Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  When I got home from summer classes she was hanging upside down beneath clouds of silk she had spun in lieu of a cobweb. Despite her disheveled home, the widow had eaten well in my absence; three-inch-long grasshopper exoskeletons dangled under her silk drapes like Chinese lanterns. Though beautiful, the widow was not terribly dynamic company. Sometimes at night I would retreat to the garage to see what she was up to. Usually nothing. One night she trapped a moth in her web. Gripping it with long, lacquered legs and thrusting her fangs, she injected the moth with poison and stilled its fluttering. When the moth dissolved, she sucked up the slurry until nothing remained but an empty, winged case. While the silk-wrapped case spun around, we both stepped back and admired her crinkly new lantern.

  The first morning home, I woke to the nearly forgotten annoyance of black-billed magpies thumping on my three-year-old steel roof and portico. Our summer classroom had tucked into a tame landscape where well-behaved birds pandered to us by singing or displaying dazzling plumage. The dominant avian fauna at my place were raptors, meat-eating birds whose ability to feed and fend for themselves meant they rarely needed, wanted, or noticed human attention: red-tailed, rough-legged, and Cooper’s hawks; falcons, kestrels, bald eagles, ospreys, ravens, shrikes, magpies, and golden eagles. The latter two species were roof thumpers. That was all I knew about the golden eagles. They were nesting on the cliff when I built my cottage. I’d chased them up and down the rocky hills to learn more about them, but between constantly retying a broken binocular strap and keeping my bloodied knee clean, I hadn’t learned anything about their sexes, ages, or social arrangements. The eagles ignored me. I suspected that was their plan all along, but it didn’t stop one from landing on my roof now and then with a signature thud and what I imagined was a freshly killed eastern cottontail.

  The magpies had no business thumping; none of their biological obligations required the use of my roof. And whereas I believed the majestic eagles were ignoring me, the magpies, I was sure, were thumping simply to annoy me. Either way, that first morning home, disgruntled by the drumming, I pulled on jeans and a fleece pullover and stumbled downstairs.

  I splattered four egg whites on a hot cast-iron pan, saving the raw yolks and half shells in a blue melamine bowl. After shaking spiders from my mukluks, I grabbed the bowl and a coffee and headed out to Tonic, a twelve-foot-tall juniper tree across the draw. The sun filled a deep pass in the eastern mountains, facing me head-on and blinding me. Scrunching my face into a tight squint, I trudged ahead until a thicket of thigh-high plants blocked my way.

  Three months earlier, when I’d left home to teach, short grasses were growing here: blue grama and fescues interrupted by a few airy sprigs of Indian ricegrass. Short did not simply describe their stature. Short grasses imbibed shortness; it was their personality. Whether neglected or coddled, a short grass could never grow tall enough to reach my thighs.

  And now, where was my fox barley with the long fringe tails that I liked to stroke? Where was my Indian ricegrass, whose seed head I would ruffle with my fingertips as if it were the head of a small puppy? Gone. Thick-stemmed aliens had swallowed the path to Tonic and taken a large bite out of the front pasture; I was under siege. And not just by plants. Beneath the masses of tangled branches, now dripping with spilled coffee, two voles played bumper cars with my padded footwear.

  No, not moles. Moles have a wrestler’s forearms, claws like ivory rakes, and long, naked snouts. By contrast, voles look like russet potatoes. Not exactly, but then, no two potatoes look exactly alike. Fat, pin-eyed, seemingly both tailless and earless, the voles in my pasture were as similar to potatoes as any two potatoes could be to each other. Ranchers called them “red-backs,” even though their longitudinal symmetry obscured any semblance of a back.

