Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  “I know. Me too.”

  He took a few more steps back.

  “But here’s the thing: Super-healthy stuff tastes bad. That’s the deal. Everyone knows it.”

  Think about it. Bad-tasting food promotes health; good-tasting food—fatty, salty, and sweet—diminishes it. Why else would anyone eat gross stuff? It didn’t get any worse than kale when it came to taste, so I went inside and took a piece from the fridge to demonstrate. I told Fox about eating repulsive food because it was salubrious, bit off a piece, and chewed. When my mouth unpuckered, I said salubrious again because I didn’t get to say it too often. I’d said it to students on a trail in the Tetons and they’d laughed somewhat nervously, like they felt sorry for me.

  I waved a rank kale leaf in Fox’s face. An odor escaped and screamed out kale’s deficiencies: not salty, not sweet, and not rich. Who would eat it willingly? Not any fox. We sat and stared at each other until I saw, behind him, the waxing gibbous moon rising above the mountains. I ignored him to watch the moon crest the peak and float upward in a pale chartreuse sky streaked with violet clouds. Anyone, anywhere, would have stopped breathing for the sight, but Fox had suspicious greenery to keep an eye on, so he missed the moon buoy above a blue mountain ridge.

  “This is supposed to be healthy enough to make up for the bad taste.” I sampled another bite of kale. It was truly awful. Moderately healthy would not justify eating it. Extremely healthy would not even do. I collected all the kale from the fridge and, while Fox turned away, scattered it around the lilacs to repel rabbits. How healthy would kale have to be to make up for its taste?

  It would have to make me immortal.

  I don’t believe that it will, and so I haven’t bought it since then. Fox apparently felt the same way about egg whites. He would not eat them with or without garlic. When served whole eggs, he separated whites and yolks using his tongue like a spoon. Licking the whites round and round the bowl, he created a golf-ball-sized blob. The egg-white-saliva ball stuck to the dish rim, glistening and quaking, while Fox slurped up the garlic-and-yolk mixture.

  From then on, I placed a bowl with garlicky raw yolks under Tonic and smashed the shells into my clay soil to add structure and improve drainage. TBall used to pull the yolk-filled shells up with her beak while in flight. Now the shells were gone and she was struggling to grasp the bowl’s slippery rim with her toes. Her wings flew up and forward for balance while her claws scratched wildly. Still, she failed. Standing next to the bowl and stretching her neck over the rim left her beak within a centimeter of the gooey yolks. A smaller bowl or more yolks would have solved the problem. Her problem, not mine. She had been using the shells like grocery bags to carry the yolks to her unfledged nestlings. If you have heard the cry of a hungry young magpie, you too would try anything legal and effective to shut them up. I ignored the cries. Maybe I enjoyed watching TBall’s anguish. But she had set the tone of our relationship because she was nesting here when I moved in. So it was her fault that I didn’t like her, my fault that I was overly sensitive to being treated with disdain.

  And P.S.: There isn’t anything that’s both legal and effective.

  If Fox worsened despite the garlic, he would find himself in the Havahart trap stored in my outbuilding and would get a ride to the vet. If I couldn’t locate any willing veterinarians, my US senator could expect a visit from me. The federal government had introduced mange to Montana; mitigating its effects was therefore their responsibility. Especially since the introduction was not accidental. They did it throughout the early- and mid-1900s to kill coyotes and wolves they believed were eating settlers’ livestock. Here’s how it worked: Land managers collected sheep and cattle carcasses and infected them with mange-carrying mites—Sarcoptes scabiei. They left the infected carcasses near dens. Foxes, wolves, and coyotes fed on the infected carcasses. Mites jumped off the carcasses and onto the living animals. Wrapping their six dirty legs around as many hairs on as many wolves, foxes, and coyotes as they could reach, mites injected Sarcoptes bacteria into the predators’ bloodstreams.

  Judas animals, those purposely infected by land managers and then released, also spread mange. The Judas technique was popular enough that Montana passed a law in 1905 mandating the use of such infected animals to control predators. The state veterinarian obliged by introducing Sarcoptes bacteria into six wolves and six coyotes and releasing the twelve Judas animals to infect their cohorts and comrades.

