The furry stranger knocking at my door changed my life

But the fellow outside was not a person. Despite folklore and myths, scientists did not include foxes in the ranks of tacticians or impostors. Those personalities required forethought, planning, intention, and umpteen other traits not known to have ever been visited upon wild foxes. My doctoral training had taught me that much.

Wiggling one hand into the pliable aluminium blinds covering the front door’s inset window, I separated two slats with my thumb and index finger and peered outside. Nobody. Nobody close enough to have knocked anyway.

The fox continued alternating between staring at me and staring down the driveway. I checked for intruders by walking down the drive and calling “Hello?” as loudly as you would expect someone to call if she did not want anyone to reply.

Circling through the back meadow, I found one doe-eyed doe and two lying fawns. Possibly, the double knock I had heard had come from one of them kicking the wooden door, although neither of them looked spunky enough to have sashayed around the cottage. Skunks denning in the front pasture could have pushed a rock against the door. I often heard them stumbling across the doorstep on their meanders. Usually they kept busy stalking wasps, uprooting perennials, and striking vulgar poses in front of my spy cam. But they rarely did any of that before midnight.

I went upstairs to listen to the radio, and, before long, a warning odour and sticky smoke followed me. It was mildly unpleasant but less compelling than the news, so I ignored it. The smoke alarm blew too late to save the stew. Dinner transitioned to a pear perching on a white ceramic plate encircled with slices of deep red venison sausage. Three squares of gold-wrapped chocolate lined up diagonally behind the pear and complemented its smooth green skin.

I sunk into the pinstriped rose sofa, balancing my dinner on an oblong tray of weathered wood. Except for the fully lowered blinds, it was a good dinner by any accounting. The blinds, thick honeycomb fabric, were soft green. The walls and both doors were rose adobe. The palette matched the bloom and leaves of Geum triflorum, a wildflower commonly called “prairie smoke”. I’d copied the colour scheme from the sunroom in Lake Yellowstone Hotel.

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Sometimes I thought about houses where sofas faced televisions and wondered what it would be like to eat without looking out at calm colours, mountains, or clouds.

Sometimes I simply wondered what it would be like to own a television.

On the radio, bells were tolling behind deep and sombre incantations in a foreign language. Latin, I think. Interviewees in various combinations of age and gender and accent recalled the benefactions of the recently deceased holy man – a man I knew almost nothing about. Everyone agreed it was a sad day and that millions would miss him. The bells kept tolling while more sombre voices added items to a growing list of the deceased’s blessed deeds.

Usually, when someone died, I wanted to know the cause of death. Will I die the same way? Tonight,
I wanted to compare my good deeds with those of the deceased. Will people mourn me in the same way?

The accomplishment of which I was most proud was having survived, in the literal sense of not dying. I carried with me one quotation from my father, not only because of what he said, but because he rarely said anything to me at all: “I didn’t want to have children, I don’t want to know if you ever have children, and I’m not interested in what happens to you.” After a pause, he added, “The good news is, if you make anything of your life, at least you won’t have to worry about thanking me.”

He said this to me when I was 12, and those statements, which represented his entire attitude toward me, overwhelmed my emotional state and all my relationships and everything I had ever done since.

I always suspected he said it to be cruel, and I interpreted it as a warning that while I was living in the house with him, he hoped I would disappear. I became very good at disappearing. When I was an undergrad, my father tracked me down and told me to sign for a college loan. He took the money and disappeared. I paid off the loan.

I became better at disappearing. Besides surviving, that had been my greatest achievement, but it doesn’t qualify as a good deed. Of course, the mourned man – I hadn’t known his name before now – was older and had a 40-year head start. Still, if bells rang for me today, they would be terse. Saving a skinny fox from fat dogs was one good deed. Another deed was … well … there had been two fat dogs.

I opened the door without exposing more than my arm in the doorway. The fox, soaked like a wet grey dishrag, hadn’t moved. But it wasn’t raining. It had rained earlier, but raindrops had fallen so sparsely that only pudgy animals should be wet. Anyone small and fast could have dodged the drops.

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I thought about the possibility of those big dogs dunking him in a ditch. What ditch? More likely they had run him down to the river. A pursued fox will run to a watercourse and even swim across. But today’s river was so swollen he could not have swum more than a short distance in the shallows before returning.

He thrust his face at me. A normal fox would have run away when the door opened. His boldness suggested that I was in his territory, instead of the other way around. I closed the door and stood there for a while, sliding the blind up and down a few times before locking it in its fully open position. I peered outside and pondered the scene, then concluded the obvious: there sat, just beyond my doorstep, rain soaked and shivering, a few hours after the death of Pope John Paul II, a fox.

Edited extract from Fox and I: an uncommon friendship (Scribe) by Catherine Raven.

This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale August 1. To read more from Sunday Life, visit The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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