No reasonable person should find it odd, then, that a few days after the death of Pope John Paul II, I once again saw a fox that I was not looking for, no matter how pitiful and needy he had appeared when he came to the doorstep. I continued seeing him every day: he strolled up and down my driveway, sunned on my boulders, hunted in my meadow, and absconded with my voles, the supply of which was now infinite thanks to the liatris debacle and the indefatigable reproductive prowess of animals who appear to lack sex organs.
Standing on the stone wall, the fox rooted his rear feet, elongated his neck, and peered around to the front of the house. Hurricane Hands was swinging a dangerously hefty tool so erratically she seemed to have lost all control. Either that or the tool was trying to escape. He pushed a rock twice the size of his head down from the wall, keeping his eyes on Hurricane. Without moving, he listened to the rock clacking down the stone wall, rustling through dry grass, and thudding as it bounced on the hard clay. All that noise and not a flinch of recognition from Hurricane. He—clever fox—was invisible and on plan.
Time could be set aside in the coming days to watch Hurricane. An important task was waiting, and he did not abide truancy. An older fox had moved on without denning. This left an abandoned territory that he would fill. In dry upland foothills, open territories came and went so fast they seemed imaginary.
Pissing occasionally to mark the new territory, he trotted down the gravel path behind the house, listening to the rhythm of his footsteps. The beat was so boring that anyone less keen would have fallen asleep. But keen observers appreciate boring rhythms; they amplify syncopations. Soon enough, an odd beat intruded, the faint sound of rough dragging. A thick black beetle had expanded its long legs and was pulling itself upward to mount a single stone. After a moment of silent stillness, a beetle’s head cracked under a forepaw’s toughened edge. Running in a crazed circle, then zigzagging to change direction, the headless insect circled back. It was a miniature Hurricane Hands without a head.
Even a whiff of repugnant she-skunk odor didn’t justify changing direction. Today he was moving so fast that she would be just another weed in the path. A hillock up ahead was a promising cache site, a distinct landmark above the water table where he could bury excess prey for a rainy day. Encircling it took a few strides. Topping it required only three leaps.
Loosely packed cobbles filled the hillock. The construction mimicked a badger’s kickback pile—a badger the size of a bear, anyway. A badger the size of a bear?
Weasel pee! He’d be stomped into the ground. He slumped on the summit. Hurricane Hands was outside attacking the pea shrubs with a long metal tool.
Could those flexible fingers and that tool bludgeon a bear-sized badger as flat as a gopher on blacktop? Yes! On plan! He jumped down, pissing to the outside of the hillock and incorporating it into his territory.
At the highest edge of his territory, he turned and headed downhill. Under a raised leg, over spread toes, another stream of pee shot toward the Alfalfa Flat den. His older siblings had disappeared; this year’s batch would follow. He, the runt, had claimed the highland. A cozy of foxes incapable of imagining his feat would soon be fighting over a gift he’d left: a half-chewed mouse with Styrofoam in its belly.
Leaving the hillock, he continued his mission. When he finished les pipis sauvages, urine encircled a grand new territory. There was nothing to do but swagger from one boulder to another, brushing his bright fox tail along each acquisition. Stopping to sniff the largest boulder, he discovered a surface so rough its minute grooves held tiny specks of water. They would moisten his skin when he returned later to massage his belly.
He stood on the highest boulder waving a white-tipped tail in a wide arc, informing incoming ruffians that a new captain was ready to scuffle. But there was not a ruffian in sight.
The rock was dark, like a fox’s nose, and smooth, dry, and warm enough to sunbathe on. He splayed his legs over its sides, the biggest toe on each foot clinging to it. A vole was sniffing at the boulder’s base—poor creature. The fox noted that the vole could not look up unless someone rolled it over. Voles, observed the heron-necked fox, were missing their necks.
Back at the hillock, the vole—almost impaled but not quite punctured—was now twitching against the fox’s lips. Biting down with his back teeth, the fox severed the creature’s backbone without breaking any hide. Buried two paws deep, the neckless vole became the first jewel in what would become a large trove of hidden treasures.
