Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship

For twelve consecutive days, the fox had appeared at my cottage. At no more than one minute after the sun capped the western hill, he lay down in a spot of dirt among the powdery blue bunchgrasses. Tucking the tip of his tail under his chin and squinting his eyes, he pretended to sleep. I sat on a camp chair with stiff spikes of bunchgrass poking into the canvas. Opening a book, I pretended to read. Nothing but two meters and one spindly forget-me-not lay between us. Someone may have been watching us—a dusky shrew, a field mouse, a rubber boa—but it felt like we were alone with the world to ourselves.

On the thirteenth day, at around three thirty and no later than four o’clock, I bundled up in more clothing than necessary to stay comfortably warm and went outside. Pressing my hands together as if praying, I pushed them between my knees while I sat with my feet tapping the ground. I was waiting for the fox and hoping he wouldn’t show.

Two miles up a gravel road in an isolated mountain valley and sixty miles from the nearest city, the cottage was not an appropriate arrangement for a girl on her own. My street was unnamed, so I didn’t have an address. Living in this remote spot left me without access to reasonable employment. I was many miles beyond reach of cell phone towers, and if a rattlesnake bit me, or if I slipped climbing the rocky cliff behind the cottage, no one would hear me cry for help. Of course, this saved me the trouble of crying in the first place.

I had purchased this land three years earlier. Until then I had been living up valley, renting a cabin that the owner had “winterized,” in the sense that if I wore a down parka and mukluks to bed, I wouldn’t succumb to frostbite overnight. That was what I could afford with the money I’d earned guiding backcountry hikers and teaching field classes part-time. When a university offered me a one-year research position, you might think I would have jumped at the chance to leave. Not just because I was dodging icicles when entering the shower, but because riding the postdoc train was the next logical step for a biologist. But I didn’t jump. I made the university wait until after I had bought this land. Then I accepted and rented a speck of a dormitory room at the university, 130 miles away. Every weekend, through snowstorms and over icy roads, I drove back here to camp. Perching on a small boulder, listening to my propane stove hissing and the pinging sound of grasshoppers flying headfirst into my tent’s taut surface, I felt like I was part of my land. I had never felt part of anything before. When the university position ended, I camped full-time while arranging for contractors to develop the land and build the cottage.

Outside the cottage, from where I sat waiting for the fox, the view was beautiful. Few structures marred my valley; full rainbows were common. The ends of the rainbows touched down in the rolling fields below me, no place green enough to hide a leprechaun but a fair swap for living with rattlers. Still, I was torn. Even a full double rainbow couldn’t give me what a city could: a chance to interact with people, immerse myself in culture, and find a real job to keep me so busy doing responsible work that I wouldn’t have time for chasing a fox down a hole. I had sacrificed plenty to earn my PhD in biology: I had slept in abandoned buildings and mopped floors at the university. In exchange for which I had learned that the scientific method is the foundation for knowledge and that wild foxes do not have personalities.

When Fox padded toward me, a flute was playing a faint, hypnotic melody like the Pied Piper’s song in my favorite fairy tale. You remember: a colorfully dressed stranger appears in town, enticing children with his music to a land of alpine lakes and snowy peaks. When the fox curled up beside me and squinted, I opened my book. The music was still playing. No, it wasn’t the Pied Piper at all. It was just a bird—a faraway thrush.

*
The next day, while waiting for Fox’s 4:15 appearance, I thought about our upcoming milestone: fifteen consecutive days spent reading together—six months in fox time. Many foxes had visited before him; some had been born a minute’s walk from my back door. All of them remained furtive. Against all odds, and over several months, Fox and I had created a relationship by carefully navigating a series of sundry and haphazard events. We had achieved something worth celebrating. But how to celebrate?

I decided to ditch him.

I poured coffee grounds from a red can into a pot of boiling water, waited to decant cowboy coffee, and thought about how to lose the fox. Maybe he wouldn’t come by anymore. I opened the door of the fridge. “Have I mistaken a coincidence for a commitment?”

The refrigerator had no answer and very little food. But it gave me an idea. I drew up a list of grocery items and enough chores to keep me busy until long after 4:15 p.m. and headed out. The supermarket was in a small town thirty miles down valley, and I had to drive with my blue southern sky behind me. Ahead, black-bottomed clouds with white faces chased each other into the eastern mountains. Below, in the revolving shade, Angus cattle, lambing ewes, and rough horses conspired to render each passing mile indistinguishable from the one before. Usually, I tracked my location counting bends in the snaky river, my time watching the clouds shift, and my fortune spotting golden eagles. (Seven was my record; four earned a journal entry.) Not today.

Now that I was free to be anywhere I wanted at 4:15 p.m., I returned to my mercurial habits and drove too fast to tally eagles. Imagine a straight open road with no potholes and not another rig in sight. Shifting into fifth gear, I straddled the centerline to correct the bevel toward the borrow pit and accelerated into triple digits. Never mind the adjective, I was mercury: quicksilver, Hg, hydrargyrum, ore of cinnabar, resistant to herding, incapable of assuming a fixed form. The steering wheel vibrated in agreement.

The privilege of consorting with a fox cost more than I had already paid. The previous week, while I was in town collecting my groceries, I got a wild hair to stop at the gym. The only person lifting weights was Bill, a scientist whom I had worked with in the park service. I mentioned that a fox “might” be visiting me. “As long as you’re not anthropomorphizing,” he responded. Six words and a wink left me mortified, and I slunk away. Anthropomorphism describes the unacceptable act of humanizing animals, imagining that they have qualities only people should have, and admitting foxes into your social circle. Anyone could get away with humanizing animals they owned—horses, hawks, or even leashed skunks. But for someone like me, teaching natural history, anthropomorphizing wild animals was corny and very uncool.

