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Preface
I began this book because it rather urged itself on me as it rumbled from within and onto the page. This began as an essay: my attempt to organize the wild. I thought I knew about the gray fox and was arrogant enough to think that someone else might enjoy such a story—that someone may just awaken, as I had. The more I wrote, the more I doubted, and the more poetic it became.
Much of the science surrounding foxes—and most animals, for that matter—came from the 1950s, and the definitions and classifications that they asserted then are still in effect today. As I probed the scientific, peer-reviewed papers on the subject of the gray fox (known there as Urocyon cinereoargenteus), I saw huge gaps between what I witnessed out in the early morning darkness before dawn and what the scientists had to say. As time went by, I learned that some of the things people thought they understood about the gray fox were clearly false—information that had been handed down generation after generation without any scrutiny. No one cared to question the “facts.” No one stopped to double-check. I saw that the doors to understanding the gray fox were locked by tradition, barricaded by so-called “objectivity.” Somehow, I needed to unlock those doors and show these foxes as they truly were.
Before I make any assertion, I require that three different foxes, preferably living some distance apart, exhibit the same or similar behavior on three separate occasions. Even after that, I am skeptical, ready to alter my ideas for something more definitive. Exceptions abound, causing a philosophical and pragmatic tension within, a furious conflict that drives me. I must sort it out. Curiosity drives me.
The gray fox in central California falls under the subset known as “townsendi,” and this is the type of fox I’ve come to know so well. They came into my life just as I came into theirs. Townsendi lives at this story’s core, and I knew in my heart from the onset that there were two hard truths I had to live by in its telling. First, I could never objectify the foxes as the scientists had, regarding them as faceless specimens or raw data. Second, no matter how much I tried, I could not keep myself out of this story. This book is about foxes, and I am a man, so what business have I in discussing myself when the foxes deserve center stage? It is because I saw them through my own eyes, and for that reason alone, I must include myself in the tale. After all, I dreamed of them, thought of them, and lived through them for all these twelve exciting years. I saw their history play out before me day after day, in the dark of early morning before dawn drew the Diablo Mountains to the east against the sky. I was there, I am there still, and in some ways, I hope to always be there among them.
Curiosity and, unfortunately, some arrogance drove me to study the foxes, to observe and sample and collate their lives with my superior intellect. What I discovered was that they taught me. They were the instructors and I was a hapless pupil. All my knowledge was nothing more than smoke in a warm breeze.
Here I will take you on a journey into the thicket, where the breeze rises to a gust and the trees chop in the gale. The story changes ceaselessly because its designs, its vibrations, and its tones instinctually cannot rest. As it unfolds, so might we. The tale of the gray fox must be told, because perhaps it will give us insight into who we are, or grant some sense of balance, or lend us the measure by which we govern our lives side by side with all bonded lifeforms. It may even allow us to recognize our compassion rippling within and embrace the wild instead of destroying it. Finally, this book is nonlinear in that it meanders through time just as the gray fox moves through its home range.
This narrative rests on a bedrock of truth, woven together with the heat of conviction from my own observations. It is a personal story of thought and patience in battling my own ignorance, and this human’s pursuit of an open mind. Of necessity, I take sketchy notes when in the field—the kind that jogs the memory back at the computer. I’ve developed a shorthand that allows me to contain all my observations from the morning on a single Post-it. To tell this story, I must draw from that abbreviated log and remember the details to the best of my ability. I have no way of knowing a fox’s motivations, and so I must speculate through the art of quasi-fiction as I give flesh and bone to the inner workings of these animals. It is as true as my limitations allow.
This account needs other witnesses, documentarians, and researchers to corroborate or challenge my observations. What follows is not to be considered the final word on gray foxes, but only a beginning. If any notion, assertion, or observation that I suggest here stirs biologists or PhD grad students to double-check, to replicate, to challenge what I submit within these pages as true or false, I encourage them to do so. I urge those with the tools to step forward.
This book is the work of one person’s studied perspective, and within that perspective I automatically project my biases as a human being. I cannot be known as holding the final truth about the behavior of the gray fox, because such a thing may not exist. I would like nothing more than to know that my impressions were confirmed through good science, but I am likewise honored when proven wrong. Failure is a wonderful professor.
They’ll Trap You
Gradually, they altered my life. I slid unconsciously through time, completely unaware that these foxes crafted my days. They changed me like none other, save only my ex-wife. My first impactful encounter with the gray fox years ago, at thirteen or fourteen, happened when I carried that fox home in my arms. It began the long thread between my youth and old age.
To us as children, these foxes were incomprehensible beyond the commodity they afforded. We could use the extra money we’d earn for their capture: seven dollars a pelt and maybe ten for a live one. For two kids living down in Freedom, California all those years ago, that was a fortune.
And besides, what was the life of a few varmints compared to cold, hard cash? They had no character, no language, no future. How could they be anything but wild animals running headlong into the inevitable?
