Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  Honeycomb blinds, each one a different color—violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and navy—covered each window in the Rainbow Room. Through late spring and summer, rainbows looped around me every few days. Double rainbows were common. Sometimes, clouds spat out fat, truncated rainbows called “raindogs.” I learned about raindogs from reading Mark Twain’s Roughing It. He’d learned about them from sailors while exploring the Sandwich Islands in 1866. Twain was so impressed with rainbows and raindogs that he suggested changing the islands’ name from Sandwich Islands, bestowed by Captain Cook, to Rainbow Islands. Of course, the islands didn’t need a name when Twain visited (or when Captain Cook visited, for that matter). King Kamehameha I, the first person in recorded history to unify the islands, had already named them Hawaii decades before Cook’s intrusion. If you can overlook the arrogance, then Twain’s suggestion is a powerful statement about the charisma of rainbows. Yes, rainbows are rare and ephemeral, but I was judging nature by what it did best, not by what it did ordinarily. I hope it judges me the same someday.

  In Moby-Dick, Ishmael believes that “heaven” shows her favor for the sperm whales by sending rainbows through their spouts. His shipmates don’t believe whales are mammals, let alone worthy of heaven’s blessing. Does anyone ridicule him? No. Either a paradigm has shifted, or nobody messes with a guy whose best friend is a 300-pound cannibal.

  Mating season was long over when the fox encountered an older male, one of his mother’s consorts, sheltering in the cottonwood copse. He stopped a tail’s length away, tilting his head up to look into the old fox’s eyes. “Qwah.”

  The old fox, hoping to enjoy a lazy afternoon free from the vixen and other perturbations, let out an exhausted yowl, then backed behind a cottonwood and lay down between clumps of tight-skinned mushrooms.

  Looking over the old fox’s shoulders, Fox spied sandhill cranes, all fanned out and hunting for frogs. With their long beaks plunged into the marshy field, they looked like three-legged birds. They would be a great diversion if only they would pull their heads up. The old fox, tilting his muzzle sideways into the soft, damp dirt, was siphoning a suspicious-looking mushroom. It would either kill him or occupy the remainder of his afternoon. Either way, pestering three-legged birds whose knees rose above his head now moved to the top of the agenda.

  He slipped under the cranes’ legs as if they were snowberry branches arching under the weight of mealy white berries. They leapt, kicking at him in midair. He circled and scuttled while they reached toward him with long sharp toenails, croaking out loud and redundant threats. When they pushed him into the alfalfa field, he played at dodging the shadows of the rolling irrigation pipes.

  Two black dogs, taller and wider than coyotes, romped out of a distant barn. They were coming for him. He ran downhill along the irrigation canal, jumping over some cottonwood logs and through a cloud of elk scent. When he reached the river, ice shelves were bobbing along the banks. Off plan! He scampered along the pliable stalks of the still-leafless willow shrubs. Then he turned to climb back uphill.

  The dogs followed. Uphill? As if. The dogs were collar bound, overweight, and weak from confinement. And those were just their physical handicaps. When the hill leveled out for a brief reprieve, the dogs slowed. The next hill came too soon, and the dogs started yelping. Their barks did not seem aimed at him so much as complaints against life in general.

  Up ahead, ice formed a thin crust over a snow-filled draw. Flying across the icy crust, he felt like a long-winged hawk. The two heavy brutes behind him crashed through the ice. After he’d wallowed in snow the consistency of dry sand, the dogs reappeared, exhausted and panting. No doubt the sharp-edged ice had left their shins cut and bruised.

  By the time he reached the blue-roofed house, the sun had sunk. He was on familiar ground. But not the dogs. As they ran through the pasture in front of the house, new odors and obstacles left them insecure and confused. This was their mental handicap.

