last day at river cabins
One strip of civilization—a garish stripe of Kentucky bluegrass, freshly shaved and watered—separated my cabin from the chaotic willow thicket at the edge of Yellowstone River. I stood at the riverbank cradling a ceramic mug with puce glaze as iridescent as a pee-filled dint in a buffalo pie. The university-sponsored adult education course had consumed its last breakfast. Very soon I would no longer have to hear the wall-muffled voices and crackling static from my married neighbors and their television or worry about whether they would mistake Fox for a hat—like Saint-Ex’s boa constrictor.
Yellowstone River was brown as cocoa. Rafts of plant debris rode rollercoaster waves on water that in two months would become so flat and translucent it could be roiled from bank to bank with the dip of a mallard’s toe. I rattled around on river cobbles, fat fleece socks inside my sandals just heavy enough so that the cold air felt cool. In less than an hour, students would gather for our final class hike. I inhaled, shook my shoulders against the steamy sensation under my arms, inhaled again. In my outdoor classroom, refusing to budge, was the elephant that had dogged us all week: a fox with traits that only humans should have.
My students did not believe that humans and wild animals shared personality traits. Several months earlier, one of my undergraduates from Florida State had helped me understand why. I was lecturing about Homo floresiensis—Flores Man—named after the Indonesian Island of Flores, where archeologists discovered their fossils in 2003. I presented the students with a drawing from National Geographic: Homo sapiens and H. floresiensis standing side by side. The juxtaposition was heuristic: although sapiens and floresiensis were both living in Southeast Asia thirteen thousand years ago, no one knew if they had ever stood next to each other. In the drawing, the human wore an animal skin over her breasts and pubic area; Flores Man, also represented by a female, stood naked. I asked the students to explain the clothing disparity. “Temperature,” said my best student. “Flores Man didn’t need clothes because they lived in a tropical climate.” I explained that humans experiencing the same climate wore clothes. Most surprising of all, considering that Flores Man lived twenty thousand years after Neanderthals—another sister species—was the supposition that they couldn’t create tools. “With such a tiny brain,” one student wrote, “Flores Man probably didn’t design clothes.” Although the three-feet-tall floresiensis species had smaller brains than humans, they weren’t morons. Tools found at the excavation site indicated that Flores Man produced wares and textiles.
Some students guessed that Flores Man was apelike and covered with a thick mat of hair and therefore did not need clothes. Wrong again. Biologists believe that members of the genus Homo lost their body hair about seventy thousand years ago. The speciation of body lice provides the evidence. Animals that are hairy from head to toe have one type of louse, head to toe. Because we hominins have a vast expanse of naked skin separating our hairy patches and preventing lice from interbreeding, we have two types of louse: pubic and head. Our pubic and head louse species are about seventy thousand years old; we had to have lost all our body hair by then; otherwise, there would be just one species.
The undergraduate who enlightened me explained that the artist’s bias had informed the drawing. Her supposition was that the artist had subconsciously drawn upon (pun intended) the Adam and Eve story and assumed that only humans could feel shame about their nakedness. The female Flores Man was naked, she said, not because she was hot, hairy, and dumb, but because she was incapable of feeling shame. Shame was a trait reserved for humans: that’s the Adam and Eve story. If the student was correct, then how do we ascribe a human personality trait to a fox when we cannot even ascribe a trait such as modesty to another hominin?
All week long, I had recounted as little as possible as seldom as possible about the fox. I withheld or edited anything too personal or subject to misinterpretation: Fox’s eyes behind Dancing Fly; my acquiescence on the inconvenient 4:15 meeting time; my nightly predinner drives home from River Cabins to check up on him. I told the students about egg yolks and magpies; voles and liatris; mange and the duties of a provincial land baron.
So that much was good. But I had slipped up and used the words “the fox and I” one too many times. I needed to make them forget that, and I had a plan. Not a real plan, but an ethereal plea just shy of a hope that if I waxed eloquently about natural history, I could distract them from questioning my relationship with Fox. Who could spot an elephant in a million acres of wilderness? By now, the rising sun had topped the ridge crest and illuminated my empty mug. I headed inside to stock my backpack.
