On a Perfect Summer Day I See My Fox

    Our summer days lately have been as beautiful as they come—warm but not overly hot, balmy, gentle, smoke-free. In fact, it has been something close to this all summer—no smoke, no triple-digit temperatures. I have been hiking a lot, with a 30-pound pack, training for a six-day backpacking trip in the Wallowa Mountains, in northeastern Oregon, but today I took a rest day and sat on the deck in my new swing, now my favorite place in the house, reading some, writing some, swinging gently.

    I looked up at a strange scraping sound in the yard in front of me, on a bare, flat bit of ground downhill from the house, between the woods and the apple tree . 

    It was my fox, rubbing his back on the rough ground. Then he sat up, glanced at me when I made a slight noise, then sat there, looking around, attentive but at ease, before loping off down the hill towards the woods.

    I see this fox from time to time, and I often hear him at night. Sometimes he stops twelve or fifteen yards from the house and barks his saw-blade-sharp arf. If I come out the door, he looks at me and barks again. I greet him with a few words, then go back inside.

    He is a gray fox, very beautiful in his red-and-gray lush fur coat and long handsome tail. 

    I know it's the same fox I see every time because he is lame in one foot. He limps on his right front foot, lifting the paw off the ground and trotting angularly, though swiftly enough. I thought at first the paw might have a temporary injury, maybe a thorn in it, and I imagined myself playing the part of the mouse who took the thorn out of the lion's paw in Aesop's fable. But I have seen the fox often enough that I think the paw is permanently injured. I doubt that it was caught in a trap; trapping isn't usual around here. I wondered if it were a birth defect. Maybe the mother fox sat on the foot when the kit was born. That happens sometimes with domestic animals.  

    I know better than to be sentimental about wild creatures, and I feel strongly about the wrongness of making pets of wild creatures. But I do love my fox. We are cordial, if distant, friends. It is between us as Emily Dickinson said:

            Several of nature's fellows

            I know, and they know me

            I feel for them a transport

            Of cordiality.

    So it is with my fox.