Fox and I

by Catherine Raven

  You cannot welcome waxwings into your home as guests and allow a magpie to drool egg yolks on their fine, feathered crests. What to do about TBall? I Grinched the yolks. I remembered when thirteen Hungarian partridge fell asleep under Tonic, each bird laying its head on the thigh of another so that the covey formed a perfect wreath. Determined to protect the birds, I’d had to Grinch the yolks then too. And there had been other times. Maybe TBall was not complaining because I had grabbed the yolks back but because I did it so often.

  Gray clouds puckered into a sucker hole. They didn’t fool me. But the risk of being miserable in a squall paled next to the pleasure of standing underneath an ephemeral shower of sun-dappled snow on a summer day and looking through to the blue-sky backdrop. I ended up tromping around on the north hills chasing a feral cat. Fox was hunting far ahead of me, with the omnipresent Tennis Ball following closely behind him. Calf-high sprigs of perennial grass were so reddened and sore from frigid, sunny days they practically squeaked in pain when I stepped on them. Feeling their anguish, I stretched my stride to its limit as best I could.

  Only one thing mattered to the Hungarian partridge trapped in the fox’s glare—in order to survive, she would turn herself into stone. She did not breathe or blink. Standing stationary was not good enough. She needed to become as inert as granite. The wind whiffled through a rotting thatch ant nest, sending fine spores floating her way. One spore landed on the thin membrane that separated a maroon eye-ring from a gray eyelid. Blinking at the spore, the partridge flinched; and the currant branch no longer separated her from the fox.

  The round-bellied magpie wrapped her claws around a dead branch, balancing precariously as she monitored the cat’s movements. The cat, crouching, her mouth agape, readied to spring on the fox, who was watching the partridge. When the partridge bent forward, the fox pounced. The magpie darted at the cat’s back. The cat had a split second to decide whether to defend itself from the magpie or kill the fox. Glaring through the matriarch as if she were an icicle, the cat focused on a sharp, orange muzzle.

  The muzzle turned into a magpie. The cat spun halfway around and hooked a set of claws into the magpie’s soft breast tissue. Pinned on her back, the matriarch aimed her beak into the cat’s eye. The cat inserted a second set of claws below the first. Just as her beak reached the cat’s eye, the cat pulled its claws sideways, ripping the round-bellied magpie with such force that guts sprayed upward. Blinded by a warm gush of her own blood, the matriarch bled out quickly.

  The fox, who had darted out of the ravine at the commotion, ran uphill on the grassy slope, stopping at a boulder a safe distance away, his appetite now vanished. The cat took a couple steps backward, dragging Round Belly’s carcass off the dirt and onto a rock slab. Watching her carcass flap from the cat’s jaw, the fox felt the way he had only felt on those rare occasions after eating something wrong, the bad mushroom, or the butterflies with too much elk droppings on their feet. Times like that, too dizzy to stand, he had lain down and waited, overheating and shivering in alternating spells. Turning away from the remains of Round Belly, he could see a long stretch of the river far below. Magpies filled the cottonwoods along the far shore and faced the little island, a haven he imagined to be calm and sunny and free of predators. But he would probably never go now that Round Belly was gone. The last time he was egg hunting along the shore he had looked downriver and felt too small for the journey.

  Round Belly had provided him with a carefree life that his size and silence would have otherwise prevented. When he was still a kit, before he met the girl, Round Belly was the only one who had protected him, staying close and diving on anyone, even his siblings, when they threatened him.

  On a jagged rock slab jammed under a dead sagebrush, a cat crouched with magpie guts spilling over its front leg. As I approached, it swayed into the bunchgrasses, weighed down with hairballs and a tattered wing hanging from its jaw. The rest of the carcass stayed behind on the rock. Uphill, Fox was staring at the mutilated magpie and shaking. From underneath the rock, an army of ants was streaming up, over the edge, and across the rock face. They crossed lines of fresh, wet blood and crawled over the pink flesh and white tendons and into the ripped upper arm. I looked at Fox just long enough to realize that the shredded magpie was TBall.

