Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  Before I met the fox, I was planning my escape. Everything I’ve never had—a home, a credit card, an age- and gender-appropriate job—was waving at me from some imagined city. The cottage was meant to be a way station, somewhere to wait while I tugged on society’s skirt and hoisted myself from the wilderness to the real world. I still slept inside a sleeping bag, and like my backcountry cabins, the cottage was small. If I removed all the furniture and shut every door, six Ve24 tents could squeeze inside: four in the Rainbow Room and two below.

  After repacking clothes, I sorted old documents into storage bins, dropping university contracts, pay stubs, bills, and anything with my social security number into a bleach bath. Another day, I trekked fifteen miles round trip to offload the incriminating papier-mâché in “green boxes”—our valley’s euphemism for “dump site”—because I didn’t know that thieves wouldn’t steal the identity of one of the few adults in America who didn’t own a credit or a debit card.

  Behind the cottage, wheat grass was doing what it usually did on windy days: surging up the north hills like waves in a shallow sea. Pointing my face sunward and closing my eyes, I waited, but not a fine hair stirred. The waves of grass rippled, turning into sheets of elk. Scores of shaggy brown necks undulated against the blue sky. The elk herd would be winter-stressed and include tired, pregnant cows. Unless something was chasing them, elk in that condition were no more likely than an ocean to flow three hundred feet uphill. I listened for dogs barking or baying, checked the sky for eagles. Nothing. The silence suggested mountain lion.

  Mountain lion?

  Big cats were too pragmatic to waste energy running hundreds of shaggy beasts uphill. In fact, I couldn’t imagine any wild animal frivolous enough to be droving elk.

  He poked his tail up.

  “Fox?”

  One fox surrounded by a hundred Rocky Mountain elk, each adult outweighing him by a quarter ton.

  “Are you insane?” I said in a normal speaking voice, which to Fox, I imagined, sounded quite loud. “Do you know what an elk weighs?” (I used rhetorical questions because Fox couldn’t reply.)

  About a dozen strides brought him within two meters of me, and he stopped.

  “Qwah.”

  He had heard me speak on at least 380 separate days, usually for extended periods during our simulated conversations, and today, with a curtain of elk legs separating us, he recognized my voice for the first time. I picked up a white egg-shaped rock, sat on the back steps, and let our milestone moment sink in: he was now on the very short list of individuals who recognized my voice.

  I had known for a long while that Fox recognized my appearance; he came around whenever I walked down the driveway or through the north meadow when I made myself large and conspicuous by waving my arms overhead. He wasn’t just coming toward someone he recognized as a person. On five occasions he ran away from people crossing my property, including Marco, four of them my size, three of them females, and none of them me. Because Fox made it his business to investigate all the goings-on in his territory, anytime I suspected he was nearby, I made a little commotion by tapping a brownie-sized rock on the wooden front steps and, if he was close enough to hear, he came around. I had always thought I was tricking him. Now that I’m shedding more of my biases about his cognitive ability, I’m thinking that he was coming over for a round of hide-the-egg.

  He twisted his torso and gazed up at the previously bald hill now sporting a thick crew cut of brown, upright elk necks. Long elk faces turned in unison and gawked at us. A year had passed since I started reading with Fox; he had become braver without getting any bigger. He used to be frightened by a single mule deer buck, and now he was driving elk. Maybe friendship had emboldened him. I wondered if that was what friendship was supposed to do.

  A rust-colored eastern cottontail bobbed up the slope’s natural terrace eating soft, feathery grasses, days old. If the enormous rabbit could slip by the feral cat, it could work its way from these north-facing meadows—which would never be fully green—onto vaguely less-brown pastures across the gravel road.

