Had they all arrived at once, BBs would have overwhelmed my auditory nerves, which had become hypersensitive from overwintering with taciturn mule deer. The bright colors that singing birds splashed on my fields were acceptable in March, unnecessary in May, and unwelcome by June, when wildflowers provided the same service without any noise or agitation. Tightening up ice-stretched fences requires concentration if you want to keep your eyes and the fence’s alignment intact. Every May, I fixed fences while red-winged blackbirds played maracas nonstop. Every May, I dodged anxious and brightly colored generic BBs exploding around my face like streamer poppers and confetti canons.
I would have liked to thank the loud robin for waking me this morning by trying to sing “cheerio” over and over. But the noise made me flinch like wet fingers on a candle flame. Instead, I got up and closed the window. Silence was my necessary comfort. I listened to CDs only while lifting weights or cleaning. Commotion unsettled me. If I could change one thing about myself, it would be that—to be more accepting of unexpected noise, sounds that I couldn’t switch on and off like a transistor.
I picked up the clipboard, swung the binoculars around my back, and recorded six Brewer’s blackbirds (Euphagus cyanocephalus) arriving in a military lineup precise enough to shame the still-quivering bluebirds. Perching on a whorl midway up the tree, the brown females and yellow-eyed males sidestepped toward the shaded inner canopy. Gin’s unclaimed topmost branch, bald and bent from bouncing hawks, looked like a long-fingered hand undulating gently with its palm opened skyward. A meadowlark singing a repetitive eight-note chorus eventually claimed the top roost. No one kept time with the meadowlark, not the orderly cyanotic blackbirds, not the two flickers whipping their tails while they balanced precariously in the wind, not the tanager stepping ever closer to the robin while keeping his head turned decidedly away.
I did not record the bluebirds’ shame, the blackbirds’ pride, or the tanager’s inclination to gossip. Cells on the graph paper accommodated numbers, not words. I reduced each creature to a concise check mark on a chart. If you looked at birds any other way, if you failed to objectify them and instead saw twittering blue sparks infusing a juniper until it quivered like a propane pilot light, well then, you would be imagining things that were not happening: bluebirds and robins gossiping when they were only eating berries from the same shrub; bitchy blackbirds shitting on meadowlarks when they were only suffering from nearsightedness. The purpose of my collations was to prevent my mind from playing tricks on me. Everyone’s mind plays tricks; otherwise, magicians would not make a living. Nature will fool you if you let her. She’s a master magician. Fortunately, I had studied the scientific method and understood how to keep my intuition at bay.
In Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Ex writes about a series of storms that grounded him at a Saharan air base. After hearing “All clear for takeoff,” he heads outside with the other pilots and engineers and checks the sky. Everyone agrees that takeoff is propitious, even for Saint-Ex’s tiny single-engine plane. Before stepping into his flying gear, Saint-Ex ventures into the desert, notices a dragonfly, understands that a windstorm has blown it to the air base, and realizes that a gale is coming. He contradicts his superiors and predicts that the sagging windsock will stiffen within three minutes. He’s right. His intuition about a dragonfly stops his crew from taking off in a perilous sandstorm. “Like one of those primitive men to whom the future is revealed in such faint rustlings,” Saint-Ex felt the desert’s anger in the barely beating wings of a dying dragonfly. It filled him with “barbaric joy.”
I could have intuited what these BBs were up to: sharing the same shrubs because they didn’t design their communities around artificial barriers. Instead, I was quantifying the birds as if they were gusts blowing through an anemometer. In another week, Fox would set me on the path away from this foolishness. I would find a book to read to him. “Those of us who understand life,” The Little Prince’s narrator tells us, “couldn’t care less about numbers!”
Around 4:30 p.m., Fox trotted down the driveway and disappeared on the other side of the cottage. I guessed he was pacing out of sight near the front steps. I was struggling to identify the species of one slender bird at the top of Gin and was enjoying the sunrays heating my arms through my cotton jacket. I let him wait while I continued tallying birds before they figured out that my property was rife with raptors and found friendlier accommodations elsewhere. When he came back into view a while later, I twisted around on my boulder and watched him slipping his snout into a sagebrush to investigate a twittering robin. Plant debris rained all over him. He corkscrewed, shaking himself off. Both rear flanks were still balding.
