The Fox

There's a fox in our neighborhood. I occasionally see him trotting across the road in the distance as I walk the dogs at twilight. By conventional wisdom, there shouldn't be any foxes within miles of us. The common belief is that we live in far too urban a setting -- more appropriate turf for squirrels, raccoon, an occasional rabbit. Yet, there is the fox.

Musing on this dichotomy between fact and expectation, I wondered what the fox thought of this tangle of houses, roads, and fences in which it found itself. It's obviously lost, I thought, having wandered here from some more rural locale, perhaps driven by starvation or fear. This was followed by the odd notion that I and my dogs could just as easily be the interlopers in a world of foxes.

With that in mind, I attempted to view my evening's stroll through a fox's eyes. Parked cars turned to rocks, houses to hills, and landscaped yards lost their geometric perfection and became small fields broken by clumps of bush and ridges of stone, with each shadow and bed of mulch hinting at the possibility of a mouse.

Suddenly, the fox's route made perfect sense, not as a furtive dash between suburban lots, but as a casual meander across backyard meadows occasionally bisected by the dried stream bed of a street. I saw the fox again -- no, two foxes, exiting a break in an old stone wall and through the fence into the old town reservoir. The taller grass there must give promise of more prey, but also of more competition from the hawks and owls that might roost in the peripheral trees. I laughed, thinking of the gated community at the top of the hill, and wondering what the people there would think if they knew their iron-barred fence was no barrier to a narrow fox, their "luxury townhouses" no more to him than steep brick cliffs surrounding a verdant hunting ground.

The fox was not driven here by fear or stranded by accident. The fox was at home, and perhaps raising a family. And now I knew what had happened to the chipmunks, so numerous in the spring and so rarely seen in the fall.

What else in our lives is hidden from our normal sight, waiting for us to look on it with new eyes? What relationships lay unaware, what wisdoms unrevealed?

What other foxes live among us?