Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  Playing hide-the-egg and chicken with Fox awakened my imagination and attenuated my attitude about realism—the belief that only facts matter. Every game forced me to ask questions that have no answers: What is the extent of Fox’s personality? What is the depth of our connection? Saint-Ex tells us that it’s necessary to ask this type of question in order to be creative. While I am no longer immune to overzealous realism, I am wary of it, thanks to a booster shot from Fox.

  As his role in my life expanded, keeping our relationship secret became impossible. When Jenna called, she would ask about the fox before discussing class evaluations.

  “Well, I don’t know that he’s a friend, but I’m not studying him anymore.”

  “I didn’t think that would work.” Jenna knew before I did that Fox was my friend and that I could not both treat him as an object and empathize with him.

  “I’m writing another textbook for school kids. Natural history. He’s helping me write it. I’m using him for the anecdotes.”

  “Does he know this?” she asked.

  “No big deal. I’m not putting him in every chapter. Just a few sentences at the beginning of some, or in material for little shaded boxes scattered about the book.”

  In other words, I needed to hang out with Fox to catch him in photogenic poses for textbook sidebars. That’s what I told Jenna, anyway. The explanation summed up our relationship just fine, highlighting the fact that I was working on a project—a textbook—and not lollygagging with foxes all day. I built up my little alibi until I had quite a nice pile of . . . snow. Except that calling him Fox instead of “the fox” was too much salt in the snow—the fact that I addressed him at all. My alibi was melting away. I tried not to notice.

  Copyeditors had just finished with my first book, a middle-school textbook called Forestry: The Green World. Chelsea House published it before the end of winter. The book included some first-person anecdotes but generally lacked creativity. Now I wanted to complete a biology-based natural history textbook for middle-school students, one that forced readers outdoors, where they would observe plants and animals with their own eyes. I had taught from dozens of college-level biology textbooks. All of them introduced students to natural history by keeping them inside memorizing facts and formulas about chemicals and molecules and energy. They could have been written by Victor Frankenstein’s professors.

  If you sat in the Rainbow Room—seven window shades dyed to represent a readily observable natural phenomenon—and thought about writing a textbook that explained natural history, would you start by analyzing molecules? Beginning Abraham Lincoln’s biography by discussing his blood type would be equally logical. “Start small,” an overused adage, does not mandate limiting yourself to physical smallness. “Small” means “simple.” And things you see with a naked eye are simpler than invisible things. Besides, molecules are not big enough to be small. Molecules are minutia.

  Minutia do not lend themselves to engaging sidebars.

  When I was an undergraduate, I read an essay by Albert Szent-Györgyi, a whole-organism biologist, in which he warned against searching for life by dissecting it into increasingly smaller pieces. He made the mistake himself. Here’s what he wrote in that essay: “This downward journey through the scale of dimensions had its irony, for in my search for the secret of life, I ended up with atoms and electrons which have no life at all. Somewhere along the line, life has run out through my fingers.”

  Szent-Györgyi, a Nobel Prize winner credited with discovering vitamin C, died while I was an undergraduate. A copy of that essay, xeroxed from my sophomore cell biology textbook, traveled with me for over twenty years, during which time I lived like a nomad without any home base or permanent storage unit. I did not want school kids to let life slip through their fingers. I wanted a textbook to open with big and simple images. And then I could parse. Or maybe just stay big.

  Every minute I spent observing Fox (supposedly while collecting anecdotes and photographs) increased my admiration for his nonverbal communication skills. For example, I might find myself without his company because he wanted to move toward an attraction: a mouse or a mate was calling. Other times he left because he wanted to move away from me: for example, in becoming interested in observing one of the omnipresent red-tailed hawks, I had failed to entertain him sufficiently and his attention span had snapped. He could never compete with a diving red-tailed hawk; I’d seen Fox pick up hundreds of rodents but had only once watched a successful red-tailed hunt at close range. I was sitting on the ground when it happened; the hawk’s kill sprayed me with robin feathers and created an addictive attachment to the thrill. Whatever his reasons, when Fox left, he signaled to me first, either scanning the ground or turning back and glaring. Yes, a mute fox communicated more effectively than I did. Actions and eyes; subtext without text.

  Sometimes when we relaxed, the cinnamon vixen wailed from the den and Fox ignored her, hunkering down tight. But never for long. Many times, he stood poised between my back door and his den with rodent tails swaying from his jaws. Turning his head between the two destinations, he considered his options. Who doesn’t face the same dilemma every day? Fox and I were always balancing duty and freedom. Sometimes, he pushed through the problem, choosing to meet his obligations and walking to the den as reluctantly as if mud had clumped up his paws. One evening he responded to the vixen’s summons by padding off slowly to the end of my driveway, where he lay down and enjoyed a momentary relief from indenture until she called a second time and he charged uphill to the juniper glade.

