Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  Sheets of old snow stretched over the ground like slices of Swiss cheese, pale yellow and rubbery. Round clumps of bunchgrasses pushed up through the snow, cutting out neat circles. It was the ugliest snow of the year, and its inability to capture and hold animal tracks sabotaged my search. After dark, while wondering if it was time to give up, I thought about those double rainbows that had changed the course of our relationship by convincing me that nature’s most wonderful gifts are often short-lived. But a rainbow and a fox are imperfect analogues. One is ethereal, the other precarious. I accepted that, but I wasn’t ready to live without him. Sitting in my enclosed stairway, the only dark place in the cottage, I decided to ask God for a favor in exchange for giving up some vice.

  Rifle casings lined up on the stairwell ledge beside me, all headstamp down so they doubled as miniature vases. Some held dried twigs of red osier dogwood, others one or two feathers: orange flicker, yellow meadowlark, blue Steller’s jay. I handled all of them while considering the deal I could cut. Nothing came to mind. Unless God took a very broad view of “vice,” I didn’t have anything swap-worthy.

  Playing with the stock market? Would that count? In grad school, I ate ramen for dinner and powdered milk for breakfast, skimming my tiny salary to buy shares in companies that published great books and sometimes picking up shares of companies whose biomedical research I admired. I still owned the stocks, and the market was kind of like gambling. I could offer that up in a trade. Maybe. But . . . no . . . it wouldn’t work. Free-market capitalism was way too complicated to explain to God.

  Instead, I reasoned with God, telling him to bring the fox back because he deserved a longer life. Did I believe that God would answer my prayer? Yes, I knew he would. Not because I believed in God, but because I knew that God believed in foxes.

  While trolling for Fox by sweeping moose-hide mukluks through the tall grasses, I spotted a new trail. Lined out parallel to Fox’s main trail, the new one stretched across higher and dryer ground. In that new trail, in direct line of sight of both my cottage and his den, three thorny weeds stood erect. Last year’s Russian thistle, they were enormous weeds relative to the width of the trail, but relative to the billion acres that a less-discerning fox could walk through to get to my cottage, you would think they were three very inconsequential weeds. The thorns, however, produced consequences by any measure, tearing my bare hands to strips as I tugged them loose. After pulling out the old Russians, I sat back on my heels, folding my head down so the cold wind couldn’t get to the sweat under my neck. I was sucking air against the stinging torn flesh on my palms when I looked up to see, bounding right at me, Fox—bursting through a sheet of tall, cylindrical ryegrass like a gunslinger through batwing doors.

  If I had been a reasonable person, and not teetering on the cusp between despair and elation, I would have known to save up some of this overwhelming joy, store it, use it to buffer myself when the next bad thing happened, because bad things, inevitably, do happen. Instead, I figured that happiness was so resplendent, and the universe so kind, that nothing bad could ever happen again.

  In each of my online undergraduate classes, I posted a short autobiography. That spring, for the first time, I wrote: “Hobbies:” and then I filled in: “befriending foxes.”

  “How do you befriend a fox?” they asked.

  I now knew for sure I had not chased down our friendship. My attempt to objectify Fox as a research subject had failed; my attempt to extrapolate him into a generic and impersonal animal had backfired. The more I watched him, the more I understood him and appreciated his ease of living; insight became empathy. And empathy, I am convinced, is the gateway to friendship. Do you think I told the undergraduates that? Yes? Then you have never tried to teach evolution to undergraduates. Believe me; they have enough on their plates learning about vestigial tails without contemplating the relationship between empathy and friendship.

  “Making friends with foxes is not easy,” I told my students. “You need alligator skin because you are going to pull a lot of weeds.”

  whales and polar bears

  In the evenings, at random and frequent times after dark and before bed, I would take a break from my reading and classwork to wander around the house and look out the windows. I often saw a mouse, squatting on the red brick walkway and pushing fistfuls of seeds into its mouth; occasionally deer, elk, fox, and skunk; usually no one. But I never stopped looking. This night, I was already asleep in my sleeping bag when a bright moon and an inexplicable yearning woke me around 1:00 a.m. Balancing on a white pine stepstool for a wide panorama of the front field, I peeked through the Rainbow Room’s green window. Fox.

