Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  According to the tradition of the River Cabins class, we returned from our hike without lecture or leader. But not without a rudder. Jenna swept trail. Everyone else hiked in pairs or packs. I hiked down alone because, unlike the students, I didn’t need to have people around me. I stopped when Jenna caught up with me. We listened to gravel rolling under Vibram soles and watched colorful backpacks bobbing below us. “They think I am feeding him.” I reached for my water bottle but kept my eyes focused on the buck antelope pacing toward the cabins; students would soon be passing nearby. “Maybe they think I am imagining his fidelity, and that he comes by every day coincidentally and not to see me.”

  “People believe what they understand. That’s all.” Swinging a plastic bag of mint chocolate wafers my way, she added, “You know that.”

  “Not really.” I poked the chocolate wrapper into a pocket of my cotton coat. “I don’t understand gravity, but I accept its existence.”

  When a clump of students reached the cabins, they congregated around one of the owner’s obsequious pet dogs. Students conversed with “man’s best friend” as though the old mutt were a child. By the time we caught up to them, they were sharing anecdotes about its habits and personality, which segued into their own dog, cat, and pet iguana stories. At dinner each night, everyone discussed each other’s pets’ psyches, and by the time vanilla ice cream pooled around our apple dessert cake, I knew exactly what outfit everyone’s “best friend” would be wearing for next month’s Independence Day parades. We hesitated to call out as anthropomorphic those feelings or attitudes expressed by animals that allowed us to leash them. If I’d kept Fox tethered like a horse, hawk, or pet skunk, I would have been allowed to assign a personality to him. Animals that we control mimic us. The more we look at them, the more we see ourselves looking back. Like a mirror.

  Jenna and I reached the cabins just as “man’s best friend” shit on the lawn right in front of us. Fox did not shit in front of me. Do you think I would be strolling about discussing The Little Prince with someone who shit in front of me? A diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens is that we do not shit in front of our friends. Boxed animals, the ones we own—either as pets or commercial property—do not abide that decorum.

  Another diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens is that we love mirrors.

  If the owner of River Cabins thought it odd that I asked permission to collect a large rock from her property, she did not say. I lifted a half dozen rocks, each about eighteen inches across and relatively flat on top. While carrying the trophy to my car, I noticed Sixth Sense staring. I dropped the rock. She was sitting on a wooden bench near the car, her short black hair shining around a wide grin on a tanned face.

  “Your car’s been gone every night before dinner.”

  Only because it was not a question, I did not answer.

  “And you live only thirty minutes away.”

  Watching pink and white streaks crossing the cobalt sky like a variant of the locally common opaque opal known as hyalite, I said, “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m glad Fff . . . um, your fox is um . . . let’s see now. It . . . he? He doesn’t have a name then? But it’s okay? Your fox?”

  I would not blaspheme an ice-cream opal sky by going inside before the colors faded. Tense, trapped between her and the evening sky, I reached into my pocket. Plunking a walnut-sized stone on the bench, I said, “Geode. Do you like it? From a butte I climbed in Northern Montana.”

  a reptile dysfunction

  The fox pressed a calloused pad on top of his dark, grainy boulder, glanced up at the sun, and stepped away. Alongside the cool boulder, voles were rustling through their runs. But he wasn’t hungry, so he wasn’t hunting. While waiting for the boulder to heat up, he would toy with an energetic patch of butterflies. They would not be as entertaining as three-legged cranes, but he didn’t need entertainment; he needed a warm rock.

  Yellow wings poked straight up from the center of the butterfly patch. Because they had crammed too closely together, most of the butterflies couldn’t lower their wings. Butterflies along the outer edge, each flapping one wing, kept the group pulsating in a mesmerizing rhythm. One of them broke from the edge, fluttering above the others and taunting him out of his reverie. The fox would not swat it. Not this time. But the insect continued rising, sinking, and fluttering around his face. With a single swat, one paw could smash the creature back into the pile. One set of claws could rake through the butterfly bunch and drag them slowly over pebbles until they were wet and rumpled and still. He knew better. Beneath their light, yellow bodies, a pile of droppings would be glistening and sticky. He was too old to whimper home with sticky paws that smelled like the rear end of a short-haired animal.