  Moles had the better reputation; they ate unsolicited insects. Voles were bulb-suckers—daffodils, tulips, crocuses, and onion. They chewed the bark off expensive trees and the roots off well-tended shrubs. Worse yet, like Norway rats, voles harbored bubonic plague. They were tough little creatures, showing up in all my favorite wildlands, enduring subzero temperatures, hurricane-force winds, and single-digit relative humidity. I liked to remind myself that while voles were as homely and troublesome as any rodent, they were significantly smaller than Norway rats. They had earned, after all, if not praise, then at least this faint damnation.

  A few years earlier, I’d trapped, bled, weighed, sexed, and measured hundreds of voles for the CDC. My field partner did the same, but many of the voles he handled died of fright or committed hari-kari. All the voles I handled survived. Now these little creatures were invading my property. Most gardeners would be running for their illegal stash of zinc phosphide bait. Not me. I wasn’t interested in filling their intestines with lethal volumes of swamp gas. Unashamedly, I was attracted to all animals that tolerated me.

  I carved depressions in the dirt under Tonic to cradle the yolk-filled eggshells. Then I searched for a place to sit among the ankle-high Opuntia cactuses. They’d been waiting for me to come home so they could stab their barbs into my innocent heinie. Tonic was the primary socializing and hoarding tree for the thumping magpies, all but two of which looked pretty much alike to me. I had assigned arbitrary genders and appropriate names to the two I did recognize, the main nesting pair for the past couple of years. Tennis Ball had a big, round belly; her mate, Torn Tail, crossed his wings behind his back like he was handcuffed.

  TBall clamped her bill on an eggshell and decamped to Gin, the juniper adjacent to Tonic. She perched on the highest branch, tipping the shell upward as though it were a tankard. When she finished guzzling the syrupy yolk, she dropped the shell into the juniper leaves and wiped both sides of her bill on a branch. Spreading her wings and fanning her tail, she descended for more yolks. Three smaller birds, who had been stabbing the dirt with beaks like black daggers, rose as TBall lowered herself. It was as if they were levitating on a pillow of hot air that pushed under TBall’s broad wings. After rising and sinking, the smaller magpies resumed scratching and pecking the soil. While searching out every edible morsel of yolk that had spilled from the shells TBall had carried off, they turned the clay soil into a loose mound of dirt as soft as talcum powder. Then they flew off, presumably to loot a birdfeeder somewhere in the valley.

  Later that month I sat by Tonic, tucked my hands into soft-fringed sagebrush, and watched four hyperactive magpies pulverize hardtack soil during their frantic search for yolk droplets. When the foursome left, a pair of red-shafted flickers—ground-feeding birds often accused of being woodpeckers—took advantage of the loosened soil to dive in and suck ants.

  Tennis Ball tolerated the trespass because flickers vacuumed up poison-spitting thatch ants that would otherwise be eating her food. The size of cooked rice grains, thatchers were not big eaters, but they conveyed a clever-enough carryout business to deprive the magpies of sizeable globs of yolk.

  Having figured out that their niches overlapped, soil-stomping magpies and ant-sucking flickers were teaming up, reminding me of the John Muir saying: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Aphorisms like that set Muir up to be one of the twentieth century’s most famous conservationists.

  What about me? To whom was I closely hitched? No one.

  I wasn’t sad about that, only curious. I had been alone as far back as my memory could reach. I saw myself alone in the furthest future that I could imagine. Sometimes it seemed natural to me, as if my psyche fit into only this single way of living. I left home when I was fifteen. It wasn’t, at first, a clean break. I’m sure you can imagine how it feels to live with people who don’t like you. Unpleasant but tolerable. My father was violent. I could live with that because—you can ask my doctor—I am quite tough. But he treated me with disdain, and that was something that I could not live with. So I left. I moved to the Georgetown University campus for summer school, and in the fall, when I was sixteen
, I started at the American University, the closest college to where I was living. The university accepted me in a rush, based on my academic portfolio, grades, and test scores and such, and I found work to support myself. Demographically it was strikingly different from what I was used to. I had moved from a middle-class neighborhood where it was safe for me to rummage in the thick, adjoining woods to a city where most people seemed to be rich or poor, and the campus guards strolled around the library telling us to beware of the foot fetishist and to stay out of the woods.

