Catherine Raven - Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of Penguin Canada,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

Canada USA UK Ireland Australia
New Zealand India South Africa China

Published in Hamish Hamilton hardcover by Penguin Canada, 2021
Simultaneously published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, New York

Copyright 2021 by Catherine Raven

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA
CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Title: Fox and I : an uncommon friendship / Catherine Raven.
Names: Raven, Catherine, 1959- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210145463 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210145471 |
ISBN 9780735243293 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735243309 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Raven, Catherine, 1959- | LCSH: Human-animal relationships
Montana. | LCSH: FoxesMontanaBiography. | LCSH: Park rangersBiography.
Classification: LCC QL737.C22 R28 2021 | DDC 599.775092dc23

Interior design by Meighan Cavanaugh, adapted for ebook.

Cover design by Strick&Williams

Cover illustration by June Glasson

The stories in this book reflect the authors recollection of events. Some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of those depicted. Some of the dialogue has been recreated from memory.

For Fox

A double rainbow had changed the course of my relationship with the fox. I had been jogging when I realized that he would live only a few years in this harsh country. At the time, I believed that making an emotional investment in a short-lived creature was a fools game. Before the jog ended, a rainbow appeared in front of me. One end of the rainbow slipped through an island of tall dead poplars drowning in gray sky, their crowns splitting and spraying into each other. I stopped. A second rainbow arched over the poplars. How many rainbows had I seen in this one valley? A hundred easy, and I always paused to watch. I realized that a fox, like a rainbow and every other gift from Nature, had an intrinsic value that was quite independent of its longevity. After that, whenever I questioned devoting so much time to an animal whose lifespan barely exceeded the blink of an eye, I remembered rainbows.

saint-exs boa

F or 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 usa dusky shrew, a field mouse, a rubber boabut it felt like we were alone with the world to ourselves.

On the thirteenth day, at around three thirty and no later than four oclock, 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 wouldnt 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 didnt 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 wouldnt succumb to frostbite overnight. That was what I could afford with the money Id 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 didnt 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 tents 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 couldnt 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 wouldnt 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 Pipers 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 wasnt the Pied Piper at all. It was just a birda faraway thrush.

H aving slept since midmorning in the shade of his favorite boulder, the fox woke to the heat of a sinking sun. Pointing his butt skyward and his nose windward, he stretched his neck along a foreleg that was naked as a newborn mouse. The fur wasnt actually gone, just misdirected. Turning tailward, he discovered his fur blowing flat back, leaving the hide on the front of his legs exposed but warm.