  Finally, he was hugging the sun-warmed rock. Elongating his back and spreading his legs wide until they dangled around the boulder, he made himself as large as possible, surveyed his surroundings, and confirmed that his was the highest and finest resting rock in the meadow. From this distance, the bendy river looked wide and still. Overhead geese were honking, and he hoped they weren’t heading to the little island that he liked to watch. He didn’t mind geese for their company, but they made huge messes and he didn’t like sharing everything, as little as he had.

  Flopping over the edge of the boulder, his tail landed in an uncomfortable position because a stiff balsamroot stalk refused to bend. As if the weight of a fox tail were inconsequential. To remind the flower that it was just another weed in his path, he used the flower’s stiff bristles to scrape hound’s-tongue seeds off his hocks. Then, turning broadside to the sun, he left the weed paling in his shadow.

  He fell asleep listening to crickets and watching a wave of dark pink clouds pouring from a mountain pass like blood seeping from a wounded marmot. It was dark when an unwelcome sound roused him. He stood on his boulder, unable to quiet his shaking body. A quixotic smell was drifting toward him. Something big and unknown and frightening was upon him. There was no time to plan. He went numb.

  Back home, plunged so suddenly into the solitude of my isolated cottage, I moved around the Rainbow Room with small, hesitant steps, as if I might tumble off a cliff without a human body or building or bus to block my fall. Except for short predinner breaks, I had been surrounded by people from 6:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. for an entire week. I hadn’t been able to stand undressed in my own cabin without closing the drapes. To convince myself that isolation had at least one tangible benefit, I left my clothes on the front steps and walked around the outside of the house in my mukluks. When I completed the circle, I still hadn’t entirely shaken off the images of the thirty-some people all eating at the same big dinner table.

  I had come home overexposed to the sights, sounds, and smells of a human-dominated world, and now I needed to concentrate on hearing wing beats and smelling deer musk. I wanted to stare at clouds again without worrying about seeming impolite. So I recalibrated my senses, readjusting my signal-to-noise ratio by pushing some stimuli into the background and pulling others forward.

  While I was inside and unpacking, I recalled—almost fondly—voices and faces from the River Cabins class. By the time I finished unpacking in the early afternoon, their images were dimming. I avoided driving to town that first day home because some of our class would still be around. I knew from experience that if I bumped into any of the students—except Sixth Sense—I wouldn’t recognize them. But I remembered things about them. This had been a special class. Unlike my hundreds of undergraduates, the continuing education folks at River Cabins had been older than me, and professionals. People with credit cards and actual hairdos, and not just clothes but outfits. Their opinions mattered to me. Their camaraderie was tempting.

  In the evening, I waited for Fox but he didn’t show. Every evening when I had driven home before eating dinner with the class, I had seen Fox, except for the last visit, when I found only paw prints. They ran across the muddy spot under the bay windows where the absence of bedding plant
s had inspired a profusion of bedding mice. Mouse tracks—four evenly spaced round toes and a tail line whisking between the right and left feet—ran from under the bay windows to a pile of coffee grounds shaded by a blue spruce. The pile of coffee grounds mixed with eggshells that I’d discarded with each morning’s cowboy coffee had been attracting calcium-starved mice. Splotches of fuzzy fox prints superimposed themselves over the mouse tracks. I squatted low and stared, more convinced than ever that Fox was one very clever individual. He was running a trapline for mice and baiting it with my coffee scraps.

  The day after I returned home, mice were still visiting the coffee bait. Their fresh tracks decorated a translucent sheet of ice. Fox’s prints, spreading and thinning as the ice melted, were not fresh, and he didn’t show at 4:15. Distraught, I went to the back meadow, turned on the water without engaging the pressure pump, and wrapped my hand around a hose with no nozzle. Staring at the cascading water relaxed me. “Meditation and water,” says Ishmael, “are wedded forever.” My plants didn’t need this much water, but it wouldn’t hurt them too much. Between sunshine and gravity, water can’t sit long enough on an east-facing slope to drown anything. And, like Ishmael, I needed the water therapy.

