Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  While I was hosing down the surfboard, rose-colored clouds spilled slowly across the mountains, like a can of tipped paint. For thousands of years, Japanese faithful have maintained the Inari-temple fox statues. As long as I lived here, I would be cleaning this rock and planting and tending a little crop of forget-me-nots. Just as I finished cleaning Surfboard, the clouds burst and flew apart. I watched the rose-colored pieces spread, trying hard not to blink and miss something now that I was watching for both of us.

  I began mourning him by doing things that he would have done. My anger did not dissipate. His death was intolerable. Chimerical images I had carried as talismans couldn’t help me because my mind was numb. My body was exploding from the inside. It is impossible to function when you feel your insides pushing against your skin and nothing gives way, not for hours, or even days. With so much anger trapped inside me, my adrenaline surged. Physiological reactions followed: rising blood pressure, rapid respiration, hyperglycemia. Some people might eat or drink to tamp surging adrenaline, but the advantage to being athletic is that you can rid yourself of anger and excess adrenaline by simply pushing your fist through a wall. Fortunately, the cottage had very little wall space and lots of barbells. I pumped iron.

  Flushing away the adrenaline left me calm but dazed. In March, a large skunk was sleeping in a mixture of scree, juniper berries, and old leaves. A tiny skunk waddled around the adult while rocks clattered underneath its feet. When the adult didn’t rise with my calling, I brushed a branch through its long hair and realized it was dead. The baby could not understand why the adult was so quiet, why it wasn’t getting up. Even the mating flickers on a nearby juniper’s crown stopped dancing to peer over at the bewildered baby skunk, one of nature’s most forlorn sights. Now I was that low-slung baby skunk toddling down the slope. How did Fox die? What were his last moments like? If the fog would clear, maybe I could see the answers. All I could do was gather as many facts as possible and wait. If I was lucky, my mind would perform tricks.

  Never dammed, channeled, riprapped, or straightened, everywhere the Yellowstone River runs, it runs wild. Curving into its muddy banks like a giant salamander, it is the longest free-flowing river in the United States. Elliptical islands swell between the river’s braids, creating logjams that trap small plant debris like branches, twigs, and leaves. The river knits the debris into raft-like mats. At the right moment, in some nuanced mood of current, she sets the rafts free.

  Today a shaking fox reclines on a raft moored to an overhanging willow. Earlier in the summer, a cat killed one of his friends. His other friend is missing. After watching and waiting for several days, he has become increasingly disoriented as the smoke and the noise have grown heavier and louder. His eyes and throat sting, his tongue is gritty from panting in the hot smoky air, and still the girl hasn’t appeared. How could she have abandoned him in the middle of this catastrophe?

  The bowline, a tangle of clematis vines, surrenders to the tossing river, and the fox sails away. The day is hot, the ride is rolling, and the fox is hungry. His raft hits a barren pebble island and leaves him marooned. With deep channels of fast water on all sides, the hungry fox on the island of sand and cobbles is dying. The fox has always loved sunbathing, and now with sun covering him, he is warm enough that he could be happy forever. But the sun keeps heating until it is no longer warming but stabbing. He’s burning hot, and the heat moves inside him, gently pushing his consciousness out of its way. In lucid moments, he sees other foxes, the magpie, and the girl. She is sitting in front of him, talking and pushing brown hair away from her eyes. The evening sky is pinking. Her long, feathered tail fans. It isn’t the girl after all: it’s the magpie. She lifts off, flying past the den cove with long fingers strumming the air. Watching her fly, he is unsure . . . person . . . magpie. Then he is certain. They are so similar—the girl and the magpie. In his exhaustion, he can’t waste energy separating them into two.

  In the end, the sun bursts through his tiny body and seeps into the cobbles below him.

  I knelt next to Fox’s birthday rock, stroking its rough, rounded edges and picturing “F-O-X” carved on top. The owner of a monument factory seventy miles away said he would engrave Surfboard while I waited. More than halfway there, I realized my idea was ridiculous. F-O-X on a rock? The one thing he never wanted to be was just another fox on a rock. But friends are not flawless. If he knew anything about me, he knew that.

