Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  In the midday sun you could find me shoveling snow. Monotonous lifting and pushing kept me warm and calm. Of course, by clearing the driveway, I forfeited the chance to show off my Mazda’s let’s see what this baby can do muscle and claim whatever miniscule right to bravado a two-door hatchback might be entitled. Truckers heading down from the mountain—late-season hunters, lion chasers, forest rangers—stared while raising the palms-up signal. Hey, what? Buy a truck. Yes, I knew about trucks and snow. Not that long ago, in my twenties and still willing to ride shotgun, my park service friend and I would drive his pickup over oil-slick mud or into cement-like snow with the rear-end fishtailing and the road going one way and the truck going another. From behind the wheel he would say, “Let’s see what this baby can do!” We would swerve and swivel, and the mud or the snow filled the hubcaps until we were completely embalmed and stopped dead. I would open the door, jumping out six miles from the nearest anything, and he would say, “Justabout made it.” Then he got on the repeater and we would walk out to wherever his friend could meet us.

  I am too optimistic to drive a truck. And I haven’t ridden shotgun more than a handful of times since.

  Besides, a packed driveway freed the wildlife from having to posthole; mule deer pronked higher and skunks hustled faster. Voles scuttled across the dense snow leaving neat, circular dive holes like the tracks of sand crabs on a beach. Refusing to hibernate, voles spent early winter building grassy nests and stuffing them between the root toes of my lilacs. Like all rodents, voles’ iron-laden incisors grew constantly. Iron gave their teeth an orange tint, while their perpetually growing teeth gave them a bad habit. They gnawed. They attacked any tree in their sights, sinking those teeth through the bark and into the tree’s living tissue. Gnawing this way and that and tilting their jaws, the creatures tested different angles, like apple bobbers at a Halloween party. As the snow piled higher, voles shimmied up trunks, carving trees into totem poles. Lilacs and cherries have thin barks. When a vole eats through the bark, clipping the vein at the soil line, the link from roots to leaves breaks. The flow of nutrients stops, and the tree dies a slow, cold, and invisible death. Meanwhile, voles stayed warm by hiding underneath blankets of snow. I tried to keep the snow blankets away from trees and shrubs to discourage voles from moving in.

  In settled snow, I followed tracks to figure out who was moving into the culvert (cottontails) and who was living under the outbuilding (skunks). The culvert extruded on either side of the narrow driveway. I kept digging it out of the snow so Delbert, our UPS driver, wouldn’t catch a tire edge. Snow-clogged culverts could also flood a delivery pad that I had constructed near the driveway’s end after observing, too many times, Delbert’s worried face as he reversed a couple hundred meters back to the gravel road.

  Snow drifts pushed against the galvanized welded wire fencing until it popped off the steel T-posts. Aluminum fence posts gripped the wire better than steel did, but heavy drifts bent aluminum posts. Hammering with a rubber mallet usually set them upright again. I also repaired shrub limbs after every big storm. When a large branch ripped under the snow’s weight, I cleaved it off and covered the wound with pruning paint. When a small branch ripped, I slung it up with a tongue torn from an old running shoe. When temperatures approached forty degrees, I watered the spruce and re-sprayed anti-desiccant to prevent wind burn and hauled dirt to pack into newly appearing driveway ruts.

  In graduate school, I had a car but no land. I changed the car’s oil myself. Discovering this, a professor pulled me aside and explained that manual labor was not my bailiwick. Budding scientists do not change oil. They hire people to do it for them. Mortified and out of my element, wearing camouflage to his suit jacket, I succumbed to his conceit, bringing the car to “be serviced,” as people unfamiliar with animal husbandry like to say. Until then, I had never paid for an oil change. But I hadn’t had a bailiwick before either, and it seemed like a fair trade. Until I noticed my head bleeding from self-inflicted sores. Sometimes I wore liner gloves indoors to protect my head if I scratched. Somehow, I would pull them off, and thin, pale blood would wet my fingers.