  Gestures, actions, and facial expressions may be less precise than the spoken word, but they are altogether a more reliable form of communication. Reading to Fox mattered because of pauses and eye contact. Our actions, not our words, built our trust in each other, and we based our relationship on shared activities, not dialogue. In fact, I was more relaxed communicating to Fox than I would have been with a person. Consider how difficult it is to communicate when our tongues send us in one direction and our feet take us in another.

  spotted foxes

  By mid-autumn, the fox had entwined his life so tightly around mine that my colleagues stopped separating into two distinct sentences their inquiries about my health and his.

  “Fox is good,” I’d answer. After exhaling loudly, I’d continue, “And I am okay too.”

  “How are you and the neighbor getting along?” Jenna would ask me, or if was Martha: “How are you and your friend doing?” I ignored the questionable epithets and replied that we were plugging vole holes, packing down gopher mounds, and keeping rabbits on the run. If it was a hot and calm October day, I would admit to nothing more energetic than soaking up sun like cold-blooded sagebrush lizards.

  When my colleague Bea emailed from Florida State University wanting more information about Fox, I might reply:

  “He wears his coat like a straight-tailed Pomeranian. Alert and thick.”

  “In quiet, dry snow he leaps often and dives deep. When the rain is loud or the snow thick as cement, he shelters under a juniper canopy.”

  “He suffers a large potbellied magpie who nests in my juniper tree with unnecessary politeness.”

  Bea knew about the egg yolks and asked whether they’d shined up his coat.

  “Yes. He glows. I need sunglasses to look at him.”

  I continued disseminating eggshell-spiked coffee grounds to slow the downslope drift of my cottage in the unreliable clay soil. Fox continued baiting his trapline with the grounds. I bragged to Jenna about his new skill.

  “Rein him in,” she said.

  Jenna was divorced and sophisticated by my standards. She was speedy smart because she supervised lots of people and couldn’t waste time doling out wisdom willy-nilly. During the three years we had worked together, she advised me about teaching and about dealing with tricky people. I think her soft spot for me came from our shared history of loving and caring for wild land. The federal gover
nment had taken hers. “Eminent domain,” the government says when they force you to sell them your land. When she lost her cabin in Montana’s Bridger Mountains, she lost her marriage. Children hold some marriages together. When the children move on, the marriages disintegrate. Land tied Jenna’s marriage together. Forest swaddled her and her husband; they hiked and skied and relaxed. Taking care of the land, bonding over common interests, they envisioned a future. With the cabin gone, the marriage desiccated and blew away. Losing her marriage reduced her income, and she eventually found a new job and relocated to a small city. Lacking ties to the land, her children scattered. Eventually she would leave the state to join her grandchildren.

  “You can’t let the neighbor run a trapline on your property.”

  But I could not make Fox, my “neighbor,” give up trapping; it was one of his hobbies. Sure, he had other hobbies too: playing chicken and hide-the-egg, spying on me, trespassing. I agreed with Jenna that it seemed like “more than enough,” without knowing the requisite number of hobbies due a fox. The rule of thumb, more nefariously known as a paradigm, implied that wild foxes, like other unboxed animals, fulfilled their biological obligations by eating, reproducing, and seeking shelter, and therefore could do without any hobbies at all.

  Lifting the shade, I stared into the eyes of mule deer—looking surprised even after seeing me for the hundredth consecutive morning. They knew me, but with extra sets of eyelashes above and below their eyes and each set two inches long, muleys have a default facial expression that resembles surprise. A yearling buck on the doorstep, pressing his wet nose under soft fencing, was sucking berries off arching snowberry branches that the fencing was meant to protect. A meter away, a fawn was eating the skunk’s orange rinds. Adult does gawked at me, some with pregnant bellies dropping into the snow, others with aging backbones poking through their hide.

  When the sun was higher, I hiked uphill, shuffling forward through knee-high snow, pushing mukluks as if they were snowplows. Blowing up and aside like goose down, the snow landed on Fox, who was following behind, sniffing for partridge. Indian ricegrass seed heads with ice-coated grains swayed in the light breeze, looking like chandeliers.

  A mule deer doe thought she might block my way (everyone knows uphill hikers have the right of way), so I challenged her to a game of chicken. With her twins and my fox watching, neither of us wanted to blink first. I won. Of course, in midwinter at six thousand feet on the forty-fifth parallel, deer blink just to keep their eyelashes from freezing together.

  Never mind our peaceful trek, Tennis Ball and two juveniles appeared, landing sequentially in three separate firs. “Foxssss,” I whispered, “we’ve been staked out.”

  Swooping into piles of snow that shimmered like fish scales, the magpies carved elegant scalloped patterns with their wings. I tried looking away, but even now I remember their jeweled shine and beveled tails. Admiring your enemies is a wearying task.

  From where we stood, we couldn’t see a single road or house. Despite the cold, I felt cozy and safe. I told Jenna that I was observing Fox and collecting anecdotes for my textbook. And when she said, “Still?” with her eyebrows rising through the phone line, I claimed to be extrapolating him into The Exemplary Wild Animal.

  “That’s what you do when you write a textbook, Jenna. Extrapolate. Shave off the outlier elements; mold a specific individual into a model of a generic individual.”

  To remind me that he was not an exemplary wild animal, or even an exemplary fox, she asked me about his trapline.