  I tripped home between bunchgrasses and cacti, skipping too fast to pick up a pencil that ejected from one of my pockets. A chocolate cake was waiting, and the more distance I put between myself and the carnage, the faster my appetite would return. Never mind that TBall belonged to my community and was Fox’s friend, she had suffered horribly while a putrid mass of fur and rotting claws had slowly ripped her to death. Yes, she was a seemingly omnipresent and grudge-bearing creature who squawked too much and too loudly. But the real reason I didn’t like her was that she harassed Fox. And now, too late, I knew I had misjudged her.

  I remembered something from late March, when magpies were fortifying their nests for spring broods. It had been horrifically windy, so the birds had toiled when the wind waned and stopped when it waxed. Except Tennis Ball. She had stayed busy through any gust, the better to obstruct the devil when it came looking for idle claws. Flitting around on the ground, TBall had picked up spiky, small-leafed saltbush twigs that had blown off winter-killed plants. When a gale shushed a twig from the bird’s beak and sent it cartwheeling, the magpie had stood steadfast with piercing black eyes and wind-whipped feathers, gripped the hard clay dirt, and waited for another twig to blow by.

  spotted owls

  Soon after Four-Kit Night, I began trading in Fox currency, which is to say I reassigned my desires and the prices I was willing to pay for their fulfillment. The incident made me think back to a simpler time in my life, when I was a young ranger in Mount Rainier National Park’s Wilderness and only windshield glass, painted steel, and Michelin tires protected me and everything I owned from the world. During my park ranger days, the spotted owl war divided our community. It started when an organization nominated spotted owls and their habitat—old-growth forests—for protection under the Endangered Species Act. Because so many local jobs involved harvesting timber from the old growth, some people believed that placing spotted owls on The List would decimate the economy. And so it was that everyone in our community aligned him- or herself with The Listers or The Loggers.

  One night, in the middle of this fighting, I swung open the bathroom door of a bar in Packwood, Washington, and in place of the toilet tissue found a handwritten sign with a question, “out of toelet paper?” And an answer, “wipe your ass with a spotted owl.” More disconcerting than the misspelling of toilet was the implication that our need for toilet paper justified destroying old-growth forests. I liked toilet paper as much as any semicivilized person, but I would rather have wiped my ass with poison ivy than with tissue paper made from a 400-year-old tree. I was just a blue-collar ranger and didn’t have a college degree, but I assumed that wasn’t really the choice anyway. I assumed we could figure out how to have toilet paper. And birds. And trees.

  We had put a man on the moon, after all.

  Then I went to graduate school and learned that “we” had not put a man on the moon. Rocket scientists did that. And from what I’d been able to ferret out about them, they were engaged in projects for which they were more highly remunerated than toilet paper designers. Projects like designing rockets.

  So it fell to all of us using the woods to think about what we wanted and what we were willing to tender. Non-loggers—backpackers mostly—favored listing the owl and protecting the wilderness it lived in. They felt that loggers were encroaching on the wilderness. (Owls thought the same thing about backpackers.)

  Spotteds are as wise as any owl, but most people don’t think so because they are hornless, and cartoonists don’t have anything around which to loop their tiny eyeglasses. Like all members of the charismatic owl genus known as Strix, spotted owls are dish-faced and round-eyed. Three species of Strix shared the
Wilderness area I patrolled: barred, great gray, and spotted.

  You would be thrilled to emerge from a tent in the Wilderness and look into the eyes of any dish-faced owl. In fact, you would be thrilled just to realize you were camping in Wilderness. I know I was. The loggers with whom I shared the woods felt the same way. Although I was a backcountry ranger with the National Park Service and loggers worked for the private sector, our habits were similar. We both worked in the woods, avoided civilization, and dressed and groomed so oddly that from a distance our genders defied classification. We did not have college degrees. Our jobs required a little supervision and a lot of muscle. No one would mistakenly call us “well paid,” and still we would not trade our quality of life for more money. Which is to say, loggers weren’t crazy people. If the salary for cutting ten trees matched that for cutting ten thousand trees, loggers would rather . . . well . . . it’s obvious, isn’t it? We all wanted a good, honest life in the woods.