  Dogs almost never bark out here. I was up and out at the sound. Two shepherd-sized dogs were chasing a fox straight across my front field. Faster than anyone could have processed a single thought, I grabbed a mop and charged after them. The field was cactus-strewn, slippery, and rotten with old snow. Had it been a rabbit or a deer, I would have let it be. But my reaction to a fox I didn’t yet know was visceral, probably atavistic, and completely beyond my control. I returned home distraught and unsuccessful. A fox could not possibly know if I was chasing him or the dogs. Now he was running—under a cloud-trapped moon—from ten legs and three crazed animals. The higher the moon rose, trying to escape the clouds, the more stubbornly the clouds clung to it.

  Coincidentally, the only neighbor whose phone number I had written down was a dog-owner. “I know who you are,” I stammered when Marco identified himself, “I dialed your number. Your dogs are running down a fox. A fox.” I shouted a string of exaggerated statements, using words like heinous and iniquitous while chastising Marco’s inability to control his dogs. Or maybe they were someone else’s dogs.

  Reciting nonexistent fox-protection laws as fast as I could fabricate them, I prevented Marco from replying in full sentences.

  The receiver hummed Italian-accented words and phrases: ex-wife, city, one dog, and sorry, sorry, sorry.

  Switching to hypothetical examples, I explained that veterinarians treat dogs with broken legs and punctured paws. “Injured foxes die. Alone. Cold. In pain.”

  “Fox, yes? Runs more fast than dog. White. Very fast.”

  “The law protects wild animals,” I lied. “You cannot let pets run down wildlife.” No matter, it sounded like his ex-wife had absconded to the city with their only dog.

  The fox was sitting at the edge of my steps when the call ended. I flipped the porch light on, and he squinted so tightly his cheeks reached his eyebrows. I apologized for scaring him when I only meant to chase the dogs. He spoke to me for the first time. “Qwah,” he said. I could tell right away that he hadn’t any vocal chords.

  After slipping into a puffy down coat, I guarded my tiny visitor while he sniffed around the front pasture, presumably checking for voles. But I knew he was learning my odor, too, and convincing himself that I wasn’t living with cats or dogs. I followed him up the ridge for about three hundred feet before he disappeared. Dogs were still barking intermittently. Foxhounds aren’t fast or clever, but they’re patient and persistent. Their strategy is to work their fox until it’s worn out. Decades of selective breeding have endowed them with the mantra Time is on our side. Meanwhile, the moon remained trapped, and I walked home in near darkness.

  Like any sensible short-lived animal, the fox kept a fine tally of his time. Another day had passed with too many hard landings and too few voles. The rough-legged hawks were gone, and he’d been hunting in the alfalfa field without the juvenile to help him hustle cattle. But a curious encounter with a dog-chasing girl had given him an idea, and he now had a plan.

  Jumping from the dirt road onto the hillside, he landed between a juniper and a thorny shrub and headed toward his den. He could easily arrive home without resting or tiring, even as he gamboled up the steep slope with his nose in the air. Instead, shuffling into a clearing, he leapt onto a flattop boulder so that he and Hurricane Hands, who was following behind, could see each other. She wasn’t much taller than a deer and kept disappearing into the shrubs and the darkness. He waited until she was only a few strides away before turning back uphill, downshifting into prowling mode, and picking up a trail that elk used for marching side by side. The girl, who smelled of goose feathers, traveled faster on the wider trail, but no one can match a fox in the nighttime. When he sensed that she was lagging, he stopped to dig up a buried mouse, pausing as he stroked the dirt until the girl caught up with him. She kept pace for a while, but then her footfalls stumbled, and she grasped at—or fell into—the sticky rabbitbrush, and he had to run ahead so she could wend her way back home. Letting his new partner suc
cumb to exhaustion was definitely off plan. He would have to train her slowly.

  Working the full moon to his advantage, he slowed when clouds covered it, ran when the moon busted loose. All while his mantra played: Time is on no one’s side. After jumping on a boulder to avoid brushing against a sticky-leafed currant bush, he worked his way around one last nuisance of the day, mounds of sleeping deer. They were dumb animals, but not dumb enough to live alone.

  rain fox

  Goblin light, missing rainbows, and a mysterious knock on the front door: it had been an odd day. “Who’s there?” I asked the venison stew. While wiping carrot-stained fingers on my blue jeans, I reasoned out the only logical response: nobody. Nobody was there because getting “there” required finding my driveway. Narrow and brush-lined, it was nearly invisible from the road. Even if anyone could actually find it, the 135-meter-long gravel drive prevented stealth entries.