  People were anxious in graduate school, and not just students. The habits and habitat of modern life are simply not evolutionarily stable. Metal and plastic. Electric lights blotting out stars. Ten-story buildings blocking sun and moon. Cars honking and everything else ringing, beeping, and buzzing until we can’t even hear aspen leaves quaking. Think about all the changes that our species has experienced in the last several thousand years. Too many. Too fast.

  A person would be crazy if she weren’t anxious. Maybe I was the only one in that university town with blood-dampened hair, but I was not the only one with anxiety caused by modern habits and habitats that were not evolutionarily stable. Take an auditorium filled with university professors and doctoral students and pull them outside in groups: the ones addicted to food, tobacco, diet pills, alcohol, marijuana, sex, hard stuff, antidepressants, antipsychotics; the ones who couldn’t stop pulling their hair, or picking their face, or cutting their arms. The perpetual psychiatrist appointments, the suicide attempts, the television binges. Maybe I wasn’t any better than they were, but I wasn’t any worse.

  Compared to humans, the natural habits of foxes have been relatively stable for tens of thousands of years. While they’ve been running and hunting rodents and digging dens, we’ve been bicycling, motoring, and jetting; eating raw, cooked, and processed foods—foods that last century’s citizens couldn’t pronounce. We’ve gone from strolling around naked to wearing Gore-Tex. And there seem to be as many career and lifestyle choices as there are people, while foxes all make their living in pretty much the same way and they haven’t changed their diet in a thousand generations. No wonder why he was a calm little animal (when the wind wasn’t gale force). Hanging around Fox became my way of relaxing. What can you do with a fox? Play. Stretch in the sunshine. Walk in the moonlight. Sit around reading fun books. My scalp stopped bleeding.

  On windy days, when white caps rolled in my toilet, I did not expect him and he didn’t come. He stayed in his high basin, jumping mice and voles. Still, I continued my habit of using classroom breaks to wander from window to window, anticipating his arrival. Internet classes and discussions with students energized me almost as much as Fox did. An upper-division ecology student wrote about feeding food scraps to a red fox who frequented his Alaskan military base. He was a young soldier then. Now he was a sophisticated college student. Some of our class reading material had instigated guilt about the fox feeding and he was writing to confess. The guilt didn’t come from one of my lectures but from researching the issue online for an essay assignment. The student did not cite any specific research, but at that time, you simply had to be an alert participant in American culture to absorb the paradigm. Feeding unboxed animals had fallen out of favor. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know enough about his army base to pass judgment. But I did love my students. And how much easier to love a student who took a minute’s break from serving his country to pass leftover MRE to a fox?

  Nowadays few believe that foxes on Alaskan military bases should eat leftover food. One reason is that it is not natural (at least not as natural as throwing the food into a steel dumpster). In the twenty-first century, everyone wants everything to be natural—with a few exceptions: medicine, transportation, energy, communication, televisions, wrinkles, cell phones, bad eyes, weak hearts, worn knees, small boobs, old hips, indoor temperature. The more we humans pamper ourselves with manmade toys and tools, dressing in polypropylene, Gore-Tex, and nylon fleece and availing ourselves of dentures, braces, statins, vaccines, diet pills, hearing aids, and pacemakers for everyone over the age of seventy-five, the more we demand that unboxed animals stay natural. Like a seesaw with humans on one side of the fulcrum and wildlife on the other, we sink further from a natural life and force wildlife closer to it. Our pursuit of the natural life is as vigorous as it is vicarious.

  I
wrote back to the student veteran telling him not to worry. “People have been feeding foxes for thousands of years.” With tongue in cheek, and because he wrote great essays, I added, “Why do you think foxes are so cute?”

  Needing a sidebar anecdote for the textbook I was writing, I pulled my tongue out of my cheek and developed a hypothetical example of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. I speculated that foxes wanted protection from bigger animals like wolves, coyotes, cougars, and bobcats. Currying favor with humans could earn that protection. But how to curry favor? Their small size prevented them from offering either protection or portage. They lacked the humility necessary to find useful employment as service animals. Foxes didn’t fetch. Do you think they would mindlessly trail sheep around? They would die of boredom.