“When you say ‘we,’ do you mean it’s like you’re a couple now?” We were not five minutes into our hike, heading up the Beattie Ridge along a dormant Forest Service road. I stopped and turned to the group, but the questioner remained anonymous. Anyway, it was rhetorical, so I didn’t answer.
“You and the fox,” another student clarified.
The balding gravel road paralleled a dry creek reach through croplands. Cottonwoods that had died when the water stopped flowing were now providing just enough skeletal shade to allow young sumacs to flourish and flaunt their glossy maple-shaped leaves. All around us, plants were immigrating and emigrating. Plants that had migrated from colder, drier places were trying to stay. Those that found the newcomers repugnant, or themselves on the wrong side of the headgate, were trying to escape to harsher climates at higher altitude. Each plant population illustrated a story that was sure to distract everyone from thinking about Fox and me.
“This tall thistle—knapweed—immigrated from Siberia, and it’s thriving in balmy Montana, along with its Siberian neighbors: lilacs, caragana, and Russian olive. All of them are happy to have relocated from a land with eleven months of winter to one with only nine months.” Tall perennial knapweed stalks rose prominently in every direction. “Scarlet globe has lived here for thousands of years.” I squatted and cupped a barely visible inflorescence floating in effuse curly leaves. “Right now, it’s trying to get out. Escape the crowds, shade, and herbicides.”
A tin-cloth hat with a man underneath moved beside me. Tin Cloth, who had been guiding me along throughout the week, whispered, “They will keep asking about your fox. Let’s see what we can do.” Tin Cloth was my translator. He translated references about television shows and pop culture into something that I might understand, explaining, for example, that various “desperate” women whose lives filled much of the background chatter during group meals were fictional “housewives.” He translated YouTube’s enigmatic spelling and tried explaining (unsuccessfully) its equally enigmatic amenities. Tin Cloth understood my search image well enough to realize that without a specific accessory like a hat, a person, even one whom I spoke to every day, became just another anonymous face. As Tin Cloth and I picked up pace to keep ahead of the main group, he slipped me a piece of petrified wood. “You’ll need this,” he said.
At our next stop, I wedged my fingernails under my bootlaces to extract a wild licorice seed. It was cinnamon brown, burred, and large as a peanut shell. “This seed is analogous to sperm, right?” They nodded their heads yes. Wrong answer. Trick question. Prior to about 1800, it would have been the right answer. In those days, Western scientists believed that sperm contained fully formed individuals called homunculi. A famous engraving from 1694 shows a baby squatting down in a sperm cell, ducking his oversize head and clutching his knees to his chest. Of course, there are not little people huddled up inside sperm cells, and that’s why they are not analogous to seeds. “A seed is a baby in a box with its lunch,” I said, repeating something they had probably heard when they were freshman.
Pointing to an eastern cottontail huddling under a sagebrush, I asked them to imagine that it was pregnant. “If we could remove the rabbit’s uterus—a baby in a box—and plant it in the ground, it would be very much like a seed. If the baby rabbit in the planted uterus were to develop underground, it
would need a protective covering, something harder than the tissue of a uterus—something like a seed coat—and enough food stored with it to make up for the severed umbilical cord. Essentially, plants enjoy surrogacy because seeds, which support the growth of baby plants until they germinate, are basically surrogate mothers.”
Tin Cloth looked up from a bird book, tilting his head back and over to one side. I figured he was gesturing Good show! Good job! I was humming to myself when someone said, “He didn’t have mange then?”
Another student preempted me. “No, he didn’t. The fox did not have mange,” she said, shaking her downcast head from side to side.
