Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  “Hush.” It hushed. I checked around and convinced myself it wasn’t in any danger. “Go on.” It went. Its tail waved high, and I could see that someone had taken an irreplaceable bite from its white tassel, leaving only a few wispy strands on the right edge.

  When the hooligan called reveille again the next morning, I reported for roll call. After satisfying itself that I had responded appropriately, the kit moved on. At sunup the morning after that, it screamed again. Yipping at dawn became a regular and yet unpredictable event. I felt like a hoodwinked townsman in Aesop’s fable listening to a shepherd boy call “Wolf!” So the next time a hooligan cried at dawn, I hesitated by the window instead of running outside. A wounded tail, kinked like the neck of a trumpeter swan, poked out of the short grasses. That was enough to remind me that the lives of young wild animals skew toward disaster. I ran out the door. A great land baron steps up when an earnest young fox calls for a fire drill.

  Emergency preparedness training wasn’t their only hobby. The hooligans stole things. Pretty much anything they could carry off: melamine plates, plastic planters, plant tags. And even some things they couldn’t carry off. After spotting a bright red line writhing through the grasses, I intercepted a role of flagging in mid-hijack.

  Two years before Fox arrived, a vixen had given birth in a den adjacent to my backyard parking pad, not twenty-two meters from the bathroom window. When they were a month old, the kits played and wandered a few meters beyond the den. I got a great view by pulling off the window screen and kneeling on the toilet. Every evening, the vixen returned from hunting and stood straight-legged and stone-still while the four largest kits jumped underneath her and nursed. Night after night, four stocky kits finished nursing and ran off, leaving the fifth and unfed runt bumping its head up against the vixen’s underside trying to coax milk from her empty teats. Night by night the deflated runt shrank, flattening further into the ground. One morning nothing remained but orange fuzz and four fat survivors. They squealed and ducked into one of their two den holes, keeping their distance from me. But not their secrets.

  The mother of the frisky foursome was relatively bold and unafraid of the cottage, often hunting in my back meadow. The vixen from Fox’s den rarely came outside in daylight, didn’t hunt on my property, and never traveled with Fox except the one time she and Fox ambushed a small black feral cat below Pillbox Hat Hill. I was watching with binoculars. The cat was ambling slowly into a juniper’s shadow. I would have sworn no other large animal was around, when the vixen, like a phantom, appeared in front of it. She swatted her long arm across the cat’s face. Fox emerged from the uphill gully, a couple of meters behind the cat’s tail. He chomped through the cat’s shoulders, crushing its windpipe. I imagined hearing a gurgle and a loud escape of air.

  With the dead cat hanging limp from his jaws, Fox watched the vixen run the fastest route to the den area. When she was out of sight, he came right to my cottage. He wasted an enormous amount of energy by loping past me with his dead cat’s tail swinging from one side of his jaw. The route brought him farther downhill and about fifteen minutes out of his way; he lost both distance and elevation. But he achieved his purpose: flaunting that dead cat to impress me.

  Of course, I don’t know why he ran past me. Not because he was a fox, but because he was an individual. I don’t know what motivates all my actions, let alone someone else’s. I’ll never know, for example, why anyone treats me the way they do. I certainly couldn’t discover the truth by simply asking. People use words to communicate, and, knowingly or not, those words can be false. So I interpret what people say by watching what they do. Otherwise, if I’m relying on people’s words, I am always getting tricked. Fox was easier to understand than people because he couldn’t use words to deceive me.

  Within a week, Jenna’s university program with the University of Montana Western would bring me deep into Yellowstone National Park—three hours deep and seven days away from Fox. I became sullen as my field trip approached, wading through seas of tall grasses, first with him in my wake, later with me in his. I hiked to his den, where Fox looked down on a thin band of clouds floating below us, parallel to—and just above—the river. Enjoying their carefree existence, the surviving kits tussled on the long flat rock that topped their condo complex: one adult, three kits, no discipline. When I said goodbye, a cluster of tiny clouds floated in the sky, like an archipelago in a crystal-clear ocean.