  While searching for information about mange, I came across a sermon on the topic of senseless cruelty that referenced a 1948 Life magazine story about farmers torturing foxes. The story recounted a method of killing foxes that involved large groups of men, women, and children flushing foxes out of cover and onto fields where they could be surrounded and slowly beaten to death. I saw some of the photos myself. The weapons, about the width of broom handles, couldn’t possibly inflict a fatal blow. One photo showed a mob of smiling people holding sticks and advancing on a single injured fox, while another depicted a child beating a fox; still another was captioned hunter holding a fox before clubbing it to death. After reading the minister’s story, I concluded that the foxes were slaughtered in a way that maximized pain, anguish, and humiliation.

  I believe that on the day of that fox massacre, someone—probably a young boy—stayed behind because he had read The Little Prince, and because stories matter. They do to me.

  I was working seasonally in Glacier National Park, and a book exchange with a river guide left me with The Little Prince, a paperback that I took along when I went ski-camping. Alone in an empty campground in Lassen National Park, I came to adore the prince and didn’t remember much about the fox. This is how life goes, I thought. You just start from where you are and you go on, just like the little prince did. You don’t look back and ask yourself dumb questions. I loved him because he was young and old at the same time and because he had no significant backstory. Nothing behind him to blame and everything ahead. What I wanted ahead was to work with animals, a decision based on all the wildlife I was working and living with at Glacier National Park. Before I left the campground that week, I completed an application for a zoology degree at the University of Montana; I told them I wanted to write about animals.

  Every Wednesday at 2:00 p.m., the saloonkeeper’s wife takes a two-hour break and becomes Winchester, Montana’s sole librarian. Today, as on most Wednesdays, a boy waits on the saloon’s green velvet love seat and turns his kaleidoscope. Outside, hundreds of pregnant ewes flow past the saloon on their way to low-elevation lambing yards. Looking through the sharp, waxy leaves of the saloon’s only potted plant, the boy recognizes his brother, one of the sheepherders on horseback. He doesn’t want to smudge the glass, but he raises his hand as close to the window as he dares without touching it. Iron-rich dust swirls skyward and settles into rusty streaks on the sheep’s nappy backs.

  When the road clears, the boy slings his leather satchel over his shoulder and follows the librarian out the heavy oak door. “Boots!” she says, pointing out a pile of horse droppings. She doesn’t bother to turn around to see him nodding, but she hears his uneven pace as he carefully dodges puddles of urine and sheep droppings. Unlike the dark log saloon, the library is white clapboard with red frames around its single window and door. Flower beds with a rock border circle it. The front of the library reminds him of math class, a perfect square facade topped by an equilateral triangle.

  At the library, card tables covered with knickknacks greet him: potholders, tea cozies, baby bibs, all knitted by members of The Grange and sold to raise funds for buying books and heating the building. He goes straight to the basket of new books and finds one whose cover shows a towheaded boy standing alone on a planet. The planet is floating in a navy-blue sky, the color of a Montana dawn. Copies have been circulating in New York City for almost five years, but in this Montana sheepherders’ town, library committees hesitate to acquire books written by oddly named, foreign-born authors
. Before handing over his library card, the boy sharpens the library pencil, signs his name in cursive, and blows away the lead flakes. On the way home, he stops to pick a stalk of wild rye and then folds it three times and slides it between the pages for a bookmark.

  Fantastic drawings decorate the book. Some of the characters are common as pudding: snakes and sheep, businessmen and kings. Rude thorny roses. The boy’s father runs cattle and sheep, flies a single-engine plane, and maintains his own airfield. His mother ties red and yellow roses up and over their doorway arch. Inevitably, the roses fall out of the arch. “Untrainable,” his father mutters every time one smacks him in the head. “If my heeler was as badly disciplined as your damn roses, I’d shoot it.”