  Fox was rubbing his neck through a stand of photogenic wild rye. Braided seed heads darted a couple of feet over his head, creating the perfect picture for a textbook photo. Instead of running for the camera, I waited. All the other photos of Fox had assimilated themselves into my life as though he were family: a leather-bound folder with two photos stood open on the bookshelf, magnetized frames attached Fox’s image to the fridge and heater, and two fourteen-by-sixteen-inch wood-framed matte prints hung above the cedar chest in the prairie rose room. Stealing shots for a textbook now felt unnatural. Would you take someone’s photo without asking permission? Would you do it if that someone were a friend? In the year that had passed since I’d started reading with Fox, I had become more sensitive without getting more sentimental.

  And the photo’s caption (there would have to be a caption), what would it say? “Here is Fox?” Posing for photographers was never Fox’s plan, and foxes, by nature, were planners. That’s why a Scottish poet likened man’s ability to lay plans with that of mice and not foxes, and that’s why the same poet noted that our “best laid schemes” (and not those of foxes) sometimes go astray. Using Fox for sidebar photos gave me an alibi for spending time with him every day. It was the one part of my life that was going according to plan. Of course, a bad plan realized is worse luck than a good plan foiled. Now I needed another pretty photo, which would be easy to find, and a new alibi, which would not.

  Cascading rocks alerted us to a small band of mule deer lined out and climbing west along craggy cliffs. The cottontail receded into rabbitbrush. Fox followed. I envied his ease of life. Not that he had an easier life. Just that he eased into his life. He didn’t spend much time alone. He collected all sorts of companions, most notably the magpie Tennis Ball. He also spent time with Torn Tail, the kits, the vixen, and an older male fox. And he had hobbies. Maybe some combination of physiology and genetics had led him to develop them. Maybe not, but, when I met him, he enjoyed more hobbies than I did. I spent more time working for, and worrying about, food and shelter than he did. Instead of hobbies, my free time belonged to unfinished applications for “real jobs” that I didn’t want to pursue, located in places where I didn’t want to live. My hobby had been worrying. I worried about what I wanted to be now that I was a grownup. I worried about where to make a real home now that I had overstayed the acceptable amount of time that one should domicile a “way station.” The more time I spent watching Fox, the less I worried. As long as he lived here, I wasn’t going to move away.

  I headed down to a scattered series of boulders and a motley arrangement of holes to see if the old badger had sprung any little ones out this year. Last spring, one young badger had pushed his fluffy head out of the den hole and rumbled like an erupting volcano. Its tiny body would have fit inside my hand, but the clever little animal, a member of the weasel family, didn’t reveal any more than the head. I suppose anyone who didn’t know that a young badger’s body was just a ball of fluff would judge the creature, according to its enormous ears, wing nut-shaped head, and ground-shaking roar, to be an underground troll. But if you knew it was harmless, you would instead notice that its navy-blue eyes were too big for its face, and its smile turned down like that of a sad old man. Despite the droll face, and their friendly demeanor, most everybody chooses to live where oversize weasels are not carving dusty holes the length of size-nine shoes into their lawn. Those of us who have barnacled ourselves to inhospitable places may be trying to avoid people not because we do not like people, but because we love the things that people destroyed. Wild things. Horizons. Trolls.

  Joseph Wolf’s 1856 painting Gyrfalcons Striking a Kite shows a pair of tame, tethered gyrfalcons ravaging a wild red kite. Wolf’s gyrfalcons look mean and angry as one grasps the nape of the kite’s neck and the other tears into its shoulder. While I studied the painting, one of my favorites, I concluded that,
Joseph Wolf, like his friend Charles Darwin, had understood the animosity between wild and domestic animals and was rooting for the wild ones. I wish he were alive today so he could paint domesticated cats in the act of brutalizing wild birds and foxes.

  Staring at Wolf’s painting at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming, I felt the kite’s pain so keenly, I shivered. I wanted to free it, but after listening to the painting for a while, I realized that Wolf had portrayed it beyond pleading; the kite was dying with its mouth open in a death cry. Standing with my toes on the silver band of duct tape two feet from the canvas and looking at a kite with a face as big as mine, I saw that it wasn’t looking at its feathered murderers. It was looking at me and anyone else who might never see a wild kite, but who instead would grow up in a world dominated by humans and their pets. What have you done? the kite cries to us.