A series of parallel rock walls ahead would take everyone’s mind off the fox. Each wall was about thirty feet wide and rose a hundred feet above the sagebrush. The walls were over twenty feet apart. Orange cinnabar sand was spilling into the spaces between each set of walls. These vertical walls had been horizontal at one time. Each was once a layer of sediment underneath a shallow sea, which over time consolidated into sedimentary rock. Millions of years ago, the earth shook violently enough to tip these sedimentary layers on edge; horizontal layers became vertical, and floors became walls. The walls, which geologists call hogbacks, consisted of different types of sedimentary rock: sandstone, shale, mudstones. Each type responded to weathering forces in its own manner. Above those walls a single stroke from a worn-out varnish brush had painted the only clouds in the sky.
“Yes. That’s right,” I said, “he did not have mange. When was this happening—the creation of these sedimentary rock walls?” Wearing oversize sunglasses, the students buzzed around me like wasps on the sting.
It would be another three years before I saw a fox dying from mange. Looking downy-feathered, like a nestling robin, it raked itself with rear claws as if to remove its own skin. If Fox—my fox—was severely mangy, I would not have mentioned it to near-strangers who were paying for my company, especially not on a day with only a single stroke of cloud in the sky. I would have found it less distressing to say, “On the way here I passed an auto accident and saw an eviscerated guy whose eyeball was hanging into his crushed mouth while a turkey vulture yanked out a long piece of his gut.” Apparently, none of them had ever seen a mangy fox either, or they would not have asked as casually as if it were chicken pox.
“So, back to our tableau. The creation of these walls?”—I saw a hand go up to ask about the fox and me—“Relative to dinosaurs?” I continued, ignoring the hand. I had never discussed dinosaurs on this trail and had nothing prepared to say about them. Someone rescued me by picking up the dinosaur thread. It was Sixth Sense, the woman who had referred to him as “Foxie” after my opening-night slideshow. She had been zigzagging through our herdlet all morning at a peripatetic pace, disappearing over a cliff to examine something, then skipping along fast and popping up behind Tin Cloth.
From my right Tin Cloth whispered, “Tab low not tab blow.”
Sixth Sense was right. Cambrian and Cretaceous Seas both preceded dinosaurs. Everyone had seen Steven Spielberg’s movie and knew that dinosaurs had run amok in the Jurassic. Someone else knew that dinosaurs had lumbered about for a million years before they attained dominance, which meant that they first appeared in the Triassic period. Inappropriately, the sedimentary shelves before us predated dinosaurs by three hundred million years. Colorful hat brims turned this way and that as confused students looked about for enlightenment.
“You were going to get treatment for him?” And then the dominoes fell. I could not make out individual questions, but I think I answered all of them when I replied, “Yes. Treatment. A veterinarian.”
Remember that metaphorical gorge I wrote about in the first chapter? The one that separates humans from other animals and prevents us from attributing human traits to non-human animals? The students figured out that if “fox and I” rendezvoused every day, one of us had crossed that chasm.
The questioning stopped while we bridged a creek barely wider than the culvert steering it under the road. The trail switchbacked from there, and we began winding into the mountain. Anticipating a renewal of interest in Fox, I continued, “But I wouldn’t say I had a plan. I do not know any veterinarians who treat wild foxes.”
When you cannot change an adversary’s mind, erase it. Hypnotize your foe with marble-sized water droplets shooting from a geyser’s white cone, or show her a green river busting through a deep red canyon; let a waterfall mist him while he looks three hundred feet over its edge to the foam rising through a rainbow. I looked around: there was just a cloud. A single cloud painted on our blue canvas sky with one sweep of a worn-out brush. There’s not much you can do with clouds; if you’re smart, you won’t even mention them.
I waved Tin Cloth’s petrified wood, dropping it into the first hand that uncurled under it. “In the age called the New Dawn—the Eocene—this ‘rock’ was a breathing tree. Maybe redwood or cypress. It stood here,” I pointed out a ledge overhang, improvising. “In its shade, on this ledge, the tiger-like Mesonyx crouched. The most charismatic megafauna of the time.” No one contradicted me or corrected my most certainly incorrect pronunciation, so I kept talking.
“Mesonyx looked like a serpentine-tailed wolf. Until you saw its tracks and realized Mesonyx was hoofed.”