  Cuteness—and their ability to catch mice—may have been their main stock in trade. Perhaps those foxes whose compelling appearance allowed them to ingratiate themselves with people ate better, stayed safer, lived longer. Of course, it was a two-way street. Animals that wanted food and protection needed to change their attitudes toward people. Neither aggression nor coyness would endear them. Using their cuteness as their collateral, the tamest foxes exchanged wildness and solitude for companionship, food, and protection. Eating better and living longer would allow them to produce more offspring. In other words—in Darwin’s words—the animals who carried the traits for tameness would experience higher fitness. Therefore, members of future generations would inherit the traits for tameness. The cute, tame foxes would become more common than the plainer, wilder foxes.

  Coy and skittish, foxes don’t often bump into people. If they encounter someone, they might snarl or flee. Most people act the same around wild foxes. As Dr. Belyaev discovered, some small percentage of foxes are genetically predisposed to seek out human companions. I think Fox was one such animal. If a small percentage of foxes seek companionship with people, isn’t it likely that a small percentage of people are genetically predisposed to seek out fox companions?

  Of course, a predisposition may never reveal itself. We all have genes that allow us to do things that we’ll never actually do. For example, genes for intelligence or creativity or athleticism may be of limited use to people who don’t have access to basic needs for survival like food, water, and shelter. They wait, these unused genes, packed into our soft, rounded nuclei, tensed and ready to spring, activated only by luck and circumstance.

  Chatting about foxes with the Alaskan veteran broke the ice. I began talking to other students about foxes. Red foxes, like people and magpies, live all over the world. My Japanese students, especially fond of foxes, taught me how to say kitsune, which is Japanese for fox. Listening to stories about thousand-year-old Shinto temples and fox-worshipping monks, I felt my world becoming cozier. Online students shared their stories about wild foxes they’d met as children or young adults, in Maine and Indiana, in villages and vacation cabins; foxes their parents told them to run from. Their interest in the relationship between people and foxes led me to write a sidebar story for my textbook-in-progress, a story that might help them understand natural selection.

  A man carries a basket of trout into a stone-cold cave with soot-covered walls. His wife is inside breaking pine branches and tossing them into a mud-walled fire pit when she stops and pulls a branch aside. Two bright pink balls as large as human eyes swell from between strips of the branch’s gray bark. Soft and solid, wolf-milk slime is too beautiful to burn. She sets her decorative branch across a flattop rock that holds baskets of drying sorrel.

  The man’s family sleeps on woven grass mats suspended from wooden beams by braided strips of elk hide. One night a field mouse runs along a ridge in the cave wall, slides down the leather cord, and jumps onto the sleeping woman’s head. The mouse collects brown hairs for its nest and leaves sooty footprints across the woman’s forehead. More hairs are collected the following night when the mouse returns with its friends and family.

  Except for finding the wolf-milk slime, these events are not unusual. At first dozens, and then hundreds, of sooty-walled caves dot the subalpine meadows and harbor warm, long-haired people and cold, pregnant mice.

  A white fox vixen with black spots on her midsection paces in front of a nearby hemlock grove. In the hanging valley above her, a lake cupped in white granite tips its outflow into a creek that runs past the grove. The spotted vixen inclines her head to her breast and watches her kits and cousins playing along the creek—black, gray, blond, yellow, blaze, tawny, white—fast foxes leapfrogging over pokey ones. The white foxes, like winter weasels, have black markings.

  Meanwhile, in the cave, there is more human hair cradling newborn mice than there is sprouting from human heads. The mice are warm. And people, who were relatively hairless to begin with, are now more hairless. And that is not as inconsequential as it seems. People, even hunter-gatherers, adore their hair.

  One day the grove’s spotted vixen happens by a cave and hears mice laughing and cave walls howling. People are throwing rocks at mice. (And missing.) She trots to the edge of the cave, presses herself against cold stone, and pounces on the giddy mice tumbling out.

  People soon realize that foxes kill mice, so they lure the creatures into their caves by offering them food and protection. By and by, many foxes sleep in many caves, sharing views of sunsets and sunrises and stars with people. And the people are once again, if not hirsute, at least as hairy as Nature intended them to be.

