Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  Three or four kits were playing in the woodpile on my delivery drive. I was watching through the bathroom window. Sometimes they scampered over the stacked logs for hours without any adults watching. Fox was upwind, hiding under a pungent sagebrush. When I went out to meet him, the odor of weasel urine overwhelmed me. Nothing on earth smells as bad. Fox’s kits probably didn’t realize. Their relatively undeveloped olfactory organs buffered the odor. Fox stood up, stretching his neck to get a better look at me, and I figured he needed something more exciting than weasel patrol to break up his day. Back in the garage, I found just the thing: a nervous mouse crawling sidelong against the cement wall.

  A mouse in the garage is a mouse in your car. If the mouse is female, your car becomes a mobile maternity ward, a precursor to a population explosion and the end of your sanity. Within a month, mouse bellies are bulging through the upholstery above your head. I knew a woman who drove around for weeks listening to increasingly louder sounds of scratching and gnawing. When she felt one mouse tail too many flicking across her ankle, she jammed on the brakes, got out, and pushed her two-year-old sedan off a cliff.

  While shooing the mouse with a broom, I noticed it was hobbled. It limped toward the bunchgrasses, and I scooped a quick ditch in its path. Fox watched the mouse flop into the hole and scratch in umpteen directions. But he didn’t attempt to jump what should have been an easy target. I pushed the frantic mouse gently with the broom. Still, Fox didn’t move. Pointing vigorously at the handicapped mouse, I called out to Fox, but he refused to budge on his policy of ignoring all my pointed-arm commands. Instead, he vanished.

  I dropped a bucket over the three-legged mouse so I could “handle” it later. Everybody did that, and mostly for the same reasons: mice bite us, eat our food, and transmit Hantavirus, which can be fatal. Humans seem to have an instinctive aversion to having mice romping around inside their living space. In fact, civilizations from every continent have idolized foxes because they kill mice.

  So, why didn’t Fox jump that hobbled mouse?

  I had forgotten one very important caveat: foxes hunt mice; they do not attack them.Hunting an animal is an art; attacking one is just bad manners.

  I was a hunter myself; after watching Fox hunt for forty-five consecutive days, I missed playing with my bow and arrows. I found them tucked behind the sofa in the Rainbow Room.

  I knelt next to a pungent sagebrush to tie my camouflage pant—with full side ammunition pockets—around my boot tops. My legs looked like stubby branched aspen trees. Oak and maple leaves decorated my flannel shirt, which hung half a foot below my belt, so that, altogether, I had composed myself into a temperate deciduous forest, a mixed wood. After buttoning the collar and cuffs to prevent exposed skin from blowing my cover, I retrieved a packet of multicolored camouflage face cream from my bow case. A tube of doe urine rolled out. Tucking it back inside, I pulled out a cordovan armguard. When I’m hunting, the armguard fits snugly over my shirtsleeve, midway between my left wrist and elbow. My arm became a nurse log under an oak canopy forest.

  Traditionally, archers carved their arrows from wood. The first archers in my valley carved arrows from bark peeled off old-growth juniper trees. Juniper bark has vertical striations, which lend themselves to strip removal that doesn’t kill the donor tree. Ötzi the Iceman, discovered in the Italian-Austrian Alps more than five thousand years after his murderer let him bleed to death, died holding a quiver of arrows carved from Viburnum lentago. I wonder if he watched me planting the Viburnum in his honor, carefully tilling soil at the end of a row of sturdy Siberian and showy French lilacs. If so, I also hope he knows that I am constantly repairing the deer-fence that protects it.

  Curling the fingers of my left hand around the cool metal riser—the midpoint of the bow’s front—I extended my arm straight out, perpendicular to my body. My forehead was level with the top of the bow limb; my hips were even with the bottom. The bow, a Hoyt compound, looked meaner than my first bow, a green Bear recurve that Bob had given me (along with the comb) when I left Mount Rainier.

  Arrows fit into bowstrings by means of a nock, a deeply grooved chunk of plastic that caps each arrow. When the arrow nocks into the bowstring, it rests lightly on a slim wire stand near the sights. The black metal trigger pull attached to my right palm clipped onto the bowstring, and I pointed my elbow straight back and pulled against thirty-seven pounds until the string skimmed my nose and the bow’s pulley held some of the weight. Focusing on a straw bale target, I dimmed my peripheral vision and, holding my breath, released the trigger. The hardest part of pulling that string back and releasing is not holding still but staying quiet. You will want to grunt during the pull, sigh during the release, and howl after the strike. You need to swallow all that.