  Last time I’d watched Fox at night, the moon was sickle-shaped, so I’d turned on the porch light before stepping outside. Moths fluttered around my forehead, shedding their creepy brown scales into my fine and abundant hair. Tonight, with moonlight mimicking a bright dusk, I kept the light off as I left the cottage. Moths disregarded me, and the sharp night air sliced through me as if it were obsidian. Bundling my puffy cotton jacket closer, I waited while Fox hunted and the cold sent my upper back muscles rippling toward my spine. Shushing sounds, ebbing and flowing in great waves, marked the path of an invisible Fox stalking mice through the meadow grass.

  When he approached the cottage’s wooden steps, I joined him and we walked together to his den. A dome of soft white moonlight scrambled all movement and sound around us. When he stopped to stick his nose up, I inhaled deeply, but the humidity was so high that scent molecules stuck to water molecules and sank before they reached me. I couldn’t have smelled a skunk unless I’d stepped on it. Trying not to, I scanned the ground looking for undulating white stripes.

  Crescendo whistles, high-pitched calls, and long wails teased us. Who was stalking us in this fuzzy-edged night? Maybe it was only wind. Maybe that whirring noise came from little brown bats. We hiked to the last switchback below his den, his shadow longer and more elegant than any he wore in the daytime.

  Despite their reputation as provocateurs to insanity and backdrops for witches on sticks, full moons are simply a rare opportunity for a unique kind of hike. Fox and I were not insomniacs; nothing had chased us into the night, and we weren’t using darkness to hide from people. After all, we lived where there weren’t any people. Or almost none. I just enjoyed the beauty, mystery, and adrenaline rush of hiking under moonlight. You would agree, if you lived in an isolated area and witnessed the full moon the way Fox and I did, as if Benjamin Franklin had not flown his electrifying kite. As if the last century had not turned.

  A couple nights later, with the moon round and rising in a clear sky, I was waiting for him outside. He trotted fast and direct to the steps. His wispy, translucent fur was swaying in the moon’s light. I stepped away from the door, and four round and fluid kits rolled past me. Fox moved off to the side, leaving me surrounded by little leaping foxes. Close enough to touch, they were tumbling around me like acrobats while my hands sprung up in surprise. I focused on two tussling kits, and everything around them homogenized into a blur.

  Riveted, I strained my eyes to watch their undisciplined performance in the moon’s light, and my other senses diminished as if I were dropping slowly underwater. Gulping air, holding my breath, I fell into the night with unfettered foxes swimming all around me.

  I may have stood still for twenty, forty minutes. Shadows changed direction before I started walking through the front field. Grass eddies swirled in disparate places, fox heads popping out from each one. Moonlight or a wide band of glinting river backlit little pointy heads as they rose. One-two-three-four . . . too fast to count, they came and went . . . yes . . . a head . . . no . . . gone too fast. A head popped out of an eddy, swinging left, right, left again, before submerging below last year’s perennial grass stalks. I tried to anticipate the eddies so I could catch a fox head rising, but I missed so often and they moved so fast it made me dizzy, and the night became increasingly surreal.


  Rolling back on their hind legs and facing each other, a pair of yowling kits boxed with both forearms. Two more jumped on them, and the fox huddle became a spastic, thrashing mass. When they calmed down, the four enmeshed foxes were throbbing like a single large animal. They dispersed when one took off in bounding leaps. Others jumped up on small boulders before following their den mates on a treasure hunt. Someone dug up one of Fox’s cached cadavers and somersaulted around the prize. A snarling, heftier sibling sauntered up, exposing fangs that caused the littler thief to surrender its copped cache for a game of tag.