I sat on the wooden steps, my toes playing with soft-fringed sagebrush. A fly was clinging to my fresh knee scab, sucking blood with its filthy little mouth. Blowing on it steadily, I sent it airborne. But it only took a few reconnaissance laps before it struck back at the scab. I blew, it buzzed, and the taunting continued. I became less interested in dislodging the fly than in watching it. Time fell away, and I magnified my focus on the ugly creature sitting on its haunches, rubbing its “hands,” and strobing its head.
He was less than two meters away when I saw him. He was crouching down and swaying like a serpent, each curve of his tubular body seeming to push him closer to the fly on my knee. I wondered if he could see me at all while he stared so precisely at the housefly. Stopping within a length of my arm, he rolled his eyes up to meet mine. The tip of a mouse tail clung to his upper left lip.
“Fox,” I whispered. He tilted his nose down toward my knee, exposing a sleek muzzle and leaving us eye to eye. And then I saw nothing but a fly and two amber eyes. “Foxssssss,” I hissed, extending the final s until I needed to inhale. “Foxssssss.” And then there was no fly no sound no smell no movement. Just two amber eyes. Something snapped, and I caught his image and trapped it in my mind. After that, whenever I wanted, I could close my eyes and see Fox’s face just as clearly as if I were still staring at him. I was grateful for the image whenever it appeared. His eyes were beautiful and wet and astonishingly convex.
From a distance, he had looked to me like just another small animal, a hundred pounds lighter and not even knee-high. But our eyes aligned almost perfectly so that when we were facing each other head-on, our size difference disappeared. I’m not sure I expected anyone to have such kind eyes, but certainly not him. How did I know he had such kind eyes? I hadn’t ever looked into anyone’s eyes that closely before, so it must have been intuitive. He couldn’t have known I was smiling, but he probably sensed the welcoming pace of my breathing: slow and steady.
When I saw his front right foot move the tiniest bit, I knew I needed to replace the fly with something to keep his attention. Slipping a hand into a pocket, I felt something cool and round, like a large marble or a small ball. It had to be a rock. Except for brass rifle casings, which I recycled, only natural things made their way into my pockets: pinecones, feathers, seedpods, snail shells, sagebrush leaves, juniper cones, unopened rosebuds. Until the day a coworker showed me otherwise, I would have told you that these objects just fell inside my pockets. Curtis and I had been counting fuel loads for the National Park Service and traveling cross-country. We were heading to a pond for a break when he stopped ahead and leaned on a boulder. “Man! There you go again. Stuffing things in your pocket.”
“No,” I said, turning not just my head but my entire body for emphasis. “I don’t.”
“You just did.”
I pulled a soft, ruddy Rocky Mountain maple leaf out of my pocket. I could not have been more surprised if it had been a human eyeball.
“I’m watching you. I see what goes on. And you’re like . . .” Curtis rolled his eyes and tilted his head skyward.
I pulled the cool rock out of my pocket. It was a geode, mostly round, with a dark pink rim around its crystal face. After placing it on the steps, I reached into the back pocket of my field vest for a trinket to hold his attention and pulled out a mass of cottony fireweed seeds, bright indigo feathers, a wire cutter, and another geode. The vest and all nine pockets—zippered, buttoned, velcroed, and flapped�
�seesawed with the shifting weight. “Stone,” I said, plunking the other geode, a walnut-sized rock, on the steps.
“It’s really a geode. Like it?” I held it up in front of my face, telling him where I’d collected it, who I was with, and what I was doing when I found it. I banged the geode against the steps a couple of times, and Fox, who now was sitting upright, pulled his ears back, stared, and kept his mouth closed. I think he knew his sharp teeth would alarm me. I was excited for his company, and happier than I had been in a long time, but only briefly. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone would see us, that communicating with a fox was a taboo. My fearfulness of the wrongness of the act soon overwhelmed the happiness it brought me.
I tried tidying up the indigo feathers by stroking them, but they only twisted into unattractive clumps. “Not too nice,” I apologized. But I thought they were pretty enough. Fox’s sparkling eyes reminded me that they were, after all, feathers. Extracting another one from my pocket seam, I asked him if he knew anything about the recent bluebird carnage. “I found these feathers on the boulder you’ve been sitting on.”