  But it had not been a day constrained by logic. At first light, a single cloud covered the entire sky, settling midway down snow-striped mountains and taunting me. For all its boldness, the cloud remained thin. If gravity abandoned me for a split second and I spun through the sky with raised arms and open hands, I could pierce it with my fingers. By midday, the cloud swirled around my ankles, swallowing me. In the evening, a light rain blew past, dispersing the cloud and revealing sawtooth mountains. I watched for rainbows, but none came. Instead, a goblin light sank into the damp evening, a light so dingy that even wet grass didn’t shine.

  There was no second knock. I had stew to stir on the first floor and a radio that only received on the second floor. If I had known the news would be important, I would have been eating jerky instead of cooking stew.

  Why wouldn’t a visitor have used the doorbell?

  You really think I had a doorbell?

  Any normal evening, I kept the blinds up and lights off until natural light could no longer prevent me from tripping over books or barbells. The habit had nothing to do with conservation or stinginess. My monthly electric bill matched the price of a deer tag, a bit less than dial-up internet service. I could well afford to leave plenty of lights on. But I needed dusk’s primitive light to soften and pause a day’s work. Tonight’s light was harsh and creepy, so I blocked it out by jerking down the blinds and turning on the wobbly torchère.

  Wiggling one hand into the pliable aluminum blinds covering the front door’s inset window, I separated two slats with my thumb and index finger and peered outside. Nobody. Nobody close enough to have knocked anyway. But beyond my vacated portico, well within a stone’s throw, someone was sitting upright and looking at me: a little wet fox. I opened the door. “Hello,” I said, extending my neck as a turtle from the shell of my cottage. The fox lowered his head and twisted his neck around so that he was facing down driveway. I followed his gaze: nothing. My Bushnell spy camera, which I had set up to see who was eating my echinacea, didn’t turn on until after dark.

  If he had been a person instead of a fox, I would have interpreted his behavior as a tactic for diverting attention from the real knocker (him) to a nonexistent knocker insinuated to have fled down the drive. He’s trying to put one over on me, I would think to myself. He’s pretending that both of us share this grievous inconvenience perpetrated by some thoughtless evening knocker. But the fellow outside was not a person. Despite folklore and myths, scientists did not include foxes in the ranks of tacticians or impostors. Those personalities required forethought, planning, intention, and umpteen other traits not known to have ever been visited upon wild foxes. My doctoral training had taught me that much.

  The fox continued alternating between staring at me and staring down the driveway.

  I checked for intruders by walking down the drive and calling “Hello?” as loudly as you would expect someone to call if she did not want anyone to reply. Circling through the back meadow, I found one doe-eyed doe and two lying fawns. Possibly, the double knock I had heard had come from one of them kicking the wooden door, although neither of them looked spunky enough to have sashayed around the cottage. Skunks denning in the front pasture could have pushed a rock against the door. I often heard them stumbling across the doorstep on their meanders. Usually they kept busy stalking wasps, uprooting perennials, and striking vulgar poses in front of my spy cam. But they rarely did any of that before midnight.

  I went upstairs to listen to the radio, and, before long, a warning odor and sticky smoke followed me. It was mildly unpleasant but less compelling than the news, so I ignored it. The smoke alarm blew too late to save the stew. Dinner transitioned to a pear perching on a white ceramic plate encircled with slices of deep red venison sausage. Three squares of gold-wrapped chocolate lined up diagonally behind the pear and complemented its smooth green skin. I sunk into the pinstriped rose sofa, balancing my dinner on an oblong tray of weathered wood. Except for the fully lowered blinds, it was a good dinner by any accounting. The blinds, thick honeycomb fabric, were soft green. The walls and both doors were rose adobe. The palette matched the bloom and leaves of Geum triflorum, a wildflower commonly called “prairie smoke.” I’d copied the color scheme from the sunroom in Lake Yellowstone Hotel. Sometimes I thought about houses where sofas faced televisions and wondered what it would be like to eat without looking out at calm colors, mountains, or clouds. Sometimes I simply wondered what it would be like to own a television.

