They gave me permanently a sense of the vertical component of life. I became intimate with the elements of that particular universe. They fashioned me, and I return to them regularly in essays and stories in order to clarify or explain abstractions or to strike contrasts. It's easy to see why animals might seem magical. Spiders and birds are bound differently than we are by gravity.
Many wild creatures travel unerringly through the dark.
And animals regularly respond to what we, even at our most attentive, cannot discern. It's harder to say why language seemed magical, but I can be precise about this. The first book I read was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . I still have the book. I was now able to perceive as marks on a page.