  The foursome, unencumbered by parental supervision, had discovered ecstasy, and they were scampering dangerously out of control. “Fox,” I called to my curled-up friend lying near me, “you need to tighten the leash.” Wrapping his tail around his shoulder, and tucking his snout into his forearms, he sank to the ground and curled up like a pill bug until he was so round that even an imbecile could see that he hadn’t any leash.

  When one of the kits rolled or leaped or grabbed a piece of grass or swatted a big moth, I pumped my hands open and closed, spreading my fingers wide like a prehistoric image in a Dinwoody pictograph. The kits charged up and down the sides of the draw like bobsledding Olympiads. I called out to him in a loud voice, “There are weasels in the draw! Wild cats!” But he would not round them up. He would not even stand.

  “Fox!” He pretended not to hear. I was a Who without a Horton. The kits needed protection or they were going to get nabbed. At the very least, someone had to watch for feral cats. “Fox!” But it was too late to get him involved; he had already decided there was no point in both of us doing my job.

  To my repertoire of memorized scenes—red berries the size of toad eyes; near-frozen cobalt-colored ponds; pond-pocked meadows below fields of tall blue lupine—I added baby fox heads bobbing in grasses on a moonlit night. I would carry it as a talisman the way I carried any other memory. But unlike any other memory, in this image I wasn’t alone.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep; an overwhelming feeling of well-being caffeinated me. I watched sharp-edged clouds transform the night sky into a navy-blue plate of raised-relief Wedgewood. Fox would be watching those stars from his den site on the slope above. I laid my forearm across my desk and swept all the papers from the nascent textbook into a wastebasket. They teetered on the rim, threatening to either fall out and slide across the floor for a second chance or curl into the damp, sticky container and disappear.

  I realized the time had come to hit the brakes, stop going in the direction I was heading—academy, textbooks, career. It was time to turn around. Fortunately, when I realized this, I wasn’t going fast enough to come to a dramatic screeching halt. Like any animal, my instinct had prevented me from running too fast while I didn’t know where I was going. Now I knew.

  The previous week, I had walked with a university class through a forest dominated by skinny, weedy lodgepole pine growing from a brown forest floor: all dirt and no detritus. Poor overheated soil kept the pine population down and prevented leafy, ground-covering plants from growing. The community of trees that composed the forest determined its smell, shape, and sounds: its essence. “Communities change,” I told the students. “The essence of the forest changes.” Hundreds of years old, the trees whose branches we were handling were part of a forest that had not yet matured. “These lodgepole are forerunners, initiating a mature forest that they themselves will not dominate.” If nothing interfered, the immature lodgepole forest would eventually grow into a forest dominated by Engelmann spruce, subalpine fir, and whitebark pine. Physical changes would precede the new stage; for example, the exposed soil would aerate and collect nutrients, and new trees would grow large enough to provide shade. Then the lodgepole would die back, become sparse, and we would call this stage of the forest, the one dominated by spruce and fir, “the climax stage.”

  We found a few dead fire-blackened trees that were spruce, and some—identified by a cantilevered shape and a twinning base—that were whitebark pine. “The forest seems to have almost achieved its climax phase, and then a wildfire—a dramatic disturbance—blew through, and the forest had to start all over from the beginning with the lodgepoles. Avalanches, major floods, logging operations, all these cataclysmic events set the clock back. Hypothetically, this forest is marching again toward its climax.” The climax community enjoys near-perfect communication with its physical environment. Because of that communication, few alterations will affect its future. The climax stage is the comfortable and most stable phase. One that is not a prelude to anything, but a culmination of everything.

  Like a forest, my life had progressed through several stages and was reaching the climax phase. I knew my relationship with Fox was more important than anything else in my life, and I could see that my purpose would be to tell his story. And purpose, I now knew, was more important than profession.

  Funnily enough, for all my worrying and deep thinking, I had changed course because of a physical event—the kits in the moonlight—and the ensuing emotion. Reason and rationality had nothing to do with it; he trusted me, that’s what mattered.

  And, so, casting reason aside, I forgot to think about this: What would happen when Fox died? How would I replace that relationship? Would my first real friendship be my last?