  On the radio, bells were tolling behind deep and somber incantations in a foreign language. Latin, I think. Interviewees in various combinations of age and gender and accent recalled the benefactions of the recently deceased holy man—a man I knew almost nothing about. Everyone agreed it was a sad day and that millions would miss him. The bells kept tolling while more somber voices added items to a growing list of the deceased’s blessed deeds.

  Usually, when someone died, I wanted to know the cause of death. Will I die the same way? Tonight, I wanted to compare my good deeds with those of the deceased. Will people mourn me in the same way? The accomplishment of which I was most proud was having survived, in the literal sense of not dying. I carried with me one quotation from my father, not only because of what he said, but because he rarely said anything to me at all: “I didn’t want to have children, I don’t want to know if you ever have children, and I’m not interested in what happens to you.” After a pause, he added, “The good news is, if you make anything of your life, at least you won’t have to worry about thanking me.” He said this to me when I was twelve, and those statements, which represented his entire attitude toward me, overwhelmed my emotional state and all my relationships and everything I had ever done since. I always suspected he said it to be cruel, and I interpreted it as a warning that while I was living in the house with him, he hoped I would disappear.

  I became very good at disappearing. When I was still an undergrad, my father tracked me down and told me to sign for a college loan. He took the money and disappeared. I paid off the loan.

  I became better at disappearing. Besides surviving, that had been my greatest achievement, but it doesn’t qualify as a good deed. Of course, the mourned man—I hadn’t known his name before now—was older and had a forty-year head start. Still, if bells rang for me today, they would be terse. Saving a skinny fox from fat dogs was one good deed. Another deed was . . . well . . . there had been two fat dogs.

  I opened the door without exposing more than my arm in the doorway. The fox, soaked like a wet gray dishrag, hadn’t moved. But it wasn’t raining. It had rained earlier, but raindrops had fallen so sparsely that only pudgy animals should be wet. Anyone small and fast could have dodged the drops. I thought about the possibility of those big dogs dunking him in a ditch. What ditch? More likely they had run him down to the river. A pursued fox will run to a watercourse and even swim across. But today’s river was so swollen he could not have swum more than a short distance in the shallows before returning.

  He thrust his face at me. A normal fox would have run away when th
e door opened. His boldness suggested that I was in his territory, instead of the other way around.

  I closed the door and stood there for a while, sliding the blind up and down a few times before locking it in its fully open position. I peered outside and pondered the scene, then concluded the obvious: there sat, just beyond my doorstep, rain soaked and shivering, a few hours after the death of Pope John Paul II, a fox.

  dancing fly

  A little cottage, a lot of windows, a fluid fox. Avoiding him was a mathematical impossibility. Surely there’s an algorithm that proves it. 2-story cottage. 1 room per story + 1 bathroom. Windows facing 4 directions. Visibility: ∞. Avoiding the fox = an event with a probability of 0.001. Sum of the cottage: a lookout with nothing to look for; a belfry without bells. An equilibration for my claustrophobia.

  Besides the claustrophobia, I do not sit well. Longer than the fox’s eighteen minutes, but shorter than the normal amount expected of a person. I figured out the normal amount by attending elementary, primary, and secondary school until I was fifteen years old. The American student sits long enough to rival the most sessile organism ever to evolve on planet Earth. Yes, excessive sitting was a form of physical torture for me. But it wasn’t mental torture, so despite the physical discomfort, many of us (myself included) earned As anyway.

  Teaching internet-based classes allowed me to lecture while standing outside. If I was working inside, a wide window ledge served as a desk. After finishing classwork, I fixed fences, collected rocks, cleared culverts, mulched shrubs, shoveled snow, poured gravel, pruned plants, and counted birds. If I wasn’t working outside, I was looking outside.