  Perhaps a caged gyrfalcon is as valuable as a free-living falcon, but they act differently. Caged animals, unlike wild animals, benefit from our human-centric world and are cowed by us.

  I realized that what mattered most to me was not what something was, but its behavior: how it lived and what it did.

  I shared my revelation with Fox a few days later.

  “You know what I’m going to be now that I’m grown up? A verb.”

  A verb?

  “Well, a verb, an adverb. Adjectives are allowed too.”

  I had been trying to define myself with a noun, a title that identified an occupation, while I should have been relying on verbs. Entitling nouns deceived people. Maybe on purpose. I would rather someone tell me that he sings than that he is a singer. The latter phrase is trying to nudge me someplace I may not want to go. He hunts is a specific phrase, weighted with responsibility; he is a hunter implies more than it guarantees. To say, “I teach and guide students” seemed more honest than saying, “I’m a professor.” I didn’t need to be: I needed to do. So I began to choose some verbs: write, teach, explore the relationship between people and wild animals. Tend a property.

  How often in life do we discover that the source of all our worries is simply a poor grammatical choice?

  If Fox could talk, he’d say, What took you so long?

  “Well, I . . .”

  Oh, you’re not there yet. If you want to be a wild animal and live the good life, you have two things to figure out.

  “What I want to do . . . and . . .”

  Habit. And Habitat. Two things.

  From the Latin habitus, meaning “character,” habit refers to how we act and what we do. From the Latin habitare, meaning “to inhabit,” habitat refers to where we live. These two variables, which describe our character and our home, apply to every living thing. I should have remembered. When I preserved specimens for herbarium collections at Voyageurs National Park, I recorded both those variables for each pressed plant. Somehow, I had forgotten, mistakenly thinking that I was supposed to choose a profession, label myself with an entitling noun, and follow my career. To wherever.

  Ishmael and Saint-Ex chose their habitats first. Then they found jobs that fit. Doing whatever. Do you want a topnotch education? You don’t have to live in Boston. “The sea is my Harvard,” writes Ishmael, and he goes on to simulate a university life while crewing on the Pequod. In Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Ex writes that he became a pilot because “an airplane is a means of getting away from towns and their bookkeeping and coming to grips with reality.” This is no trivial sacrifice. A person would have to really abhor towns to take up cross-continental flying in the 1920s. He flew over the Andes, for goodness sake. But “a man cannot live a decent life in cities,” he writes. In the winter a neighbor of mine from downriver rescued me with his front-end loader. There were eighteen inches of snow on my lane. In the summer, a few other people used this road, but in the winter, only me. We lamented that we had so much road to plow and so few houses here to share the cost. When I asked my neighbor if he’d be moving to the townsite like most everyone else, he said, “I would slit my throat before I’d live in a town.” Which, when you think about it, is just as likely to be fatal as flying a tin can over the Andes in a snowstorm.

  “Men will die,” Saint-Ex writes in Wind, Sand and Stars, “for a calcined, leafless, stony mountain . . . will defend to the death their great store of sand as if it were a treasure of gold dust.” Not all animals need space, solitude, and wildness, but all animals need to fight for their optimum habitat, whatever it is. Fox and I spread our toes in the Indian ricegrass and faced the sun, heliotropic, like Darwin’s mustards, feeling no less dependent upon the sun for energy than the plants around us. And we—me and the fox who now recognized my voice—kept turning.

  elephants

  By early May, we had read The Little Prince several times. Since I never bothered with a bookmark, we read freestyle. Most days I did more talking than reading. When my supply of scintillating stories ran out, I brought out a new book. Fox had to listen to me read from Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!, a glossy, red oversize book about an eponymous elephant who hears the peep of an eponymous Who in the thunderous Jungle of Nool. No other book in my cottage seemed appropriate for someone with an eighteen-minute attention span and modest mental acuity.

