The Accommodation
She has the eyes of a cat the coat of a dog the “gruff!” of Black Bear, huffing. There is fur between her toes that her prints in dust and snow are a blur. Those paws planted firmly now she is angry with me. It shows. She does not lower her head or pull back her lips as she might if she wanted bite. She won’t. Instead she moves from the clearing to the woods, and stops and huffs again and furthers her retreat and huffs once more and only well into the underbrush, so that I cannot see her does she bark, twice, a mournful cri de couer, “Leave us alone!”
Red Fox confronts a dilemma: That “us” is more than a matter of diction. Four kits in her care peer from the mouth of the den on the other side of the clearing. Though I stand respectfully off to one side to her I am still in the middle, and she is the one who is stuck.
Foxes are acutely aware of their surroundings. They hunt for voles by sound alone, through matted grasses, through deep powder glazed with ice, ears twitching. Even if you approach in complete silence don’t expect to remain undetected. They will see you long before you see them – and Red Fox missed me entirely.
She had just returned with a squirrel, a squirrel without a mark on him. No blood. No part misshapen. Probably a broken neck, a kill that was quick and sure and without risk of injury (even rodents have teeth). Perhaps her concentration was still on that, its aftermath, that her brood would soon be hungry again. I doubt this was her first hunt of the day so there is also that and how tired she must have been. And so she was surprised. But not completely.
Red Fox, albeit on her own terms has acquired a degree of domesticity. She has made her den beneath someone’s garden shed. Not farm country, a suburban neighborhood, half-acre lots driveways front walks and every weekday morning a big yellow school bus, gears grinding. Why here in the middle of this dangerous bruit instead of the backwoods? Truth, it isn’t much of a woods, a thinned strip of silver birch, skunk cabbage and fern not paved in human habitation only because a stream runs through it. The garden shed is on high ground and perhaps no other clean dry place was available to her. More like, it was the relative absence of coyotes. As wolves are a coyote’s worst nightmare so coyotes are a terror to foxes. Though coyotes are opportunistic (and not above a hit-and-run on the family dog) they aren’t to be found hanging around the house. I suspect this was the risky bet Red Fox made. Better a fifty-fifty chance on us, than the certainty of them. This time she got lucky.
To Red Fox’s kits (who cannot know the difference) it seems the normal life. Proximity to people is all they know and after a while they forget all about me They romp and tumble and one of them drags the squirrel under the shed and leaves it there. Perhaps they do not know how to break the skin. Perhaps they prefer play to food just now. Perhaps both. That their game takes place on a cut lawn is by the grace of tolerant homeowners who might have had them shot, another thing they cannot know about.
A few days later I see Red Fox again, cutting through the woods on her regular route. This time she’s expecting me. She ducks around to the back of the shed and the kits, who usually greet her with their high little voices don’t make a sound. She must have told them not to, but there is only so much she can do. One of them rounds the corner in a blur, a dead chipmunk in its mouth.The kit stops and looks me right in the eye. Then it turns and trots back to where it came from, not too fast, not too slow, but at the necessary pace.
