Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  Eventually, I explored the area around the den, poking around longer, and looking more carefully, than when he was alive. I expected to find remnants from a short, staid life. Instead, a wonderland of natural art objects greeted me, funnily arranged as if to be aesthetically pleasing. They whispered stories to me under cloud-covered sky: segmented deer vertebrae, a garter snake’s shed skin, grouse feathers spraying from the base of dried yarrow, and green-tinged lacunae mottling an elk’s scapula. A large trophy, the elk’s scapula suggested that the den was a hunter’s home, one whose life, though short, was not without glory.

  Arranged on his well-kept lawn—not a speck of scat or a whiff of decay—mementoes from his visits to my house saddened me: a piece of hand-cut deer hide, a plastic seedling tub, a shard of pottery with part of a blue donkey’s face. I was less sad when I convinced myself that he had staged his memorabilia with a little bit of whimsy, creating a place where he enjoyed spending time. Maybe he liked the way those objects looked. Maybe he liked the way it felt to be around them. Like the feathers, sand dollars, and dried mushrooms I stuffed into glass and wood boxes and placed on my letter desk, and the colorful beach pebbles I poured into glass test tubes stopped with cork. I think he gathered scraps the same way I did: absentmindedly. Which is to say: instinctively.

  Picking up a hefty white chicken feather, I thought of Fox rustling someone’s rooster. While two ravens waged an acrobatic attack on a bald eagle, I sat in a sandy pit above his den boulder recalling my own rustling adventures from my early twenties. East front of the Rockies. Buck mule deer. Spectacular scenery. Evergreens speckling rolling hills beneath a banded flattop mountain. Guys from Dupuyer tied my buck to the roof of the jeep lent to me by a male nurse from the Glacier County IHS hospital. Someone I met at the Dupuyer diner brought me home to her family for the night. I stayed over with new people a lot when I hunted. And I hunted a lot. I never thought of them as “strangers,” but of course stranger is a relative term. You have to categorize some people as familiar in order to categorize others as strangers.

  Fox’s teeth had scored the biggest bone at the site, an elk femur. The rest of the carcass, mud mired about two hundred meters away, belonged to a bull who died before Fox was born. I remembered watching Fox gripping the femur with his teeth, choking up, and swinging it around like he was a big leaguer. How could I complain about my handicaps when a runt fox could bat a long bone?

  I was hiking home when a fox darted in front of me and crouched behind a boulder not much higher than her shoulders. After making eye contact she ducked back. Her fur was like a cinnamon mink, homogenized and subdued, just slightly paler than rich. I designated the cinnamon a vixen because she didn’t identify herself as a male. Besides, avoiding people was a decidedly female trait. She-foxes rarely took risks simply to assuage their curiosity or ward off boredom. I imagine that a population of foxes whose vixens took to socializing with people would dwindle to extinction. Also, she had an aura of feminine vanity. She was stouter than Fox, with a shorter, finer muzzle. She looked to be more symmetrical and unblemished, which might have been due to the distance and the lighting. Perhaps she chose not to tramp around unkempt. Then again, this was just one encounter, and I had seen Fox hundreds of times by now, in wind and rain and snow and desperation and fear, and, frankly, well . . . he was not a perfect specimen. On a good day, he was merely disheveled. When wet, he looked like a dirty dishrag. If you stood on his north side during a strong north wind, he looked like a Chihuahua suffering from chronic Montezuma’s revenge. The vixen ran into a thick clump of bunchgrass ten meters away. I sat on a rock and talked softly, but she never exposed more than her muzzle.

  No matter. I did not need another fox to entertain me. I was still deciding whether I needed the first fox. During the previous week’s field class, my students—essentially my peers—had decided that the only acceptable reason to associate closely and regularly with a fox was to objectify it, to use it, to turn it into a research subject. I implied agreement and then tried to make the implication a reality, imagining myself as a scientist coolly assessing tagged or caged foxes. I imagined filling out and mailing in even one of the applications for university positions awaiting me on my desk—real jobs in real towns—and relocating to a place where my friends would be humans and not foxes.

  If I really wanted a study subject, then one fox would be the same as any other.