  Worse luck, I am only human; ostentatious grieving is our touchstone. Maybe wild animals are too genuine to grieve ostentatiously. After he died, I decided to grieve with a little less culture and a little more wildness—like an animal. This meant, of course, almost not at all. I soon came to understand the self-serving nature of human grief; my sadness was nothing compared to his. I had lost a friend; he had lost his life. He died too young, too happy, too ambitious. How could I wallow in a shallow pool of misery when his misery was infinite? Regardless of where Fox ended up when he died, he would rather be here, pushing his nose into that blue forget-me-not, leaping on a vole, sunbathing on a boulder. He would want to be alive. I want that, too, but I won’t be so patronizing as to pretend that I want it more than he does.

  fields of dun and gunny

  A flock of bluebirds pushes against unyielding wind. Sinking slightly, the birds slip under the current and advance steadily until the wind finds them again. Gut punched by one gigantic gust, the flock back flips, rights, regroups, carries on. Above Gin, my favorite juniper, they hover and rise like a cumulus cloud. Before the next gust strikes, they flatten into a cirrus sheet, tip their black beaks toward the tree, and descend. Within seconds, the bluebirds infuse the entire juniper. Their quivering turns the flame-shaped Gin into a propane pilot light, an image more comforting this chilly spring day than tiny birds, blue or otherwise.

  I wouldn’t mind being alone with bluebirds, but the red-winged blackbirds swaying on cattail heads can’t resist a following wind. They push off and end up layered between Gin’s braided branches. Robins sheltering in pea shrubs wait for a lull, and then they flee to take up widely separate perches in Gin. Perhaps they’d been arguing. I can’t hear anything over the cackling of red-winged blackbirds. Why do different species of birds huddle together? I never answered that question because it has no answer. It’s the wrong question. Lots of wild animals are less finicky about whom they socialize with than we are. The right question is Why don’t people socialize with animals? And by “animals,” I mean unboxed animals. Like the little prince’s fox. Like my fox. Animals that are as free-living and independent from us as a meadowlark is from a wren. Maybe we like pretending that they are not very human. Or that we are not very wild.

  The dry meadows are covered with clumps of dun bunchgrasses poking through soil the color of a gunnysack. Today, I’ve been outside so long that my lungs have synchronized to heave between gusts of wind. I keep squinting to wring wind tears from my eyes. I’m thinking about a fox who’s been dead for two years now and who wanted to rub noses with the only blue flower in this endless field of dun and gunny.

  There isn’t a clipboard to shield me from the wind today because I am not counting birds or doing science. It’s not that counting is bad. Numbers provide the raw material for statistics that enlighten us about how average animals behave. Of course, I am not just talking about wild animals. Most of us want to understand how all average animals behave, including people. Society sets parameters for “normal” behavior based upon what it perceives as “average.” And it never hurts to know what the rest of the world is up to. Don’t discount the value in that. But don’t confuse normal behavior with natural behavior. If people need to stay under the bell curve’s peak to be “natural,” then we are, all of us, and everywhere, dun and gunny.

  This reminds me of Martha’s secret. I share a curious worldview with Ishmael, Saint-Ex, and another million or so people (in this world of seven billion). By instinct, we perceive a world dominated by Nature, its wild
animals, plant life, and nonhuman elements: sand or sky or sea. We don’t purposely ignore people; we just have trouble focusing on them. As Martha would say, my first family was everyone who lived outside—squirrels and lizards and ducks. Sometimes I push human faces to the far background. Finally, Martha told me that some of the time, I don’t see people because I’m communicating with other animals. Or staring at clouds. And when she thought I figured it out, I think she said, “Most of the time, you don’t hear us.” Something like that.

