Wild Sightings
Red Fox in the Berkshires, wild, beautiful, fleeting.
The other day I saw a red fox walking daintily across my back yard. I ran to get my camera and it disappeared down the hill towards the pond. When I came back to the window I picked up its deliberate journey along the frozen water’s edge, through bushes and out again. I snapped several photos even though I realized that the window screen would interfere with the picture. When I ran out to the porch to get an unrestricted view, the fox was gone.
The photos were grainy, the fox nothing but a sooty smudge on the white snow of the pond. I was disappointed, and posted the photo on Facebook, describing my frustration. People “liked” the post and remembered their own wildlife sightings, but it was my son-in-law’s response that got me thinking.
He posted, “How wonderful to see it. And, not to get too philosophical, but once upon a time we were satisfied with memories that we could share and didn't even conceive of the possibility of lasting visual documentation. Perhaps that is your relationship to the fox? Although, there are always stories to be told. Do you know anyone who could do that?”
His “poke” at this story teller, brought me up short. Of course I have stories about my wildlife sightings, most of which I have not been fast enough to catch on camera. The red fox, iconic symbol of the Berkshires, has always evaded my camera, but not my memory.
The first year we bought our house in the Berkshires, my widowed father came to spend a few days with us. One summer afternoon he stood peering out the picture window, looking at the lawn that swept down to the pond, and I heard him exclaim, “Look, look.”
There, on the grass, was a perfectly poised red fox, stopped in its tracks, tail lifted, head turned to stare straight at my father. It seemed the fox was gazing only at him and he only at the fox. “He’s looking at me,” my father whispered. I nodded. It seemed a long time before the fox turned his head away and continued on the path into the brush and woods.
My father was touched by this encounter . He couldn’t stop talking about it. He was born, raised and lived his whole life in New York City and had very little connection to nature. But the red fox had communicated something to him. It was a beautiful moment, frozen in time and memory—without benefit of camera.
That winter, my father suffered a stroke. It affected his speech and he could not make sentences that made sense. He was staying with me in our house in Rye and was looking through a picture book with our daughter-in-law, a teacher, to try to bring back his language, when he seemed to remember his encounter with the fox.
I can’t recollect the words he used—he was stuttering and pausing—but it was clear that the memory of the fox, speaking to him through the long attached gaze that summer, was a picture in his mind.
“The red fox?” I remember asking. “When he looked at you for such a long time?”
He nodded, his face lit with joy. He was looking past me, in the middle distance, as I described the incident to him and I thought, “He’s seeing the red fox again.” What was the meaning of the experience to my father? A wild animal had paused in his walk, in his comings and goings, to notice my father, to acknowledge him as a fellow creature with his gaze, and my father had responded back.
If I had a camera that day in August in the Berkshires I would have been focused on the fox and missed the silent dialogue between wild and civilized. And then later I would not have understood the message my father was delivering when he could not speak.
I see you.