  I liked meeting people from all over the world but hated the city, and when I wasn’t running on the track, I bicycled on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal’s towpath. The land belonged to the National Park Service, and I started hanging out with a ranger, who told me stories about fighting wildland fires in the Rockies. I left college and drove 2,280 miles to Glacier Park, where I found jobs waitressing (although I was too young to legally serve alcohol) and volunteering for the National Park Service. This time the break wasn’t just clean; it was immaculate. I never saw my father again. Decades passed before I saw my mother. The ranger and I kept in contact for a while and met again in San Francisco, where he’d been promoted, and we spent time hiking and touring around the Presidio. I was always terrible about building relationships, and now I’ve forgotten his name.

  Just as I’ve always been alone, I’ve never felt lonely. But I did want to fit in somewhere and belong to something. I tried lashing myself to the land, but it wasn’t reciprocating. Land, I discovered, does not behave like a pet, offering unconditional love just because you own it. I thought I was buying space and rocks and dirt and a creek, and instead I ended up with a community of animals who wanted me to work for my welcome. For a while, I’d been working on TBall. She wasn’t the biggest animal here, but she was the most influential; she had loads of followers. I brought her egg yolks, and, in return, I imagined her perching on the deck and cooing while I read; pacing reverently beside me when I gardened; waddling politely behind me while I carried yolks to the tree; and refraining from roof-thumping forays.

  Tennis Ball goose-stepped toward me. Two birds followed her, one on each flank. Three birds filled the next row, four in the back. All stiff-backed, they were dragging fat white bellies and propping up long necks and narrow heads. They looked so much like a rack of bowling pins that I didn’t feel guilty about imagining I was aiming a big, shiny ball at them. They waddled unnervingly close. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” I said, knowing that their little bird brains couldn’t possibly realize that I wasn’t actually feeding them. I had been delivering the yolks under Tonic for whoever to eat—the weasel in the woodpile, the skunk, the baby badgers. I ate eggs every morning but rarely ate yolks, since they had fallen out of favor with the medical community.

  Stopping just beyond my arm’s reach, the magpies raised their wings and stretched their necks impossibly forward. When their beaks popped open, they extruded skinny wet tongues. An unfinished adage had duped me: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you . . . or else? Or else what?

  I might have continued trying to appease the magpies, but every morning when I walked over to Tonic with egg yolks, voles ran over my feet. Those tall invading plants that attracted the voles had grown right up to my siding, flush to the front steps. At midday, for the price of a few moments at the front window, uninvited weeds parted to reveal a vole who was, if not entirely friendly, at least moving too slowly to escape the illusion of conviviality. All I needed to hitch those unpretentious rodents up to my metaphorical wagon was a mutually beneficial activity. Something like a gardening project.

  While trapping rodents for that CDC research project, I discovered that voles harvested liatris seeds and stacked them outside their burrows. Liatris (Liatris punctata), sometimes called blazing star, was one of my favorite plants. It stood stiff and upright, a stalk of densely packed purple flowers, tall as a crocus. In these endless fields of dun-colored grasses, liatris produced just enough pigment to be visible, but not so much as to call attention to itself. And it endured deer and drought with less complaining than any other flowering plant. Liatris, I decided, could rehabilitate my north meadow. All I needed were lots of seeds. And now I knew who was going to collect them. Tolerating me, I realized, was not the voles’ only endearing trait.

  My role in this mutually advantageous gardening project was tending their patch of tall weeds. Vole Forest, as I would come to call the weed plot, provided voles with a safe harbor in a world rife with foxes and hawks. My plan would proceed as follows: in late summer, voles would gather liatris seeds from the adjacent open lands and stack them outside their weed-fortified burrows. I would wander around my property like a great provincial land baron, scooping seeds from burrow heads. By early next fall, my replanting project would be underway.

