Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  In the red Folgers coffee can, cable-shaped fox scat was waiting to have its DNA extracted so a laboratory could identify the number of foxes that shit around here and their paternity and other odd and esoteric facts. I didn’t need to gather facts; I studied biology. Facts stuck to me like metal shards to a magnet whenever I was in their vicinity. Then I would try to find uses for the self-adhering facts.

  Nothing could be more important than the fact that Fox ran from Marco. I knew then that he was not habituated to people, but to me. Why? Did he hang around me because I provided egg yolks? Protection? Because he sensed endless possibilities for mischief? Or was it possible to think we might be friends?

  Nothing tumbling out of that Folgers can could answer those questions. I’d be better off spending my free time cleaning tumbleweeds out of sloughs like some kind of fox social worker.

  Lime green oak leaves decorated the shaft of my bow, providing great camouflage until the day that deer would discover that oak doesn’t grow here. I aimed the target-tipped arrow at a fist-sized pinecone tied to a juniper branch. I watched it fly past the cone and skim the tops of feathery bunchgrasses. I found it—blaze orange vanes encircling the nock and fluorescing with gaudy pride—waiting for me near a gopher mound hidden under salsify seed heads. Playing games is more fun when you don’t lose the pieces.

  Overhead, a soaring golden eagle, sister species to Mongolia’s wedge-tailed eagle, reminded me that until the fox came out to play, I could be Genghis Khan. I raised an arrow to salute the eagle, and to being me. In the background far away, a Harley was publicizing its legally unique sound. The biker, gripping black leather gloves on handlebars, would be wearing a full-face helmet with UV shield; he would be fat, bald, and gripped in the arms of his passenger: a grandma with scraggly bleached blond hair and harsh blush worn too high. As the sound tailed down valley, I wondered who that biker was pretending to be.

  meadowlark

  Fox had just caught a rabbit but dropped it as soon as he saw me dancing across the pasture in my cactus-crushing Wellies.

  I had my eyes uphill, on the hound across the gravel road. Maybe it was on a leash or lazy or mired in quicksand—but that dog never moved from its one spot, a half mile away and an unimpeded line of sound and sight to my front door. I sang over Fox’s head, Elvis’s song about a hound who can’t catch a rabbit. Fox pranced a horseshoe pattern back and forth in front of me. Ignoring Fox, I jumped right into the third iteration of my musical complaint, reminding the hound dog that he hadn’t ever caught a rabbit and would never be a friend of mine.

  Fox didn’t like being ignored. He snatched up his rabbit, squeezing it in the middle and leaving it sagging from either side of his jaw. It looked like the toothpaste tube my fist had wrapped around that very morning. Bending down until my face was an arm’s length from his, I placed a hand on each knee. Fox leaned in. “That rascal with the slobbery flews,” I whispered, pulling the skin on either side of my mouth and shaking my head to imitate hound flews. “He’ll never kill a rabbit.”

  Fox dropped his rabbit and said, “Qwah.”

  Standing up, I crooned about the dog whining all the time. It was a pitiful rabbit specimen, but I couldn’t stop in the middle of the chorus. The sheriff picked up the abandoned dog a few days later.

  We were not trophy hunters, Fox and I. But we gathered our share of mementos. The Boone and Crockett Club wasn’t sending judges over to measure the four-by-four mule deer rack hanging above the sofa between photographs of a Grand Teton moose exiting a foggy pond and animal pictographs carved into sandstone. I shot that mule deer in the dawn following a full moon. The night before, I’d tromped four miles along a snow-packed ranch road listening to my footsteps, scouting for hoof prints, watching a bright orange dome fill the horizon in front of me. The entire horizon. Right to left. Nothing but moonrise. I could feel earth’s round ball melded under my mukluks. Of course, a full moon seen along the horizon is the same size as every other moon. (So say physicists.) The size of the moon glowing before me was an illusion—magic! My mind playing a trick on me. Here’s what I learned from that trick: when you are walking alone on the prairie, and unless you are a physicist, how the moon feels, looks, and acts is more important than its approximate size.