  “Whos are so small that their entire town fits on a tiny speck embedded in a thistle.” I held up a drawing of a vulture-like bird with a single flower in its beak. “Black-bottomed eagle. It’s making off with the thistle with Whoville inside.” Fox tilted his chin up for a view. In the story, the vulture-like bird drops the Whos’ thistle into a field with a billion other thistles. The endangered Whos call out for help, and only the caring, observant, and big-eared Horton can hear them. “Horton,” I said, holding up another page, “sets out to find the Whos, one thistle at a time.”

  When the wind wasn’t blowing, our valley was well suited to reading alfresco: cozy, well lit, and not too tight. And private. Although several landowners divided the foothills, borders were invisible, structures were scarce, and fences uncommon. You might find a bit of barbed wire wrapped around a few cattle paddocks and chicken coops, a couple strips of post-and-pole-confined mules and horses.

  Fox and I followed a party of four resident deer shuffling toward his den. In the dusky light, their backsides formed three white streaks of distinct phosphorescent guidelines: the tail in the center and two lines along the backs of each lower leg. “I wonder if that has a purpose, Fox—all that glowing like highway markers?” I guessed, out loud, that backside markings allowed deer to follow each other and march in straight lines. We stopped speculating about deer when we came to a patch of white sage. After checking that thatch ants weren’t hanging underneath, I pruned a bouquet of long, soft leaves and slipped them into my coat pocket.

  Phosphorescent white markings on mule deer had a purpose only if straight lines also had a purpose. So, there was our next topic: the essence of straight lines. I didn’t care what we discussed. His inability to precisely understand me afforded a limitless number of engaging topics.

  The four deer joined a herd line crossing the alfalfa field below us. Walking in a straight line would save deer energy if they were plowing through deep snow because only the lead deer would break new trail and everyone else would use less energy than the animal it was following. But the field wasn’t snowy. Maybe the straight line confined their scent and shrunk whatever advertisement they’d be flashing to predators. Maybe not. We didn’t need an answer; we really just wanted to stretch and poke around. I squinted, my eyelids fluttered, and the deer became pylons lined up in the seemingly endless emptiness of east central Montana.

  Yes, Fox and I were goofing off. We were not doing science, collecting data, or writing hypotheses; he wasn’t helping me write a textbook. Instead, we were entertaining ourselves with an endeavor no more intellectually rigorous than playing with green army dolls. Night after night, when more respectable individuals paired up and watched TV or visited movie theaters or leaned on c
ounters spotted with gooey droplets of yellowing cream and called fancy drink orders to a barista, Fox and I spied around.

  Days after our discourse on deer, he disappeared. I sat alone at the rendezvous site. Grief descended on the fourth day. I didn’t recognize it. By focusing specifically on one goal—finding the fox—I reduced everything around me to a blur. It’s not that hard to do if you are used to looking through a bow sight. Meanwhile, the target image in the center—the lost fox—grew so large that all the images necessary to maintain sanity disappeared, and madness enveloped me.

  I walked miles from the cottage along gravel roads until they ended on private land; I followed faint dirt trails until they disappeared into bedrock. Almost four miles from the cottage, a man hoeing a tiny garden outside a single-story modular house hadn’t seen a fox. Not even after I asked him six or seven times. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been wearing such an old and poorly engineered down coat. While pleading my case, raising my arms and gesticulating, I noticed white feathers raining on me. They were escaping through the seams of my coat and floating around me like I was a crazed cooped chicken.

  Every passing truck, either government or civilian, deepened my paranoia that a human predator had taken advantage of Fox’s good nature. Federal personnel would be out trapping who-knows-what for whatever reason. Civilians shot anything capable of menacing chickens and anything that looked like it might grow up to be a coyote. Lion chasing, a popular (and legal) habit-forming sport, kept hunters and their hound dogs on the prowl in the surrounding wilderness. A lion hound without a mountain lion to tail is a hound on the trail of a fox. Trucks drove down from the National Forest behind me every day, all with stocked gun racks in the cab and ominous boxes in the bay. And each one could have been holding Fox—dead, caged, or manacled.