“Every little bit counts,” Mom always told us. As a Dust Bowl family, we’d narrowly escaped poverty because Dad was smart. He could look at a problem and know the solution right away, and though he worked himself down to the bone, we still knew the pressures of want. His own long road eventually led to managing the apple cider vinegar plant in town, owned by the Speas Company out of Missouri. He was the boss, and I respected him as only a son can. I wanted him to be as proud of me as I was of him.
The feed store sold traps of all sizes, and we stood there, my brother and I, staring at the wall of teeth, chains, coils, and stakes with a sense of dreadful mastery. Those implements of pain and terror gave us power over all living things and affirmed our right to rule—provided they didn’t snap off our hands in the process.
“Wanna fox, huh?” said the man at the counter. We bobbed our heads up and down. “Ya find they trail an’ put this here ‘longsides.” He pointed to a trap hanging above us. “Seen some few up by Diehl’s land, in that floodplain upstream.” I lifted the trap from its hook and brought it to him, sliding it over the counter as I laid two dollars in his palm.
“Snatch you some dog food an’ sprinkle it all ‘round yer trap when it’s set,” he added as we made for the door. “Gits ‘em sure as shit.”
We looked to the brush for signs and found an animal trail, then crawled on all fours into the thicket, steel trap clanking behind. When we found a likely place, we staked down the chain. I dumped a sack of dog food on the ground and scattered it with my foot. We set the trap, prying apart steel with what shaky strength we could muster against the taught springs. The trap seemed just strong enough to hold until we could return the next morning before school to see if everything had worked.
In the early light, caught at the leg and still as stone, was our four-legged payday.
One trap wasn’t enough for long. Greed led us to hunt glass bottles in the grass along the roads, and the five or ten cents we got for redeeming them at Freedom Market all went to buying more traps. We set five traps at a time and checked them every morning. Gone was the impulse to help Mom and Dad with the monthly bills; our only thought was getting money to get traps to get foxes to get money.
We didn’t sell them all; sometimes the traps were more gentle, and we’d stuff the foxes down in a gunnysack. Scrounging together enough wood and wire mesh, we built a pen to hold a few, with the idea being to contain them until the market price improved. Their little eyes behind the enclosure wire showed that they were lost and concerned, but not afraid.
One afternoon, my brother and I went along the creek bed to check our traps, strung far and wide upstream from home. I heard the chain rattling before we even got close.
“We got one,” I said. “Get that sack ready.”
My brother readied himself as I leaned down to grip the fox by the scruff of its neck, but the instant my hand touched its fur, the fox slumped into utterly fluid docility. When the trap fell from its leg, the fox squirmed a bit but didn’t try to bite me or get away. I couldn’t tell if it was frozen with fear or was grateful for the help, but the bag suddenly wasn’t necessary. Something happened then within me, and I scooped the gray fox up in my arms to cradle it like a baby...and it allowed me. Holding the fox against my body, I headed home with my bewildered brother in tow.
We came up through the rentals that Mr. Johnson owned, and a woman who lived there was out in her yard. Even now, I can see it all unfold. I know exactly where her house stood. She saw us coming and moved to intercept. She came out to the dirt road with all the severity of old age and snapped, “Whacha got there?” She shook her finger and pointed at the fox.
“It’s a fox, ma’am,” I said. “A gray fox.”
She frowned, then asked, “A wild fox?” I hesitated, then nodded. Her brow furrowed as she scowled at it.
“Gonna bite ya, ya know. Bet mah bottom dollah. Careful, hear?” Her eyes flared with fear and she shot her finger at me. “Could have rabies, ya know. Ain’t natural, you holdin’ a animal like that. Ain’t natural, I say. Spooks.”
I worried for an instant that she might be right, but then I looked down at the creature in my arms and knew with certainty that her fears were unfounded, outdated. “Oh, it’s okay,” I told her. “He’s fine.” I stepped around her and went home to put the fox in our pen with the others.
The next day, we arrived at the pen to see a hole dug beneath the boards we’d buried a foot deep to keep the foxes in. They’d escaped, which baffled us in our arrogance. I remember noting, Those little guys must dig fast to get out in one night.
We modified the pen to keep them cooped up, but no matter how many hours of sweat we poured into it, no matter how ingenious we thought ourselves, they always escaped again. Despite our “higher” intellects, our tools, and our materials, we could not match their persistence and will to be free. As long as they were alive, they would win.
Dad watched. He didn’t interfere, nor did he help us solve our problem. Maybe this was his way of testing us, but I wanted his approval so badly that it twanged in my guts. I yearned to trap a whole pen full of foxes, to march Dad down to the cage and show him how capable I was. In my mind, he’d see my handiwork and give me a proud pat on the back.
I never got it.
