Mr. Fox (29 page)

The young woman saw a streak of grey, saw a tail brush the windowpane, saw a green parcel fall. And her puppets fell from her hands with a clatter and lay on the ground with their knees bent as if they meant to spring up again on their own. The lantern flickered. The girl saw a fox a little way down the corridor of trees. The creature was watching her. She moved to the right and its gaze moved to the right. She moved to the left, far left, almost out of the window’s frame, and the fox’s head moved with her. It appeared to be smiling, but that was just a meaningless expression created by the look of its muzzle. There was an unfaltering clarity to the animal’s gaze: thought without emotion. And yet. The fox was quivering. It had brought her something and it had stayed to see what she would do, and it was quivering. So the girl didn’t draw the curtain, and she didn’t turn away. She opened the window and slowly, very slowly, closed her hand around the bulky leaf. The fox did not approach—if anything, it drew farther back. The girl opened the leaf. Berries, but they looked more like jewels. She tasted one, and it was delicious. She ate another and another, and she beckoned the fox. “Come here, come here,” she said in a syrupy voice she used with very small children. The fox did not approach. The fox looked desperately from the girl’s eyes to her berry-stained mouth. She didn’t like the gift. She was angry. What was she saying, what was she saying. . . .

“Won’t you come closer? You’re the one who sought me out, you know,” the girl said crossly, in her own voice.

The fox had had enough for one night, and fled.

Now the girl wished to thank the fox.

(The girl wished to know the fox.)

She wrapped herself in a shawl, took a lantern in her hand, and slipped out of the house, thinking that she would follow the fox to its den and see how it lived. Our girl raised her lantern as she followed the paths between the trees. She ducked under the bigger branches, but the smaller ones raked her hair; she gasped at first, but then the pull became so frequent that it was caressing, a ceiling of hands. She stepped across shallow, pebbled brooks. Her skirt dragged in the water—the hem would be ruined, she thought, distantly. The fox was nowhere to be seen. The girl stopped beside a fallen log and swung her lantern around behind her, trying to remember the direction she had come from. She couldn’t remember. She was lost, and she didn’t know what to do. She sat down on the log and cried. Unfortunate girl—her tears were beautiful. From his hiding place, the fox watched her weep. All he could think was that she was doing something with her eyes, something that shone. He watched her until she fell asleep, and he kept watch over her while she slept.

This happened in winter. There was ice in the earth. When the sun was down, skin and clothing were of no use outside. You needed fur, or feathers, or you needed to be indoors. The girl caught a chill. A bad chill. Her breath cracked in her chest; she took a fever because her body needed the warmth. Her teeth chattered. She reminded the fox of leaves blown in the wind. When she woke up, she was weak, and, much to the delight of the fox, she lay on her log and wept again. Without knowing it she had walked a long, long way into the wood. Sunrise dazed the redwoods—birches wept, and so did the girl. Eventually she chose a direction and began to walk—the fox followed her, wondering where she was going. Home—her home—was the other way. Discreetly, he rattled some branches. She noticed him, and then he ran, too fast for her to catch him but slow enough for her to keep up. The girl could hardly believe that she was following a fox again—it could be taking her anywhere. To her death in a deep pool, to a shallow pit crammed with tiny bones. Perhaps it didn’t even mean for her to follow it, perhaps it was just bounding along, enjoying its morning. The fox never looked back at her. A different fox?

She heard the search party before she saw them. The air rang with the sound of her name. The fox swerved and dashed past her, back to the heart of the wood. She put out a hand just in time and felt its warm fur against her palm.

There were no more puppet shows after that. Snow fell. The girl sank, and the girl shivered, and the girl raved, and the girl died. The cause of death was twofold—the extreme chill she’d taken alone in the night, and the berries, which were poisonous. The fox didn’t know what was happening. He dared much, so he returned to watch the house. All the curtains were drawn. Steady lamplight escaped from a gap at the top of one pair of curtains, the pair in the girl’s bedroom. He lost interest after a few nights of that view, and returned when he next remembered. There was no light that night. The whole house was dark. It was the same the next night, and the next. The fox was philosophical. From the moment he had recognised loveliness he had known it couldn’t last. And he returned to fox business.