You don’t need much imagination to see that society has bulldozed a gorge between humans and wild, unboxed animals, and it’s far too wide and deep for anyone who isn’t foolhardy to risk the crossing. As for making yourself unpopular, you might as well show up to a university lecture wearing Christopher Robin shorts and white bobby socks as be accused of anthropomorphism. Only Winnie-the-Pooh would associate with you.

Why suffer such humiliation? Better to stay on your own side of the gorge. As for me, I was bushed from climbing in, crossing over, and climbing out so many times. Sometimes, I wasn’t climbing in and out so much as falling. Was I imagining Fox’s personality? My notion of anthropomorphism kept changing as I spent time with him. At this point, at the beginning of our relationship, I was mostly overcome with curiosity.

I gripped a couple of firm white mushrooms in one hand and reached for one of those slippery plastic sacks with the other. The Timex face flashed on my exposed inner wrist. Forty-five minutes shy of 4:15 p.m. The fox! Meeting a fox that I wanted to jettison suddenly felt more important than mushrooms for which I was driving sixty miles round trip. I shook the bag several times, but it refused to open, so I jammed the mushrooms back onto the shelf between some oranges and pushed my full cart to the registers. While calculating the time needed to drive home through a gauntlet of white-tailed deer along a two-lane road, I somehow ended up in the empty express-checkout lane. A cowboy rolled in behind me. The clerk observed my cart, raised her eyebrows, smiled, and said nothing. She was supposed to ask if I had found everything I was looking for; she wanted to ask if I could count to eight.

“Yes. Thank you,” I answered the unasked question, “but I regret abandoning some mushrooms at the last minute.”

Her eyebrows dropped. Eyes rolled.

I pulled a wallet out of my back pocket. “Shame about the mushrooms,” I said, flipping through the cash. Then I turned to the cowboy and noticed he was about 110 years old.

“Goodness. Just a little bunch of bananas.” I bent over his cart and peered inside. Nothing. Just bananas. “Didn’t even need a cart for that, did you?”

“Needed something to hold me up,” he said, “while waiting.”

For a moment I considered the remark, wondering if it had some underlying message. The cue hadn’t been in the cowboy’s words, but in his flinty-eyed stare. He’d expected an apology. Halfway home, I realized that he was annoyed that I was in the wrong checkout lane. I hated missing social cues. For every cue I caught too late, I worried about another few flying right over my head.

But more so, I worried about not being home when the fox came visiting. He was an uninvited guest and I couldn’t keep him waiting. Uninvited guests are quite unlike invited guests, whose entitlement (I imagine) allows them to overlook their host’s temporary tardiness. Invited guests will call, “Yoo-hoo!” and without waiting to see if “yoo” is even home, they will let themselves in. They will saunter over to the fridge and grab a drink. But uninvited guests are fragile, and you need to greet them punctually to minimize the discomfort inherent in their ambiguous status. Most problematic is the uninvited guest who knows he’s expected.

Unless I was home in forty minutes, a red fox would trot his reasonable expectation of hospitality down to my cottage, scratch the dirt, sniff the air, feign preoccupation, and expend his tiny reserves of patience and humility. Then he would slip away in a dreadful sulk. This could not be explained to a 110-year-old cowboy propped up by a five-banana cart, but it was true nonetheless.

Motoring down the driveway, I scanned the chubby hill across the draw. A vertical cliff with a sassy tilt to the north lay on top of the hill like an elegant pillbox hat. In the middle of the cliff, on a ledge tucked into a shaded pleat, a golden eagle rose from its nest. I ran upstairs, leaned onto the window ledge, and searched for the fox. When the tip of his tail breached the wheatgrasses, I led him with binoculars as though he were a grouse ahead of my 20-gauge. Leading, a traditional hunting skill, requires hunters to anticipate an animal’s speed and direction, keeping the barrel, sights, or scope just ahead of the moving target. Fox was an easy lead. His tail bobbed brazenly down the fall line. My college textbook claimed that wild animals instinctively elude their natural enemies. That may be true for a generic fox, but this specific fox was not eluding the golden eagle; he was bounding down the hill to the tune of the “William Tell Overture.”

*

As the golden eagle rose from its nest, a hundred feet below it a tiny dog fox was journeying down the draw. Just as the fox reached a blue-roofed house, the garage door roared shut and he turned sharply to run along the only clear path to the river, a dirt road adjacent to a rivulet lined with cottonwoods. An alfalfa field as green and neat as a pheasant’s neckband stretched along one side of the rivulet. Dry hummocks as mottled and messy as a pheasant’s tail pushed against the other side.

Across the river, fields bounced into hills, hills rose into forests, forests slid off steep cliffs, cliffs tucked underneath snowcaps. Beyond the snowcaps, rows of mountain ridges stretched endlessly. Where the mountains ended, or if they ended at all, the eagle could not know. After watching the fox disappear into the thick leafless willows along the river’s edge, the eagle flew upriver, where newborn lambs dotted the nearby fields.

The fox crept under the shrubs until his front paws dipped into the river. He stared at a newly exposed sand island glowing in the sun. The fox could swim, but he preferred not to. In any case, the river, almost at high water, was muddy and tumbling wide, drowning last autumn’s braided channels, spits, and gravel shoals. Not even a moose would try to cross. And today? Today a girl might be waiting for him.

Later, the eagle saw two animals outside the blue-roofed house: a fox moving west toward the sagebrush hills, and a person heading east toward the river. Quartering lower, the eagle decided they were not going in separate directions; they were walking—the two animals—toward each other.

From FOX AND I: An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven. Copyright (c) 2021 by the author and reprinted with permission of Spiegel & Grau.