  When the day arrives to massacre foxes, the boy follows ranchers and baying dogs to the killing fields until a cattle guard set into a line of post and pole stops him. The guard, a deep hole covered with steel pipes laid just a bull hoof’s width apart, does a fine job of stopping cattle; they can’t balance their hooves on slippery steel pipe. People cross using slow and methodical steps. The cattle guard assures that each rancher who joins the fold that day has made a careful and considered choice.

  The boy hears foxes screaming, smells their blood, imagines their wounds, and thinks about the fox in his new book. He’s only seen live foxes from a distance, but now he’s curious about them. If he sat still in the farrow field, would a friendly fox approach him? This year, the boy doesn’t cross the guard. He wonders if he is all alone on his own planet like the boy on the cover of The Little Prince, a planet so small there is room enough for only him and his retired blue heeler. Sometimes he feels like the schoolmaster, or the woman sitting at the dinner table, or the man bringing hay for the horses live on entirely different planets from him. “How can this happen,” he says to himself, “that people who live in our own time and place act foreign, while a pilot from a country whose language I will never speak, on a continent I will never visit, is the one person in the entire world who knows how to draw me a sheep?”

  What links the boy at his dinner table to the imagined foreigner who knows how to draw just the right sheep? Spirit. That’s the essential thing that we see, according to the prince’s fox, “only with our heart.” Blood, law, commerce, or physical proximity link us to family, neighbors, in-laws, and colleagues. But connections of the heart transcend time and space. Saint-Ex knew this. If Antoine’s mother, the Viscountess Marie de Fonscolombe, were to queue up acceptable friends for her son, Léon Werth wouldn’t even have made the long list. Yet Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the graduate of an elite Swiss boarding school, would come to describe Léon, twenty years older and a public-school dropout, as “the best friend I have in this world.” Léon was famous for his acerbic-witted columns and critiques of art and society, and he was a bohemian, an anarchist, and a Jew. When Hitler’s troops invaded Paris in 1940, Léon escaped on foot to the Jura Mountains. Saint-Ex, a Catholic, feted and already famous, was living safely in Manhattan, New York, at the time. Knowing that his best friend was cold, hungry, and destitute in the Juras, Saint-Ex returned to Europe to fight the Nazis. That decision ended with the fatal crash over the Mediterranean. I think that the fictional friendships between the prince and the pilot, and maybe even the prince and the fox, are based on this real relationship between Léon and Antoine.

  dancing fox

  Four Rocky Mountain juniper trees arranged themselves in my east meadow as corners on a rhombus, almost a square. In the center, water that had not seen sunlight for a hundred years was flowing from an artesian spring. After seeping downhill through a cattail meadow, the stream funneled through a culvert, eventually joining the Yellowstone River, flowing north, then northeast, merging with the Missouri, then the Mississippi, and finally discharging into the Gulf of Mexico.

  Each of the four junipers was about fifteen feet tall and skinny enough for a porcupine to wrap around the bole and clasp its hands together. Members of the Cypress family, the junipers were conifers that didn’t look like the other cone-bearing trees around here. Unlike the pine, spruce, and fir trees in the Pine family, each juniper identified as a single sex, displaying either male or female cones but not both. Gin, a female, and Tonic, a male, marked the rhombus’s corners closest to my cottage. One of the unnamed junipers on the far end of the rhombus was female, the other, a male. The junipers were about three hundred years old. If no one blocked their sun, they would happily live another seven hundred years.

  Like typical females, Gin was bluer than the males. Her flexible branches, spreading loosely in wide, elegant arcs, bounced gracefully under the weight of a single bluebird. Like humans, Gin produced eggs. The eggs stayed inside cones, where they were fertilized by sperm and developed into seeds. The cones, bright blue and pea-sized, had scales that were fleshy and fused, so that they looked like berries. If you looked at them through a magnifying glass, you’d notice they had seams like a soccer ball and bracts pinching upward like volcanoes on Asteroid B-612.