The following evening, around five o’clock, I paced around the steps where we’d had our show-and-tell arena, waving my arms so that Fox would see me and trot on down. If I got lucky, he would approach within two meters and watch me knock rocks, wave feathers, and tell stories. I wanted to tame him so he would appear when summoned, or at least at my convenience, at 6:00 p.m., so I could check on his mange. In the 1940s, Adolph Murie, one of North America’s leading wildlife experts, was studying wolves in Alaska when he trained a fox to follow his whistle by feeding it “tidbits.” Saint-Ex’s little prince tames a fox to dance to the sound of his footsteps “as if it were music.” Today at 6:00 p.m., he ignored me.
Dr. Dmitri Konstantinovich Belyaev, the Russian geneticist whose work convinced me that foxes identify specific human sounds, spent fifty years taming his subjects. He succeeded in raising foxes who wagged their tails when people approached and who followed a trainer’s gaze and point. His research began in 1952, the year Stalin banned—on punishment of death—this type of genetic research in the Soviet Union. Belyaev, you might say, was dying to understand the genetic nature of tameness. As is common in domesticated animals, some of Belyaev’s foxes were white with black spots. These tame foxes entered my life while I was researching a lecture on the genetic basis of inheritance for freshmen biology students. I thought about Belyaev’s foxes a lot because black-and-white foxes with blue eyes are one of the most pleasant things you can think about while preparing lectures about evolution for college freshmen.
Belyaev, who I am sorry to say died of cancer in 1985, tamed his foxes using artificial selection, the way breeders produced passenger pigeons and most of our common livestock. Charles Darwin described the method in his 1859 treatise, On the Origin of Species. Selection, whether artificial or natural, depends upon variation. Breeders need to have choices from which to select their desired traits. Belyaev noted that most foxes either feared or disliked us. He initiated his experiment with the outliers, foxes who were nether timid nor antagonistic around people.
As a population, we treat wild foxes the way they treat us: with animus or apprehension. Belyaev didn’t, of course. And neither did I. That’s why, at first glance, I thought I had a shot at taming Fox.
Starting with stock from Russian fur farms, Belyaev selected the tamest foxes and bred them with each other: tame by tame. From the resulting pool of offspring, he again selected the most approachable and bred those with each other, tame by tame, and so on for many generations. Over time, the percentage of docile foxes in Belyaev’s experimental population increased.
These trained foxes did not only behave oddly; their morphology changed as well. Tails curled and ears flopped. And they wore spotted coats. In the wild, red foxes appear silver, blue-black, blond, tawny, blaze orange, or gray—but not spotted. Regardless of their main coat color, they all wave white tail tassels and wear tall black boots. Belyaev did not purposely breed spotted foxes; the change in coat color was an unintended consequence. He selected the foxes that carried the gene for domestication, and the gene for spotting went along for the ride. Belyaev’s belief that friendliness had a genetic basis explained why so many foxes who had lived around me were unfriendly, and why Fox, who was mostly blond and red and gray, was going to be nearly impossible to tame.
The next day, betw
een 5:30 and 6:00 p.m., Fox hunted on the far side of Pillbox Hat Hill, while I waved periodically to attract his attention. A popcorn-shaped cloud was blushing pink as it chugged alone through the gray sky. Its edges were so well defined that the cloud looked like a solid object. When it stopped blushing, it was 8:00 p.m. and everywhere was too gray to spy a small and poorly trained fox.
On the fourth day of trying to train Fox, I was sitting at the kitchen booth shortly after 4:00 p.m. with phone, electric, and propane bills waiting for my attention. Two gray-flannel deer ears popped up, rubbing against and smudging the kitchen window. Attached to the ears was a relatively small buck, quite conventional but for his bedroom eyes.
I joined him outside, almost tripping over Fox before I noticed him sidelined at the edge of the driveway, nose pointing at the deer. While the buck was too tired to let a little furry animal bother him, Fox was not equivalently inclined.