  Before you denounce my lack of judgment, ask yourself if you haven’t engaged in a lopsided relationship with an individual even more demanding and less likeable than a vole. Take your fifteen-second count.

  The broad glacier-carved valley was so dry and sparse it could not forgive meat eaters or grain growers a single misstep. If the valley tossed them a modicum of good fortune, the sirocco-like winds would blow it away. For the past hundred years, humans and magpies were enemies. They stole each other’s food: chicken eggs, crop seeds, wild and domestic fruit. They mimicked each other’s tactics: rabble-rousing, mobbing, explosive fecundity.

  Now the round-bellied matriarch was tasked with sharing her home range with a human. The matriarch, born the scion of eleven generations that had survived the enmity, was self-possessed. She was a calm bird anyway, calm in an ethereal sense, calm beyond what one would expect from the upheaval surrounding her.

  Condemned to communal lives, most magpies did not possess the skills necessary for independence. Community members divided their tasks—not without violence—according to how each bird perceived its relative abilities and needs. Most birds considered their options and chose the best way to assuage their constant hunger and avoid unwanted responsibilities. The matriarch didn’t have options. She was destined to travel a path with no junctions, crossroads, or choices. She inherited wisdom, amended it, passed it on.

  She also inherited instinct, which wasn’t always an advantage. Instinct is a genetically inherited pattern of behavior that, at one time and in a specific environment, increased the population’s fitness. Sometimes the specific environment that fostered the beneficial behavior changed before the genome could catch up. For thousands of years, instinct compelled magpies to follow people. That instinct was an artifact of an ancient détente, long since invalidated. People who had lived peacefully with pied birds for thousands of years no longer existed. A new human culture dominated the landscape. Now that people and birds were competing for the same foods, friendly tolerance was impossible.

  As millennia passed, magpie genes performed their magic tricks: poorly adapted genotypes diminished, and fitter genotypes flourished, such that descending generations employed better tactics to avoid humans. But in accordance with Charles Darwin’s prediction, small amounts of behavioral variation persisted. The matriarch’s nestlings were fledging, and the same urge that made them raise their arms when she poked them out of the nest for first flight would drive them to houses, to people, to buildings—for food. She could not reconcile the urge with the reality: people were not as reliable a shield against starvation as wings were against gravity.

  Her torn-tailed mate was balancing on the portico’s pediment when a girl carrying yolk-filled eggshells emerged from the house. When the girl set the egg yolks under the juniper, he flew toward her. Gawking fledglings joined him, flying in decreasing concentric circles around the girl until the matriarch darted toward her foolhardy family.

  All her life, an innate quantum of wisdom overrode her genetic predisposition to tolerate people, and she remained wary of humans. “Don’t trust,” she croaked. “Don’t trust the hand that baits you.”

/>   It’s a safe assumption that any plant called weed goes through life with low expectations. The corollary is that husbanding a thirty-square-foot weed patch should be a cinch. Still, I could not identify a single species in the patch. If you don’t know what they are, you can’t know what they want. My professional plant guides, Flora of the Pacific Northwest and Flora of the Great Plains, both thick, faded cloth-bound books, did not deign to document weeds anywhere within their cumulative 2,132 pages. The owner of a saddle shop forty miles upriver in a 600-person hamlet sold me Weeds of the West, a compendium of rap sheets for every plant that had ever been cussed at by a farmer. It included mug shots.

  Four Eurasian weeds dominated Vole Forest: kochia, yellow sweetclover, Russian thistle, and Russian tumble mustard. The kochias looked like miniature Christmas trees. Annuals, they regrew from seeds each year and wasted no time producing nondescript flowers on their stiff branches. If the weed patch were a forest (and it was if you were a vole), then kochias belonged to the midcanopy. By shading the forest floor and humidifying this high-altitude desert, kochias kept voles cool and dewy.