  I sliced the buck from sternum to pelvis, yanking out the lungs with two bare hands. Pulling the legs, I tilted the 200-pound body. Cavity blood and wiggly, pungent guts spilled onto the snow. I set the heart aside. It had one neat hole—right through the middle. My beautiful rifle, my 06 had done that at two hundred meters offhand with snow covering every scraggly knee-high rabbitbrush on the mesa and a golden eagle passing overhead. I left the buck and headed toward the nearest gravel road. Ranch hands sledding up the mesa saw me and finished the gutting. I spent the night in a wallpapered room with a shag carpet and a chenille bedspread while my buck hung from its hind legs in their outbuilding. I had bacon and black coffee for breakfast. My harvest—the buck and a doe from later in the day—barely fit into my forest-green Volvo sedan. Carrying a buck propped up in the passenger seat and a headless doe in the back, the Volvo sputtered down a gravel road to a mom-and-pop butchery.

  Feather-shaped Lombardy poplars, too tall for their width, lined the drive to the house. Of all trees, I most distrust Lombardies. Pop was waiting outside in dark green coveralls. After throwing a padded cloth over the buck’s head to protect the antlers, he hugged it under the front arms. Distracted by the naked and punky-barked trees and searching out an escape route should they succumb to their natural inclination and topple over, I ignored Pop’s mutterings. By the time I got over to the buck, it was on a wheeled cart. Pop had his hand looped around one of the buck’s legs and was tapping the hoof with a finger. He was pissed.

  Right away, I realized the problem. My blood drained away. The buck should have had a carcass tag tied around its leg. It didn’t. I pleaded. Pop sucked in his lips, holding up one hand to stop his son from opening the shop door. If he called a game warden, I would lose my hunting privileges and my beautiful .30-06 bolt-action. If he didn’t call, and a warden raided the shop, he’d be out of business and worse.

  Pop disappeared while I was tearing the car apart like a border guard stopping a van on the Canadian crossing. My head must have been under the front seat when the boy came out and grabbed the doe from the back. Mom, wearing a dress, came out with a tin, offering me a cookie.

  Pop was in a better mood when I returned days later with coolers to pick up the meat. I never found the tag.

  That’s enough reason to mount a four-by-four on a suede pedestal and hang it on a wall the color of prairie rose.

  When Fox scored his big trophy, I saved only two feathers. The first thing I recall about that day was watching him through my spotting scope. He was at the far edge of the alfalfa field, a good quarter mile away. Low cloud cover kept the sun from his eyes as he ran a beeline to my cottage without stopping to set down, nibble, or adjust his precious cargo. All the while, he was hustling at a speed that kept me from identifying his prize.

  He stopped two meters away from me, a meadowlark’s entwined legs dangling from his jaw. He dropped the lark. Walked right past it and sat as I turned to face him. No one likes a dramatic fox, but I had expected a little more animation for such a huge milestone. “It’s a miracle,” I told him. Then louder, with arms raised and fists clenched in the victory salute, “A miracle!” I repeated.

  Fox was talented, but he could not fly. I hadn’t thought he could take down a robin-sized bird. The spring bluebird carnage I had once accused him of perpetrating had turned out to be the work of kestrels, North America’s smallest falcons. At one time, kestrels were hardworking, respectable raptors who earned their living killing insects and hunting BB birds. When the valley people lined the roadways with bluebird nest boxes, kestrels went on the dole. Now they eat subsidized bluebirds morning, noon, and night.

  Tennis Ball and Torn Tail swooped in and began tear
ing at Fox’s unguarded kill. The twiggy legs and curled knuckles of the abandoned lark reached skyward. I jumped into the fray when more magpies arrived. As is the case with all animals we dislike, there were too many of them. Thousands probably. The magpies swirled around me in tightening circles, leaving me in a vortex of yellow feathers. Fox ignored the pilfering magpies and my energetic attempts to scare them off.

  The magpies retreated to the blue steel roof and lined out, hanging their long toes over the edge and tipping toward me. I brought out a refrigerated raw egg, nesting its white shell in a wreath of blue fescue. “For you,” I said to Fox, backing away, maintaining eye contact, and trying to ignore the wretched, random cries of the roof-thumping magpies.

  Snatching the egg in his teeth without breaking the shell, Fox disappeared into the vast rolling north meadow below Pillbox Hat Hill. He returned nearly to my doorstep a few minutes later.

  Surrendering the lark’s loose remains to TBall and Torn Tail, I nested another egg. Fox ran it back to the north meadow. The Egg Games had begun.