  On the back patio a few days later, while enjoying the retreating sun’s glance across my legs, I caught movement near his den site. Looking through the spotting scope, I saw animals proceeding toward the rock where I had last seen Fox alive. Four fox kits, maybe five, rolled and jumped around his boulder.

  Three of those kits would make it to the beginning of winter. One grew a tail permanently kinked at ninety degrees about two thirds of the way from the base, and another sported a tail so insubstantial that a muskrat’s could put it to shame. In the middle of all that confusion of kits, one furry orange animal was dancing on a boulder. I don’t ever need to be happier than I was at that moment when I realized Fox was alive. On the hillside where he was dancing, rivulets rained down from a carnelian cliff and flowed through round-stemmed sedges, not so different from a stretch of the Wonderland Trail that I used to cross on my way to Indian Bar. Those subalpine meadows spread out in my minds’ eye, and I remembered bending down to pull salamanders out of ice-cold brooks.

  When it was too dark to see Fox, even through binoculars, I sat back in my chair, and imagined him dancing all the way back to his den. I had just learned for certain that one fox was not the same as the rest.

  endless possibilities for mischief

  At dawn the fox opened his eyes into fur that was soft, fine, fragrant, and someone else’s. A foot smashed into his windpipe, diverting his attention from the pain shooting along the side of one ear. Kits had pinned down all four of his legs. A quick body check revealed more unwelcome news: if persistent tiny feet kept pushing, they were going to invert both his elbows. This was not how he liked to greet the day.

  When the kits pounced on the mink-colored vixen, she shook and howled. They shed off her like fleas on a dead skunk. She had a hackle-raising scream; he had “qwah.” After a few serious head shakes, the hot fur entangling his eyelashes drifted slightly. The paws clinging to his jowl hairs dislodged, too, but they took with them more fur than seemed appropriate. A tiny clawed hand brushed against his eyelashes as it reached up to pull skin from his forehead down to his cheek. Blinded again. Off plan!

  How often was he waking up with the feeling of trotting into a windstorm on the river’s sandy bank and discovering small claws stabbing at his face? How long had he been waking to the sting of yanked-out hair? Tightening his lids against kit drool, he heaved his torso under warm, wet weight. There was only one question worth answering: How to stop this assault?

  Wings stuttered over the melee. His friend Round Belly was approaching. He wondered if she had quit a screeching match with the girl in the blue-roofed house to come and rescue him. She flew back and forth over the kits, lightly scraping a claw across their ears. Unable to resist a play fight with a harmless bird, the kits rolled off Fox and freed him. On plan! Now he would spread them out in a sand patch and drop in a couple of live grasshoppers for entertainment. Then he could leave them and find himself some sun. He turned the pudgiest kit toward the sand and it flopped over, landing not a toe’s width closer to the mark. Another kit, a female with a muzzle soft as a bald caterpillar, would crawl into the sand pit with just a light push. Except she didn’t. His next push was a little harder. Maybe too hard. The little fox rolled into a dirt-and-gravel chute. Weasel pee! With no neck and legs too short for her rotund body, the rudderless kit was helplessly sliding down the bald chute. Leaping over the top of the rolling kit and digging into the hill with his hind feet, he held his front paws out to arrest the runaway.

  He turned uphill; kits were peering over the edge. Scooping the yipping kit un
derneath and up, he curved around the small zaftig body, reached above her, and pulled them both up. She wiggled one arm free and raked his muzzle. Uphill, the magpie was teasing the other kits with long, steady calls.

  When he was young, his mother would sit on her hind legs, swatting magpies. One time, a bird she knocked down sank into its broken wing. Hopping around in a circle, it tried to shield the injury from his littermates. They flashed their shiny fangs and tore the bird into pieces so small no one would bother to eat it. He hadn’t ever attacked Round Belly, even though she had followed him around all his life. When he finished pulling the rescued kit up the hill, Round Belly, the biggest magpie he had ever known, was waiting at the den, eating bugs and getting even bigger.

  Fox always kept a neat schedule. Now that he was juggling four kits, I didn’t expect him to visit again. Certainly not the afternoon following the rock dance.

