Northern Woodlands Magazine

It was only at this point that insight struck; I had been viewing the fox’s behavior through human eyes. We are a sight-dependent species; the fox is not. It was not seeing its prey, but rather hearing it. The meander of the trail was an effort to triangulate with its ears some sound beneath the surface, perhaps a squeak, or the muffled sound of tiny footfalls, or the sound of chewing as a vole gnawed the bark at the base of a hobblebush. In my imagination, I could “see” the fox now: upright, ears perked forward to catch every sound. Slowly, it had moved forward, lifting and placing each foot deliberately and carefully ahead of the other by no more than a couple of inches. Finally, there was a short space clear of tracks. The fox, having gauged the location of the vole, leaped into the air, ears perked forward, in a pounce that to humans looks playful but that is deadly earnest to the fox. The high-arcing pounce is an effort to get both its big front feet together in the air so that they may come down at the same time, covering as much as eight square inches, punching through any crust in the hope of pinning some part of the prey long enough to get its sharp muzzle into the snow to grasp the creature with its teeth.

I sat on a blowdown and opened my pack for a candy bar, pondering what was in front of me. Now it was clear why the fox had ignored the trails of mice. They could have been made at any time during the previous night, mice with their big eyes being nocturnal wanderers after birch seeds scattered over the snow. To hunt down every mouse trail would be a fool’s errand; it’s what I would have done, having lost my instinctive intelligence many generations ago and been forced to replace it in the puny span of one life with the intelligence that comes from books. I had long ago resigned myself to the fact that in a primitive state I would have become an hors d’oeuvre for the saber-toothed tiger very early on. I was not the end product of thousands of years of ruthless natural selection as was my red fox. Civilization had been invented to protect me from that. Reynard, on a remorseless energy budget, can afford no such human mistakes for which he will be indulged and forgiven. Unless the fox’s incredibly jazzed-up senses tell it through some lingering whiff or some errant sound, that one of those trails will lead with fair certainty to warm-blooded prey beneath the snow, then the fox will, in fact must, ignore it.

That was it, of course. I had phrased it without realizing:
“instinctive intelligence.” The fox doesn’t think in the human
sense of sequential reasoning. It is a creature of action. In some
mysterious evolutionary way of trial and fatal error, the thinking
had already been done for it, the wis-
dom accomplished and encapsulated in
that seeming oxymoron. What was left
for the fox was to act upon it.

Somewhat heartened by my rehabilitation of the fox, I finished the candy bar and, renewed by the energy of the sugar, prepared to move on up the mountain. And so did the fox, itself refreshed not by a Milky Way but by the transmuted energy of one of its nearer stars contained in the meager flesh of a vole. Within a hundred yards, the shivers that had set in while I had sat were calmed by the effort. There it was again, another flash from the mental front: that was why the fox was climbing out of the valley on the coldest morning of the year. It must descend into the pool of cold on the valley floor every evening for the abundant prey that live there. But then it warms itself, as I myself was doing, by the exertion of the climb back up to some high, sheltered spot with a sunny southern exposure.

As I half expected, when I reached the top of the shoulder of the mountain west of the main ridge, the fox’s trail led off from the hiking path toward the south side of that shoulder. Let humans continue on to the heat-robbing winds of the summit. Whatever their reasons may be, athletic or aesthetic, they are foolish compared with spending the day curled up with nose and feet under a bushy tail, absorbing the energy of the sun directly while digesting it indirectly.

I didn’t follow the fox over the shoulder to discover the animal itself, perhaps to inform it in a patronizing way that humans had deduced from textbooks of meteorology that the day would turn cloudy with a chance of snow rather than yielding the sunshine its instinct predicted. It would be cruel to disturb the animal in its doze and make it run for no other reason than the pleasure of seeing it when it had been so perfectly and necessarily careful about such energy expenditures. Or perhaps it was simply that I had set another goal, a mountain peak more explainable to the achievement-minded back in the lowlands than the pursuit of fox wisdom. It was a failing perhaps that I was unwilling to be put off from accomplishing that summit, even to follow farther and perhaps suffer more enlightenment at the paws of the fox.

This story was adapted from The Next Step: Interpreting Animal Tracks, Trails and Sign by David Brown. Reproduced with permission of The McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company.