert of fruit – but too much rotten fruit gets him drunk, emboldening him enough to commute to a subdivision and break past a picket fence and into a backyard chicken coop, where he steals a Speckled Sussex to bring back to his clan. In Wisconsin, your father feeds you fish dinners every evening – fish moilee on Wednesday, Alleppey fish curry on Thursday, fish pathiri on Friday, fish sukra masala on Saturday. The primitive badger was hunted for his pelts, which woodworkers sculpted into shaving brushes or “blaireau,” French for “badger.” Your father shaves every other day; he squirts a dollop of Barbasol on his fingertips and rubs cream onto his face and neck, then scrapes it all away with a generic plastic razor. As a child, you joined in on his ritual by patting shaving cream on your own face and using your finger as a “razor” to wipe it all away, stroke after stroke, just like your father. “2 x 2 strokes is 4, plus 3 is 7 strokes.” Your father is a math professor and you are failing math, so every activity together becomes an arithmetic lesson. At the end of the day, Bucky Badger returns to his sett, where he tells his kits about how UW defeated the Minnesota Golden Gophers with a touchdown in the final minute, recreates the chants that rang from the bleachers as everyone sang his name, and gives his kits Bucky Badger bowties. They aren’t sure what to do with the bowties, so they place the ties on their dressers, hoping to please their father. 

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The white-tailed deer is so popular that she’s shared with the state of Michigan, where the severed heads of her colleagues decorate every inch of your Uncle Mike’s basement walls. Upstairs, your Aunt Mary stirs another thick pot of deer chili, sighing as she thinks about the next four months of venison cheeseburgers, hunters’ casseroles, cheesy venison potatoes, and probably a venison bourguignon, special for Valentines Day.  From her bedroom, your cousin Jane Googles, “Are deer heads/antlers tacky décor for a family room?”