The Omnivorous R eader By Stephen E . Smith

Comrades in the Wilderness

A solit ar y wom an an d a red fox

By St ephen e . Smi t h Literary agents and acquisition editors who read early drafts of what would become Catherine Raven’s bestselling Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship must have wondered what niche the book might fill. Memoir/ autobiography? Not exactly. Humanities/social sciences? Not really. Spirituality/self-help? Probably not.

T his much is cer tain: W hatever nook the book occupies, a carewor n copy of Walden is already there. Like T horeau, Cather ine R aven wandered into the wilder ness “to live deliberately, to conf ront the essential facts of life, and see if she could not lear n what it had to teach.”

At the age of 15, R aven escaped her abusive parents who, she claims, wanted her “to disappear.” She event ually landed a job as a ranger in the National Park system. She was homeless, living in her car on a piece of remote land in Montana while putting herself through college and g raduate school, where, as she f requently reminds the reader, she ear ned a Ph.D. in biolog y. She built a house in Montana and taught the occasional college class, all the while avoiding her fellow human beings. T hen she met the fox.

Ever y day at 4:15 p.m. a red fox v isits R aven’s proper t y. His arr iva l quick ly becomes the centra l focus of her other w ise unevent f ul life, and she beg ins to str uct ure her activ ities around his v isits. She reads to him f rom Dr. Seuss and A ntoine de Saint-Ex upér y’s T he Lit tle Pr ince (a fox plays a centra l role in the stor y). She obser ves his ever y movement and speculates as to his motivations. She keeps track of his nutr itiona l needs (he has an appetite for voles), his mating habits, the k its he helps raise, and his interaction w ith the sur rounding fauna, especia lly t wo mag pies who she names Tennis Ba ll and Round Belly, and bluebirds, deer, bats, eagles, elk, fera l cats, etc. A nd she details the loca l flora — fescue, mustard, cheat, mullein, sunflower, Russian thistle, rabbitbr ush, k napweed, sagebr ush, w ild r ye, bluestem, wheatg rass, sow thistle — w ith equa l pur pose, producing a litany of zoolog ica l annotations libera lly spr ink led w ith a biolog ist’s vocabular y. (R eaders utilizing a K indle w ill appreciate the handy “Dictionar y” f unction.) The fox never exhibits what might be interpreted as af fection and doesn’t approach within petting distance. But R aven’s isolation leads her to imagine a relationship has developed between her and the animal. Her friends, few though they may be, remind her that her academic training forbids anthropomorphizing the fox, but the regularit y of his visits and his attention to her human af fectations lead her to project a personalit y onto the fox. “I tried to imagine when Fox and I first became more than just two itinerant animals crossing each other’s paths. . . . Maybe the relationship had developed so smoothly that I never doubted that all was as it should be, or maybe it had developed rapidly enough to keep me perpetually conf used. . . . I had barely enough social intelligence to understand that adults, least of all trained scientists, don’t go around treating wild foxes as if they had personalities.”

R aven’s nar rative doesn’t collapse into a mawk ish “L assie” stor y, but it approaches, especially in its conclusion, a sentimentalit y that is tempered only by her scientific training. Because she accepts that communicating with a wild animal is not the same as conversing with her f r iends and that her relationship with the fox is in no way tantamount to a human f r iendship, she remains uncer tain as to why the attachment has developed or what lessons she might draw f rom her limited interaction with the fox. In fact, Fox and I might be read as a rationalization for R aven’s bond, real or imag ined, with the fox. A s beautif ully wr itten as her memoir is — and cer tainly R aven’s prose occasionally r ises to the level of poetr y — she never tr uly resolves the ambig uities that are central to her life with the fox.

Predictably, the moment arrives when R aven senses that the fox’s

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tr ust in her is almost complete. On a moonlit night, she is waiting outside for his arrival and notices the fox’s “wispy, translucent f ur in the light” as he trots directly to her f ront steps. “I stepped away f rom the door, and four round and fluid k its rolled past me. Fox moved of f to the side, leaving me surrounded by little leaping foxes. Close enough to touch, they were tumbling around me like acrobats while my hands spr ung up in surprise. I focused on t wo tussling k its, and ever ything around them homogenized into a blur.”

A ll such animal tales have an obvious and inevitable conclusion, and it’s not spoiling the ending to reveal the fox’s fate. Wildfire rips through R aven’s corner of Montana, and she flees for her life. She returns to find that her house has sur vived but that the fox and his k its are nowhere to be found, gone up, one would suppose, in smoke, possible victims of global warming. “Nature is cruel,” she writes, “that’s a trope masquerading as a paradigm, in the sense that a carpetbagger might masquerade as a charlatan.”

R aven blames herself, enjoying the selfpit y that accompanies the probable death of the fox, noting that he might have fled to safet y with his vi xen and the four k its, but that he waited for her to appear: “I imag ined him upr ight on his hind legs and pressing his nose into my f ront window like he used to do. I could see him standing with his ears draw n back until his ank les shook and then sk ipping back ward to regain his balance. His last memor y of me was an empt y house.”

A lthough Fox and I is nonfiction, R aven uses fictional techniques to tell her stor y and includes chapters wr itten f rom the fox’s point of view. T hough occasionally af flicted with the dictionar y disease, her st yle is fluid and lyr ical and is a joy to read, propelling the reader through her inter mittent pedantic ramblings. More to her credit, she doesn’t burden the reader with timely political insights or lessons lear ned. Readers are lef t to their ow n conclusions. She simply tells the stor y of a lonely woman’s encounter with a red fox in the wilds of Montana. PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetr y and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetr y Nor thwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetr y and four Nor th Carolina Press Awards.