  If Martha had read Moby-Dick, she would have recognized my personality in the novel’s last scene. Pequod, the busted whaler—now nearly vertical—is sinking. Tashtego, the Native American harpooner, is drowning in a shark-infested sea and will soon join all of Ishmael’s compatriots. Something Tashtego is holding, part of the ship perhaps, inadvertently traps a sea eagle. During the entire tragedy of the Pequod, Ishmael, who is off the ship and watching from one of the smaller whaleboats, most keenly perceives the trapped bird. The sea eagle panics, struggling to free itself while slowly submerging to its death. How is it that in all the infinite, gray depth that surrounds him, while he’s listening to his shipmates’ screams, Ishmael writes, finally, about the suffering of one anonymous hawk? “And so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her.”

  I suspect that Ishmael wasn’t quite tame. Neither are most foxes. Foxes are genetically predisposed to be wild and shun people and our contraptions. Through Dmitri Belyaev’s research we learned that people can tame foxes. Fox was not typical for his species, and I am not typical for mine. That’s what the statistics show anyway. Mostly what makes me atypical is that I live alone, far from any town or city or suburb. Fortunately, I have access to books that let me connect with people whose spirits transcend time and place. People like Saint-Ex and Ishmael and Mr. Frankenstein. Of course, we all carry genes that never matter, those that predispose us but don’t commit us to any specific behavior. Sometimes, without the right circumstances, genes aren’t enough to determine our behavior. Sometimes we do what we want despite our genes.

  Fox and I first came eye to eye when a housefly distracted me from counting birds in the very same juniper I am looking at now. It was a warmer day, and yet I wore more clothes. Today I’m wearing Carhartt overalls and a red river-driver shirt because I value my time and don’t mind being chilly. Piling on enough clothes to stay warm takes too long. Even if I live another sixty years, life will be short. I can’t waste time wrapping up against inevitable wind.

  Before I met him, I hadn’t thought of a red fox as one of life’s necessary accouterments. I was plodding along, somewhere between birth and death, and, like you, trying to do whatever people of our age and culture were supposed to be doing. I experienced my share of life’s requisite calamities. Some left scars. Overall, my life was not especially wanting. Not especially anything except uncertain and sans Fox. Today, my relationship with him so thoroughly defines my life that all my previous years on earth seem like nothing so much as impoverished by foxlessness.

  I finally figured out that the fly on my knee—mesmerizing Fox on one side and me on the other—was not the centripetal force that pulled Fox and me together. Not really. At a single extended moment of time, we both stared at a black fly sucking blood from my scab and saw an ornate creature dancing on a crimson pedestal. We both dismissed the inherent danger of breathing within striking distance of someone’s hands or fangs and watched the dancer twirl blood like it was a silk scarf. I doubt there was another individual in the valley that day who would have done the same.

  I’ve stopped planting forget-me-nots and keeping Surfboard Rock clean for Fox. I prefer bright red yarrow and purple Russian sage, so I’ve let them crowd out his favorite flower. Some days, cherry-red bird droppings coat Surfboard. My concern is with foxes now, not with Fox. That’s part of his legacy, and legacies are the point of friendship. I keep the draw clean so foxes can travel safely from ridges to river. I fight tumbling, tall, and thorny weeds aggressively.

  If it weren’t so windy, I could sit at the old rendezvous site. I’ve stopped throwing my camp chair on hard clumps of spiky weeds, stopped asking permission of the land to seat me. I’m here for the long haul, so I find a comfortable spot and make myself fit in, like Fox used to do. Life on the land is not a way station while I wait to entangle myself in a more appropriate career. Wild lands and quiet spaces are not my escape; they are my home base. Sporadically, I retreat to field classes, surrounding myself with people and enjoying a reprieve from natural space. I know there are people who do the reverse, and people who have not yet decided which is home and which is holiday. However we choose, let’s not fuss about it; we’ll bump into each other in the coming or going. I trust we’ll be cordial.

  During the fire, I evacuated my entire cottage in two hours. It will never again be that easy to move. The cottage is deeply rooted. Like Fox, I have marked my territory. Remember when I became indignant over the suggestion that fox (“Foxie!”) was a pet, and I told you that hanging around a fox was not the same thing as decorating a terrier in tartans or teaching a parrot to solicit crackers? Here’s why: When you spend time with your pets, they become more like you. When I spent time with Fox, I became more like him. Monkey saw; monkey did. And like Fox, I have filled my home with objects of personal value. After replacing my young cherry tree (times three), I began large landscaping projects. Because builders are erecting houses at a never-ending pace and traffic on the gravel road is sure to pick up, I am planting long, deep hedges that will soon be ten feet tall and will form dense screens even after autumn’s leaves drop. I ordered furniture built and delivered by Amish folks in the Midwest, and, for the first time ever, the furniture is too big to fit in the hatchback.

