What does one do when a wild fox starts coming by one’s house everyday at precisely 4.15 pm? If you’re biologist Catherine Raven you take the first step on a transformative journey: you start reading to it.
I left The Little Prince and an iced tea next to my camp chair and went looking for Fox. I spotted him trotting back from the river, following a trail that swung below my cottage. He could have either stayed the course and avoided me altogether or broken trail and marched uphill to meet me at the rendezvous site. I walked directly toward him, tripping over pits and mounds where the skunks had been digging, stubbing my toes on mud-mired rocks the size of melons, fighting through thigh-high pea thickets. Clover vines clawed at my burr-covered shoelaces. When he was about nine metres away, he stopped and watched me, Had I wandered around obstacles instead of through them turned my gaze toward the singing meadowlark, or stooped to pull a weed, he would not have understood that I was expecting him. Standing at the meadow’s edge, I wrapped my arms around my chest and squatted like a frog, tucking my torso between my knees. He saw me waiting and started for his regular spot next to the forget-me-not. I followed.
I continued reading out loud from where we’d left off the day before. After two paragraphs, I held up the book and showed him a prince with hair as blond and spiky as an antelope fawn. Switching from reading to summarising, I continued, “The little princess lives on an asteroid – it’s a miniature planet. The planet has one flower – a rose. She’s vain. Her petals…” I planed a hand like a 737 on take-off (just for emphasis), “flat. Life a face-lift. Never wrinkled. Yeah, I know, Fox.” I nodded. “But the prince loves the rose.” My throat, prone to laryngitis, tightened against the hot, dry win.
Like all domestic roses, the prince’s rose was high maintenance. “Here she is, swollen with water” – I held up an imaginary beach ball – “sending… demanding that the prince fetch more water.” I tossed the beach ball over Fox’s head and reach for the glass of iced tea sweating next to me. Fox’s eyes followed the glass. He twitched and startled; I set the tea down without drinking. He polished her single thorn just to appease her vanity.”
Fox winked and stared intermittently. I coughed without looking away from him, silently counted to 15, including the ‘one thousand’ pauses in the middle, coughed again. “I know what you are thinking, Fox. The rose is not in love with the prince. He is wasting his time.”
Fox sat up and cocked his head in the classic pose of canine inquisitiveness. This encouraged me to continue summarising. I pointed to the single-flowered forget-me-not and explained that a rose, like the forget-me-not, is a plant: a small, sessile autotroph with a short life span and limited emotive capabilities.
“This obviates the question about whether the rose is really in love, Fox.”
I paused and counted. He showed no sign that he had found that last comment flippant, so I continued recapping the plot. “The prince propels off his planet, travels all over the universe, and ends up on Earth. He wanders through the Sahara.” I told Fox that the prince stumbles upon the delusional Saint-Exupery, who is trying to patch a broken airplane and a relationship with a woman he’s left behind. “The woman, like the rose, is spoiled and vain.”
After hunting, the fox stretched himself into a long thin line on the gravel driveaway, stomach down, shoulders and both front legs stretched back toward his hips, pads up. The wind licked his grey fur cross – one streak down him back and one the length of his shoulder – into calico. When he finished sunbathing, we hiked to his den. Despite the presence of a well-worn route, he gerrymandered the trail to avoid facing the sun. He was already inside his den when I said goodbye. I told him I was off to teach a wildlife class in Yellowstone and would return in half a fortnight.
The next day, I arrived at class hoarse. “Talking the ears off a visitor,” I told the students. Luckily, no one asked if my visitor had talked back, because Fox, the runt of his litter, had been born mute. When he opened his mouth, only one faint sound escaped – qwah – like the last gasp of a dying duck.
This is an edited extract from Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven, published by Scribe. RRP $32.99