  His nose brushed the weeping stem of his tattered forget-me-not; scuffmarks ran the length of his muzzle. Bald spots and kit licks had left his coat tufted, as if shaved by a remedial barber. Was I flattered that he had missed me? No, he was giving me something more important than a compliment: a purpose. Something significant to do besides look for a secure source of income: establish a relationship with a wild animal. I sat cross-legged on the ground with Frankenstein on my lap.

  “You may bivouac here, Fox.”

  His forget-me-not had produced three new buds in his four-day absence. He stuck his head under the flower’s arched stem so that he appeared to be bowing down under its weight.

  The next day at first light, Fox was waiting for the vixen, who had been hunting all night. Just seconds after she breached the grasses, he escaped. In fact, every morning, even after weeks of kit duty, Fox was so eager for freedom he nearly flipped over the returning vixen on his way to sniff out mice, leap through the air, maybe bother some birds. This changing of the guard proceeded on schedule all summer in a most undignified manner, and his pace on egress never slowed.

  The first of many days we walked down the gravel driveway and through the pasture, TBall watched me wobbling along through bunchgrasses with Fox alongside, patting soft dirt. Directly above us, dense, disk-shaped clouds were tumbling from a stack. Overlapping, they formed a ring in the blue sky, like cobbles circling a pond. A lonely starling perched on the sagebrush, gyroscoping its head and flashing a bright yellow mating bill. What was it doing here? I told it to lower its elevation. Or its standards. Starlings didn’t mate in this high, dry desert.

  Poor things, those starlings. Twentieth-century Americans disdained them. Not because their feathers were rippled with a deceptive prism like a black oil slick, but because the birds’ ancestors had emigrated from England to North America in the last two hundred years. I had enough to do worrying about my own transgressions to belittle starlings or cast blame on Shakespeareans, who’d carted them to our continent in the 1890s. I had, for one, the Panther Creek Fawn. Besides, time had taught me that there were beings so easily stifled that they were not suited to life on a small, damp island in the North Sea.

  When Fox started trolling Pillbox Hat Hill in his hunting posture, I returned to a fuel-reduction project I had started in late spring with two meadow patches totaling 320-square feet. After clipping all the vegetation to the ground and raking and flattening the soil, I had started rolling out landscape fabric. The black plastic material prevented sunlight from passing through and would keep the area free of vegetation. Adhering the cloth to the ground entailed pounding four-inch-long staples every few inches. After about twenty hours of labor and a hundred dollars of material, I finished. A few days later, Fox and the kits were in the front lawn diving on voles. They had raked up every inch of the landscape fabric. I tried hard to be mad at them. But I was so happy that Fox and the little ones were having fun. I realized something important about my character that day: I was a forgiving person, under the right circumstances. As I sifted through the shredded plastic, I discovered that the rubber boa was an accidental casualty. Someone’s claw had caught the boa while it was sheltering under the tight black blanket. I was sorry about the boa, but not enough to feel angry with Fox. He was a friend; the boa was only a neighbor.

  Fox ran himself skinny carrying rodents up to the kits all summer. One time he surprised me with a gift of three voles at my doorstep. I could have spent a long time basking in the glory of his adoration, but it turned out I had only an hour. He returned with one more vole, then claimed his booty by clamping the four dead things in his jaws and charging up the hill to the kits. He had figured out that my doorstep provided protection from thieving magpies and had been stashing his loot there so he could continue hunting until he caught a rodent for each kit.

  Late afternoon, he would arrive for our rendezvous, sliding himself into the smoothest sitting spot available and leaving me jostling on rocks and bunchgrass in a tippy camp chair. Our seating arrangement was beginning to look less accidental than I once supposed. After I read from The Little Prince, he would stretch into one of his yoga poses. Pressing his belly into the gravel and stretching his rear legs back as far as possible, he aimed his paw pads upward. I would squat and perch with the balls of my feet on the ground. One day, as he rose to move into another posture, I dropped to my hands and knees and faced him. Our eyes were level. Believing that I could rise rapidly if necessary, I inched toward him.