  I’ve become more like Fox in other ways, too, because in order to find friends who are like Fox, I have to act like him and not like a magpie. I’ve stopped trying to disappear. We had been opposites that way, the fox and I. He wanted connections. He wanted to matter. And for no reason other than that it felt so much better than being alone, he often liked to have someone at his side when he padded under the full moon’s light or stretched on a sun-warmed rock.Accidents of birth didn’t handicap him. So I’ve had an oral surgeon remove the frenum between my front teeth and stitch up my gum. I decided to visit the Everglades, and the first person I asked to join me said yes. Now Jack and I chat on the phone all the time. I’ve been corresponding with Chun and Doug, a couple I met in Yellowstone, the ones who recommended Downton Abbey. They asked me to meet them in Mount Rainier. It was terrific fun, and now we’re planning our next vacation together.

  I’ve committed myself to a full-time university job and will not look back. Jenna wrote a letter of recommendation for me. Almost every day I study, discuss, and write about natural history, not from a college campus, but from a country cottage or an outdoor field site—a virtual campus, an online community. I teach biology, a discipline with beautiful edges, sharp as obsidian. But that eloquent precision is not enough to satisfy me. I like to keep my thoughts so fluid that the real world and the imagined world swirl together until it is just as easy to separate them as it is to combine them.

  It’s November, and the low-elevation rifle hunt is open. Mule deer are frantically dodging guns, hormones, and trucks. They are not successful. Yesterday I drove thirty miles to town along a blood-splashed two-lane. Now a cold north front is driving more deer down from the high country, and I wander around my property, waiting to warn them off my favorite shrubs. It seems like there are hundreds of them in the back pasture, though I count only fifty. They have come to build their first winter trails across my property. They move slowly, but I am patient, steering them around my shrubs and trees before they entrench a trail. Once their route sets, this herd will march u
nwaveringly upon it for the next six months. In one winter, fifty deer that look like hundreds can carve a canal into a meadow. The herd tumbles down my back hill, skidding on fresh snow and meandering toward my steps. They are pretending not to notice me and expect me to return the courtesy. I don’t. Because they move as a herd and the young rarely nurse this late in the year, I am having a hard time picking out the family units.

  Clouds shape today’s sky. They cast it gray and flash blue sucker holes from time to time. The edges of one sucker hole roll upward as though someone has punched a fist through the clouds from below. Before the day ends, I’ll stand under it and pretend to be shocked when clouds sear the hole shut, turn charcoal black, and hose me down. Acting the fool for anxious clouds is just one of the roles I sometimes play because I live in country where the sky dominates land, buildings, roads. Other times, I decide to wear Gore-Tex and act like I don’t care.

  Tennis Ball’s nest has not had any occupants since the fire. Once round and bigger than a basketball, it is now cascading though the juniper and will soon disappear into the duff. Iridescent blackbirds built a hand-sized nest several branches above it. For two months this spring, they sat in her juniper and rattled like maracas, pausing only occasionally to emit an unsettling sound like someone blowing bubbles into a glass of water.

  If new magpies move in, I suspect they, too, like Tennis Ball, will dislike me. Many magpie generations ago, the first humans they saw were ruthless. And it will take too many more generations of human kindness and egg yolks before they learn to trust us again. When I came along, trying to make friends with them, I was too late by a hundred years. Despite the egg yolks, I really wasn’t all that nice to Tennis Ball. It wasn’t conscious, but in hindsight I understand that I couldn’t like her because she was too similar to me. She reminded me of my worse traits. She couldn’t change her druthers, but I can change mine. Not because I’m better or gifted, but only because I’ll live longer. It’s not practical for a short-lived bird to change her personality.