  After he left for the day, I decided to take a couple of minutes and hunt up those two eggs. I suspected he was watching me search and understood that I had picked up the gauntlet. Thirty “couple minutes” later, I still hadn’t located any evidence of an egg internment. Another twenty minutes and dusk prevented me from seeing cactuses underfoot. I headed home.

  The next day, I left an egg under his forget-me-not. Running the egg through the spring seep while flushing red-winged blackbirds from the cattails, he disappeared in the hummocky meadow above my well. When he returned to my front pasture, I headed out to find it. Dry and rocky, the meadow couldn’t support tall grasses, so tiny flowering plants—some not tall enough to shade a weasel—were flourishing in the sunshine. Taking in a panoramic view, I saw that the flowers’ arrangement followed the paths of wind and water, and that the meadow’s contours directed these paths. When I crouched down for a closer look, I saw that every bump and slope in the meadow, no matter how slight, steered the flow of water, creating distinct garden eddies, some no bigger than my hand. Wind influenced the shape and size of every plant growing in the eddies. Miniature ferns fashioned their own windbreaks by growing no taller than their windward-side neighbors. Lycopod, a moss-like plant with cylindrical branches, covered the ground like a net made of pipe cleaners. Phlox leaves spread out like shrubs, spiky, out of control, tall as toads. Squatting on leafless stems less than an inch high, walnut-sized blossoms of bitterroot had dried and faded into paper-thin bowls. Some of the dried blossoms, having blown off their stalks, were cartwheeling into rivulets too shallow to hide a robin. I picked up a bitterroot bowl and held it gently. When I pinched its central tubule, shiny black seeds spilled out, freckling a cutleaf daisy’s white face.

  If I hadn’t lost every round of chicken, I might not have devoted so much time to searching for Fox’s elusive eggs. But I was now determined to win the Egg Games. And if I hadn’t kept playing the Egg Games, I would have missed the miniature world I was discovering by crawling around on all fours with my face snuffling in dirt. Losing could not have been more enlightening.

  The next time he ran off with a game egg, I brought out the big guns: leatherette-barreled Bushnell binoculars, older than me and almost as wide. I decided to record his movements. Leaning on the window ledge with a pad and pen and watching Fox trot off with the egg, I wrote “SH FT JUNPR E Well > 45 DOWN” and included a diagram. How hard could it be to find a freshly buried white egg in dark soil? Tearing off the notepaper, I headed out to the SH FT JUNPR east of the well and turned downslope at forty-five degrees. It turned out to be the wrong short fat juniper. I would find that egg tomorrow.

  Not one to waste a calm, clear day, the fox slipped under the skirt of a fir tree and dropped in on a party of cud-chewing does. Weak buck scent wafted above the resting animals. The buck had pissed and gone, and the cud-chewers turned out to be asleep, so he headed to the blue-roofed house to bust open an otherwise boring day.

  He dug up a previously buried game egg and carried it uphill to a soft hummock. Hurricane Hands was watching as he placed the egg on the ground. She probably wasn’t close enough to see it, but even so, kicking up dirt in high, wide arcs—high enough for Hurricane to see—seemed like a good idea. Picking up the egg, he ran off to bury it somewhere else, then headed down to the blaze vixen’s hunting ground.

  Fox territories operated according to rules. He obeyed those rules just well enough to stay alive—but no better. He was in good shape and well rested; why not trespass into the blaze’s territory to toy with a mouse or two? The biggest fox in the valley, she didn’t need any more food. Spreading his hind toes wide like a goose foot, he leapt up and sailed through the still air. He enjoyed a soft landing on a good mouse.

  Round Belly strutted impatiently while he ate. The girl may have forgotten to put egg yolks out again. If he wanted, he could have worked his way into the dense, prickly juniper, all the way to the bole, stood on his hind toes, stretched his neck, and reached his nose to the bottom of the fat magpie’s nest. The same branches had weighed her nest all his life. But he wouldn’t mess with a companion’s home. And besides, the river reeds still held plenty of duck eggs.