  I wanted that life after leaving the park, but when I’d earned my doctorate, I felt that acceding to a brass badge, a starched uniform, and unhelpful policies was too much to pay for the privilege. I wanted to manage my own land, not someone else’s. I wanted to sink into land and wrap it around myself. And I wanted the land to reside in a special place, somewhere with an equitable distribution of power between people and Nature. A place where sometimes Nature would refuse to let us boss her around. And where wild fawns wouldn’t die slow painful deaths after domestic dogs bit chunks out of their thighs.

  Four-Kit Night taught me that we need to choose our desires carefully. A man with emeralds isn’t rich because of the intrinsic value of emeralds. He’s rich because of your desire for his emeralds. The joy that I experienced on Four-Kit Night was a product, and it had a price. If I wanted to buy more experiences like that, then I would need to pay for them by giving up a city job with a decent income and health insurance (and money left over for emeralds). How much did I want to live here in isolation, with foxes? What was I willing to pay for it?

  In July, for the second birthday I would celebrate with the fox in my life, my friend Mike Higham drove down from Canada to visit for a week. His ancient Volvo sedan winced down the driveway and onto the front field and rolled to a stop in my garden, just inches from the front steps.

  I tried to explain his mistake as he stepped out of the car.

  “Ahhhh. This is a garden.” He slid his sunglasses up and looked down at the cheat grass seed heads clinging to his socks. “And the difference between your driveway and the garden is . . . ?”

  “The driveway gets driven on.”

  Because he still looked confused, I added, “By design. The driveway gets driven on by design. Not by accident. The garden is here.” I waved a hand at the Volvo. “I am going to plant it . . . someday. Probably. The pasture is . . .” I spun around to look for a landmark. “Well. It’s the part that I won’t plant.”

  “And yet, garden, pasture, driveway . . . they all look the same.”

  Regardless, Mike’s car needed to move. Whether it was the shiny body, noxious chassis, or rubber tires, Fox did not tolerate automobiles in his territory. Mike backed down the drive with his arm hanging out the window swatting dried husks from last year’s black henbane. In another month, scores of henbane blossoms would burst open, and I would learn what a hearty weed could do with nothing but gravel and deer piss for sustenance. Helga, a colleague working upriver in Yellowstone National Park, dropped by to stash her station wagon behind my cottage. She asked why my driveway’s location kept changing. I was kicking clay onto the wagon’s obtrusively glossy rim when Helga answered her question by informing me that I camouflaged my driveway to discourage visitors. I did not deny it. Even Mike couldn’t distinguish between driveway and pasture and he had a doctorate in botany.

  The next morning, Mike and I motored into the Beartooth Mountains searching for sights to photograph and rocks to collect. Riding shotgun in a private rig without an actual shotgun racked across the back window was a new experience for me. Unless I was hunting with someone—and I usually hunted alone—I always took the wheel. Relinquishing control was uncomfortable, but the scenery eventually alleviated my distress. A wooden platform that our electric cooperative had built onto a retired telephone pole to stop ospreys from electrocuting themselves with live wires supported an overflowing nest with a Canada goose head popping out. Three great blue herons kited above their riverside rookery—dense and pointy-topped spruce trees near an island in the river. Black moose legs rushed through a thick clump of gray-barked fir trees, followed by a brown baby moose with a panda-marked face that made its eyes look as big as saucers.

  Poplar seeds that resembled cotton balls covered the black highway. They swirled ahead of us, floating several inches into the air and making me feel as though I were riding through clouds. Mike stopped to photograph an elegant whitetail doe, and I woke from my passenger’s trance, slipped out of the Volvo, and headed for the scree.

  He caught up with me while I was bending over small boulders. “Searching for a party favor,” I said, “for Fox. For my birthday.”

  “Noted,” said Mike, tightening the chest straps on his capped Canon. “What are our specs?”