  People often describe Moby-Dick as a novel about a mad sea captain. I think of the novel as a journal written by a loner who loves nature and wild animals, and who mourns the extermination of the American buffalo. Whose nature (and probably nurture) compels him to live beyond the gridlines. Ishmael leans away from the cultured society and toward the wilder world, staying close enough to people to satisfy his curiosity yet far away enough to avoid commitment. On a ship crowded with people of his own culture, he chooses a Pacific Island pagan as his one friend. Like me, Ishmael thinks that dividing the world into humans and nonhumans is irrational; instead he believes that all members of the animal kingdom—including humans—fall into one of two categories, wild and domestic, with some humans falling into one category and some the other. I’d read Moby-Dick so often I felt as if I was conversing with Ishmael, a fictional sailor.

  “Are whales as intelligent as people?” I asked him.

  “A whale is more intelligent than most people. A whale is as intelligent as Dante or Plato” (see chapter 85, “The Fountain”).

  “Killing a person is murder. What do you think about killing a nonhuman animal?”

  “If we kill an animal in self-defense, it is not murder. No doubt, the first man that ever murdered an ox simply to make a soup was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung, and if he had been put on trial by his oxen he certainly would have been. Yes, we murder whales. We murder whales when we kill them just to acquire oil to light gay bridals and illuminate our churches” (see chapter 65, “The Whale as a Dish”; chapter 81, “The Pequod Meets the Virgin”; and chapter 82, “The Honor and Glory of Whaling”).

  “Is it moral to eat animals?”

  “It is immoral to eat four-legged animals” (see chapter 65, “The Whale as a Dish”).

  If I lived on a ship and ate dairy products, I could swap meat for fish and cheese. But I am a landlocked dairy-avoider living in cattle, sheep, and elk country. Replacing mammals with fish of equal quality isn’t a viable financial option, which means that eating meat is simply a defense of my livelihood and well-being. When I am an old lady, maybe I will think about Ishmael and stop eating meat. Until then, someone needs to kill the animals that provide my meat, so it might as well be me.

  “Your shipmates say that whales are man-killing fish and monsters. It’s easy to attribute a nefarious personality to an animal. Do whales have any positive personality traits?”

  “In fact, some whales display personalities that match their unique philosophical outlook on life. When facing death, the right whale is practical and resigned. I take him to have been a Stoic; the sperm whale a Platonian, who might have t
aken up Spinoza in his later years. We whalers have named some whales, not because of their unique appearance, but because of their unique behavior. So there, too, is your personality, in the pragmatism of a dying whale. And, therefore, in the sperm whales, who are ponderous and profound beings, sublime, and inherently dignified” (see chapter 75, “The Right Whale’s Head,” and chapter 85, “The Fountain”).

  “It must be hard for your shipmates to look into a whale’s eye when they’re torturing it. But if they hesitate, if they think the whale might be an animal with feelings, if they’re not able to kill these whales . . . well? What happens to whaling? It seems like the economy of the whole northeast coast is betting that sailors will look away.”

  “Looking into Moby Dick’s eyes, I saw a pitiful sight. Nothing but blind bulbs resided in the places where eyes should have been” (see chapter 81, “The Pequod Meets the Virgin”).

  “Did you feel empathy?”

  “Yes. When First Mate Flask stabbed a harpoon into one of Moby Dick’s festering wounds, I saw the wound burst and squirt, and I recoiled in pain and in synchrony with him, Moby Dick. Another time, another whale, the sun sent shadows of three ships to the deep ocean, and I felt the whale’s anxiety. How appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!” (see chapter 81, “The Pequod Meets the Virgin”).

  We draw minute distinctions between individual people—the way they look and how they act. When it comes to nonhuman animals, we tend to generalize because too often they all look, sound, and act alike to us. We’re just not very empathetic toward wild animals. I’ve a notion it’s because we think we’re evolutionarily advanced and more intelligent than they are. Arrogance dissolves empathy.