  Reaching his forepaws forward, he pulled himself closer to me. I shuffled back on all fours. He and his forty-two sharp teeth elbowed forward again; I backed away. He, with his mouth opening wide enough to engulf my entire head, elbowed forward.

  “We are playing chicken. If you turn away first, you lose.” Fox—who could sever a vole neatly in half with one snap of his jaw—glared. I waited only a few seconds before rolling back on my heels and rising.

  We squinted into a speck of blue sky on this overcast day: a sucker hole. Clouds form sucker holes to lure someone, usually a fisherman—that was how I learned it—to come outside. When the fisherman is sufficiently far from shelter to appease the clouds’ sense of humor, they close ranks and dump torrents of rain on him. In my own interpretation, when a solid sheet of cloud opens to form a sucker hole, it’s as if a big homogenous clump of people in this whole tightly knit human world makes a space to let you and your fox in—and after you accept . . . wham! The big homogenous world of people closes up, casts its forbidding face your way, turns gray, then black, and lets loose the deluge it was planning all along. Sucker! Fox and I enjoyed the sun for about ten minutes before pieces of clouds filled up the sucker hole. “You won,” I said. “I am the chicken.”

  I conscripted the name chicken from a game of dare traditionally played with two cars driving directly at each other. Unless one of the drivers swerves, both drivers die in a head-on collision. The driver who prevents a crash by swerving earns the nickname chicken. Well, I didn’t expect that either Fox or I would die if neither of us capitulated, but still, like the road game, we were playing a game of pride. I liked games, so Fox and I played chicken often. I never won. I would have liked to win, but I knew Fox and his forty-two sharp teeth well enough to understand that he would have liked it more.

  Playing chicken forced us to face each other as equals. As a result, our relationship changed. When he’d suffered with mange, or when ranch dogs took a run at him, he seemed frail and needy, so I took charge and became caregiver. But after losing every round of chicken, I realized that we each had strengths and weaknesses. Because responsibilities attach to our strengths, we now had new responsibilities, too. Chasing dogs was still my job; I could intimidate dogs, who were, after all, boxed animals. I could not intimidate Fox. The game leveled the power in our relationship; I lost some, and he gained some. In losing some power, I gained some empathy. I think Fox noticed our power and responsibilities changing too. Playing chicken exposed my puny, flat teeth and general lack of agility, two traits that rendered me altogether incapable of killing a mouse.
>
  So, he caught one for me.

  Well, the kits were hunting for themselves by now, and he must have had an extra. In fact, the mouse he brought me looked like a creature he had cached and dug up, so he must have really pitied me. The earnestness with which he attempted to deliver a gift to someone too ignorant to realize its value charmed me. With the dead thing swinging from his mouth, he skipped forward. I tensed. Although I did not want a dead rodent dropped on my bare feet, I tried to stay cool. Among all traits, I most appreciate earnestness.

  Sensing my discomfort, he cycled through a series of advancing and retreating moves: two steps forward, one step back. I reversed, pressing my bare heels against the front door. Throwing my arms up to the side, I grasped the doorframe with my fingertips, balancing on my damp toes and feeling like a wilting clematis on an espalier.

  Keeping my face beyond reach of sharp and dirty claws I bent forward, pushed my open palms toward him, and said, “No.” Not with an exclamation point, because he was standing closer to me than he had ever stood before. Stilling his bandy legs, he bemused himself watching me panic. I remained pressed against the door, my bare feet threatened by Fox in front and sharp-needled juniper on the sides.

  Finally, his tiny reserve of patience and humility evaporated. He took his precious mouse away and would bring it to someone more discriminating than I was. He skulked off, stopping periodically to lay the mummy down, raise his head, and stare at me over his shoulder. Last call! Come and get it! He had never looked back at me before. My inexpressible guilt mushroomed as he padded away.

  It wasn’t my responsibility to keep Fox from getting his feelings hurt. But it was my responsibility to avoid hurting him. Right away, I started looking for an opportunity to correct my behavior. I figured I wouldn’t need to wait long; after all, he wanted to kill mice and I wanted the mice around my cottage killed.