  All the plants on this back slope grew wild. I controlled them, like any provincial land baron controls his subjects, by wielding water like a scepter and a sword. Favorite plants—ground-hugging rings of fuchsia locoweed, beaded sprays of Indian ricegrass, plumes of fringed sagebrush, curls of blue grama—received water and grew faster. I ignored skeleton weed, hound’s-tongue, and alyssum, and as a result, they were moving out. Well, not alyssum; it would not leave simply because you ignored it. If ever a plant had no shame, it was alyssum. If I wanted it out, I would have to drag it by its rough racemes.

  Orange rind curled around a lupine bush where it was supposedly serving as an appetite suppressant for skunks. (No one likes a fat skunk.) A rubber boa slipping under the rind stopped to flash a come-hither look—wet red tongue, gunmetal skin, invisible scales. Unlike foxes, rubber boas are difficult to misplace. I could go inside, use the bathroom, grade a student’s paper, go back outside, and relocate the boa within seconds. Knowing where voles lived, I enjoyed trying to anticipate the boa’s moves. But sometimes—suffering from some kind of reptile dysfunction—the snake would raise its slender limp forebody and stare in the direction of a freshly dug vole hole before veering off in the wrong direction.

  I abandoned the boa as 4:15 approached. Aiming my spotting scope above Fox’s den, I searched for flying scavengers that might reveal a carcass. I quit, without success, when the evening light rendered the scope useless. Fox’s little body would disappear quickly out here. In the spring, two turkey vultures had picked a skunk carcass clean in a single morning. When they finished, there wasn’t enough organic material left for a fly’s aperitif.

  Three days after returning, I headed out on recon, searching for a track or a scat from a fox or something that had recently eaten one. A mouse’s tail waving from under the siding near the garage door disappeared when I stomped. A mouse’s head, and then an entire mouse, quickly replaced the tail. After running under the hose bib, the mouse slipped into the siding. I found more bad news at my oldest lilac, where a Roman-nosed rabbit poked its head out from under the world’s most expensive mulch—the remains of my former cherry tree. Pulling its nostrils down tight, the rabbit glared and chucked a wad of soil at me.

  “Fox, where are you? We are under siege,” I said, forgetting we were no longer on the same team. Forgetting that I was carrying a rippled, red Folgers coffee can and lid so I could collect his scat and use him for research. You can collect his DNA, they had said. They probably thought I would use it for paternity tests. But I had forgotten my backpack shovel.

  I was side-hilling up a steep slope, when a shiny brown mammal with white feet darted past. I lost my balance and dropped to one hand. When I turned to look uphill, the weasel, now paused, set his black eyes on me for a moment before darting away. It had surprised me because my default hiking gaze focused one meter above the ground—bear height—a habit from living and working in bear country, where I’d bumped into them often at Mount Rainier and Glacier National Parks. If you cannot spot a bear within thirty meters, neither your running ability nor the sidearm in your shoulder holster will save you from injury. Yes, I stubbed my toes and tripped a lot, but I never had a confrontation with a bear that didn’t end in a mutually agreed-upon resolution.

  The weasel, an ermine, ran down a hole at the base of a slate-colored boulder. Hoping it would emerge, I sat down, sliding off my backpack and rummaging for the camera. As far as I could see in any direction, I was alone—even when I spied through binoculars. So it was odd to hear someone say, “Here at last is someone who has a real profession.”

  My conscience was mocking me. Fox and I had met the man with the real profession in The Little Prince: a deskbound, self-identified scholar, who hasn’t discovered anything because he is “too important to go wandering about.”

  I didn’t want to be too important to go wandering about; I needed to be too important. Well, important enough to have health insurance anyway. Stepping off the bus in Lamar Valley earlier in the week, I had appeared so peaked that a student had told me to find a doctor. I did not tell the student that what I really needed was a surgeon, and that I could not afford one; that my affliction was not fatal, and that I was still guiding backcountry tourists, teaching field classes, lifting weights, and jogging. Yes, I was exhausted and still sleeping too much. But never mind the four-pound tumor. It wasn’t malignant.