  Many generations later, most foxes sleeping near humans are black and white. The other color phases appear on foxes who are too aggressive or too shy to sleep in caves with people. The human population grows, expanding into new territory. The fox population follows the expansion, relaxing onto trees in the little groves surrounding the people’s huts. The foxes sleep on the lower branches, and the young soft boughs bend like hammocks.

  Eventually, people build sturdier houses, sprinkling strychnine in the corners and setting mouse traps behind refrigerators. They have fewer reasons to protect foxes, and one important reason to kill them: fur coats. Spotted foxes disappear first because they are tamest and therefore easiest to bait and trap. Many more generations later, no one will remember ever having seen or heard about wild spotted foxes.

  At least one forest still has hammock boughs. Running alongside the forest is a gorge lined with ash-colored pinnacles, narrow enough that a keen-eyed animal can look across to another forest, but so deep that only birds flying in the gorge can see the bottom. A scientist, panting and dusty, emerges from behind a pinnacle, carrying a metal box with long antennae; numbers flashing on a screen beep and change value with his each step. He faces a ghost forest of standing dead trees whose lower branches are gently bent, hammock-like, their surfaces shiny as if polished from wear. The scientist takes out a notebook and writes that burls, a physiological response to a bacterial infection, have distorted the boughs and caused the branches to bend. In the field research cabin, he takes out his lighter to start a fire in the fireplace. As he builds up the fire, he puts one piece of wood aside. A bright-pink ball, wolf-milk slime, swells from a flaky barked branch. The branch is too punky to burn. He goes outside and tosses the worthless piece of wood into the gorge.

  Deep in the forest, too far for anyone to see, one inky fox kit scratches his back against a hammocked branch, crosses his legs, laughs, and sets all the kits in the forest laughing. The scientist hears the noise. Wind. He records some important numbers in his notebook. He will not let his mind play tricks on him.

  This is unfortunate. Among all skills possessed by the human mind, performing tricks is the most important.

  elk and badgers

  Late April. I dragged storage bins out of the shed, swapping—till mid-September—heavy winter clothes like double-layered wool balaclavas, bibbed ski pants, goose-down mittens, and lined gaiters for light winter clothes like lined canvas overalls, wool ball caps, chopper mitts, and unlined gaiters. I could have pretended tha
t four distinct seasons visited me, but living and dressing for two seasons—like the fox—was simpler.

  You might think people would seek out gentler landscapes, places tucked into cozy climates. White sand beaches sprayed between blue water and artistically arranged greenery come to mind. Saint-Ex didn’t agree. He’d spent enough time in deserts to figure out that “men attach themselves more stubbornly to barren lands than to any other.”

  In graduate school, I worked with DNA, a molecule that’s shaped somewhat like a ladder. I inserted dye molecules between the rungs to make it easier to see. This procedure is called intercalating. The dye doesn’t fit well. Edges bulge out, and gaps form between DNA and dye. In comforting habitats, humans can enmesh themselves, snuggle in, and fit securely. But in harsh climates all we can do is intercalate. The stress of this imperfect fit keeps our adrenaline surging. Saint-Ex and his fellow pilots scoped out some of the most popular—and populated—habitats on earth, and yet in the world’s harshest places they found “joy that [they] could not possibly know elsewhere.” Joy, I’m pretty sure, is an emotion primed by adrenaline.

  The desert-like land Fox and I inhabited amassed only ten inches of precipitation each year and was prone to vicious windstorms. Cold and elevated, though not nearly as dry as a true cold desert like the Gobi, our semi-desert frosted over at least once a day from early September through mid-May. Quite a bit of snow fell, but most of it was too dry to ease a dogged drought. You might wring only one inch of water from fifty inches of our driest snow. Wind tossed the dry snow, rearranging it in reckless patterns and leaving behind parched frozen dirt, icy shelves, and waist-high drifts. Clay soil with an embarrassingly high pH hid underneath the snow. Because water couldn’t percolate through wet clay or soak into dry clay, plant and tree roots were either desiccating or drowning. Very few plants grew in our alkaline clay, and almost none that did enjoyed themselves.