  A golden line streaked twenty-five meters, puncturing a red circle. Bull’s-eye. I could have pretended to be a horseman thundering across a steppe behind Genghis Khan; the great Chiricahua chief Cochise moving effortlessly past shadows of towering saguaro; an 1800s voyageur paddling on Lake Kabetogama watching a six-point whitetail buck dappling beneath leaves of big-tooth aspen. I could have imagined myself as any other great bowman. I didn’t. When you are shooting a bow, the present moment is perfection: the pull of a single muscle, the silence of a held breath, the sting of the string on my left forearm.

  Fletching, either feathers or vanes, encircles the ends of the arrow shaft and stabilizes flight. Ötzi the Iceman fletched his arrows with feathers. Or hired a village fletcher to do it for him. Fletching was an esteemed craft in his day, both in the Alps and throughout the English-speaking lands. If you know someone whose surname is Fletcher, his ancestors finished arrows for English nobility. Today you can stabilize your dart with plastic vanes in every imaginable color. Also in some colors I’m sure you would never imagine.

  I fired arrows until smacks from the bowstring left a welt on my inner arm. Now I was just sore enough to be cocky. So I shook off the trigger pull, which was meant to cure a flinch I’d developed a few years earlier. After slipping on a black calfskin hand protector, I released an arrow into the bottom of the bale.

  I yanked the arrows, tawny with multicolored vanes, out of the bale target and dropped them into the grass. The next arrow missed the bale target entirely. Camouflage shafts are convenient for hunting because deer can’t see them, but they are inconvenient when you lose one—because you can’t see them.

  Squatting on my heels, I shuffled through tall dry grasses, searching for the arrow. The insulated Carhartt overalls I had changed into dragged their shredded hems behind me in long tails. While crawling on all fours, I looked northeast toward where the far range of snowcapped mountains should have been, and a mound of dry grasses waved through my entire field of vision. The same dry grasses prevented me from seeing the blue river gleaming through leafy cottonwoods. From the elevation of Fox’s den, he and I shared nearly the same view, but what he could see from my cottage—unless he could hop up on a rock—was mostly just grass. For the first time I realized that all the times Fox and I had spent hiking and reading together, we were actors in the same play, but on different stages.

  Inhaling too much dust and pollen, and barely escaping injuries to my eyes, I maneuvered between stiff bunches of grasses. Forward was not a guaranteed direction. The bunchgrass maze led to dead ends and forced me to back out. A wide, dusty bald spot provided a reprieve until I was jumped by a sagebrush lizard masquerading as a downed twig. Wingless grass seeds attacked me. Because they couldn’t fly, the seeds had evolved coats with frills that clasped into hair and hide. Consider the corkscrew-tipped seeds of Stipa richardsonii, now twisting into my overalls. Meriwether Lewis called the Stipas “needle and thread” grass: thread-thin tails—up to four inches long—and needle-like tips. Richardsonii lined the bottoms of my moose-hide mukluks as tightly as if a professional cobbler had sewn them into place. Forgetting about my missing dart, I pictured Fox struggling to tunnel through the debris as he tr
aveled from home to spring to mouse meadows.

  A shrike—a gray bandit-faced bird the size of a robin—called from a wild rose that was growing out of the draw. Meat-eating shrikes were not uncommon here, but they didn’t get close to the cottage because—unlike TBall—they were clever birds, much too clever to waste time trying to wangle food from me. Shrikes prepared their captured mice by crucifying them on wire fence barbs and leaving their corpses to lengthen into taut red leather. I think they dried their meat to preserve it the way Fox buried his carcasses. Until I saw Fox’s trapline baited with eggshell-spiked coffee grounds, I had never known a predator more innovative than a shrike.

  Fox was innovative, yes. But not innovative enough to figure out how to traverse a draw filled with tumbleweeds. Fox couldn’t fly. And a hundred more such draws furrowed the valley. Hurricane-force winds delivered nature’s detritus; steep-sided draws trapped it. Avoiding the draws wasn’t a good option; in the open, foxes exposed themselves to trails scoured by predators. When I stared up at the mesa, my mind’s eye saw an endless row of perched foxes looking down at their clogged avenues. Countless indignant foxes turned in synchrony and aimed their wizened mugs at me, as if to ask why I hadn’t kept their trails clear.