  And for the small price of sucking in his stomach and wiggling through a scratchy shrub line, and between the rungs of a wooden fence, he could have chicken for dessert. The fenced area was huge, with horses sleeping on the far end. He headed to a chicken coop that was creaking in the wind, couched low, and waited for the giddy chickens to come strolling out. As the wait got longer, the horses woke, and soon their thick legs and shiny hooves blocked him in. The horses spotted him and whinnied, pounding the ground and filling the air with dust and the smell of manure. Weasel pee! The price of a chicken just shot up. One kick from a horse would keep a fox down for a long while. Maybe forever.

  The best escape would be a dead run straight toward the sound of Round Belly’s screeching. It worked. He ran to the one spot the horses weren’t blocking and leapt between two rungs in the fence. Whether she was trying to help him, or whether it was serendipitous that she sat at the edge of a safe route, he couldn’t know. But he was in danger and her call was familiar. He crossed the dirt road toward the blue-roofed house, where challenging winds sent him headlong into the sun with Round Belly following. The grass on the hillside was short, soft, and crisscrossed with vole runways. Whenever the breeze disappeared, he waited for his prey to scurry down its path before leaping as high as an overfed raven. And not a single hard landing. Round Belly rested on sagebrush and collected his leftover scraps. Older and weaker hunters didn’t leave any scraps behind. They would eat guts if it spared them the energy of a single extra leap.

  Several more games left me eggless, so I grabbed my compass and corrected the declination in order to reclaim the eggs. For the next game of hide-the-egg, I followed a transect for a quarter mile. Fox was waiting for me at the cottage when I returned without any eggs; in fact, he was standing in my spot on my portico, blocking the door, strutting like a sandhill crane powdered in pink clay. TBall paraded back and forth in front under Tonic, using tommy-gun chatter to warn Torn Tail that the mean girl was headed his way. I yelled at her to scoot. Did they think I’d put out more yolks if they harassed me enough?

  “You win,” I told Fox. I was crouching close enough to touch him but didn’t. You don’t just reach out and grab someone because you can or because he’s smaller than you. That’s one important difference between a pet and a friend. It distinguished Fox from the rubber boa, whom I didn’t hesitate to pick up and move to the front steps, where it could discourage mice from drilling into my foundation. “You win,” I repeated, and I turned my palms up empty-handed.

  I became slyer. Sitting on the camp chair, salvaging buttons from dilapidated shirts, I pretended not to notice him heading north—always north—with the game egg. Still, I never found a missing egg. Two years later, while weeding in the sout
h meadows, I found two of them, only meters away from TBall’s nest. I wondered why they were so close to her, and why she hadn’t stolen them.

  Losing kept me humble. Playing kept me nimble. In Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Ex writes that during our young adulthood, our future is as malleable as soft clay. Our imaginations continue to shape our future until we grow up, slip into the mold society readies for us, and harden. Once we step out of the mold, our hard clay cannot soften or reshape itself again. In the process of growing up and allowing ourselves to become recruited into this adult-centric world, our imagination contracts.

  Like most people, I was born with immunity to overzealous realism. When I was six and seven years old, I staged green army dolls in shrub jungles. Gunners jumped on cobblestones, looking for horny toads to ambush. When I dug my hole to China, a nervy turtle intruded. I double knotted my red Keds as quickly as possible, clamped one hand on each edge of the turtle’s shell, and ran it back to the jungle camp. Army dolls dropped from the rubbery branches onto the turtle tank.

  I started college. Gibbous-bellied professors with lips like duck beaks scuttled around a courtyard muttering nonsense. Someone’s lacquered comb-over flew up into a panache; I felt I had entered the pages of a Dr. Seuss book. Sometime during graduate school, in the midst of all the memorizing and mimicking of facts and professors (respectively), my childhood immunity to overzealous realism wore off. When university ended, I climbed to a podium, shook a hand, answered to “Doctor,” and walked away flush with rectifying truths: the jungle was a jade bush, the toads were horned lizards, and, since there wasn’t any water anywhere nearby, the military tank must have been a tortoise, not a turtle. At that point, I had almost become what Saint-Ex calls “petit bourgeois,” referring not to a shortage of cash but of creativity. Instead of choosing my own path, I stepped into a mold that society had designed for me. Fortunately, I stepped out before the clay hardened. If I hadn’t, there would be no going back, because petit bourgeois, according to Saint-Ex, is a permanent affliction. Once you’ve succumbed to it, “nothing within you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer.”