“Be careful,” he told me one night at supper. “You keep gettin’ those foxes like that and one of these days they’ll trap you.”
* * * * *
It was about 4:30 in the afternoon when my brother and I headed up the hill to the main road where the apple trucks came through, loaded with boxes of tart Pippins or juicy Bellflower apples fresh from the tree, destined for places unknown to us. We ate them at our leisure. We were headed on up toward the Green Valley Bridge when I looked over, and there, reaching for a low-hanging apple, was a gray fox.
He was one we’d trapped and caged—and later lost—and I recognized him by his severe limp: I’d accidentally broken his hind leg while trying to pull him out of a trap, when he’d leaped out of my hands and cracked the bone. He held that paw off the ground as he made for the apple. The bandages and my makeshift splint, which I’d fastened around the break before putting him in the pen, were gone. He suddenly jerked in pain, unable to reach the apple, and I realized the suffering my error had caused him. With a twitch, he fled, limping through the brush on the search for easier food.
I remember hoping that he would be okay and maybe eventually regain the use of his leg. Such wishful thinking for a child. I know the unfortunate truth now—that an injured fox’s chances of survival are next to nothing, and that I’d doomed that creature to a slow death by starvation.
We didn’t know what we were doing, and our ignorance was causing irreparable harm to a group of animals we should have left alone.
When all was said and done, we pulled our traps from the woods along the Corralitos Creek and let Mom fill our fox pen with chickens. Half a century later, another fox would strike a chord with me. I’d feel that deep pang of sadness drenched in curiosity tug at me. It was heavy as a teenager, and heavier then as a man. I can still see that gray fox down there beneath one of the apple trees in Old Man Resitar’s Orchard, reaching for a need that would never be filled.
* * * * *
Dr. Ben Sacks at UC Davis wrote in a letter concerning my work that the gray fox developed from “the most evolutionarily basal canid, representing a more ancient lineage than wolves, coyotes, jackals, the South American canids, and all other foxes, including the odd bat-eared foxes of Africa and raccoon dogs of Eurasia. Despite their key position in the tree of life, there have been no detailed studies to date of the behavioral ecology of gray foxes, other than to document home ranges and habitat use based on radio telemetry.” Dr. Sacks has pinned the date of the emergence of the gray fox to between eight and twelve million years ago, originating in what is now California.[1]
That Corralitos Creek is a living thing. It’s still there, of course, and will be there long after all of us are gone and this story is forgotten. The creek has supported all manner of life just beyond our reckoning, whether dry with sand and stones or flowing deeply when the rains come. If we had two, maybe three, inches overnight, we stood at the kitchen window watching the brown, boiling water rush downstream through our backyard. It was a haven for us kids and, at the same time, a looming threat so very close at hand. So it is with humans: no matter where we might be, anywhere on the planet, we are always drawn to water, our enduring holy grail.
The gray fox is so ancient that it has withstood global warming and ice age episodes repeatedly, and it continues to thrive. It has known periods of thousands of years of hardship when the great ice sheet gouged out the Great Lakes. What does it know that allows it to survive so well? There must be something within this small canid’s mind that can teach us how to manage and survive the warming cycle we see everywhere. Could following the gray fox teach us how to survive, too?
More than fifty years have passed since my brother and I pulled up our traps. The habitat of the gray fox now lies destroyed, overtaken by an invasive species. Houses stand on the creek’s banks where foxes and raccoons and other night-prowling mammals once roamed and hunted, denned up, and birthed their young. They understood the ecology of an optimal people-scape and lived their lives as best they could under the circumstances. It could be that they still prowl there in the darkness between trash cans and boat trailers, but reality—humanity—says otherwise.
Their voices have been silenced and their cultures erased from time by driveways, sprinklers, barbecue grills, swing sets, and patio furniture.
What is the effect of a mass extinction on those wild cultures that never understood what was happening? They didn’t know where the others of their kind went, but one day they were simply gone. Pertaining to foxes, I call this “The Vanishing.” What might it feel like if you knew that you were the last of your kind? How would that affect humanity, to feel the distinct lessening of one’s species rather than the constant, overwhelming increase?
It behooves us to seldom intercede in nature. The forces of evolution have brought us to this moment in time. Look at our long history of unnecessary destruction: we allowed our egos to govern without understanding all the dynamics of nature. What might happen if we stopped trying to control every inch of this planet?
We cannot call ourselves civilized until we freely give all living things on planet Earth their rightful place alongside us. The best practice is to allow nature to live for itself, and for us as humans to find a comfortable niche in that greater universe of being. This may very well bring about the eventual death of the city, that needlessly large-scale social monstrosity, which I can understand is a frightening concept for most. Will we ever return to the balance where we understand that we are multifaceted mammals feeding in the primordial soup of time, the same as every lifeform on the planet? We share the same bowl. We do not own it. When will we accept that all life is equal? It is absurd to think otherwise.