  Tonic’s branches packed tightly together, and he held them erect even when assailed by an army of blackbirds. His fragile cones, splaying from the tips of braided leaflets, released pollen grains skyward, where they would sometimes form great aggregates that people mistook for wildfire smoke. Pollen is meant to convey sperm to eggs, but it often goes astray. After landing on mountain lakes and swirling into unique patterns, mats of golden-colored grain turn cobalt water into spectacular liquid marble. One time a cloud of dehiscing cones flew into the windshield of my parked hatchback. Dipping an index finger into the dust-like layer, I drew one big arrow pointing to the nearest female juniper and wished their cohorts better luck.

  For several weeks in the late afternoon, birds of many different species were landing in one of the four junipers, while leaving the other three almost unoccupied. They selected different trees each day, but without any predictable pattern. What intrigued me wasn’t the process of choosing, but the act of sharing. Instead of segregating themselves, birds of different species were roosting together. Imagine humans eating at a picnic table alongside bonobos and orangutans. We’re supposed to prefer the company of our own species. I wondered why birds didn’t. We humans are serious about the species category. Heck, we’re serious about the genus category. We guard our Homo designation as jealously as thatch ants guard aphids, hesitating to include Neanderthals in our genus despite knowing that humans and Neanderthals mated and produced fertile offspring. But maybe lineage is not significant to birds.

  Now, with a good view of the junipers, I was wearing binoculars, squatting on top of a lichen-encrusted boulder, and clutching a particleboard clipboard that smelled like wet wool. I wanted to count the birds as accurately as possible and convince myself that I wasn’t just imagining interspecies camaraderie. Yesterday, eighteen birds from four species rested in the far female, while no more than four birds perched in any of the other trees. Gripping the lime-colored lichen with my soft-soled mukluks, I steadied myself and focused the binoculars. Already a flock of bluebirds was perching on Gin, settling down as much as possible for naturally jittery birds. Bird scientists do not actually classify them as “jittery,” but rather as members of the Passerine order. An order is a category of birds between class and . . . well, you remember the grade school mnemonic: King Philip Calls Out For Great Sex, or if you are like my students who roll their eyes and complain that they attended Catholic schools: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Order is a category more general than family and more specific than class. Passerines tend to favor perching and singing. The exceptions, at least on my property, were magpies and ravens, oddballs who favored hovering and screaming.

  Ravens didn’t nest here but flew over frequently and congregated in large numbers whenever golden eagles tore open a deer. Carcass frenzies encouraged a level of selfishness incongruous with camaraderie, even within species, let alone between magpies and ravens. If TBall and Torn Tail wanted friends, they would ha
ve to look elsewhere. But not to the other passerines. Magpies are meat eaters; the littler passerines are vegetarians. They ate seeds and insects on my property, but in town they scurried underneath outdoor café tables, collecting breadcrumbs. In parks, the songbirds jumped on picnic tables and nicked scraps.

  You might expect to find eagles and hawks chumming with magpies. But they belong to a different order—Falconiformes—and eat only meat. Quiet epicureans, I’ve noticed, don’t socialize with loud omnivores. TBall and Torn Tail were destined to be lonely misfits.

  I wasn’t tracking all passerines; the category was too diverse to be useful. Instead, I tallied birds under columns titled “BB” and “others.” BB stood for “breadcrumb buskers.” BBs migrated here in a staggered fashion, individual sentinels preceding small flocks in a simple, well-organized pattern of species: bluebirds, robins, waxwings, juncos, warblers, meadowlarks, assorted blackbirds, and sundry sparrows. The bluebirds, the first wave in the spring invasion, had been comforting themselves in the eaves of the cottage’s overhang since March. Now that May had ended, all BBs had made landfall.

  Like the down-valley ground squirrels emerging from nine months of hibernation, migrating BBs were easy prey for hawks: unprepared to defend themselves, adrift in new habitat, disoriented. Think of the staggered immigration waves as breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Between each wave, hawks had time to digest and renew their appetites. During migration, hawks perched in cottonwood branches, slurping wet intestines and snapping delicate bones. Sometimes I stood under the trees catching pretty BB feathers while the hawks ate.