  We climbed far up the alluvial fan until the only remaining road sounds came from Harleys. With our ankles turning this way and that, our toes sliding and wedging themselves under motley-colored granites, we lifted, examined, and sorted like two Hortons in a clover patch searching for Whoville. We did not settle for the first best rock; we held out for the last best, the perfect rock among hundreds. The one we carried a quarter mile back to the Volvo was a slightly concave surfboard when viewed from the side, an isosceles triangle from above.

  Back home, we positioned Surfboard Rock so Fox could rest on it while admiring his forget-me-not. A Hungarian partridge hen held her breath as she watched us wedging small stones and clay underneath the seesawing rock. We pretended to ignore her but heard the covey shuffling across the brittle grasses into the septic ditch where they could hide and heat themselves between rocks and thistles. We celebrated my birthday with watermelon and Fox, the former uneaten by the latter. “Happy birthday to us, Fox,” I said, and I spit out a watermelon seed. Fox balanced on Surfboard Rock, daring anyone to say otherwise. Mike stayed inside. After witnessing Fox flee from Marco Antonio, I didn’t think he would tolerate another person. Mike didn’t mind; he was, by nature, accommodating. We had met a couple years earlier in Yellowstone, while I was waiting up late in a lodge for a policeman to return my stolen spotting scope. I was prepared for a hassle because I knew they would want to keep it in evidence for a while. Mike offered to sit up with me and wait, and we started talking. He was a botanist by profession and a photographer by passion. Bizarrely, because he was good-looking and compassionate and funny, he had never married and had lived alone most of his life; as he explained it, his mother’s disdain for him had tainted his ability to interact with women.

  The next day, we were all of us busy because it was cool, clear, and calm, and any other summer day might just as easily pelt us with hail or fry us with rays and leave us as deflated as slow worms on a hot rock. It’s good to get outside before the day’s heat, especially if you like watching damselflies. You can lure the beautiful creatures by spraying water and wetting down any surface, but especially one without vegetation. That’s a trick I learned while fighting wildland fires in Minnesota. Damsels love freshly wetted black ash. I often dug fire line with nothing but damselflies to distract me from blisters bleeding inside my ten-inch White’s. Some days I mopped up knee-high smoldering ash pits with nothing but these bright turquoise insects breaking up Nature’s grayscale wasteland.

  I was spraying down Fox’s birthday rock with water when a damsel came to my distress, crooking her six angular legs and landing on his rock like a Mars rover. Twisting her thin, straight body and large, oblong head, she explored miniscule pools pitted into Surfboard’s broad
top. Pausing occasionally, she turned herself into a series of turquoise sculptures. An hour passed before she tired of posing and I moved to the white-leafed sage—hip-high and barrel-tubby—for another show: red ladybug beetles spinning around white velvet branches. The beetles were chasing the aphids. Somersaulting over each other in their panic to escape, the aphids piled up into green grape-like clusters. Also in the audience: sturdy thatch ants who decided I was a bigger and easier target than the ladybugs. When they hustled for my Wellies, I retreated faster than General Custer at Little Bighorn. During this performance, Fox was excavating a hole near Tonic that would become his grouse-hunting blind.

  Fox arrived for our rendezvous, and shortly afterward Torn Tail appeared, taking his usual perch on Gin and looking more forlorn than you might have guessed possible for a scrawny, ripped up, black-beaked scavenger. After considering the bird, Fox and I faced each other.

  “Maybe I should have been putting out more yolks?” Truth is, we were all three of us missing TBall.

  With the light still good, I spent an hour watching a skunk churning the soil. Every few minutes it advanced, its wide, flat body undulating and its thick tail erect but for the lolling tip. Who would pass up the rare chance to admire a skunk tail brushing the air with a big question mark?

  So, this was what we did with our time. And people wondered how we stayed busy without televisions.

  My legs swung out of bed and hit the floor before I realized that a howl had woken me. Trailing behind on the whiplash, my head righted in time to spot through the window a kink-tailed kit with its head thrown back. Cracking open the dawn, the hooligan was yipping long, loud, and high. Shoving my bare feet into Wellies, I ran out of the house, the unfolded rubber pinching my calves. I almost tripped over the kit before I stopped running.