Fox raised one front foot, looking like a Brittany spaniel on point. I recognized his May Day! signal, but I stayed my ground, crossing my arms over my chest. Chasing slobbery dogs in the moonlight was a job with a bit of an edge. Bouncing bucks seemed like a demotion. Especially that buck.
“You see that he’s an herbivore, Fox. No fangs. No claws. He’s walking. Barely moving.” I knew Fox did not like deer, which was a shame because they seemed attracted to him. In the past, I’d noticed that when deer sat down near him, he would stand up and move. Inevitably the deer would approach his new resting spot, and again Fox would get up and relocate. This time, Fox would not relocate.
I feigned disinterest. Fox stomped his leg and shuddered. No doubt he was afraid of the buck. Also, he was testing me, figuring out just how far he could push me to do his bidding. I let the buck alone so Fox could develop some experience with deer and build up his self-esteem. But he, Fox, continued to shiver. Stretching his neck high and tight, while his little body was still vibrating, he stared me down with squinting eyes. I was in Fox’s sights. His irritation was increasing. I would have to bounce the buck.
I clapped and told the buck to get moving. The buck posed, mimicking an unpainted lawn ornament. I continued clapping. The buck turned to face me as slowly as if the air were made of Play-Doh. Counting his breaths as his nostrils expanded and his stomach heaved, I tried outpacing him with my own loud breaths. After listening to me exhaling in sync with him for some minutes, the buck realized I was calling his play and blinked. By then I had loitered long enough. The fox disappeared before I turned back to the front steps. He would not abide breathing contests between animals whose metabolisms matched that of a slug on a hairy leaf.
Day five. After dinner. 5:30 p.m. I couldn’t spend every moment waiting for Fox. Across Yellowstone River, rain brooms were sweeping the ridge and stirring up dark fluffy clouds. They jumped like dust bunnies before resettling into the crevices of the foothills. Lightning scowled into the night. I needed to prepare my property in case of wildfire. A great land baron promotes his property’s natural fire regime: slow and seldom. That’s what this land of bunchgrass, creeks, rocky slopes, and scattered trees expected. But a rebellion was underfoot. Newer grasses introduced from Europe and Asia, like the thistle from Siberia that made up Vole Forest, were promoting their own fire regime: fast and frequent. The renegade grasses spread across the ground in solid sheets and dried during the hot, windy season, whereas native grasses grew in clumps and surrounded themselves with fire-resistant dirt and gravel. And they usually stayed moist until after the lightning season ended.
Bromus tectorum, a sheet grass called “cheat,” died early in the season, a welcome invitation for wildfires. Cattle, deer, and elk don’t eat dried cheat, so it just sat around, bronze and ugly and too sharp to touch with bare hands. Its worst habit was growing on steep slopes, something very few plants could do. Fires move fastest upslope, and I needed to keep my slopes rocky and semibarren. If you don’t understand why fire races up hills, stand on flat land and pretend you’re a flame. Look around. Extend your arms. How close are you to fuels you can ignite? (Answer: They’re on the ground.) If the grass is ankle-high, then you can heat—and potentially ignite—the area between your feet and your ankles. Now stand on a hill, facing the slope, and extend your arms. The fuel has come up to meet you. You’re close to an area that reaches from your feet all the way to your midsection, more if the slope is steeper.
You can’t fight the war on wildfire without soldiers. Someone needed to push the cheat grasses back, chase them off the hills, and wrestle water away from them. Liatris could climb hills but bloomed too late to compete; the cheats finished setting seed before liatris germinated. And in any case, the vole debacle had left me wary of attempting to grow liatris on my property. Salsify was an early bloomer. A flat-faced daisy spruced up with spiky petal tips, salsify produces seed heads the size and shape of baseballs. The countless individual seeds in the head each terminate in a long shaft attached to a rotor with feathery blades. If you blow on a salsify head, each seed lifts and flies away sequentially, like a fleet of helicopters. It’s a great distraction, but not a great soldier. Hermit-like, salsify arranges itself sparsely. Cheat and other flammable grasses can easily move into the open spaces surrounding each salsify.
