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.
The perfectly measured pace of a red fox.