Only a few days earlier, the sight of bison, elk, or antelope sent the class running into meadows with cameras and binoculars swinging. After watching hundreds of bison and elk in the park, and herds of antelope cruising past our cabins every night, the students had altered their search image, as predators often do. Now they were looking out for bears, cougars, and wolves. If I wanted to get them excited about a wild, hoofed animal it had better be dead, ground, and served over pasta.
“Mesonyx was a predator, but a really odd one: a hoofed carnivore. All hoofed carnivores are now extinct. Think about it.” I paused. They thought about me and the fox.
“So, you’re pretty sure the fox didn’t have mange.”
I did not hear an upward inflection, so I assumed it was not a question. Crossing my arms over my chest, tucking my chin, and hunching my shoulders together, I wove my way through the student cluster.
Tin Cloth suggested that the fox’s mange was incipient and that my garlic and eggs had cured him.
It was true that Fox ate a lot of garlic with his egg yolks. Still, my science background nagged me, prodding for proof. I didn’t own a digital camera. Kodak film for my single-lens reflex camera required a 120-mile round trip, over one mountain pass. By the time I made that trip and bought the amount of film one might deem reasonable for a person with serious financial limitations, his balding splotches were gone. I could not reject Tin Cloth’s hypothesis; likewise, I also could not be sure that I had not imagined the mange because the fox seemed so slight, so shaky, so needy.
“Maybe,” I said.
As we climbed steadily upward, I found reasons to pause: admiring the wilted leaves of flowerless evening primrose, listening to a screaming red-tail hawk, passing around a delicate white snail shell.
Someone suggested that I’d bolstered Fox’s immune system by protecting him from dogs and unnecessary stress. I heard ideas about support systems and social networks, and “well, there was the garlic.” I smiled, thanked everyone, and retained a bit of doubt. I didn’t know anything about support systems.
I slowed when the panting behind me got too loud, stopped when it disappeared altogether. We paused for magpies, which the East Coast students found interesting until I admitted, “No, they do not sing. And, also, they do not soar.” We broke for flycatchers and towhees. The olive-sided flycatchers were singing, “Quick, three beers!” (according to Cornell University’s online bird guide). The green-tailed towhees sounded to me like the Popcorn’s ready! bell on a microwave oven. Everyone knew I was joking about the microwave. It was obvious I had never owned one.
Our road continued wrapping itself upward around the mountain. We followed,
students hugging the mountain, me favoring the outer exposed edge. They whispered to each other; I was sure they were collaborating on a plan to ambush me with questions about Fox. I had plans too. I was a fisherman, after all. I carved a hole in the ice and dropped bait: questions instead of salmon eggs. The first one to rise to the challenge explained that Homo sapiens were among the smallest Pleistocene or Ice Age mammals; they were more like prey than predators. I continued setting the hooks—intriguing questions—and the students, finally animated about something besides Fox, responded. Keeping all the lines taut, I said, “Yes, humans—basically cavemen—spent their time running and hiding from big predators. The super predators decreased in size about five thousand years ago. Why?” I asked. “What was happening five thousand years ago to cause that?”
“But you read to that fox, kept him around, so you could check on his mange. But now that he doesn’t have mange?”
“Oh. That is a good point. That is.” (It really was.) The fisherman became the fish. Pinned on the outside edge along a sheer drop, I could not defend myself. Not while standing on a precipice so narrow that no one could fit behind me to cover my back—not tiny Jenna, not even skinny Tin Cloth if he removed his brimmed hat. I stood alone, guilty of abetting a fox who was not to a single hair mangy. My crime was imagining he had traits only humans should have. I pointed up at a birdless pine branch, and, in a voice loud enough to distract everyone, I said, “Quick, three bears.”
Addressing the question about the 5,000-year-old predator-shrinking event seemed inappropriately complicated. No one had attempted to answer that question, and ecologists were still weighing two possibilities: an increase in Homo sapiens hunters or a warming climate that favored small body size.
Fox and I Page 12