  Then there was Martha. The first time I told her that a fox was dogging me around, she said, “Right. He’s your friend.”

  He wasn’t. I didn’t know much about him then, except that he liked to play and win games and had a fast obsession with fat, scab-sucking houseflies. Martha should have been less concerned with his obsession and more worried about my knee’s oozing new scab, the result of a slip and roll along a steep trail while I was jogging alone chasing the eagles up the cliff on the day I first met Fox. I could have died. Martha didn’t ask how I got the scab. Instead, she pointed out that I’d never had a fox friend (or even a close friend) before, and that my knees, well . . . they were always scabby.

  Martha and I had been park service coworkers and neighbors in Glacier Park, where I still owned five wooded acres near her farm. I’d bought the land from her years earlier: green paper cash down from my back pocket; a scrap-paper remit. No interest. A quitclaim deed when I paid it off. Her property ran along the Scenic Flathead River, which was capital S Scenic because of an Act of Congress. For seventy years, Martha had been living on her father’s homestead along that Wild and Scenic River, with black bears in the apple trees, elk in the hay fields, and nine cords of firewood on the porch. Other than photos of beloved brothers who flew into WWII and didn’t fly home, the house hadn’t had a man in it in the fifty years since her father died. In those early days before I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in zoology, I respected her knowledge about animals above anyone else’s. After I finished my doctorate, my opinion of her hadn’t changed.

  Martha was enough older than me that I treated her with a deference that I think people reserve for their bosses rather than their friends. She knew something about me, and she wouldn’t tell for another couple of years. Instead, and in the meanwhile, she said that the fox understood I was different from other people. We were rocking in upholstered wingbacks next to her wood stove that spring I met Fox. I unspooled stories about him while we looked out her bay windows for bald eagles hiding in the snow-topped pines. After pointing to the same eagle we’d been pointing to for fifteen years, she told me to stick with Fox. I listened to the stove burping and spitting, and she interpreted my long silence as ambivalence (which it was). She told me she knew Fox and I belonged together.

  Only Martha knew about the times Fox pressed his paws against my window while standing on his hind legs. I was out front pruning caragana the first time. Deer had been browsing on them indiscriminately, and I needed to realign their height and spread so that all of them could enjoy sunshine. A swath of wheatgrass that was too high for Fox to see over blocked his view of me. In his stretched-up position, he looked thin and pitiful, and, I thought, he must have been lonely. I’m sure he was looking for me. I watched him move to a second window. I didn’t want to startle him, so I wandered around, picking up interesting rocks and knocking them to make a slight noise. He turned from the window, saw me, and started mousing. That was one of the things I enjoyed most about Fox: being together, while doing separate things.

  When I visited Martha at the beginning of my second summer with Fox, she told me he wanted company. I’d been living by myself for what seemed like forever and wondered, aloud, why I never felt alone. If Martha knew, she kept it to herself. Instead, she asked about Fox’s little ones.

  “Not a single kit made it through the winter. They were tiny. I mistook them for weasels when they were a month old.”

  “Foxes are small.”

  “Baby weasels.”

  “I think that might be what fox kits look like.”

  “Kits from the alfalfa field den have meaty limbs. They swagger around like young wolverines.”

  The kits at Fox’s den the following year would also end up looking and acting weaselly. They would be wild and squirmy animals. Jittery, out of control, flexible, and fast.

  Regardless of the number of degrees below zero, Fox bustled around on the dry, calm, sunny days of winter. Wearing every hair perpendicular to his hide, he looked like a giant salsify seed head. When winter wind blew boxcars off the railroad tracks at the foot of the valley, Fox hunkered down, keeping himself dry and leeward in the powder-snow basins above his den. Winter sun melted the snow, packing it down until it was hard and slick as ice. Although foxes belong to the dog family, their bones are less dense and weigh less than dog bones of the same size. Fox’s chevron-decorated footpads left a slight depression in the hardpack, too sh
allow to keep him from skittering out of control when the wind blew. Ballasted with heavy bones, a big belly, and twenty pounds to Fox’s six, the feral cat and its unadorned pads tracked straight across the icy snow.

  Neither Fox nor I was crazy enough to enjoy sitting still on frigid days, so we ixnayed our reading rendezvous until early March. Instead, if snow had fallen overnight, I was out early checking on tracks. Fox often walked in an elegant straight line, each foot directly in front of, or behind, another. I do something similar when performing the classic kick turn for cross-country skiers. I swing the toe of my right ski up, point it skyward, turn to my right while balancing on the left ski, plant the right ski about 180 degrees to the right, and lay it as near as possible into its own indentation. The left ski is then pointing forward, and the right ski is pointing as nearly backward as my ligaments permit. Then I swing the left ski up and around to the right and make a fresh track. Reusing my original two tracks allows me to change direction without further scarring the snow. I don’t like messing up the snow and leaving a big oafish sign of my presence. My deep tracks can freeze into an extra mountain for a field mouse to climb, a ridge for an ermine to scale, one extra ditch waiting to turn the ankle of a running deer. I try to be courteous. The tracks we trouble to leave behind tell a story about our character.