  Driving to Yellowstone, I practiced saying, “My best friend is a fox.”

  I know man’s best friend is supposed to be a dog, but only because people pull the French philosopher François Voltaire’s quote out of context. He never actually said, “A dog is man’s best friend.” And, anyway, long before Voltaire, Middle Eastern girls were befriending foxes. In the Levant, the region that today encompasses Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine, 16,000-year-old graves cradle the bodies of girls, dogs, and foxes. A series of 8,000-year-old graves discovered in northern Israel tell a similar story. The dogs were working animals and dependent upon people. Not the foxes. Anthropologists figured that out by examining the bones and their stomach contents. Like their owners, the dogs ate grains, something they would never eat unless people were feeding them. The buried foxes remained true to a wild diet. It seems the dogs were pets and property; the foxes, I suspect, were friends.

  “Nature has given the dog to man for his defense,” wrote Voltaire, “and for his pleasure. Of all the animals it is the most faithful: it is the best friend man can have.” When I met Fox, I couldn’t admit to knowing anything about friendship. Now I know this: Voltaire has low standards for a famous guy. Defense and loyalty? A best friend should give you something money can’t buy.

  I planned to wait for an appropriate moment to announce, “My best friend is a fox,” and while the students were cocking their heads in the classic pose of canine inquisitiveness, I would confuse them by adding that I was the loner who didn’t want a friend, and he—the fox—was a bon vivant who dogged me around until I gave in. I would explain that Fox was a wild animal—not a pet—and that he chose his own companions and lived as independently from me as any one of them did.

  “My best friend is a wild red fox.”

  They stared as if I were wearing cropped green jeans trimmed with orange ribbon. Apparently, the moment was not appropriate.

  In hindsight: Everyone assumes that if your best friend is a fox, your only friend is a fox. And that was not the sort of thing anyone should have been bragging about. I could have denied his existence or our relationship, but what if the knowledge that his friend was a person was a source of pride for the fox? What amount of ego could justify an omission that might supply a modicum of satisfaction to a powerless tiny animal like Fox?

  When Saint-Ex was dying in the Sahara Desert, foxes comforted him. He befriended them. Though he could have eaten one to save his life, he understood that we should not eat our friends no matter the temptation. If Saint-Ex wouldn’t eat a fox to save his life, I wouldn’t disown one to save face. I’d rather have people ridicule me for having a nit’s wit than a snake’s tongue.

  Before meeting Fox, I avoided humanizing wild animals, an attitude I picked up in my scientific training and in my professional life as a ranger. I passed that attitude on to my students. The summer before I met him, I brought students to the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming, on a cold summer day: windy, thirty-four degrees, and drizzling. In other words, too nice to let a museum enshroud me, but my contract said otherwise. We entered the museum, and a painting of swans accosted us. It was loud and mislabeled.

  An artist had painted the swans with bright orange bills and curvy necks. Their eyes cast demurely downward as if admiring their own reflections. They were mute swans, Cygnus olor: classic, elegant, and European. Mutes populate the pages of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, floating in castle moats with their wings arched up over their backs. Lovely. And silent.

  The plaque read: “Tr
umpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator).”

  You’d think a wildlife artist would know the difference between a European mute swan and a native trumpeter swan, especially since the museum specialized in native wildlife. Trumpeters are stockier birds with black beaks. Instead of classic curvy necks and downcast faces, trumpeters hold their bills perpendicular to their tall straight necks. They float with their wings gripping their flanks, whereas mutes keep their wings ruffled up in an alluring pose. Instead of Ss, mutes are plumb-necked Zs. And they aren’t silent; they sound like a honking car rodeo. Almost no one finds them as attractive as mutes. Sometimes trumpeters swished over my head when I skied. Sometimes they flew close enough that I could touch one with my raised ski pole, close enough for me to realize that their wingspan exceeded my height. They weren’t just bigger than mutes; they were bigger than everything—they were North America’s largest waterfowl. And we almost exterminated them.