  That’s how you realize that Homo sapiens are holding all the aces. Wind, more than anything else, did not suit Fox. He was jumpy in a ten-mile-per-hour breeze. A fifteen-mile-per-hour wind would rake the meadow, pitching tumbleweeds and jamming them into his den door. I’d seen twenty-five-mile-per-hour gusts curve his sausage-shaped body like a sail.

  I hated the wind, too, but at least I could hide indoors. When one of our common-enough fifty-mile-per-hour windstorms hit with gusts exceeding seventy miles per hour, I would lie awake, feeling the cabin shake and listening to thunderous booms intermingling with painful moans and high-pitched screams. Cattle make similar noises during castration when steers bawl high and cows bellow low in response. Wind sometimes sounded like ten minutes of castration cries condensed into two minutes. Anonymous pounding periodically tracked along the roof and bounced down the leeward side. Objects hit the cottage with a thud and a bellow or knocked like hooves along the windward side, repeating at random intervals. My best guess was that cattle from the alfalfa fields, having gone airborne, were crashing into the house.

  And my dart? I hoped to be buried with one of my arrows. After forty minutes of unsuccessful searching in the tumbleweed-packed draw, I realized I was not going to be buried with that one.

  I tossed a bone-colored tumbleweed skeleton up and out of the draw. It was as intricate as coral and as wide as a grizzly bear’s head. It flew from my fingers, soaring like a paper kite. Without waiting for it to land, I grabbed another, snapping it into so many small pieces that a fox trotting down the slough could crush it into clay. I kept grabbing and tossing until I could see bare ground. The list of services I provided for Fox now included slough cleaning, weed pulling, dog chasing, and buck bouncing.

  And soon it would include shooing cats.

  A feral cat’s menacing shadow stretched toward the cottage. Cats are killing machines. They tear baby foxes from their dens and eat them alive. Okay. I only have proof that that happened once. But how many times do you need to watch a feral cat chase four tiny kits into their den? How long do you have to wait after the bloody cat emerges before accepting that nothing bigger than a beetle will be following it? How much do you owe the vixen who returns in the evening and finds that her babies have been reconstituted into cat shit? I hated feral cats. They ran riot on my property, jumping birds and pulling cottontails from their hiding places. One of them ate on my back steps, replacing the birds and rabbits with piles of offal. The whole area looked like an unlicensed abattoir. I could not bring myself to shoot the cat because it was just this side of pitiful. (And because, well . . . it was a cat.)

  Fox perched far to the side of my front steps, facing the cat and cowering. It wasn’t a big cat, but it competed with Fox for food—invertebrates, rodents, birds, and rabbits—and I expected that it understood, instinctively, that this land didn’t have enough resources to allow both it and Fox to earn a decent living here.

  Fox’s ancestors may have made their way here thousands of years ago, following people of America’s first nations as they trudged through melting walls of ice. But never once in all that time did they make the acquaintance of a single house cat. Pointy-shoed ladies carted cats to this continent from England. Cradled in the ladies’ warm laps (or some other equally embarrassing conveyance), cats arrived only recently. According to my county’s published history, our first non–Native American settlers, a few hundred gold miners who may have owned cats (or not), arrived in 1864. Because cats were relative newcomers, their prey—birds, lizards, and rabbits—may not have evolved avoidance strategies. Cats, I believe, enjoy a better living than honest predators have a right to expect.

  Twisting toward me, the cat shadow extended its head. Then the cat cried out.

  “Fox, make noise. Go on.” Silence. Not even a breeze in the dry grass stalks.

  I told Fox to hiss and spit. The cat hissed and spat. Fox alternated his gaze between me and the cat. I wanted him to chase the bully, stand up for himself, learn to fight, so he’d be ready when I wasn’t around to protect him.

  We waited for what seemed like forever, but Fox, clearly petrified, chose to exercise the better part of valor. The feral cat may have outweighed him by a dozen pounds—it was hard to tell with its skin so ruched and the fox’s so taut. “Yes, black is very slimming, Fox,” I said too softly for him to hear. “Surely this is a very fat cat under all that black.” Fox held his weak card close to his chest, by which I mean he withheld his breathy “qwah.”