That boulder was a multicolored collage—pink, white, and black. Potassium feldspar and a little garnet provided the pink blush. The white pieces were mostly calcium feldspar. A variety of minerals contributed the black specks. Three-point-something billion years old, nearly as old as Earth itself, the large rock perched on the high point of my back field, reminding me that our planet has been beautiful from its beginning. A glacier moving north through this valley dropped it here about fifteen thousand years ago. I didn’t mind if the fox snatched a few of my bluebirds, but I preferred that he didn’t eat them on my precious Precambrian boulder.
He pushed his face closer to me, dipping his nose downward and staring with round, open eyes. Even if you have never seen a fox, you would have recognized on the fox sitting before me a face so innocent that you would have concluded that he had never stalked a bluebird, let alone dismembered one.
“Yes, Fox, kestrels eat bluebirds too.” I rolled my eyes. “My mistake.”
A clump of dried root looked like a pale, tiny carrot. Its genus name, Lewissii, honored Meriwether Lewis from the US Corps of Discovery, the Lewis and Clark Expedition. On July 1, 1806, near what is now the Montana-Idaho border, Lewis collected a bitterroot which sprung to life after months of dry storage at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Rediviva, its species name, is Latin for “rejuvenating.” Bitterroot, as we commonly call it, blossoms into a quarter-sized fuchsia cup. Stemless, the blossoms sit on the ground. I placed the root on the wooden steps. Pulling a manila envelope the size of a large postage stamp out of a vest pocket, I emptied whale-shaped seeds next to the bitterroot.
“Probably columbine seeds. Liberated from the stash of a bushy-tailed wood rat. Mount Rainier. Three Lakes cabin. I raided the rat’s midden when my spare mantle socks disappeared.” Mantle socks, which would fit nicely on a housecat’s foot, slipped over a gas pipe inside my propane lantern. Without two good socks, my Coleman would not light. “Anyway, I let the rat keep the socks.” I sighed and shook my head. “Tooth holes everywhere.” I shaped my index and middle finger into gnawing teeth and motioned. Fox put his nose right up to the shiny black seeds. I told him that I had swiped the seeds to discourage further pilfering, but it was a lie. Like the bushy-tailed wood rat, I too treasured shiny trinkets.
When a relationship begins, dialogue is easier when the parties are not facing each other. Concentrating on my trinkets, I forgot about Fox. Sniffing all the trinkets, he forgot about me. That’s the trick of show-and-tell: it opens as a soliloquy and sneaks into conversation. No wonder teachers use it in kindergarten. It alleviates self-consciousness and teaches shy kids to talk.
I rattled two beautiful brass shells from a .30-06 in my cupped hands. The fox jerked upright. “I don’t know where these are from.” (Of course I knew.) Rolling between my two fingers, the brass cases glimmered in the sun. “Ohhhh . . . maybe that mule deer. Up on the East Front near Dupuyer. Can’t say for sure.” He came closer. He could look through the window and see the mule deer’s rack hanging on my wall, but, like any guest who wants to be invited back, he pretended not to notice.
I’ve always liked guns. The old-fashioned kind with wood stocks and grips. When I was little, my grandfather put me in the back seat of his T-Bird with his handgun, drove me around, and told me to look out for cops. He was probably kidding. But I loved the game and the excitement of doing something important. We never got stopped. My grandfather wasn’t violent toward me, so I never developed a fear of guns or an association of guns with violence.
When the fox turned his head as if to leave, I pulled out another trinket. We jockeyed back and forth before settling on one and a half (human) arm lengths between us. At that point, if I scooted two inches closer, he would move back two inches; if I scooted two inches back, he would move forward two inches. Our movements could not have been more precise if we were Doctor Dolittle’s two-headed pushmi-pullyu.
He nosed through the loot piece by piece, keeping one front leg raised and his back arched. The quick-getaway pose. Several months on, I mimicked that very stance when I found myself stuck behind talkers at the grocery. The two people who cornered me ignored my off-putting forward-shoulder crunch, but my tensed midsection and slightly raised leg facilitated a fast escape.