  Two hundred years ago, anyone floating the Mississippi River or fishing Chesapeake Bay could have watched trumpeter swans flying overhead. Between 1850 and 1880, the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson Bay (later shortened to Hudson’s Bay Company) collected eighteen thousand swan skins—almost all of them peeled off trumpeters—and turned them into women’s fashion accessories. Americans coveted the feathers but not the bird; landowners killed them and restocked their ponds with silent, beautiful European swans. By the time the Great Depression descended, fewer than a hundred trumpeters survived in the United States. Now that they are no longer harvested, trumpeters number in the tens of thousands. Some of that increase is due to reintroductions, including in my own valley. Most of them winter in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming; we could see a dozen from the museum’s rocky parapet.

  The artist had confused mutes with trumpeters. Fortunately for my students, my doctoral degree and I had come prepared with facts. One of Montana’s most famous wildlife artists, Mr. S., was outside lecturing in the sculpture garden, and when he paused for questions, my hand shot right up. I shook my little facts out like loaded dice on a craps table, ending with an emphatic, “So! Those are not trumpeter swans in your painting.”

  “Oh, no, they are,” he replied calmly after a split-second pause. “In fact, they’re vain trumpeters, and for that reason, they are pretending to be mute swans.”

  Naturally, I thought he was a jerk.

  Graduate school training had led me to believe that understanding animals required gathering facts and creating objective and quantifiable data. Nothing more. I lost my imagination and ignored the importance of intuition. I thought it made me more professional. It didn’t. Never mind that Mr. S. was an artist and I was a biologist; lack of imagination is not a career choice, it’s a personality crisis.

  Three years after I sauntered away from Mr. S., I was heading back to the museum with a similar class to show my students what a trumpeter swan looks like when it’s putting on airs. Some of them would accuse me of fitting Mark Twain’s definition of a nature-fakir: “a person who knows more about an animal than the animal knows about itself.” I was fine with that. After all, there was a fox sunning above the Yellowstone River who knew more about me than I knew about myself.

  sand dollars

  I finished presenting the last slideshow of our weeklong field class. Thirty-five miles upriver from my cottage, I was anxious to go home. While our cabins were tucked into a damp green oasis, Fox had been suffering in an alarmingly dry August, and I was worried. Outside the auditorium, the sweet odor of rotting fruit wafted off the canker wounds in the cottonwoods. Cow elk meandered through the parking lot with their noses in the air, acting disaffected while their calves tried to nurse. Under a lamplight, Yellowstone’s Mammoth Subdistrict Ranger was waiting for me. “Wildfire . . . fifty-mile-per-hour winds . . . road closed . . . evacuations likely.”

  This was not my first evacuation. In 2003, I had evacuated those five wooded acres next to Glacier National Park that I had purchased from Martha. No one expects a place called “glacier” to burn. Like International Falls, Minnesota, but a few thousand feet higher, Glacier’s northern boundary follows the forty-ninth parallel. Annual snowfall on my parcel averaged thirteen feet. The year of the evacuation, I had been skiing in Glacier on the Fourth of July. Then it got hot. Weeks passed without rain. Inside the forest, sparks from multiple sources exploded into wildfires. I stored my skis on July 8, and twenty days later, with the Robert Fire advancing toward my property, officials issued evacuation orders.

  Robert was only one fire in a complex of wildfires that bit 136,000 acres and some outbuildings out of the Glacier National Park area. I didn’t have a house on my land, but if I did, I would have been able to rebuild it in less than a year. If I lost the western red cedars on my property, I wouldn’t see them restored in my lifetime. Of course, old cedars—several hundred years old—can handle themselves in a wildfire. Ancient cedars might even benefit from a wildfire if it burned away the pesky underbrush. My red cedars were about eighty years old and living at the eastern extent of their natural range. They loved humidity and shade. If wildfire removed the forest canopy, sunlight would heat the soil, drying it out and killing the red cedar embryos. Seeds that survived the drought wouldn’t germinate until after pines and firs grew up, branched out, and shaded the forest floor.