  The cat was waiting for me to leave so it could jump him. In fact, it could easily kill him. One trait alone, the flat-face profile—the missing muzzle—that makes cats so apparently cute also gives them an unfair advantage. Biting down on a victim’s neck, a cat exerts the full force of its skull, whereas a fox’s long muzzle attenuates the force of its bite over a larger area. Power is equal to force divided by area. Cats have a more powerful bite because their force spreads over a smaller area. In a battle between that cat and Fox, Nature intended the cat to win. I did not. Slipping a matte green predator whistle between my lips, I blew one long shriek, the cry of an injured rabbit, meant to attract coyotes. The two predators scattered in opposite directions. I expected Fox to sulk for a while. Ten minutes later he was sniffing out voles in the front meadow. The cat didn’t return.

  And so, Fox added another tick to the tally of advantages he gained from our alliance: sunshine. I freed him from the confines of a nocturnal life. Instead of tucking into a dark, damp hole to hide from marauding dogs and feral cats until sunset, he romped through the pasture, harassing rodents and dazzling me with his acrobatics.

  If you were to come by around 4:15 any summer afternoon, the sight of us might bring to mind a couple of middle school truants playing hooky. One is reading something completely irrelevant to any responsible line of work, and the other—who should be nocturnal—is sunbathing and massaging his belly on the warm, gravelly driveway. Fox and I, complicit in each other’s monkey business, avoided our less enjoyable tasks—educating college students and young foxes—by playing chicken, reading nonsense, and sprawling in the sun.

  But you didn’t come by, or if you did, we hid.

  Not always successfully. Marco Antonio (the dog-owner) popped over with his camera one morning. “Did you see it?” he asked as he skidded down the cobblestone hill separating me from the back trail, “that little white animal?” Marco’s voice jarred me from deep reverie, and I muttered an acknowledgment, if not an answer.

  Marco Antonio ignored my lack of enthusiasm. “There! There!” he shouted, pointing the camera with one hand and poking my shoulder with the other, “Coyote!” Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Fox making a getaway across the wet meadow, skipping through the wi
ld rye.

  Marco pointed again. Fox kept running until even a close-up lens couldn’t distinguish him from a Daniel Boone hat. “Come back here,” Marco Antonio pleaded, passing me the digital camera. The sun’s glare completely obscured the screen.

  “Great photo.” I nodded exuberantly to add some authenticity to my lie. Meanwhile, Fox slowed to a walk.

  “It keeps wanting away from me.” Gazing at the disappearing fox, he called, “Stop!”

  “Remember that night I called you about the dogs? They were running down that little white animal. Not that one specifically. Not that one at all. But one just like that.” I handed back the camera.

  “It will come back?” Marco Antonio looked down at the camera, leaned toward the fox, who was now a half mile away, and depressed the magic button. “I think this photo is much better.”

  In the LCD screen, there was a tiny smear where a fox should have been. “Yes. Much better.”

  Satisfied, Marco Antonio checked out my odd paraphernalia. A hand spade and a covered red Folgers coffee can rested against my boots. I had been collecting fecal samples.

  “You are collecting. Something now special.”

  I nodded. The red Folgers can contained fox feces, deposition, time, and location known with approximate accuracy thanks to my Garmin wrist-GPS unit.

  “It’s a ball cactus to transplant to my garden.”

  Scat contains sloughed-off intestinal cells from which scientists can extract DNA. I was collecting fox shit to justify spending time with Fox, following up on suggestions made by the River Cabins students who knew I had interned on the Human Genome Project in Los Alamos while I was a doctoral candidate. Because I didn’t have a lab, I planned to hand the fox scat over to someone who did. Finding takers would have been trivial relative to the work of collecting and labeling the scat. DNA lab monkeys always wanted more shit. On university campuses all over the United States, labs were extracting DNA from scat because no one in authority could say no to shiny new technology, profuse government funds, and cheap graduate student labor. If you thought of all the reasons why you might want to know someone’s DNA, and their family’s DNA, and their neighbors’, and if you never stopped to think about the reasons why you did not need to know any of that, or about better ways to employ students and money, well then, you might just go ahead collecting shit and extracting DNA.