  Any job that seemed an appropriate match for my PhD in biology, and that offered steady pay and health insurance, would require casting aside the life of a terrestrial Ishmael. I would need to give up living in a wild, isolated area where I felt emotionally comfortable. I would be exchanging my known world for the chance to live and work around people in an environment that might always be fraught and in which I might never fit in. Wouldn’t it be swell, when I could afford surgery, to write someone’s name on the line next to Person to Contact in Case of Emergency? I might have been chugging down the wrong track, but I couldn’t see any other track to follow. My conscience usually did a good job highlighting problems, but it disappeared before providing solutions.

  “Here at last is someone who has a real profession!” the voice in my head repeated.

  I was pouring myself warm tea and Tang from a stainless steel thermos when Ishmael propped a boot on the boulder and leaned forward, resting his forearm on his thigh. His monkey jacket was gaping open where a button was missing. “I abominate all honorable respectable toils,” he said, knocking off my baseball cap. It was a phrase from Moby-Dick. In the book, Ishmael has a real profession—schoolmaster. He quits. Pursues his purpose. Rides the Pequod and communes with whales.

  “But here’s the peculiarity of ‘respectable toil,’” I replied to him. “It’s just a tithe, isn’t it? In exchange for membership in society?”

  Ishmael responded that he didn’t want membership in society, and therefore he didn’t need to pay his dues. I reminded him that he’d ended up with only one friend, Queequeg, a pagan cannibal and shipmate. Ishmael had written in his journal that Queequeg was his “only heir.” I considered whether the cannibal was any more verbal than a fox.

  I watched as the wind, already guilty of removing my cap, blew it down the steep ravine into the thorny arms of a wild pink rose. Ishmael quoted Moby-Dick again. Something about Heaven’s gate opening just as wide for schoolmasters as for slaves.

  I reminded Ishmael that he was an atheist. And that I was knocking on society’s gate, not Heaven’s.

  A swarm of biting thatch ants put an end to my daydreaming and I ran downhill. In the evening my calves swelled up with ant bites and my back hurt from bending over an indolent boa constrictor while shouting, “Left! Left! Hard left!” as I rooted for it to shove its blunt nose down a mouse hole.

/>   I was setting up the scope when the sun swords appeared.

  The thick puffy cloud stack billowed, glowing orange along the bottom. The sun was partially visible above the clouds. Six distinct rays shooting from the sun reached toward the ground, forming an inverted fan of light. I walked outside, where light rays—sun swords—surrounded me. It was like being in a tepee encircled with light instead of a canvas tarp.

  Orange splotches appeared in a hanging meadow near Fox’s den, one large piece topping a boulder, smaller pieces blowing through the grass. Higher magnification revealed hairs waving from the splotches. Horrified, I realized they were pieces of Fox’s hide. I regretted telling the class that Fox would be gone when I got home. More so, I regretted saying I would use him for research if he returned. Regret crossed the thin line into guilt.

  After realizing that Fox was dead, I kept my eyes on the blowing hide until darkness separated us. I would like to tell you about sadness and loneliness and about losing my fox. But I won’t. Because I didn’t lose my fox. He wasn’t mine to lose. And I could not imagine the fox and me as a pair. I was, relatively speaking, too insignificant here. But I could sense our valley, with its bushy, round olive trees, knobby hills, and junipers spilling down the draws, and I sensed that we were all together one fox down, and missing him.

  I went to bed thinking that one fewer fox would be sleeping in my valley tonight, and that tomorrow might not be as good as yesterday. How would I go on? Rejoice that nothing was keeping me from focusing on a responsible job? Leave this isolated patch of thatch and cranky magpies? That’s what a rational and practical person would do. An image of the Three Lakes cabin on a grassy knoll above an emerald lake appeared, and I heard tree frogs singing. I couldn’t forget Fox any more easily than I could forget those tree frogs at Three Lakes.