Later that week, I worked on student essays using the violet window’s sill as a desk. By “worked on,” I mean looked up euphemisms for plagiarize in the unabridged edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. I had purchased the ten-pound book two decades earlier, along with a ten-cent cup of coffee, in Kalispell, Montana. In lieu of plagiarize, Random House suggested “-napping,” to which I could append word, idea, or fact. Or perhaps, and derived from the Latin root “to snare,” the kinder word: appropriation. Above the dictionary, out the window, with his nose hell-bent for hunting, the fox trotted steadily across Pillbox Hat Hill: too close to ignore, too far away to appreciate from inside. The wordnapping student would wait.
Fox zigzagged up and down and turned gentle corners, gradually advancing in my direction. When he reached my spring seep, a rusty rear flank flashed a balding patch.
Mange.
When I first bought my land and paced across it, clutching my deed, lunular heads of ripe blue grama struggled above the dun and gunny to greet me. I fell in love. At that very instant I assumed responsibility for the land and everyone on it. No one would die of mange while I stood the masthead.
“Sarcoptic mange,” I read on the internet site, pausing to consider the word sarcophagus, “is caused by a mite, and generally kills a fox in a slow tortuous manner.” The website, sponsored by the National Fox Welfare Society of Great Britain (NFWS), featured medical information, offers of help, and before-and-after photos of foxes successfully treated with synthetic medicine or (if you were in a pinch) garlic. If your fox was too fussy for garlic, NFWS would send the medicine free of charge.
Maybe they figured free medicine would make amends for three hundred years of foxhunting. The modern event, involving horses, a long-distance chase, and packs of dogs tearing a fox apart, began with a British teenager’s hound-breeding program in 1750. By 1910, the hunt was so entrenched that foxes became scarce and Britons had to import more from continental Europe.
Foxhunting was more or less outlawed in England in 2004, but the “sport” (which seemed to me like the ritual brutalization of foxes) was no less popular for having been banned. The year I was trying to save one single mangy fox, hounds killed over twenty thousand foxes in England. That number doesn’t include live kits fed to hounds by owners anxious to keep their dogs’ appetites whetted. I found some information on the internet that shocked me. Veterinarians who managed to examine carcasses reported that the foxes “died in agony” from multiple and serious wounds. A nonprofit called Hounds Off displayed a photo of an eviscerated fox wrapped in its own entrails.
If my friends Doug and Chun hadn’t recommended Julian Fellowes’s Downton Abbey, I probably wouldn’t understand the hunt at all. I bought the entire series on DVD from PBS. Season six opens in 1925 with footmen and butlers serving drinks—champagne, I think—to mounted riders wearing black top hats and red blazers. The horsemen mingle with a pack of energetic hounds that are preparing to murder a fox. How sophisticated they all look. Way back then, homosexuals stayed in the closet, unmarried couples who shared hotel rooms paid off blackmailers, and girls who fell pregnant out of wedlock gave birth abroad. Cars and landlines were rare. Skirts were midcalf. Less than a hundred years later, the mores of Downton Abbey are quaint memories. Except for the foxhunting.
It’s one word—foxhunting—because it is no more like hunting than a titmouse is like a mouse. Horsemen do not harvest the meat or the hide. It can’t possibly be an economically efficient means of eradicating problem animals. Foxhunting is a ceremony during which grown men and women mount high white horses and shout, “Tally ho!” while racing over hill and dale following as many as sixty baying hounds that are chasing after a relatively tiny fox. And all this while wearing red wool blazers and black knee-high boots made for rattlesnake country. What could look more ridiculous?
Doing all that without the fox, that’s what.
Shakespeare’s Othello tells us that a “glorious” war consists of “pride and pomp, and circumstance.” Without the fox, the foxhunter’s pomp would be missing its circumstance.
I can’t imagine a worse reason for killing a fox.
The fox padded cautiously up a faint trace of flattened spring grass. A bowl with a shimmering mix of garlic and raw eggs was waiting for him. After one long sniff, he stepped back. Straddling the medicine with his front legs, he slid his nose all the way around the bowl’s lip. He did not dip his tongue into those eggs, not even after I diluted it with another yolk. “Who raised you, Fox?”
Fox and I Page 8