Bright-dim afternoon, the light was gauzy-grey, sky the
color of...
Bright-dim afternoon, the light was gauzy-grey, sky the
color of a shiver. Christmas Day, mild, quiet. Away from home, afternoon lull,
and a run to move the blood, five miles on farm roads. Stone walls, silos,
barns, wide flat fields to the west, and wide fields that slope down to the
tidal river to the east. An ocean close, sensed in the lungs, and in the
magnetic way the body knows where ocean is.
It was Christmas Day and something happened.
A mile or so from the house, some movement ahead and a fox came
into focus. There it was, ahead, 20 yards. It stopped in the middle of the road
and looked at me. I stopped on the side of the road and looked at it. Then it
turned and ran, right down the yellow lines. I followed.
Thirty seconds, a minute, two, who knows, it stopped, looked
back at me, and kept running. An easy loping pace, this sleek orange flame
against the yellow lines. Skeleton, muscle, fur, yes, and also: a ripple of
heat. This low-down animal, its tail tipped white with grey, candleflame on the
wick, fire-fleet, and moving. Then it stopped again, there on the
yellow lines, it looked back at me. Come,
it seemed to say, come, come, keep coming.
I did.
Here we were on the road, farms every evidence of human’s
control over nature; we were not in glen or forest dense and dim. A driveway
there, a fat shiny car, chimney smoke, little lights on a wreath, even the stone
walls showed the hand of human work and our arbitrary, imbecilic idea of
boundary.
As we ran, these structures, these delineations, started to
dissolve.
It was a fox, a fox, a fox, a fact as true as the slugs I
sometimes see on the sidewalk on summer morning walks in Cambridge. Pure
animal. And it was more, this flame, this guide, keep coming, animal and energy. Force and substance both. A
flesh-blood creature and a loping potency taking its place at the center of
things, defying the boundary and uniting two sides. The stone walls didn’t
matter, the road, the yellow lines, the driveways, didn’t matter. Our human
movement of time didn’t matter. The world was getting wilder.
And then a third time it stopped, turned, faced me. This
animal, this flame in the street and I, I cheek-flushed and breathing fast, we
looked at each other, and for seconds, an epoch, eternity, who knows how long,
it was only the two of us in all existence. A shared heat, an awareness only,
total, of each other. Not the sky, not the hawk, not the rabbits, squirrel, or
deer. Not the silent tractor in the field nor the wooden fence nor the greenhouse
or road sign or mailbox. And inside this moment, for an even smaller mote of
time, immense and nothing, we were not two, the fox and I, but one. Time
dissolves, the regular flow deregulates and the boundaries slip away. “Out of
time, out of space, before the fire, our being is no longer chained to a being-there,” Gaston Bachelard writes.
So it was. I was before the fire and the chains gave way.
A second, less.
Time returned and the fox veered left toward a farm. I caught
up enough to see its tail slip behind the silo. The thought moved across my
mind: keep following?
But no. It had showed me what it needed to, had set the pace
and way, and I was not meant to tail it into the woods. I knew two things at
once. It was fox and more than fox. Why does one feel so self-conscious when
using words like magic? I have trouble finding others for it.
That night, awake in bed in the dark, I kept seeing the fox
in my mind, its fire color, its curious face when it turned to face me on the
road. Could it possibly have happened? French writer Henri Bosco gives an
answer when he writes: “I was not dreaming. I was getting warm.”
[Fox Hunt by Winslow Homer]