  Someone started the Robert Fire. Law enforcement officers didn’t charge anyone, but they assigned the cause to either arson or human error, something like a four-foot log left burning in a campfire circle with a two-foot diameter. I would be more forgiving if Nature had started the fire by throwing a lightning bolt and cracking open one of those Douglas firs that were so tall I couldn’t see the crown with my head tipped all the way back. Manmade fires demoralize me. They remind me that we are too many people living in too small a space and that I share the planet with bad people for whom we will never have enough space.

  On the Robert, managers steered the wildfire away from private forests and cabins using an aggressive technique known as back-burning—fighting fire with fire. To get the back-burn started, helicopters dropped fuel-filled Ping-Pong balls that ignited when they hit the ground. The backfire was meant to produce an updraft that would pull the fire away from private landholdings—including mine. Backfires are dangerous. If the management-ignited fire blew in the wrong direction, the Robert would have incinerated a great deal of private property. Back-burns are also dangerous for firefighters. I’d been a buck firefighter under Ping-Pong balls in Hells Canyon, Idaho. I thought I might die. As the balls were dropping, a few went astray, wind and mass being what they are. We had to run after the wayward balls and beat out the flames and then run back uphill to the safety of the rocky ridgetop. On the Robert, the back-burn worked, and my little cedars survived.

  Facing my second evacuation, I checked into a motel in Gardiner, a hamlet straddling the Yellowstone River. The next morning, I was sitting at the counter of a diner, scraping my fork across a plate of cold scrambled eggs. Our county undersheriff lumbered in wearing a radio that was crackling barely audible commands. Keeping his head down, he pushed through the kitchen doors to gossip with the cook, emerging with a piece of flakey toast, no plate. He told me the blockade might open for an hour or two before noon. His free knuckle rapped alongside my coffee mug. Let’s go. Cowboy up. I was too exhausted to eat or cry.

  Getting to the barricade quickly might give me time to pack and do the fire chores: sliding furniture away from windows, unlocking doors for firemen, drenching wooden steps, running soaker hoses. Packing. Contacting Helga about her station wagon still sitting at the cottage.

  I used the motel’s landline to phone my friend Mark, a wildlife photographer in Gardiner, and he picked me up from the diner. Mark’s son and his girlfriend, Lori, both offered to help me move. Leaving my hatchback behind, we drove to the fire blockade in Mark’s truck, not knowing whether the road to my house would be open.

  For several miles we follo
wed the river’s canyon, white water to our left, a rocky ridge and Dome Mountain on our right. Above the summit, a column of white smoke streamed into the sky, curling upward until it was twice the height of the mountain. Dense brown clouds surrounding the white pillar were rolling upward and punching into the bright cobalt sky. Crossing a bridge put the river on our right, and I could see the hillside above my cottage. When a narrow stream of black smoke shot up, I figured that structures were burning and I started to cry.

  I’ve seen enough crown fires that I can’t remember the first one. Like so many park rangers from around the United States, I’d served on a fire crew in Yellowstone during the infamous summer of 1988. Now I was staring at billowing gray plumes that were rising and expanding at a speed that exceeded all my expectations of physical reality. Like the fear small animals have of shadows passing overhead, my fear of great uncontrollable forces was primal. Worse, distance had muzzled the inferno. Silent enemies are more frightening than those we can hear.

  “Two hours. In and out. Houses on your lane are burning.” The uniformed official manning the roadblock slapped Mark’s truck and waved us through. Everything I wanted to save fit in either Helga’s station wagon or in Mark’s small truck. We grabbed my .30-06, slides, skis, books, Remington 20-gauge, Pivettas, Moss tent, several pairs of moose-hide mukluks, a Model 19 .357 with a crosshatch pattern carved into the wooden grip, four sleeping bags and a bivy sack, a bear on skis given to me by a fellow ranger at Mount Rainier, two bows and a camouflage quiver with arrows, my North Face Moraine women’s internal-frame backpack. I did not own anything heavy or fragile. No TV, stereo, cell phone, or desktop computer; no dishes that cost more than a dollar, glassware, or pottery. Very little jewelry.