Now I will speak of another kind of fox. The other fox was a grey fox; this one is red. I am speaking now of a fox who had been hunted, a beast of the chase who was alive only because of luck and cowering and grim fighting—grim and miserable and low. This fox wasn’t innocent—he had turned hutches into bloodbaths purely to divert himself. But he also knew wounds and weariness, had crawled into holes and lain like a rag wadded deep into the ground. He killed hens because they were there to be killed, and he understood that the hunters sought to do away with him for the same reason. The fox had started his life in a den heaving with cubs, but they had all been hunted down almost as soon as they were grown. A few times he had hidden alongside foxes who had been bred in captivity, but they never got away. Their wits were dull. The horizon made them run around in circles, confused.

This fox had no one. I’ve said that foxes are solitary, but there’s a difference between having no one because you’ve chosen it and having no one because everyone has been taken away. I’m not saying that I myself know what the difference is. But our fox knew.

One afternoon the fox jumped some fences and walked straight up to a farmhouse. He didn’t want to be a fox anymore. He didn’t want to be anything. His head was down, so he didn’t see the farm dogs, looking askance. They bristled and growled, but they didn’t attack, not even when the farmer’s wife came out and commanded it. The farm dogs knew a sick fox when they saw one. The farmer’s wife went inside, but she left the door half open—she was coming back with something. The fox looked at the ground. He appeared to be smiling, but that was just a meaningless expression created by the look of his muzzle. The fox had no plan. Something might happen soon. Or it might not. Either way he was here, at the end of his nature.

A human form appeared near him—the dogs jumped at the sky and bayed in a way that wolves do sometimes when the full moon draws them. The fox didn’t look. This person had been following him about for days. He couldn’t remember when she had begun. He had been badly hurt and she was there, she was just there. She had sticky stuff that he had permitted her to smooth over his wounds. The wounds were just scars now; they’d healed fast. He had been too sore to move, and she had dug up voles and snapped their necks and scraped at them and fed him. With her five fingers and her funny, flat palm she had placed food in his mouth. At night, when he was in too much pain to rest, she counted stars and whispered into the hollow of the tree he lay in, telling him how many she could see, until he fell asleep. There was no reason for her to do such things. He didn’t know what this person wanted from him, and he hadn’t come across anything like her before. So she probably didn’t exist. The fox ignored her as best he could. Now she crouched down beside him and she touched him. She rubbed his neck. She spoke into one of his ears, and he understood. Whenever she spoke, he understood. Her voice had all sorts of sounds in it—the flow of water against rock, an acorn shaken in its shell, a bird asking for morning. Her voice wasn’t loud, but he heard it throughout his body.

Listen . . . That woman is looking for a gun.

A gun? Good . . . Even if the fox had been able to reply, he wouldn’t have.

She’s found the gun. Quickly: Why did you come here?

The dogs became braver and crept close—she put out a hand and sent them away.

It’s true, then, fox? That you want to die?

He couldn’t tell her the truth; he lacked the language.

She sighed.

Very well. It is your right. Good-bye.

She stroked his back. She strolled away. The sound of the shotgun shattered the air and sent him after her, as hard and as fast as he could go. They both ran, but he overtook her. All things considered, two legs, etc., she wasn’t a bad runner. “Live.” She laughed, breathlessly. “Live, live, live.” And when it was safe to stop, she collapsed against a stile in a fallow field and held her face between her hands and made noises that sounded like “Hic, hic, hic.” He began to pay attention to her. Her eyes were set quite far apart. He had never been so close to one of his hunters, had never been this close to harm.

She told him that she had looked after him because of the white hairs on his forehead that grew into the shape of a star. Sometimes you see that someone is marked and you’re helpless after that—you love. She wanted to tell him that, but she decided it was better not to. He hadn’t known that there were such hairs on his forehead, or that such a thing could be of significance. She sat and he lay near her, and a little time passed, quiet and bright. Then they had to go, in case the farmer had been told of their trespass and decided to look for them.