Cutleaf daisies grow in mats dense enough to crowd out invading cheats. Their nickel-sized faces are ringed with petals cut straight and fine like fringe on a rodeo shirt. Daisies belong to a family that botanists called Composite, a reference to the composition of two distinct flowers that make up that round daisy head—ray flowers and disk flowers. You probably realize which is which. Each elongated white petal in the mane belongs to its own ray flower and therefore has its own ovary, and eventually its own seed. The yellow face is comprised of hundreds of disk flowers pressed so tightly together that there isn’t any room for petals. You will have to take my word for it because you cannot see the individual disk flowers with your naked eye. Of course, you will need to bend awfully close to the ground to see the flowers at all. Bobbing on ankle-high stems, these daisies would wilt in the shade if they tried to invade a field of calf-high cheat.
Butterweed spreads its soft gray leaves outward from wide clumps. Its frail stems bend under the weight of orange daisy-faced flowers. Nothing special. Unless you notice its misarranged petals, though they are not unkempt enough to elicit pity. Butterweeds are charmingly disarrayed, as if a small child had pulled out every petal and then hurriedly replaced them. Big gaps separate some petals, while others squeeze tightly together. All the plants commonly called butterweed are Senecios, a genus that encompasses a million species. Or might as well do so, because the odds of me figuring out which species was growing here was the same. The species name didn’t matter. It spread sheet-like and bloomed early. Tall enough to shade cheat and cure in autumn, senecio was my best defense and offense against hazardous grasses. All I needed to do was dig it up and transfer it to strategic locations.
Day six. Lunchtime. The big blaze vixen cruising along my property’s east edge where gravel met grass didn’t let her tail’s shadow fall on my meadow. Has Fox piss-marked a territory around the cottage? I hoped so. I’d never felt comfortable around the blaze vixen. Her presence always forced me closer to the front door. I knew she would never attack without good reason, but when it came to defining a “good reason,” I’d bet she’d go wide.
Fox arrived at 4:15 p.m. and wasted no time curling up and licking the forget-me-not stem. I took the timing as an aberration. He yawned, extending a pink tongue decorated with a perfectly intact blue petal imbedded in saliva.
Beginning on the seventh day, and regardless of the weather, Fox came by at 4:15 p.m. It was inconvenient. Shouldn’t my convenience have superseded his? How did convenience even apply to a fox? He was out all day anyway, doing whatever. I had a job. If he waited until 6:00 p.m., I’d have free time and the magpies would be gone. Instead, trying to read and listening to Tennis Ball squawking nearly continuously, I waited for him. Terrible idea. To
prevent her screams from being perfectly continuous, TBall carefully allowed between one and four silent seconds between squawks. When intrusive sounds follow a pattern, I can anticipate their arrival and assimilate them into background noise. But Tennis Ball cried out at random intervals. Mathematically random. They could strike at any time. Like malaria.
Maybe social interaction is your forte, and the last time you resorted to show-and-tell to ease your interaction with strangers, you were carrying a Superman lunch box. Maybe meetings, conferences, and soirees do not exhaust you, and your patience is as infinite as the demands of politeness. But if you shy from social interaction and tense up, leaving one leg slightly raised while people are trying to converse with you at the grocery store, then entertaining a guest day after day leaves you dusted. If your guest is an impatient fox who walks away when the wares you’re displaying get boring, you need to rev up your repertoire. This is especially tedious if you are pathologically private. I hesitated to talk to the fox not because we were different species, or because he was mute, but because I didn’t talk about myself with anyone. In fact, like the narrator of The Little Prince, I hardly talked about anything with anyone. The necessity of entertaining a visitor at 4:15 p.m. each afternoon left me no choice but to read. And so.
You have no recourse to balk at how an educated person might begin planning every day around a schedule that included nothing more important than reading with a fox. I have had to do worse in my short life than wait for the sound of a fox’s footsteps so I could dance like a fly on a scab.
panther creek fawn
On the first night of the River Cabins class, while dodging little brown bats, I had drawn a map to show that my relationship with Fox had followed a natural route, that it was perfectly logical—inescapable, really—and that nothing happening between us was bending the immutable laws of science. At the end of that first night, my mapped route had only one landmark: Vole Forest. Now, four days later, before heading off on another field day in Yellowstone Park, I labeled several additional locations: black fly, show-and-tell, mange. And there were still two days left of class.
Fox and I Page 10