They parted outside her hut. It was a ramshackle thing beside a stream. It had a heavily dented tin roof, and its windows were coated with dust. All in all, it looked cross, and as if it had plenty of things to say to its inhabitant about having been left alone for so long.

“Come inside,” the woman said to the fox.

The fox demurred. Sadly, the woman watched him go his own way again.

Days went by. The woman made her peace with her hut. She gave it a thorough sweeping, built herself a new roof, washed the windows, plaited rugs. The woman picked herbs and grasses and boiled and bottled various concoctions. Sick people and their relatives sought her out in the forest; she took their money and they took her bottles away and were cured. “Where have you been?” she was asked, again and again. “Weeks we’ve been looking for you.”

And she answered, “I fell in love.”

“Congratulations! Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll see him again.”

And her pupils grew vast as she spoke, as if her eyelids had been opened while she was still in the first stage of sleeping. Women like her are very serious once they have chosen. To everyone who saw her she said, “If you see him, tell me. He wears a white star on his forehead.” She didn’t tell anyone that he was a fox.

One of the village women went into labour, and our woman served as midwife. The days were full of screaming, and the nights were hoarse, and there were three of each until the baby was born. This happened in summer. When our woman came home, she jumped into the stream and washed; the blood and sweat whirled away, and afterwards she sat outside until the sun dried her. She watched lizards and felt humming in her skin; tiny creatures bit her; they were alive and they wanted her to know. Her pulse slowed to its lowest ebb, and sped up again, flashed through her wrists, in her head. She was happy and unhappy. “The fox has forgotten you,” she told herself. Yet all around her she saw white stars. . . .

Because of a fox?

Because of him.

The woman went into her hut to find clothes to wear and found that she had been robbed. Bottles and picture frames were broken, her table and chairs were overturned, her papers had been rifled through, matches were scattered on the ground. The woman searched the hut for missing things. She wasn’t aware of all her possessions, so really she was just looking for a gap. She found it on her bookshelf. The thief had taken a dictionary. Nothing else. She stood, looking at the gap, and thinking. Then thinking turned to wonder and she smiled into her hand.

Now think of a fox in his den, wrapped round a book. His front paws are resting on the pages, and his eyes are very close to the text. These shapes! They’re useless. They frustrate him. The more he looks at them the more they mock him. He nudges the book into a sack and drags the sack along by its drawstring, through the forest. In the bushes by the village nursery, he listens to children saying their ABCs. He can see the blackboard. The teacher taps it with a ruler, going from letter to letter. His mind wanders. . . . He bites his paw. Look and listen. His mind wanders again. . . . He nips at his paw again, savagely this time. And again, and again, until his paw is bloody and he is learning.

First light finds the fox at his stolen book. No one else knows, no one sees what he’s doing. But words are coming. The fox doesn’t hunt anymore—he doesn’t hunt! He eats easy meat, forest rats. He stays near his den or he goes to the nursery school, he listens carefully, he connects pictures with words, he eavesdrops, he steals newspapers, he stumbles in his understanding and snarls and shreds the newspapers to pieces. . . . But he will know this language, he must have this language.

Because of a woman?

Because of her.

The day came when the fox had words. Only a few but enough to begin to talk to her. He went to the woman’s hut. Her hair was grey, and there were lines on her face, but otherwise, she was the same. She had not been young when they’d met, and two years had tipped the balance. He wasn’t young himself. The woman smiled and touched his forehead. So it was still there, this shape that she liked. Good.

Come inside, the woman said, in that way that he heard from head to toe. One day he would ask her how she could do that.

The fox entered the hut.

The fox had brought the dictionary back. She’d long since bought a new one—just as well, since the stolen one was falling apart. He had also brought words. He had chewed them out of newspapers: long, patient work, and anxious work, too, double-checking that each word meant what he thought it meant. If he had got it wrong, all wrong . . . if she laughed at him . . .